• 2 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Moving Mooney would be just giving up on offense. This has been a down year for him - it’s shaping up to be a down year for the whole passing game. But leaving Moore as the only legitimate WR threat won’t help win games or evaluate Fields/Bagent.

    If I could chose between the two, I’d like to see JJ stay. He’s a solid pass defender, although his availability has been limited by injuries.

    I’m not sold on Tyrique “PI” Stevenson. Every game he seems to get beat and has to interfere.

    Edit: Wait what? I thought I was commenting in the post about moving Mooney or Johnson.


  • I think Poles gets more time. He took over a team in free fall and saw it crash into the ground. It’ll take more than one off-season to build a competitive team. I like what Poles has done with draft capital. Claypool is a big mark against him. On paper it was a good move. At the time, I recall a lot of excitement, further fueled by talk that GB was after him.

    I don’t know about Flus. Maybe one positive thing I can say about him is I believe the defense has been playing a little better since he took over. I thought the rule used to be that coaches got three years. (Trustman was a fairly recent counterexample).

    I agree regarding Fields. It was unfortunate the circumstances he’s found himself in, but I think good quarterbacks would find more ways to have success. He’s going to have to play great the rest of the season too stay in Chicago. I’d love to see it, but I’m not very hopeful.



  • I can type pretty fast on a full keyboard, so for me writing is slower. But because it is slower, I find it can be more thoughtful. About two years ago I started making an effort to hand write notes to help me think, learn, and remember things.

    Pen and paper are also pretty great. You can take them anywhere. They don’t require electricity or a battery. They are small and lightweight. You can use them on a hike. You can use them if the power goes out. The format will never become unsupported.






  • I’m a hobbyist, I don’t use common lisp professionally, but it has become my go-to tool for little personal projects and puzzles (like Project Euler or Advent of Code). The interactive development (mentioned in the article) is one of the primary reasons.

    I find it so fun to build with. You can write functions and immediately test and interact with them in the repl, and then build on them from there. You can compile code at a granular level - for example you can recompile a function rather than the entire source file. This is helpful if some stuff is still being worked out and would produce compile time errors.

    Occasionally I’ve gotten into a weird place because of the evolution of my code and incremental changes along the way while running a program. When I stop and completely reload a program, it behaves differently from what I previously experienced. It is something additional to keep in mind when interactively modifying a program.

    The debugger experience with Emacs/Slime is the best I’ve experienced (professionally I’ve used various versions of Visual Studio, and as a hobbyist, various open source IDEs.)

    The programs I have written are simple. Some day I would like to grok CLOS and the condition system.






  • My favorite notebook is the JetPens Kanso Noto. They have 160 sheets (320 pages) of Tomoe River paper with a 5mm dot grid. Tomoe River paper is a premium fountain pen friendly paper that should solve your feathering problems.

    https://www.jetpens.com/JetPens-Tomoe-River-52-gsm-Kanso-Noto-Notebook-A5-Dot-Grid-Black/pd/29704

    JetPens offers free shipping in the US for order of $35 or more. I don’t know what options are available outside of the US.

    The notebook is currently out of stock. I expect more to be back soon. Tomoe River paper was sold from one paper company to another. I think JetPens just cleared out their stock with paper from the original company and I anticipate they’ll bring the notebook back soon with paper from the new company (Sanzen). In the past, the notebooks sold for $19.50, which is a great price for a premium paper notebook (seriously, I think only the Nanami Seven Seas notebooks have a better price per page for premium paper) . However, to keep the price low, the notebook doesn’t have bells and whistles like an elastic closure or page marker ribbons.


  • They are quite different! My Pilot pens have fairly narrow bodies, while the Pelikan M400 is more stout. As a western fine, the M400’s nib is a little broader than the Pilot fine nibs. I can feel this as a write, a little more contact with the page. Perhaps the nib is also a little firmer. Nothing I don’t like, just a different feel.

    My biggest complaint about my Pilots is they seem to dry out quickly. (But I still really like them!) I haven’t had the M400 long enough to know how it holds up. I expect it to last longer, by virtue of having a screw cap.

    Overall I’ve been enjoying the M400. The nib, being slightly broader, can produce more shading than my Pilots. It is a newer M400, and in the last few years, Pelikan stopped making the barrels translucent, which is a bit disappointing.





  • I was looking through here to see if anybody was recommending a Pilot Vanishing Point or Majohn A1/A2.

    Don’t have time for a screw cap? How about no cap at all!?

    The Vanishing Point is really handy. There is the full sized VP and the slightly smaller VP Decimo. The Majohn A1 / A2 pens are lower cost clones. I have a Decimo and find it can go quite a while without drying out. Longer than my snap cap pens. If you do a lot of writing, I’d suggest a fine nib, or even extra fine nib, to get more mileage per fill. Some people have trouble with the placement of the clip on the pen interfering with their grip. In general, if you use a tripod grip, the clip shouldn’t be an issue. The Decimo sells around $160 USD, but you might be able to find a deal. The regular VP is a little more still. I haven’t used an A1/A2, but they are less expensive alternatives that still seem to be well liked.