rbandrews

I've had three posts kicking around my head for a while, and this one seems basically done. The second post follows a theme with it, sort of, but we'll get to that.

A few weeks ago I went to Disneyland.

This is not something I would ordinarily do: I don't live anywhere near it, I never really had a strong desire to go to it (well, I did as a little kid, but not as an adult), and I don't really like Disney as a company or their shows / movies. I like some of the comics: the old, classic Carl Barks and Don Rosa duck comics are fantastic and a huge part of my childhood, but that's about it. And yet, I got into the spirit of it, had a fantastic time and would absolutely go back!

This all happened because my friend turned 55, and he's a huge Disney fan: lives in Costa Mesa, a few minutes from the park; has had a season pass for years; goes there once a week at least. He wanted to show us Walt's park as a way to celebrate his birthday, so Megan and I went. At first I thought, well, I love history and especially history of American culture (huh, guess this ties into all three planned posts) and Disneyland is a huge part of that. Plus this is a good example of a principle I have, which is that the best of anything is probably worth trying: maybe you hate theater but if you get a chance to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, that's probably not something you turn down, right? I'm not that into theme parks but Disneyland is the gold standard of them.

Anyway we go down there. First, everything's on an app, so we set up the app, and then go through security and a tram and into the park itself, and I'm just following people, but we walk to the back and end up in a Star Wars themed area in line for... something. I'm not sure exactly what. The line is long; apparently this is the one thing we do all day where we're not able to skip the line. We wait for like an hour. And then walk into a room where there's... a hologram. Just like Star Wars. I mean just like the ones in Star Wars, but in real life. I can't figure out how they did this. It's literally magic to me. Then into a motion-ride-thing, which is just absolutely full of special effects, and I can pick out most of it but there are still a couple things in there that I don't know how they did. I eventually did look up the hologram effect and even knowing how it works I'm extremely impressed. It was unreal, it was perfect, it was even better because I legitimately had no idea what was coming, I didn't even know we were in line for a ride, or what the rides were like, I was just following the group, and then suddenly was transported to this fantasy world.

That first one was the best, but the rest were all extremely good, magical. My overall impression was that everywhere I looked I saw evidence of years, decades, of work and cleverness and polish by extremely smart people with the goal of making something delightful. It wasn't what I expected, I don't even know what I was expecting, but it was amazing. Some disconnected things that got me:

• The food. I figured it wouldn't be great, but the thing is, parents come here too, right? So there was actual food that was actually good, and it honestly didn't cost any more than a restaurant outside. We went to the Storyteller Cafe, which was extremely good (little red bell pepper pesto tortelloni things!). Lunch at Tiana's Cafe, was also surprisingly good (very good cornbread!).
• I expected everything would cost a fortune but actually once we were inside we barely bought anything. I bought a bottle of water and refilled it a couple times, and Megan and I each got a hat, but that was about it. Except for...
• Genie. This is some sort of pay-by-the-day thing that lets you skip lines by booking ahead. We did this for every ride after the first Star Wars one, and it was great, pretty much just walk on to most things. Absolutely worth whatever it cost.

There were all sorts of things. There were rollercoasters, motion-simulator-rides, the parade... The parade got me. I was kinda still trying to be my usual cynical skeptical self, but I just fell in love with the parade. I went to Disney World once as a little kid, and missed out on the parade then, but this time we were right in front right near the start, and saw everything.

The only two I really wanted to go on before we went were the Small World ride, which was again magical, it was pure 1960s campiness, exactly the sort of thing I like. And Space Mountain: when I was little, and we went to Florida, I desperately wanted to ride Space Mountain, and it was the first thing we went to, stood in line for an hour, got to the front... "sorry kid, you're an inch too short." Devastating. So the first thing I looked up when I got the app was what the height limits all were, and of course now I'm well over them, but I really wanted to do Space Mountain, and for the last ride of the night we got to, and it was great! We also got to see an amazing fireworks show, ride Pirates of the Caribbean (with no wait; we were standing around waiting for something else and Joe pointed out that there was no line, so I just walked over there and went through it alone), see little hidden details of the park...

Everything was great. It was exactly what I wanted, and didn't expect, for it to be like. I still don't like Disney the company and I still don't like what pop culture has become, largely because of them, but I have to admit that what they do, they do extremely well, and it's not all bad. Walt's park is a nice place to spend some time.

Last Monday morning I woke up with a slightly scratchy throat. This progressed as it usually does, until by Wednesday I could no longer deny that I was sick, by Thursday I was miserable, and I spent most of Friday in bed. Then Saturday I started feeling a bit better and yesterday I was better still, and now today I'm basically fine.

