Kara’s Blog

I have returned from my first exploration expedition in Elite: Dangerous. I'm putting a checkmark here: huge success.

Financially, I made over 7.8 million credits. I spent about that much buying and outfitting my Asp Explorer for the trip, so I’m very happy with that. Exploration is not an easily lucrative venture—yes, you can make money by “farming” more valuable stars, but it takes much more time to make the same amount of money…

I started playing Elite Dangerous over the Christmas break. Now that I have a shiny new computer (which I still have to blog about), I can actually play PC games again. I’m pleasantly surprised by how well my XPS 15 can play such a demanding game, graphically—once I figured out why Windows kept crashing at the worst times (totally unrelated to the game) it started running without any hiccups at 1080p. I haven't been running…

I started watching The Big Bang Theory in my last year of university. A friend introduced me to it via the tried-and-true method of pressing some torrents on burned DVDs into my hand. (We were such rebels!) I quickly devoured, what, three seasons? Then I started watching it on TV. And, for a time, I really enjoyed it.

But eventually that enjoyment dulled into a vague sense of ennui, which then sharpened into a more…

The UK government's latest remarks are frustrating and wrong

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but if I did, one of them would be to blog more often. I fell out of the habit last year because I was so focused on finishing my new blog platform. Now that I'm using it, I really don't have any excuse. Look how many posts I've squeezed into January! February should hopefully be even better.

Aside from the rash of depressing celebrity deaths, this month has been…

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was moving my website—well, all my websites—to a VPS, a Virtual Private Server. I’m pleased to announce that the transition is complete. In about a week, I moved over all my various software installations. Indeed, I even upgraded some shamefully old versions. And, as I mentioned previously, I have replaced my old blog script with a new blog written in Python/Flask.

Why I Moved

…

It has been too long since I blogged! This lapse isn’t the result of any one thing so much as a variety of factors. Mostly I’ve been reluctant to blog because of how frustrated I am with my blogging platform—a bespoke PHP script I made years ago. I have been plugging away at various replacements over the past few years, first in PHP, and then in Python.

Finally the replacement is almost ready. I’m writing…

At lunch today I was talking with a colleague. She’s cool; I really respect her attitude towards pedagogy and also like her as a person. But our conversation on the environmental dangers of cows led us to talking about lab-grown meat, which then led to a discussion of whether food grown in a lab is any better or worse for someone than food grown in a farm. And my colleague mentioned that she thought the…

So I came home tonight from a long night at work, only to see Twitter full up about the shooting at a Umpqua Community College in Oregon. My initial reaction was weariness—I was tired, already not in a great mood, and here there was yet another mass shooting.

My second reaction was anger.

I’m angry that a country where this happens would dare to utter the hypocrisy that it is the “greatest country on Earth”…

So, recently I blogged about my friend Cassie getting married. I gave Cassie and Marian a knitted blanket for their wedding gift (I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t spoiling this fact before I wrote this blog post!). It’s my first full-size blanket, and I am so impressed with it I’m not even going to attempt false modesty, OK?

Look at that. Gorgeous.

Prior to this I knit a baby blanket, which…