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I have many many online friends but very few meatspace friends.

Monday I felt tired and depressed, today too. But after work both days I visited with a couple of the few IRL friends I've got. And I wasn't so tired anymore, nor depressed.

A while back Anonymous Coward drove down to Vancouver and took me out to lunch. I'm going to email him to suggest I return the favor. He'll still have to drive here - he lived about forty miles away - but now I have the cash that I could buy us both lunch.

I've been sleeping excessively. Time that I could otherwise spend with other people, I spend sleeping. This is bad - excessive sleep makes me depressed, depression makes me sleep excessively. Clearly the solution is to sleep less, but when that alarm clock rings, I am immune.

A new guy moved in across the hall from me, that's in the same housing program I'm in. Chris is a good guy. I'm going to invite him in for coffee.

He said "Do you need any food? I got food". "No I got lots of food" I replied. "I'll get you anything you need - food, girls, you name it."

Just spending a little while having coffee with me would be all I need.

I know waitresses and baristas all over the Pacific Northwest, but there's only one I know well enough to see outside her work. She said she wants to come visit, but she's been very busy. She works a lot of hours, then her troublesome sister keeps her busy. She babysits her sister's kids.

I'm planning to buy a car with the money from my next project. (I've been asked to do a second project!) That should help quite a lot as it will enable me to play Open Mics with my keyboard. Performing live music is a good way to make friends. Musicians are a lot more fun than computer programmers.

Spring is here. It's still cold but many of the trees are covered with blossoms. It gladdens my heart to see them.

I still have to wear a coat but I no longer have to wear a sweater under the coat. Soon it will be warm enough to go out without a coat.

I haven't been singing on the street since I've had this client. I'm thinking seriously that I should resume singing. As my Newfie ex-wife said, it would blow the stink off me.

It's evening twilight as I write this. I like it that the sun is up later and later in the day. When I get off work there's still a couple hours of sunlight left.

With daylight savings time it's hard for me that the sun is still down when my alarm clock rings. It's not quite dark, it's morning twilight but there is very little light at that time. Soon though the sun will rise before my alarm.

Krddit's tdillo suggests that I need a hobby away from the computer. Really my music should be that hobby but my depression leads me not to practice. The crazy thing is that I feel good whenever I do practice, I know that I will, but even so I dread practicing.

The dread I have of doing just about anything is delusional. But just knowing that you're delusional doesn't make the delusion go away.

I'm going to ask my pshrink to change my happy pills. The ones I'm presently on - two different antidepressants - do help but not enough. I don't feel bad exactly but I sleep too much. When I talk to other people I speak very slowly. I have difficulty talking at all.

Well I'll post this and head home. The apartment manager will be replacing one of my light switches tonight - when this switch is turned on, the bulb flickers dimly. I don't know for sure that it's the light switch but it seems a reasonable explanation.

Today Theresa May's letter triggering Article 50, the UK's withdrawal from the EU, was delivered to Donald Tusk. Far-right populism appears to have triumphed over post-WWII cooperation. We live in interesting times. Scotland has voted to have another independence referendum, and Northern Ireland's regional assembly is in limbo as a result of a corruption scandal and republican parties have increased their presence. The UK's days are numbered.

AP link #1
AP link #2
Fox News
The Republic

(all 4 links are the same AP story)

Dell’s 32-inch 8K UP3218K Display Now For Sale: Check Your Wallet

Overall an 8K monitor offers 33.2 megapixels of coverage, which in a 32-inch (31.5-inch) form factor gives 280 pixels per inch. 33.2 megapixels is four times that of UHD, which is 8.3 megapixels. Users wanting to play some AAA titles at 8K on this beast are going to run into walls with memory bandwidth very quickly, however eSports titles should run OK. Using some undocumented tricks, a pair of tests in our new set of gaming benchmarks for CPU reviews can render at 8K or even 16K without needing a monitor, so you might see some numbers in due course showing where we stand with GPU power on this technology. It’s worth noting that Raja Koduri, SVP of AMD’s Radeon Technology Group, has stated that VR needs 16K per-eye at 144 Hz to emulate the human experience, so we're still a way off in the display technology reaching consumer price points at least.

Oh no, that's not enough horrifying detail for me and I think I will wait for 16K.