Meanwhile. Thursday evening around 6, the sky went from a normal nice day to black as night over the course of about ten minutes. Then there was some light rain. Then there were sheets of sideways rain. Then we lost power. It didn't come back on until about 2 PM Friday; we spent Thursday night in a hotel (with me hacking and dripping and feeling miserable) and even if I hadn't been sick I couldn't have worked Friday, because it turns out that electricity plays a big role in most of what a programmer does.

We were lucky. A tornado touched down about a mile away, big sections of the city are still without power, and the official death toll is up to eight. There's a six-block "exclusion zone" set up downtown. It's sort of like a hurricane except it happened with no warning.

But here on the west side, in the upstairs office, things are normal and I feel fine. Browsing the internet and watching TV and mentally getting ready to go to BGG Spring on Wednesday.

I've been thinking that I want to have a journal again. Even if no one reads it, which, I expect no one will read this. I'm even making it public because I doubt it even matters.

(while we're on the topic: if you still use this site, either LJ or DW, please comment and let me know? I'm curious).

Anyway. I'm probably going to revive this, and I see that the last entry was in 2015, nearly a decade ago, a few days after my wedding. So I'll go over some life changes:

• I got married on Sept. 26th 2015, then separated on June 3rd 2018, then divorced Dec. 8th 2018. So it goes.


• I bought a new house, in June 2020! Then I bought another new house in April 2023 and sold that one.


• I got a new job in 2016, then in 2018 that company was acquired. Stuck it out for a year and then got another new job in early 2019, where I still (happily) work.


• The world ended in spring of 2020, but that's a major life event as much for everyone else as me, so everyone already knows about it.


• I started seeing my new girlfriend, Megan, in October 2021, and we're still together (and living in the new house).


• Three new cats joined, two cats left: Cheeto was adopted in 2017 and Keanu was found as a stray the same year. Leeroy ran away, and Cassie took Robert when she left. Megan brought Kai with her.


• I bought a new car and a new bike: 2016 Indian Scout and 2019 Ford Mustang. Neither one's really "new" any more though.


• The board game collection has both grown and shrunk, the friend circle has done the same. I have some new hobbies and have progressed further into others.

I think that pretty much covers the major life developments.

I've been wanting a place I can write about things. It might be rants about things that will tick people off, it might be talking about projects I'm working on (software, hardware, games), it might be just organizing my thoughts. But I need a place I can write things down. I miss the times when there was a community here but even without an audience I think this has a place in my life. So here goes.

Yesterday I learned about a site called Tip4Commit (I'm not linking to them). I learned about them from a thread on Hacker News complaining about them. Here's how it works:

- Tip4Commit has a search engine where you can look up open source projects. If you search for one that doesn't exist (on GitHub), they automatically add it.

- Once you find one, you can donate a sum of money to that project, in Bitcoin. Your donation goes into the Tip4Commit wallet.

- Tip4Commit then watches that project's GitHub repository, and each time someone commits to it, they give that committer 1% of the project's (remaining) Bitcoin balance.

- If the committer has an account with Tip4Commit, then it sends them the money, to their Bitcoin wallet

- If they don't, then it sends them an email saying they have money they can go claim.

For a lot of reasons, this is extremely bad. And the author's reaction to criticism is even worse. And I'd like to discuss why.

First, the complaints. I saw three main complaints about T4C from people on the Github issue tracker:

1. Spammy emails. This was brought up by the Django project maintainer here. Sending emails to developers that you don't have a prior relationship with isn't cool. It's spam, and actually illegal. T4C gets the emails by scraping the commit logs of these projects.

2. Discouraging developers and offering perverse incentives for committing. This was brought up a couple places. T4C encourages developers to make lots of small, low-value commits and maintainers to be suspicious of new developers offering small commits. It insultingly "rewards" developers with a fraction of a cent for hours of passionate work.

3. Implying a relationship with the project maintainers where none exists. This is a big deal, in my opinion. He's using the names and GitHub identities of other developers in order to raise money, some of which he then keeps, without their permission. This is fraud. And it's probably worse than any other bad-behavior thing this project does.

All those are problems, but what I really want to talk about is the utterly horrible way the owner of Tip4Commit is handling the criticism.

First, there's been no acknowledgement that he's done anything wrong, or (god forbid) an apology for it. All criticism has been treated as a discussion of a technical problem. Sending out unsolicited emails? Add in a threshold, it only sends emails when you've accumulated $2. No acknowledgement that maybe the fact you're sending unsolicited mail means you need to communicate with someone that you shouldn't, just a quick fix for the mail.

