Movie

As I wrapped up my Friday debugging, Claire and her beau came over. We opted to go for a family Chinese Dinner together – always a good call because it’s an affordable way to eat “family buffet style”. And the table we usually get (due to family size) is a larger round table away from most background noise, which makes for easier conversations and less distraction.

When we got back, we watched “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil”:

From the 2010-11 timeframe it’s a funny parody of so many horror movies. In it two simple country guys are just trying to enjoy a vacation at a new shack that Tucker just bought located deep in the woods. They get confused as being backwoods psychos by a group of nearby camping college kids. [plot]

Calc

Lately I’ve been interested in getting something to help me with the Programmer type Math in my daily job. While I had thought about perhaps digging up my old HP-28S from college, I decided to dig deeper into Emacs Calc Mode because 99% of the time I’m already in Emacs when I’m doing any computer writing. Calc can sometimes seems a bit overwhelming, like starting a new car driver on Stick Shift right away. It is pretty powerful though: a bit like a mini- Matlab or Mathematica. I found that if you’re serious about learning Calc Mode, this ten year old Introductory Video on Vimeo is good at demonstrating its power in 50 minutes – from simple to calculus and plotting.

The basic things that I need to do involve a lot of binary math, a common thing when you’re involved in very low level programming and modeling, as I am daily. This section in the official manual covers this, as the video skipped over that.

Phone

After making a fresh batch of chili for lunch, I decided to take another look at Michael’s phone, a two year old Moto G6, which has been Boot Loop’ing since yesterday. Boot Loop’ing is when a phone tries to turn on, but gets stuck at its lowest initial startup, fails, and restarts. Lather, rinse, repeat until the battery dies. Having been on Android since it’s early days, I knew about getting into the low level menus and doing various resets and factory wipes of data, but the phone was so stuck you couldn’t even get into those “scary” text menus that allow that.

So after a little bit of web searching for any other hints besides those that I already had familiarity with, I decided to log into my “Fi” account and use the Chat Support. The twins’ phones are under Device Protection. After a bit of online chat, the rep is sending a replacement model and I just need to send this one back shortly after it arrives.

Some have complained about using “Fi”, but I’ve found it to be pretty convenient. I’ve never had to wait at a phone store, setup and data transfer operations have been fine from home. The bills are low and a la carte for minutes, texts, and data usage. Most folks like having “unlimited” plans but then you’re paying a lot more per month. It’s like the “deductible” trade-off in car insurance. You could say you want no deductible, but your monthly car insurance premium will be extra $$.