“I have several friends who know him to some degree. One of them said ‘he often walks the fine line between genius and lunatic.’ The problem is, genius is such a commodity these days, that it’s not acceptable to be an eccentric any more.”
— Greg Hudson

I’ve know way too many creative people who’ve hidden behind elaborately constructed facades of eccentricity. Initially it takes up too much of their energy, then after a while it just becomes an excuse.

Tangentially related and potentially contradictory:

You have to pursue greatness not success. Achieve greatness and success will follow.
— Keith Schacht

One for my dad: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Morse Code

Growing up, I have very fond memories of my dad tapping out morse code. 30-odd years later, I find these recordings to be quite soothing, triggering a childhood feeling of warmth and safety from somewhere deep in my brain.

I never learned Morse Code, I faked the post title with this Morse Code Translator

(Si dad, fixed.)

From the sed manpage:

-i extension
   Edit files in-place, saving backups with the specified extension.
   If a zero-length extension is given, no backup will be saved.  It
   is not recommended to give a zero-length extension when in-place
   editing files, as you risk corruption or partial content in situ-
   ations where disk space is exhausted, etc.

This doesn’t work:

sed -i -e's/apples/oranges/' file.txt

The key thing here is that the extension after the -i flag is not optional. If you leave it off, sed assumes you’ll be entering it via stdin, which isn’t allowed and yields this error:

sed: -i may not be used with stdin

The solution is to send a zero-length extension like this:

sed -i '' -e's/apples/oranges/' file.txt

Careful with this, it could be really dangerous with poorly crafted commands.

Ran the Sunrise Lake loop this morning. Sunrise Lake’s elevation is 1,440 feet above sea level, which, considering that I normally run at sea level, made the hills seem that much more difficult.

Ran the 4.5 mile Hudson River route with Harris. Started out at dusk, which was amazing.

Four miles in 35 minutes on the treadmill.

Three miles in 25 minutes on the treadmill, I started off slow instead of stretching. Various body parts felt good. Followed up with lots of stretching and iced knees.

My left knee was pretty messed up after the five mile run back on August 12th. I saw the sports medicine doctor again a few days after that and she advised taking a few weeks off to let my knees recover. Tonight was the 12th day, things have been feeling pretty good for several days now.

The other thing she pointed out was that my experimenting with off the shelf arch-support insoles (my feet have hurt for a long time) was probably a big part of my knee pain. Legs seem to be very precisely balanced, the hips, knees, ankles and feet all affect one another more than it seems they would. I now have a prescription for orthotics and some medieval looking thing called a night splint. That’s only supposed to be worn for 4-6 weeks, but it would be nice to wake up in the morning and not have the first 15 minutes on my feet be excruciating.