Its Days Are Numbered

I love Tree.

Meanwhile, in Burlington yesterday…

We went to Burlington on a small errand which turned out to be a bit of a fail. We walked up & down Church. We only went into Homeport, for my errand, and Kiss the Cook, because they were keeping the door open & that made me feel good about their ventilation. At KtC, X saw a pie plate for cheaper than what he had just recently paid online for the same. Although it was in the 30s, there was a cold breeze and no sun, so we felt colder than I’d hoped we would. Altogether, a lot of things to feel down about. On the upside, we stopped for refreshment at an outdoor kiosk specializing in Frenchy baked goods and drinks. X got a ham sandwich and I got a Belgian hot chocolate. The hot chocolate was the greatest. There’s nothing better than real hot chocolate made out of chocolate and not from a mix. Like drinking a hot candy bar.

I didn’t feel great but I didn’t feel awful, seeing all the places of business that were verboten for us to go into. I felt like that world was not gone forever, but rather just waiting to burst into life again. It’s not just that I want to go to a restaurant per se. We like to go to different places. Walk into a store with some odd thingamabobs in it. X is drawn into little details most people don’t see. He will see something odd in a store that catches his fancy and he just lights up, gets lost exploring it. It’s like the world is our museum. That’s what I miss.

Book Corner 2020.59

Out of the Ether

by Matthew Leising

A double story – the founding of Ethereum; and the $55 million heist of its cryptocurrency, ether, in 2016.

Written by a journalist and based entirely on first-person interviews, it’s got credibility and an in-depth perspective. Leising spends a lot of time speaking with and admiring wunderkind founder Vitalik Buterin, Russian-Canadian child-prodigy eccentric genius who saw the potential of blockchain to do more than just serve as a ledger of a digital currency. The beauty of Ehtereum, the Avis to Bitcoin’s Hertz, the number-two-trying-harder, is that its ledger doesn’t just store coins or tokens or static things. It also stores programs, “smart contracts”, which can DO things to the things. You can have literal contracts. You can do crowdfunding. You can do anything you can dream up and code in their programming language, Solidity.

But it also stores cryptocurrency, ether, the “gas” that makes the contracts go, and a speculative currency in its own right. And basically, one day a hacker found a bug in a big important “smart contract” which allowed him to sneak in and steal ether, over and over again.

He was stopped. White-hat programmers first went in and exploited the same bug to “steal” as much ether as they could to keep it safe from the thief and be able to return it to its rightful owners… but then the hacker snuck into the stolen ether, too.

So they had to decide what to do… one option was called the “hard fork,” which meant basically rewriting history so that the hack never happened. Ether is, well, ethereal – it doesn’t exist except in the blockchain, so, why not? You can code whatever you want and make it so the hack never happened. But many objected to this, including Vitalik, as “icky.” You’re not supposed to do that. The thing about blockchains is they’re supposed to be immutable. In fact, the thief didn’t really “steal” anything or do anything wrong, right? In theory, he just ran the program a certain way, doing something that it allowed him to do. There was no fundamental bug in Ethereum. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Not the hacker’s fault somebody coded something in a smart contract that they didn’t intend to.

Well, the other option was to basically invalidate the stolen ether – they could make it so that it would no longer be tradeable for other currency, making it worthless.

They chose the hard fork. This isn’t a spoiler. Anyone who cares knows.

It was a pretty good book… never really got bogged down in anything that would be over an interested reader’s head, and never got boring. (  )

Stay-in-cation and Schloot

So, mission accomplished for first Day Off of the week: I didn’t get depressed. I set myself various goals and hit them. The trick was that I would only have to spend 1 hour total on any one task. If I didn’t feel like doing something, I could goad myself by remembering it was only one hour.

So belatedly, here’s a photo of Xmas schloot.

Clockwise from top left:

  • a coconut scented candle
  • an out-of-print book showing weavings from the Victoria & Albert Textile Museum
  • a book spelling-bee puzzles (these are fun)
  • a wine stopper – but why stop?
  • a tea holder – made in Japan of cherry bark
  • a vanilla scented candle (there are 2 vanilla and 1 coconut)

I’m surprised X bought scented candles. He’s normally quite opposed. He must have liked these (he smelled ’em before he bought ’em).

