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Wed May 30 09:23:46 EDT 2018
Slept from ten-thirty to seven. Woke briefly around one.
High of eighty-three today. 40% chance of thunderstorm.
Work:
- Prod Julie about copier agreement
Done.
- Read about https://github.com/gravitational/teleport
Done. Probably not worth trying for us.
- Review open tickets
Done.
- Test DNS resolution on Wolf and Flow after hours
Done.
- Install updated VirtIO drovers on Nostromo after hours
Done.
Huh. There's an OpenBSD package for the micro editor, but not one on Debian.
Twenty-minute walk at lunch.
Warm and overcast.
Home:
The MATE desktop environment looks nice, better than Gnome.
MATE may become my recommendation for people who wouldn't be comfortable in i3.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/tower-of-light-when-electricity-was-new-people-used-it-to-mimic-the-moon/273445/
> Before streetlights became the standard way to light cities, town leaders looked to "moonlight towers" to provide mass illumination.o
> And so, for a brief and literally shining moment early in the days of human-harnessed electricity, the future of municipal lighting was glowing orbs suspended high above cities -- towers, resembling oil derricks, capped with 4 to 6 arc lamps with a candlepower of 2,000 to 6,000 each.
> But not all of the crowds were excited about the new buildings studding their town's landscape. On the contrary, "many Detroiters," Freeberg writes, "were skeptical from the start." Some found the towers to be eyesores, each structure braced with a chaotic network of wires and posts. (One man even tried to chop down the wires that hung near his home, an act of civic-cosmetic rebellion for which he was arrested.) The lights also brought unanticipated complications along with their steady illumination. Animals, for one thing, were unaccustomed to the newly extended daytime. Chickens and geese, unable to sleep in this new state of omnipresent light, began to die of exhaustion.
> Humans, too, found the high-slung orbs to be as disorienting as they were ethereal. As tall as the towers were, they still left shadows in their wake -- shadows tinged with sharp blue light, Freeberg notes, which left pedestrians "dazed and puzzled." Foggy evenings, combined with the air pollution of a newly industrialized America, could thrust all of Detroit into effective darkness -- meaning, Freeberg writes, that "Detroiters could only speculate about the lovely sight that their lights must be creating as they shone down on the blanket of mist and soot that smothered the city." Even during occasions when the fog broke enough to allow some light to penetrate to the streets below, "many found themselves groping along sidewalks in an eerie gloom."
> So the moon towers were replaced, eventually, by a more modular solution. But Detroit's farewell to its moonlighting was a long one. Some of the towers were dismantled. Some were felled by high winds. Some were brought down, Freeberg notes, by "a rash of runaway mules that, in their 'fury,' accidentally knocked down towers."
> Detroit's remaining towers, for their part, moved south: They relocated to Austin, Texas, where city leaders, having newly constructed a dam on the Colorado River, were eager to make use of their harnessed electricity -- both for convenience's sake and for the prevention of crime. In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 of Detroit's used lighting towers. Seventeen of those structures survive today. (You may remember the teenagers from Dazed and Confused assembling kegs for a "party at the moon tower.") They are now, in the words of one historian, "much-loved curiosities" -- objects, generally speaking, of awesomeness rather than awe.
Lunch: coffee, grape leaf wrap
Dinner: pizza
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