Recently – was it this year? Last year? – after I realized the binoculars put the moon in ideal focus, I focused our good binoculars on every full moon.

Gary priced telescopes. I wanted a telescope where there was a dial and you spun the dial to “Jupiter” and the gears would hum and ta-da, there would be Jupiter! In perfect focus. I think my laziness repelled Gary. I did not end up getting a telescope.

Now I’ve discovered that a few miles away from me there is an astronomy park.

Seriously, it’s a park, with cement pads fitted with electricity where people can hook up their telescopes, and there is also an enormous telescope in a shelter just for public use.

I mean, I am sure the enormous telescope doesn’t have the Jupiter dial. And it’s probably so complicated I won’t even know where to put my eyeball. But still, they have gatherings every clear Friday night. I did buy a red-light flashlight (so I don’t pollute the extra darkness) and I think I’ll head out there Friday and see if I can spot a Jupiter dial telescope.

Well, sadly, the Up series* is coming to an end.

*If you are unfamiliar with the long-running series (like 63 years long-running): it re-visits a group of British schoolchildren every seven years. Go here to Wikipedia, or here to see how much Mom and I enjoyed it.

They consider the quote, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Supposedly, seven is the year children develop logic and cause-and-effect thinking. Which, I suppose, is the reason they now say if a trauma hits you when you are seven, the coping strategy that makes you feel safe sticks with you for life. (This is something I heard on the radio but I can find no source for it.)

Anyway, I suppose they feared we’d have to watch each of these kids die off or become senile, so they’ve decided that 70 will be the last installment of the Up Series, especially now that the director has died.

Except, again, as I say, Tony, who will be the last to die and will die in the saddle of a very fast racehorse.

If all goes well with the Chicago trip I’ll be staying at this robot-bidding Alexa-enabled science-themed EMC2 hotel.

The focal point of my room is the glass-encased shower.

That link was a nice interactive 3-D map of the room, with this nice detail:

And of course the robots, which look more like paper shredders and less like robots.

I have twelve wigs. I know that seems excessive for a four-year endeavor. But I need a wig for work, one for high heat (eating next to a fire / blowing molten glass), one for water (rain / water balloon fights), one for lying on my back (doctor visits and … no, just doctor visits).

Add in Labor Day sales and I got the itch for the first time in almost a year.

This is the first page that came up.

”When did they hire robot models?” I wondered. “They all look scary. Except for that woman in the lower right.”

Ranked by level of creepiness points:

0 pts. Bottom right. I have seen his photo before. Normal.

1 pts. Top middle. Her eye-smile doesn’t match her mouth-smile.

4 pts. Top right. Okay, sure, she looks way too perfect, but she at least looks human.

5 pts. Bottom left. I feel like this isn’t an image of a human being. It looks assembled.

10 pts. Top left. That looks like a perfectly good photo of a pretty human that the alien overlords behind this have deliberately distorted. Orherwise why are her eyes so big yet expressionless? What did they do to her?

15 pts. Bottom middle. That’s a mean spy robot the aliens have created. That’s not a human.

The creepiness hit me so hard I thought I was having some Oliver Sacks Capgras delusion thing Then I supposed it could be some AI sweetening.

Is it just me? Is that unnatural?

An utterly lovely woman at work with a wholesome natural style heard I was intrigued by this Polishey system for nail polish.

”I am intrigued by this thing where you draw the polish on your nails with something that seems like a marker,” I said, and she had actually just bought it, and her family had joined in to give her manicures.

I knew that wouldn’t be happening, but the cool girl had it so I needed it for my own.

I suspect I haven’t worn nail polish in six years, except maybe one time on my toes per Spunky’s demands.

Anyway, it came and I love it.

That’s a bad photo. But it was remarkably easy, and when it got nicked I just scribbled over it. I thought it would be tricky to do my right hand by drawing with my left, but I just used my left to hold the pen steady, and then moved my right hand around under it.

Anyway, Polishey, seems good so far.

I finished this in one day last year, and the glass on the left is wrong. Well, really, the entire bottom half is wrong.

Just watch, it will take weeks to try to get it right, like my grandmother’s portrait, and I still won’t succeed. Or perhaps not.

Sometimes I work on the edges of programming scripts and the standards and protocols needed to get a device and a script to talk to each other. Most of the time I just use them. I tell my Mini application to honk my car’s horn so I can find it. The code in my phone would send a message to my device, which is my car.

There is a protocol that both the phone and the car device use. The protocol says what to do if the device gets the message (Honk) and also how to explain itself if there’s a error performing the required action (Car horn currently disabled.).

On April Fool’s day in the 1990s someone created a very detailed protocol, a Hypertext protocol, for a different type of device — not a car but a coffee pot. Not broad humor. Subtle humor.

I mean, here you go, see how detailed it is.

It was an April Fool’s joke, and I think also a reference to the famed Trojan Room Coffee Pot I encountered in the ‘90s.

The best part is that every error is identified. Say my phone tries to contact my coffeepot to tell it to “BREW,” and if brewing does not begin, the device needs to send back the reason it cannot brew. Pot not closed, no water in pot, etc.

Each error has a number. It’s just like when you try to get to a web page that is gone, and instead of sending back the latest post it sends you a page that says Error 404, Page not found.

The Coffee pot protocol is designed to send back my new favorite error: Error 418, I am a teapot.

Sadly, some people want to use the lighthearted error number 418 for legit reasons, and they want to change the I am a teapot error code.

Here is the reference in Google’s offical list of error codes.

418 I’m a teapot

The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot status response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503. This error is a reference to Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol defined in April Fools’ jokes in 1998 and 2014.

While originally defined in RFC 2324 as an April Fools’ joke, this status code was formally reserved in RFC 9110 due to its wide deployment as a joke, so it cannot be assigned any non-joke semantics for the foreseeable future.

Some websites use this response for requests they do not wish to handle, such as automated queries.

There was a time when I designed a database, so now I am really fighting the urge to have some key combination like Control-t-p generate error 418.

Wisely, the Powers That Be have taken the edit rights to that database away from me.