Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

Baking cookies on a gray rainy day.

When I was in California a couple weeks ago visiting Mom, she gave me her mother’s box of recipes. Today I’m baking some of the cookies Grandma used to make. My grandkids can give them a try tomorrow.

These are “Candy Cookies”, made with graham cracker crumbs, condensed milk, chocolate chips, coconut, and pecans. Yum.

I'm switching back to Hawaiian in Duolingo, after a year of Japanese. It seems to expect me to remember words from before.

I decided I'm OK with using the dictionary to fill in these blanks, rather than trying to make up a word.

I hit the 400 mile mark on my new Tern Vektron e-bike on the way to work. It happened right near the bakery, which I took as a sign that it was a good day to pick up scone to have with my morning coffee.

Almost all of my riding has been to and from work. It's an 8-mile round trip, so that's about 50 commutes on the bike, and not in the car. The trip is much more enjoyable riding on the bike path through campus; the route for the car is on the bypass highway that goes around campus.

#bike #ebike #WarOnCars #Bloomington #Indiana

It’s a beautiful morning in Mountain View, catching the train to work.

I find that the Bay Area is much nicer to visit using public transit than renting a car and fighting the traffic.

Biking to work this week was awesome.

This beech tree in the woods out back seems determined to be the last tree with leaves.

Sometimes it’s clear that lunch is not planned, just random things in the kitchen. Today it turned out to be “turkey sandwich with orange things”: mango juice and seltzer, carrots, Trader Joe’s cheeto clones, and mandarins.

When there’s an autumn day this nice, enjoy it! Temp is low 70s, sun is out, and there’s a breeze.

Set up camp this afternoon at Lake Lurleen in Alabama. It’s our favorite campsite of the trip so far. I’m halfway through @pluralistic ‘s Internet Con and the sin is setting. Time for dinner.

Paused my camping vacation for a couple hours to call in to a work meeting. The Hatch Coworking space in Asheville NC is nice.

It turns out that driving a white SUV does *not* help find the car in a parking lot. 🤣

Opened the patio umbrella and found the beginnings of a wasp nest. It’s about half an inch across.

Food Truck Friday. Bike to the park, get a burrito, sit on the grass, enjoy a perfect autumn day in Bloomington.

#FoodTruck #friday #bike #Indiana #Bloomington

Does my science fiction book, Ministry for the Future, count as “literature”? 🤔😁

Sunrise at Indianapolis airport.

We’re heading to SFO, and then on to Japan in two days with grandchild. Grandchild and parents have an appointment at the passport office this morning, with a promise of same day service. We won’t fully relax until we succeed in boarding the flight to Osaka.

Life is especially good today. Living in the Eastern time zone, and working for a company in the Pacific time zone means having time in the morning to read and think before everybody else gets on Slack.

The weather is perfect today in Indiana for reading outside at the co-working space.

The past few weeks, I've rolled my eyes at the NY Times online edition, with a section header "Arts $amp; Leisure". They should have people who can get this encoding right.

Then I looked at the HTML, and I must admit it looks right to my inexpert eye. I have no idea what's wrong.

Haskell style question:

When do people use regular function application and function composition, and when do they use `&`, the reverse application operator? The Elixir folks really like their equivalent `|>` operator for building pipelines.

For me, when the chain of functions is long, I find `&` clearer. In day 1 of Advent of Code this year, I wound up with two functions, one in each style.

https://github.com/bwbeach/advent-of-code-2022/blob/main/day01/app/Main.hs

#haskell

(Note: I tried markdown for the code in the post, but triple-backticks didn't preserve newlines. 😞)

I love my afternoon walk through Ka‘anapali, on Maui.

A friend of mine posed the following puzzle:

> You have 12 marbles, which all have the same weight except one, which may be either heavier or lighter. How can you find the different one in three weighings on a balance scale?

I know I've seen it before, but it still too me a while to work out a solution. Then I wanted to visualize the solution, and cobbled together haskell, graphviz, and a couple shell scripts.

Then, of course, I saw my solution was wrong and had to re-work it.

Spoiler, of course:

https://github.com/bwbeach/puzzles/blob/main/weigh-twelve/README.md