The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

To think that my previous pair of glasses lasted nearly twenty years, and yet my current pair almost two

So there I was, sitting in the Compute Room at Chez Boca cleaning my glasses. I was holding them in my left hand, and I had finished cleaning the left lens and had started cleaning the right lens when …

SNAP—

I now had a literal pair of glasses. The bridge on my glasses had snapped cleanly in half.

Well, gosh darn it, I thought to myself. What I said out loud, though, was “XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­X!”

I did my best tape job, and then Bunny drove us (because I wasn't about to drive with a pair of glasses that might fall apart at any second) to the store where I had purchased my glasses.

Of course they don't sell those frames any more. They still sell Flexon frames, just not the ones I have. And because they can't just take the existing lenses and recut them for new glasses (because I now have progressive lenses) it'll take a bit over a week for the new glasses to be ready.

Aaaaaaaaaahhh!

In the meantime, it was suggested I try going to a jewelry store to see if they could temporarily solder the two halves together, because the clear tape clearly wasn't cutting it.

So then Bunny and I went to a nearby jewelry store, and while they didn't have the equipment to do that, they did suggest we head out to International Jewelers Exchange out in West Boca. It's a large, flea-market like jewelry store with multiple merchants inside, some of which do repairs.

West Boca and the International Jewelers Exchange it is!

Asking around, we found Mike, who also does eye glass repairs. When he saw the glasses, he had bad news for us. “That's titanium—my equipment doesn't get hot enough to properly repair it,” he said. “You can try the laser and welding store upstairs, they might have the proper equipment.”

So we trudged upstairs to the laster and welding store and asked. “Sorry, no,” that guy said. “I mean, we can try soldering titanium, but any slight pressure and ‘POP!’ it will fail. Our equipment just isn't hot enough to properly handie it.”

Well, I thought, gosh darn it. This time, I managed not to say “XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­X” out loud.

So now I'm back home at Chez Boca. The 3M micropore tape and a small segment of a toothpick for structural support appears to be working, although my glasses are now a bit floppy. But it's holding, and it should be fine until next week.

“XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­X!”

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Some musings on the Metric system

I just watched this amusing video “Why Didn't America Go Metric? Now I Finally Get It” where Busted Knuckle Woodworks goes into the history of the matric system and why the US doesn't use it. Yes, it goes into the whole “pirates stole the metric system from the US” story, but it also mentions the late 1800s Pyramid Power movement that also put the kibosh on the metric system here in the US (and one I had not heard and sadly, such mystical thinking is still very much in the main stream). And it's interesting that the Imperial System is still in main stream use in the UK.

But one advantage I see for the Imperial System is that it's mostly based on factors of two and three, like two cups per pint, two pints per quart, three teaspoons per tablespoon, and three barlycorns per inch. The downside of that advantage is the sheer number of units available, like drams, furlongs, pennyweights and gills. I don't think it's that bad though.

For instance, the chocolate ice cream recipie I've been using contains the following ingrediants:

In the metric system, you get some really weird values though:

I think the amount for cocoa powder is correct, as I found answers from 75‥95g of cocoa powder per cup, and as I like chocolate, I used ¾ the upper value.

I suppose one could get by with:

for more “round” amounts in metric. I do wonder if such rounding up (or even down) might affect the results though (probably not). Personally, I find the Imperial version easier to remember, but that might be bias on my part.

Sunday, September 07, 2025

There's a van Gogh joke in here somewhere

Bunny went to the local Michaels Craft store to pick up a project, and she returned with a small gift for me:

[An image of a pencil eraser in the shape of a human ear] “'Ere you go! Earase to your ear's content!”

An eraser (or as it states on the package, a gomme à effacer) in the shape of a human ear. And it also appears not to be for kids between newly born and 12 years old if I'm reading the small graphic icon in the corner of the package correctly. Maybe not for kids less than a year old? I don't know, it just has a small kid face with the text “0–12,” encased in a circle with a slash.

I … don't know what to say, other than “Thank you!” but aside from that … I have nothing.

Saturday, September 06, 2025

Notes on an overheard conversation of two people opening a package

“Oh, it's a mug from Sunny Farms, in Sequim, Washington.”

“It's pronounced ‘skwim.’”

“Pardon?”

“It's pronounced ‘skwim.’”

