Going with my usual format, I rose early-ish as I again had leg cramps and had to rise to take in some water to stop the pain and clenched muscles. I heard my 6:30 alarm go off after I entered my office, started my usual tasks, and watched the dark gray turn light gray. Overcast days are back, but with sun breaks, for now. We have a few lovely days left until the unrelenting rains start. Though with the change in weather patterns, we often have sunny days in winter. But these are overwhelmed with “rivers of rain,” which are impressive, even for someone like me with 30 years here. I liked the rain all the time in the Fall-Winter-Spring better.
While writing that, I realized that I moved to Oregon in September thirty years ago and stayed at the Lakes Apartments for a few months until I secured 20625 SW Clarion Street; Oct. 31st is the start of the 30th year in the house. I vowed, and still do, that I will stay here. It has always felt like the place I belonged.
Also, my oldest Dungeons & Dragons email is from 2010, but I know we played for ten more years than that, so I have also been playing D&D for over twenty years here and have hosted an online game through the pandemic.
Returning to the narrative, I wrote the blog and finished it a few minutes over. I dilly-dallied for a bit, saw the clock, jumped in the shower, did the usual, and soon was in Air VW the Gray ten to 9 for a 9:30 game. I was ten minutes late. It was the ISS Vanguard cooperative board game with a role-playing and app-driven experience. I play the Engineering section. Our last play, over a month ago, involved a special set of rules, an invasion of our spaceship, and us fighting to take back our ship. I lost one crew member, as did Richard. That left us with a strange restart, and then a month later, we picked it up again.
Richard and James, both board gamers and not RPG players, had forgotten much of the story and rules. I am used to returning to a campaign after a month and doing lots of RPG-style play. Also, Richard wants to min-max, while James is always interested in exploring every corner of the material he has bought. I am interested in the story and figuring out what we are supposed to do while avoiding any video-game-style mining and so forth (can’t stand that; it is a time sink). It takes us from 9:30 to 11:15 to set up for the next away mission. We play until about 3, with my new engineer promoted but off to sickbay, lightly wounded on the mission. We manage to connect, in the story, with friendly, if not unusual, aliens who help us repair the ship. Lastly, a surprise storyline and a secret envelope get opened. We had a choice: military or diplomatic; as usual, Richard wanted military. His characters are set up for this. We picked diplomatic, and this became a permanent change to the game; new items were added and some removed. We had reached a major turning point in the game. All interesting.
I left as Richard and James finished up “saving” the game. I took photos in case we needed to return to the same planet. I headed home in heavy traffic and never enjoy a traffic jam on the bridge. The number of heavy trucks always surprises me. I think it is a waste, since most of this freight should be moved more efficiently with less wear on roads and air pollution, but that would require a group to invest heavily in infrastructure, and billionaires prefer easy money like AI and Social Media.
I arrived home, reheated the pasta I made yesterday for an early dinner or late lunch, and watched season 3 of For All Mankind. I was disappointed that the giant spinning-wheel hotel in orbit has issues (I have always dreamed of one of those), but it’s still fun to imagine as a real thing. It is also interesting to see everyone aged and the styles updated to the 1990s. The story is now in full alternate history.
After that, I decided The 649 was a good choice and headed there; I had a smaller beer, read, and then skimmed the endless math in the book, Quantum Computing. It is interesting to me that my earlier confusion was that there is no reason to apply multiple gates to qubits, since each is a matrix and the whole process falls under the tenets of linear algebra. Instead, you multiply the matrices (fixed values) and apply the result to the qubits once. I also learned that this is true for multiple qubits in the same circuit (I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but it became obvious once the text brought it up) and that you can also entangle the qubits, effectively collapsing them into one value. Hmmm.
I have to admit, my head is overflowing with details, and some of it is getting confused. I need some practical use, but there are another fifty pages on measurement, which I understand is also weird and linear too. I also was not surprised by the no-cloning rule, which says a qubit cannot be copied. Certain processes (i.e., entanglement and CX gates) can create some known changes, but again it is limited; until a measurement is taken and the qubit wave function collapses, it cannot be known and thus cloned. More to come.
I got sleepy and stopped reading for the night. This is more a morning topic for me. I watched a video on the history of the Old Fashioned and talked to my bartender, Matt, and we agreed to try it. Rye with no lemon or cherries, just fresh nutmeg. Maybe with a little water too. Ice stays. Next time we will experiment!
Instead, I had a coffee with a side shot of amaretto, my late-night stay-awake drink. I looked at coding examples in Python and began to understand more about how this must be implemented. Python has matrix and tensor multiplication available in its super-fast libraries (implemented in C and even lower-level ops). Also, the reality of quantum means that these processes would be instantaneous, outside of time. Interesting.
I returned home, and it was still early, but I was tired again. Something I have noticed of late. I got out the Civil War book, did no more math tonight, and read a few chapters of Eric Lawson’s book, The Demon of Unrest. It is a physical book, as it has excellent footnotes. I slept and dreamed I was back at work; I was quite happy, working in RPG, COBOL, and maybe some FORTRAN. I enjoy being paid again, working on old stuff, and being around my co-workers. Yes, sometimes I miss it. I do have a foot cramp, but that works into my dream, as I used to have that problem when coding, as I would push my foot down while I thought and coded. I wake up, it fades, and I return to work/sleep. This time, some Python and AI stuff. I woke up rested on Wednesday.
An interesting dream. Thank you for reading.