Weaselly refusal to do simple requests, also. Someone asks their projects be removed? Well we can't do that because someone else could just add you back. Well add me to a blacklist then! Oh but a blacklist would be adding a new feature, why don't you write that for us? I am not even kidding.

Not understanding (being charitable here) why anyone wouldn't want what he's forcing on them. This is a big one. In response to "please remove my project," he just keeps saying "why? what about his instead? why isn't this good enough?" in different ways. This is boundary-pushing, turning into boundary-ignoring. It's actually really creepy to watch. The project maintainers (who are also sometimes the sole developer) are very clearly telling him to stop doing what he's doing, and he's choosing not to hear or understand them.

Shutting down discussions when it starts going against him. As soon as he has no way to misunderstand what someone is asking for, he says "this discussion has wandered too far" or "this isn't appropriate for a bug tracker" or something, and forces the people complaining to start all over again somewhere else (with him again obstinately refusing to understand).

All of these are really manipulative, scummy tactics. What I think is really going on:

- If a "donor" gives, say, $10 to a project on Tip4Commit, then the next commit to that project earns 10 cents, then slightly under 10 cents, then a little less, etc.

- But, because it's only taking away a percentage of the remaining balance each time, then the balance never actually reaches zero. And since that percentage is 1%, it takes hundreds of commits to even get close to zero.

- Eventually people will forget Tip4Commit exists, and the author can shut it down and pocket the remaining money.

- There will be more money the more projects he can pretend he's working with, so he adds everyone he can and refuses to remove them.

His defense for this, when he finally gets argued with enough to give it, is "why don't you want your developers to get free money?" I submit that this isn't the point at all. The maintainers don't want their names associated with this scam, and a few cents of free money isn't enough to change that. That's the tone-deafness the maintainers are fighting against with this guy.

Or sometimes his other defense: "how can you release your code as open-source and then object to this?" Well, because it's not the code you're using, it's the names and reputations of the project maintainers. And no matter how many times this is pointed out he doesn't hear it.

This whole thing is incredibly scummy and needs to be shut down.

Update:

Here's a message I just sent to GitHub support:

I'm writing this to talk about a project you're hosting the source for, tip4commit/tip4commit.

The way it works is, people can donate money to a particular open source project, and then the people who write commits that are accepted to that project get a small percentage of the donated balance. So if the current donation balance for a project is $10, the next commit would earn one percent of that, for 10 cents, then the one after it would earn 1% of the remaining $9.90 for 9.9 cents, and so on.

The problem is that the whole thing reeks of being a scam:

- Projects are added without the consent of the owners, and in many cases against their consent. Searching for a GitHub project adds it automatically to their database with no way to remove it, and people opening issues to have their names / projects removed get brushed off.

- It's almost impossible, at 1% per commit, to get an appreciable amount of the donated money back out. 68 commits to get half of it, 228 commits to get 90%. What happens to the money that no one has committed enough to claim? Who knows? Probably it just stays with tip4commit.

Which is why I think the whole thing is a scam, using GitHub to carry it out (by scraping contributor emails from GitHub commit records). They'll accept donations fraudulently under project maintainers' names, then dole out a few percent of them to committers, and eventually shut down and keep the balance.

I realize there's not a lot you can do about this, since you're not hosting the actual site and they don't need an API key to pull the commit data. But it would send a great message if you shut the repository down, IMHO.

I've had a little back-and-forth with the author of this scam, Arsen Gasparyan, here. He claims to not comprehend that the project maintainers might have a stake in this. This morning he disabled unsolicited emails and made it opt-in only for committers, thus making it even harder to get the fraudulently-collected money out of the thing. Projects are still added on search and can't be removed.

Which is the infuriating part, really. He totally denies that he's done anything wrong, because he totally denies that project maintainers have any rights to be trampled on. It's all about the committers.

- Had my check card canceled, because of bullshit. I'll be able to fix it tomorrow, likely by switching banks, because this isn't the first time.

- Bought a grill and a cylinder of propane. Then spent way too long assembling the grill, when I could have bought a pre-assembled one for $30 more. But, I have a grill now.

- Set up (mostly) the Old Video Game Nook: my 21" CRT that I got from Dave, hooked to an RCA -> VGA converter, hooked to a Dreamcast / PS2 / Gamecube (actually a Wii pretending to be a Gamecube). Nostalgic fun!

- Replaced all the dimmers with real switches but one. The hall light is still stupid; you can only control it with the dimmer from one end of the hall, and only if another light switch is off. But the dimmers in my room, my workshop, and the kitchen are all gone now.

- Finally got in the mail a thing I've been waiting for for weeks; a little toy that I had shipped from Ukraine right before the war broke out.