“So, you're saying the ‘E’ is silent?”

“Yes.”

“…”

“It's Washington! What can I say?”

Saturday, August 30, 2025

Notes on an overheard conversation between a prescriptivist and a descriptivist

“I'm going to the grocery story, so if you wake up from your nap and I'm not here, that's where I will be at.”

“No. Don't say that.”

“You don't want me to go to the store?”

“No, don't end your sentances with a preposition.”

“Really? How should I have said that?”

“‘That's where I will be.’ You don't need the ‘at.’”

And the next thing you'll tell me is to stop splitting my infinitives.”

“Pththththththththt.”

Friday, August 29, 2025

Some more notes on the “wireless service unit”

After much experimentation, I found out that the “wireless service unit” the Monopolistic Phone Company sent us to replace the DSL does in fact support multicasting, although it's a bit more pedantic about it than any other router I've encountered so far. The address I used to use, 239.255.0.1, falls into the “administratively scoped” category of multicast addresses, and I picked it because I wanted a multicast address that was scoped. The “wireless service unit” isn't something I fully control, so it rejected that range of multicast addresses. In fact it appeared that it didn't like any multicast address that could, in theory, be routed.

Of course it exhibited different behavior with different blocks. Most of the blocks it would work for just under five minutes, then fail. I found this out by writing some very simple programs—one to send some data once per second to a multicast address, and one to receive the data. I would run the sender on two computers, and the listeners also on the two computers. Both the listeners would receive data from both senders, and then as they approached five minutes, they would only receive multicast packets from the sender running on the same computer.

It was only when I switched to using the one non-routable multicast address block, 224.0.0.0/24, did things Just Work™. 224.0.0.0/24 is categorized as “local subnetwork” and is not routable.

Sigh.

So now I'm able to use the multicast program I was using before, since it was always local to my home network anyway.

Other notes about the “wireless service unit”—it's reporting pages suck. There's the “event report” page, which dumps data like:

No. Data/Time SoureIP DestinationIP Proto Reason
1 2025/08/… XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX TCP Generic Discards
2 2025/08/… XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX TCP Generic Discards
3 2025/08/… XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX UDP Generic Discards
4 2025/08/… XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX TCP Generic Discards

TCP and UDP traffic is being stopped, but what TCP and UDP traffic? No indication, and there's no way to configure what is logged. Lovely.

The other log report is the list of current NAT sessions. It's more useful as it includes source address, destination address, NAT address, protocol, port numbers, and lifetime, but the table itself is capped to a maximum width, so making the browser window wider doesn't show more columns. Horizontal scrolling for the win? I guess? Sigh.

The port-forwarding feature is wonky. On my old router, I could set incoming packets from the Internet to TCP port 22 to be forwarded to my development machine. On the “wireless service unit,” however, setting that up means all traffic to TCP port 22 gets forwarded to my development machine, even on the local network! I mean … yeah … it works, but it's not public traffic that gets forwarded, all traffic gets forwarded. I can work around that but it's annoying.

The “wireless service unit” has also spontaneously rebooted itself a couple of times. Not enough for a pattern to emerge, but enough to be very annoying. And one time it failed to obtain an IPv6 address (which shouldn't change in my opinion but then again, I don't run the Monopolistic Phone Company) and I had to power cycle it to get IPv6 back.

And I can't shake the feeling that it's doing something to my DNS queries, even though I'm running a local DNS server …

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

My post about banning a Chinese web bot? Apparently, that was really about me being shadow banned from Hacker News … which is news to me

Oh my! This is hilarious:

Developer gets shadowbanned by Hacker News and asks for a real IP ban instead

Sean Conner discovered he's been shadowbanned from Hacker News and would rather just be banned at the IP level if they don't want him there. SEAN'S BLOG POST | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION

Unsupervised Learning NO. 495

I can see how the author might get that from if they only read the headline on Hacker News, but (to his credit) he spelled both my first name and last name correct, so he must have clicked through to my post (where my name shows up at the bottom of the page) but not read the actual post.

Wow!

But given the author writes about AI, perhaps he had his AI write the summary for him. Given the two errata he mentions about his previous newsletter, if he does use an AI, perhaps he needs a word or two with it …

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[Self-portrait with my glasses taped together]

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