Author: yonghokim

I have a strange permanent problem with video playback, only happening on Netflix and Amazon Prime. (But not on Hulu or YouTube)

I have a multi monitor setup – 4 monitors, 3 of them 1080p, plugged to a NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti. Whenever I stream a video from Netflix or Amazon Prime in one of the two main screens on Chrome, the screen starts alternating between flickering, going green, etc, until going completely black or green. When I close the browser (I can’t see the screen, so I press Alt F4), screen goes back to normal. I had this problem previously on a R280X setup, and i3770 & i6700

A general Google search didn’t bring up anything specific.

For now I’m skirting the problem by plugging one of the monitors to a Windows tablet and connecting to the desktop speakers via Bluetooth. (So I don’t have to do so much recabling each time I watch)

One dissipating point of Crash Course Big History: The Deep Future is how, despite being assured that it’s very, very, very, unvisualizably far away, trilliion trillion trillion…. trliion years doesn’t sound like THAT much of time – especially when you write it as “10 to the power of 100”. Like, if a consciousness was immortal, it would just sit around for a long time, and wait patiently, and poof we would be there, like at the end of a long road trip, say from Arica to Punta Arenas. It probably speaks to how efficient the logarithmic notation is at zooming out quasi-infinite amounts into a speck of information. (The notation). I’m surprised that amount of time can even be represented in earth years, as opposed to, were it to exist, the time dimension’s equivalent of “light years” for space.

I’ve seen those videos that represent the 7,000 years of known history into a moving map’s representation of territories controlled by various human polities. It’s interesting, but 7,000 years represented in this way is not that long. It would be helpful if the 10^100 year thing was represented visually as a very fast spinning of the earth, where in each frame we can see a portion of the earth (a sixth of the sphere added to the sight in each frame maybe?), and we stare into the thing for.. i don’t know, 500 hours? 50,000 hours? split into videos of 10 hours each (YouTube’s length limit) to better represent the idea of “the amount of time after which some scientists predict matter will start slowly decaying.. headed to a heat death of the universe”

i remember when my digital program coach asked what inspires me to continue to do the work. what i described was 100% field organizing, which was throwing us off the curve because we thought we would find language that described my current focus, data and automation. well, there’s inspiring, then there’s fun. if for some reason inspiring and fun became a dichotomy, i’d always choose fun.

i had some light fever yesterday, and was given oscillococcinum (anas barbariae) by a colleague. It was unusual looking (dust in a tube), so I googled it, and found the above wikipedia entry. I said thanks but no thanks. Instead of ingesting some sugar and hoping it acts on the virus, I’ll get plain old traditional western medicine.

that moment when I think I clicked the gmail search box and start typing

> from:blabla to:blabla filename:(doc OR docx)

but turns out the click was off by a few pixels and the prompt was not in the search bar and instead a bunch of gmail in-browser keyboard shortcuts are triggered during the typing, and I’m not sure whether I accidentally marked innocent bystander emails as spam or trashed them

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1. After watching Game of Thrones “The Mountain” advertisements, I buy a SodaStream carbonator to get sparkling water at home
2. i order a co2 replacement pickup-exchange service
3. some middle eastern looking guy delivers it and asks for the replacement, which I had forgotten to place on time. (i’m actually unclear how it works – do i place the bottle outside the apartment room door? or outside the apartment by the sidewalk? the exchange program does not specify)
4. apartment manager receives the package, and by middle eastern guy + small very heavy package + the guy rambles about needing the replacement => deduces the guy could be terrorist and the package be a bomb. Yes, in a delivery truck. Delivering bombs in a carton box. She sternly warns about its explosive potential to another person before passing the “bomb” to her to pass it on to me.
5. This is so great. I love America.

i was like “oh i need to pay today’s rent, i’m one day behind schedule (apt is pretty lenient)”, and cut out a check and was looking at my check records to see what the current rent amount was, and noticed i already paid the rent two weeks ago… -0-;

did i just get $900 for free?

over the weekend, i came across the youtube channel “classical musicians react to kpop” which was a very unique experience.. i had no idea that rap songs had chord progression!

Because there *are* kpop songs of questionable quality, this channel seems to focus more on iconic pieces or songs that do have musically interesting attempts or high quality pieces. That’s how I came across Ailee, AKMU and Mamamoo.

In particular I really enjoyed the jazzy touch and full volume singing in U&I of Ailee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4_rwTytAOs

I also get a vague impression of blackness performed in the song, especially with this visual sequence:

I’m sop glad to have found this channel

After a few days of 15-hour workdays, we were all half brain dead. One of those encounters happened on the last day. I saw a black woman waving a Kenyan flag in the crowd, and I asked: Is that the flag of Zimbabwe? No, it’s Kenya’s. “Oh, Kenya! That’s where President Obama is from!”

For some reason I really believed for a brief moment that he was born in Kenya. He was born in Kenya, right? Even Trump confirmed it. All those racists saying that you can’t be president if you are foreign born… uh wait..was I joking about birthers and then spaced out and fell into my own joke or was I lost from the beginning?

In any case Kenyans must be pretty proud of this achievement. He’s the son of a Kenyan national? That’s as close as you can get to Kenya while still remaining eligible for public office!

I don’t know how much Kenyans have claimed it, but if Obama was the child of a Korean person, there’s no way Koreans would have let that pass. Of course they would ignore him along the way, but the moment he’s elected everyone in Korea would open their windows and shout “All hail the Korean president of the USA!” and every interview wiith a celebrity instead of “Do you know Gangnam Style” would be “Do you know Barack Hussein Park?” – just like they have done with every drop Korean abroad who became famous, rich, or both.