The Unicode Consortium will adopt a new crop of emoji in June 2017.

So far, we're getting an exploding head, a face with "!@#$%&" in front of it, a vomiting face, a monocled face, an older (unemployable) adult, a woman with headscarf, a bearded man, breast-feeding, mages, fairies, vampires (you can potentially make a black vampire by adding the U+1F3FF Fitzpatrick modifier), merpeople, elves, genies, zombies, an orange heart, gloves, giraffes (pregnancy not specified), a hedgehog, a T-Rex, a steak, a fortune cookie, a flying saucer/UFO, and the flags of England, Scotland, and Wales (perhaps the Unicode Consortium is preparing for the dissolution of the United Kingdom by adding these in advance).

I'm not sure why this stuff popped up in Google News on the 22nd, since most of the glyphs have been known for months. There may be some new languages that weren't there back in August, as well as a Bitcoin sign.

Rumor: AMD Working on 16 Core/32 Thread Ryzen CPU To Take The Performance Crown In The HEDT Spectrum

The White House's official newsletter linked to an article sarcastically ripping apart Trump's budget

This budget will make America a lean, mean fighting machine with bulging, rippling muscles and not an ounce of fat. America has been weak and soft for too long. BUT HOW WILL I SURVIVE ON THIS BUDGET? you may be wondering. I AM A HUMAN CHILD, NOT A COSTLY FIGHTER JET. You may not survive, but that is because you are SOFT and WEAK, something this budget is designed to eliminate.

AMD Announces Ryzen 5 Lineup: Hex-Core from $219, Available April 11th

$249: Ryzen 5 1600X
6/12 cores/threads
3.6/4.0 GHz base/turbo
95 W TDP

$219: Ryzen 5 1600
6/12 cores/threads
3.2/3.6 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

$189: Ryzen 5 1500X
4/8 cores/threads
3.5/3.7 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

$169: Ryzen 5 1400
4/8 cores/threads
3.2/3.4 GHz base/turbo
65 W TDP

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003574546

Their project is supported by a Japan Science and Technology Agency program that provides subsidies of up to ¥5 billion for promising technologies. The corporate-academic project team aims to achieve the fastest computing speed in Japan by June, which would make the computer the third-fastest in the world, and eventually claim the world’s fastest position.

The new supercomputer will be the first to be equipped with a high-capacity, low-power 3D integrated circuit (IC) developed by Keio University Prof. Tadahiro Kuroda. The team is utilizing ExaScaler’s original “liquid cooling” technology to efficiently cool down the heated computer using liquid carbon fluoride.

These technologies allowed the supercomputer to be downsized to about one meter wide by one meter long. The plan is to link and install 18 such computers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology’s Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, to achieve a speed of 24 quadrillion computations per second. If successfully realized, the new supercomputer will have the highest capability in Japan and be the third-fastest computer in international speed rankings.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/03/14/new-japanese-supercomputing-project-targets-exascale/

I could open a business checking account but that means I need business licenses with both the city and state. But my first paycheck is almost gone.

What did I spend it on? Might as well be hookers and blow, I'd have as much to show for it. Actually I spent most of it on restaurant meals. I'm fortunate that I spent some on items of lasting value, like my spiffy new Mac Mini, and some new clothes. Otherwise I would have spent the whole thing at restaurants.

Fortunately a close friend is willing to lend me the money for the business licenses. I will apply online later tonight. This friend of mine is well aware of my fondness for hookers and blow, but frankly I'm shocked.

I used to enjoy cooking at home. It's my depression that discourages it.

I could take sandwiches for lunch but every morning I feel too wiped to make my sandwich. Starting tonight I'm going to make my sandwiches the night before.

Rice and Beans. I like rice and beans, but my bean pot is dirty. I have two kitchen sinks. The left-hand one I actually use, and do a good job of keeping it empty. My bean pot is in the right-hand sink, and has been there for months, unwashed.

There is no excuse. Depression makes me lazy but even so I must not give into it. Among the best ways to overcome depression is to act as if one is not depressed. If I were to wash that damn bean pot I would be rewarded with wholesome nutritious hot meals each evening.

I don't really have any plans for this second paycheck. But that means I must be extra careful or I will spend the lot of it at the taqueria down the street.