- Ate a steak that would have cost like $30 in a restaurant, for $4 because Cassie made it on our grill (and tomorrow I'll try doing burgers).

- Shelved all the DVDs. They all fit with about half a shelf to spare, because I put the games in the den, and the same with Bullshit (which is a shelf all on its own; they never released a proper boxed set).

I sort of went nuts on eBay the other day and ordered a few slide rules. Today the first ones came in: a K&E "beginner's slide rule" with only four scales (A, B, C, and D), and another little pocket one with some trig scales, but no folded scales and broken indicator. I realized these were in pretty bad shape when I bought them, but it was $5 for the pair, so I bid to see what would happen.

So, slide rules are essentially a collection of weird-scale rulers that you can line up against each other in different ways. The scales are all labeled with standard names that say what they are. The basic scales that all rulers have are C and D, which are log scales, used for multiplication: since log(x) + log(y) = log(xy), if you line up the start of the C scale with some number on D, then see what's across from another number on C, you multiply those two numbers.

A and B are also log scales, but compressed so that they show ten times the range. CI is a log scale just like C but backwards, used for making division easier.

Anyway, I now have four slide rules. Only one of them, the first one I got, has a bunch of fancy scales, though, and I want to get another one like it. I've got a couple more auctions I've won for odd slide rules, that I'll probably post about when I get them.

I did finish the Asimov slide rule book last night. It was great, especially for someone into recreational math. I was a little disappointed that he didn't go into the more fancy log-log scales on my K&E rule (used for raising things to arbitrary powers), but it's kind of expected since almost no slide rules seem to have had them and almost no one would ever need to use one anyway.

So now I have no excuse for not housing.

Yesterday was the roofer. The old owners had made an extension on the roof for a covered patio (pretty much exactly what you just described, Tucker, except no pomegranate tree), but that added a new valley to the roof which made water pool up by the chimney. They raised the roof in that corner so it drains better; it was easily the most expensive thing I have ever paid for on Square. :) I have some pictures. Sorry for potato quality; I didn't take them.

Today I didn't wake up before my alarm, for the first time in weeks. I went to the house, replaced one light switch, hung around while the cable guy did his thing, and put together a wire shelf and loaded it with some board games. Also did some minor door maintenance.

The light switches, apparently the old owners loved dimmer knobs, because they put them on everything. This means that turning on the lights is kind of a chore, and anyway why would you ever want a light to be dimmer? So yesterday I bought a bunch of light switches, with the intention of replacing most of the dimmers with normal switches (Cassie doesn't mind the dimmers, so the one in her writing room and the one in the hall will stay). I found out that none of the breakers are labeled, so I had to switch the whole house off, but whatever. Other than that it was pretty straightforward.

The door, there were two things wrong with: one, it didn't latch; you could open it by just pushing it in, without turning the knob. What happened there was that the strike plate came loose, one of the screws worked its way out, and nobody noticed and kept slamming the door on it. So part of the wood there is pretty shattered. I was able to hold it on with just one screw, so now it latches, but it's pretty crappy, I need to work out a better way to fix it. The internet says "fill the hole with JB Weld and drill a new everything" which seems plausible.

Cable though, that went perfectly. The outlet is replacing the old AT&T one, and it's right where I wanted it to be, behind the TV. There's a cable running directly from the pedestal (serves the whole block) to my modem, so in a first time occurrence for me there was actually too much signal; he had to put in a splitter to nothing just to make it work. So I have really fast internet there now.

The plan now is, have most everything moved by the end of next week. Cassie has next week off (spring break) so I'm going to pack stuff into boxes and stack them in my room, she'll move the boxes during the day, and I'll pack more / unpack (to reuse the boxes) at night. Then next weekend we can borrow her father's truck.

Surprisingly, I kind of love fixing things on this house. Which is probably a good thing. But this is why I've only moved like five boxes; every time I go over there I end up fixing something instead.

Today I closed on the house, and got the keys. The previous owners are still moving some things out of the backyard, but it's officially mine and I can go over there whenever I want to, because it's my house.

Closing was insanely fast. The bank did it in two weeks, because they were super into getting it done in February for some reason. I got a bunch of concessions from them too, they waived almost all of my closing costs, I paid about $150 over the down payment. So that's cool.

I bought a refrigerator today too, which I'm actually more freaked out about than the house. A fancy french-door stainless steel refrigerator.

I suppose I should start packing things. Cassie has a cold so I guess that's why she's not moving things yet. She says she's going to move a bunch of stuff over spring break though.

"Character is to man what carbon is to steel."

So, too much makes them brittle and easy to break?