Last Thursday I had that interview with a Michigan Tech research institute. It felt pretty good, overall, running a bit long. I'm sure I'll overthink the fact that a person did join our Zoom meeting when it was partway through and never say anything or even turn the camera on, but I'll suppose she knows what she's doing. They said they had some more people to interview and would get back to everyone, saying whether we'll move on to the next stage of interviews or not, late this week or early next week. Also, this roused me to finally go looking into Python as a programming language and while this is dangerous to say, I think I could get myself up to competence in it in maybe twenty minutes of trying. Doesn't look that strange. (This sounds smug but, like, I know Fortran, I know Matlab, I know C, I'm not coming in ignorant.)
After that we went off to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's parents. This was intended to be a shorter visit than usual, and it was, by maybe two hours, which is the best we can do to hurry things on. It was a full visit, including things like bunnyhugger explaining how to use the rather expensive and substantial photo scanner they just got. It seems like more scanner than they could need but they also said they couldn't find a cheaper one that works with the current edition of the Mac OS. This seems implausible --- I can't believe there's not a significant number of Mac owners who need to scan photographs or sketches or stuff --- but I also don't actually know.
And we finished off that Mice and Mystics chapter we'd started last visit. In this we had to get our party of mice through two rooms, and a boss rush of battles. We made a little bit of metatextual-based decision-making: we had been saving the ability to call on Olga the Owl to help us out, one time, and figured this was our chance since there's only one more chapter in the campaign. Peeking at the next we're wondering if we made a mistake. In the other room we had special rules that let us, in the right circumstances, bring another mouse into the party. We were not sure whether those additional mice could bring more mice in, and decided that as best we could tell they could. Great for us because we were able to double our party size before most of the villains started their work, and we knocked our way through the end of the chapter in remarkably good time. Like, to the point we wondered if we should have saved the owl for later.
And when we left, we left Sunshine with them. They'd watch our pet rabbit for the weekend because, for the second time since the pandemic started, we were going out of town overnight. And what for?
Well, here you can see ... and we hope to know by Sunday whether we got away with it.
Do you recognize this? The setting, perhaps; the directions sign, more likely; the bright splashes of color?
Yes: it's Motor City Fur[ry] Con 2022, somehow held five months after 2021's con. Here we get back to the main hotel's lobby.
And saw all sorts of this walking down the halls. Note the suiter with the 70s game show host jacket on the right.
Trivia: Between 1839 and 1859 United States wheat production rose from 85 million bushels to 173 million. Source: An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.
Currently Reading: Across The Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, Earl Swift. Had not before thought of it but the Apollo 13 disaster was a lucky break for the lunar rover development team as it gave them several more months to make the thing actually work. Ill winds ...
PS: What I Learned Writing the Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z, a recap with less mathematics in it than you might have expected.