The tea holder is funny because three people gave me tea this season.

Next Mix

This should be contrasty enough.

I’m retiring the daily update for the new year. I stay home constantly. I’m going to make one more big whizzbang charitable contribution in 2020 and then rest my finances for a while. I do reserve the right however to chat about what’s for dinner whenever I feel like it.

I have this whole coming week off, even though there is not a damn thing I can do with it, just because I thought it would be mentally healthy to … I don’t know, I would say not work for a week, but I wasn’t working anyway. Between big-picture idleness (the big reason I jumped on that rotational position), end-of-year idleness, and I guess Chris-isn’t-going-to-be-here-come-January-anyway idleness, I was spending almost all my hours listening to podcasts about blockchains & digital currency in the hopes of learning something to help me navigate my way around Tech Lab next year. I have no idea what is going to be expected of me in my new position, and I’d say that’s scary, except it’s not, because I haven’t the foggiest idea what to be scared of.

Too Close

I may be sticking too close together on the color wheel. It hardly looks variegated at all:

But it is! See:

My next will possibly be my final variegated for the season. It’ll be orange-themed, to prove orange can be beautiful. As usual, the top is the blend of the four below:

Book Corner 2020.58

Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

I saw this book well described as “a disaster novel without the disaster.” All that the characters know for sure about the disaster is that power went out on the East Coast. It becomes eerier than that, but I won’t give away any spoilers.

The plot is simple. A Brooklyn family of four rents an Airbnb out near the Hamptons on Long Island. The owners of the house show up one night just a few days into their stay. The owners had been out & about in NYC when, they report, the power went out. (The power remains inexplicably still on out on eastern Long Island.) But it didn’t seem like a normal blackout – plus, their apartment in the city was too many flights up to want to climb with the elevators not working – so they drove out to Long Island to wait things out at their summer home. But things are weird. They feel weird. The Airbnb guests feel weird. And not just the awkwardness of all having to share quarters with strangers; it’s all just… weird.

I found it enthralling and scary. It’s just about how these different people respond to crisis. And the scary part was reading it during this little world crisis of our own – not knowing what chapter we are currently in, out of how many chapters, of THAT crisis.

First stirring quote: “Waist-deep water was lapping against Venetian marble, and tourists were smiling & taking snapshots. It was like some tacit agreement: everyone had ceded to things just falling apart.” Makes me feel like the way most of this country seems to just be shrugging their shoulders at 300,000 dead – crisis came, and we all just acted like such a bunch of surrender-monkeys, we would put France to shame.

Clay & Amanda, the renters, fantasize about what they will do when (they imagine) shortly they will pack up and head on home to Brooklyn… Clay wants to stop in a diner. “Chrome. Jukeboxes. Corned beef hash.” Amanda wants to go to an old-fashioned sit-down Chinese restaurant. “The only things a person ever wanted were food and home.” Preach!

“Lemmings were not suicidal; they were driven to migrate and overconfident about their ability. The leader of the pack was not to blame. They all plunged into the sea, thinking it easy to traverse as a puddle; so human an instinct in a bunch of rodents.”

The narrator is omniscient. The perspective of each character in turn is assumed. The narrator also knows exactly what is going on, but is coy about sharing it. You may be more clear than I about exactly what happened and is going to happen, but I felt I might have blinked and missed a thing or two.

Note: I own this in hardcover and am willing to lend. (  )

Did you stay home today?  100%

What local business or charity did you support?   Gotta think on that

What’s for dinner? Chicken tortellini in sauce

I Like It

Did you stay home today?  Popped into Mama Pho for my order

What local business or charity did you support?   Mama Pho, tipped large

What’s for dinner?  Mama Pho. They have 35 items on the menu. I put on my random number generator and chose 26. It was chicken & beef, in a spicy sauce over rice. With a bit of duck sauce (sweet tooth) it was good to the last drop.