Chop Chop

Ah Friday once more. This is actually take two of my attempt at writing this entry---the previous one was a little too off.

I'll keep it short. The weather's hokey, October's ending, am looking forward to NaNoWriMo, December's Christmas Eve and Christmas services require me to start working through all the possible hymns/carols from Hymns of Praise, and beyond that, I have no idea what is going on in my life any more.

There. Back to reading and doing other stuff.

Till the next update.

position: sticky;

I'm on leave! Yay!

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk something serious: the need to curb the irrational urge of taking sides in any conflict, be it personal, local, regional, or international.

For some unfathomable reason, it seems that people are compulsively declaring their support for this faction or that faction, rational or otherwise.

My personal [professional] take on things is, if one is not in a position where such a decision is of immediate relevance, just shut the hell up and say absolutely nothing. It is a no-win scenario in most cases, because it is almost always the case that the situation is often more messy than it is expected.

``But MT, the politicians are declaring this and that! So why shouldn't I?''

My reply is simply: are you really involved in international politics? If not, why make any statements at all? In some cases, I would go as far as to say that the politicians who made those declarations could have done better with shutting up instead of trying to virtue signal with some declaration or another.

The thing about making statements/declarations is that each new statement made acts as a partitioning of the people, separating them into at least three cohorts---those who agree with your declaration/statement, those who disagree with your declaration/statement, and those who don't give a damn either way. As a private citizen, there is hardly any advantage to force such a partition---the number of people we end up seeing/working with on a personal basis isn't large enough that allows us a substantial number of people left to work with in the event that our declaration/statement is a polarising minority statement.

Moreover, much of personal declarations/statements are reliant on what the media reports (mainstream or otherwise), and the problem with that is that these media reports aren't always correct at the time of publication. This means that the stance that one declares may seem to be safely in the majority, but may be [quickly] shifted to that of the minority when new information appears.

In short, personal declarations/statements of stances [in any conflict] has a pretty sizable risk of going in the ``wrong'' direction, especially if the purpose is that of virtue signalling.

Thus, it is better to just shut the hell up.

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In other news, I've discovered about position: sticky; in CSS, in relation to having the header of the table to be floating at the top. The need for this came about when I was messing around with my instrument ambitus experimental tool. The list was too damn long, and it was hard to see what the ambitus us once the header information is scrolled off the screen. Having the thead tag set with position: sticky; meant that the complicated header row that highlights the actual notes selected was visible once more.

There was a catch though: for some reason, combining position: sticky; with border-collapse: collapse; messed up the border information for the cells that make up the header. It is highly likely to be a bug, but it isn't going to be solved any time soon by the major browsers. To mitigate that, I went the whole extreme of defining the entire table to have border: none;, while setting each individual td tag have their own borders. This gave a more consistent looking feel for the header information (borderless) and looks pretty okay.

And I suppose that's it for now. Till the next update then.

Solving the `m'-Key Problem?

So, sometime back I mentioned about how the `m'-key was reporting double triggering. I had a hunch that perhaps there was something that was trapped under the key that caused it to press on the underlying bubble membrane more than once when the angle of the key itself varied.

But I never really took any specific actions to take care of it. Or rather, I tried to take care of things without taking the obvious action that I ought to be taking.

Today, I finally got angered enough to do it. I pried open the key cap for the `m'-key, and used my electric blower to blow the crap out of it, before reassembling it all over again. I'll admit that I saw nothing out of the ordinary before nor after the blow out process.

But once I put the keycap back on and typed on it, the doubling problem went away.

Go figure.

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I completed the main story of Chronicon using my Magic Find (MF) build. It was a fun diversion, like a cross between old school Diablo in gameplay but with Grim Dawn levels of quality of life updates. I am taking a break from it now because the DLC that I tried a little of was a bit too hard for my current MF-build. Plus I was basically pushing hard through the last act, where there were just so many enemies, even on the normal difficulty.

I'll definitely come back to it later.

Games wise, I've not played any in a few days. I might continue on the System Shock remake in a bit, but for the moment, I'm in the middle of doing quite a few transcriptions of hymns that need to be played over the upcoming fortnight. There are two reasons why I do the transcriptions:

1. To fit the score maximally within a single portrait laid-out A4 paper; and
2. To have a quick preview of how the piece sounds like.

The third unspoken reason is to further improve my Lilypond wrangling skills.

I've recently completed the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and loved it. It gave me strong Dragon's Egg vibes, with the narrative of an alien civilisation (jumping spiders and lovable amoeba (Cheela)), as well as their struggles, both the alien civilisations as well as the human ones. It also gave me strong Speaker for the Dead vibes as well, and as such, scratched my sci-fi itch in all the right places.

And I think that's it for this entry. The paucity of updates this month is largely due to the general lethargy I am feeling from having to deal with this unbearable consistent heat and humidity. Till the next one.