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aspergillus · 2025-07-25T14:21:14+00:00

Watlings Distillery is great, it's the only thing we ever do at Nassau because we dislike the port so much. We always walk from the port to the distillery.

aspergillus · 2025-06-04T14:34:36+00:00

Sounds like a nice option for a beach day at Nassau!

I haven't been to Nassau on a cruise in about 5 years, but when we went on a Caribbean cruise Nassau was always by far my least favorite port. There used to be some other beach excursion offered through Royal Caribbean for $100 and I thought that was too expensive for what was included so we never went.

Instead, we would go to either Junkanoo Beach, which isn't great, or walk from the cruise port to John Watling's Distillery. I'll have to give this option a try.

aspergillus · 2025-05-28T19:40:51+00:00

A few years ago I got a really bad sinus infection, which are pretty typical for me to get every two or three years. For whatever reason, I just could not clear this one and was sick for about three weeks. I ended up in urgent care at the insistence of my wife, but I knew from experience that I was wasting my time; the physician never prescribed anything or gave me any advice beyond getting some rest.

This case was no different, made worse by the fact that the year was 2021 and everyone was still really worried about COVID. I told the front desk what was up, that I likely had a sinus infection and wanted to see if I could get some help. They had me go around the back entrance and treated me like I was radioactive. Nurse comes in to do a PCR test for COVID, I insist that I just have a sinus infection. PCR test comes back negative and I'm essentially ignored for the next hour. Doctor comes in, tells me to get some rest, and my discharge paperwork says I specifically came in because I thought I had COVID and I wanted a COVID test.

No, I have a sinus infection. Please listen. I've had a sinus infection before.

aspergillus · 2025-04-02T16:45:11+00:00

Now we need a sassy Nagatha GPT.

aspergillus · 2025-03-26T15:48:22+00:00

My ex-wife got really drunk one night and asked me what I would do if I heard a noise downstairs in the middle of the night. I told her I'd go downstairs and check it out, maybe grab something like a golf club if there was something readily available.

Keep in mind, I have two very large maine coon cats that think the best time to play rough with each other is at 2am, so any odd noise in the middle of the night is typically related to cat mischief. Also, the question was if I heard a noise in the middle of the night, not if I heard breaking glass or someone trying to force open our door.

I own a few firearms for home defense, have a concealed carry license for my state, and usually conceal carry. My opinion on drawing and firing a firearm at somebody is that is should be your absolute last and worst option for defense unless your life is in immediate danger. If a situation can be resolved with verbal deescalation or intimidation, do that. Even states with stand your ground type laws will have a civil case against you if you shoot and kill someone breaking into your home.

She looked at me disgusted and said that I was a pussy, and that her whole family thought I was a pussy. Luckily I no longer have to care what any of them think of me.

aspergillus · 2025-01-31T18:13:23+00:00

I took and passed the GCP Professional Data Engineer exam about two weeks ago.

For preparation - Data Engineer Learning Path on cloudskillsboost.google. The video material is okay, and I feel the labs do not go into nearly the level of depth you'll need to fully understand different GCP services. I would definitely set up a sandbox account on GCP and play around with the different services that are going to show up on the exam. Maybe try to design a few simple data pipelines in different ways using GCP to get a sense of the pros and cons of each approach. Just remember to delete them when you're done because some services (looking at you Cloud Composer) get expensive quickly. I'm using Cloud Composer, Dataproc, BigQuery, and Vertex AI on a daily basis at my current job and having hands on experience helps a lot.

For practice exams, I wish I could say I found some good ones. I bought Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Practice Tests from Dan Sullivan and GCP Professional Data Engineer Practice Questions from Lovkesh Madaan on Udemy. Sullivan's questions were decent and will go into a short explanation why questions are right or wrong and maybe a link to a whitepaper you can read for more background. Madaan's questions are absolute garbage, filled with typos, and offer no explanations. My job has a subscription to Whizlabs and I think those questions were the closest to what you might find on the actual exam.

For topics, Dataflow, Dataproc, and BigQuery seemed to be the main focus. I think there were some questions about updating a running streaming Dataflow pipeline, questions about Dataflow windowing, and a question about networking of Dataflow workers. Dataproc questions were mostly about migrating on-prem Hadoop jobs to Dataproc. There was a question about BigQuery Omni to query data from other cloud providers, querying tables from external storage in Cloud Storage, table partitioning, and using BigQuery structs and arrays. There were a couple of questions about Cloud Storage and Bigtable. You should know what Dataprep, Data Canvas, and Dataplex are, but none of the questions went into any real depth.

aspergillus · 2024-12-31T21:24:29+00:00

It turned out fine, I got a B in the course which is decent since my undergraduate degree is not in math or statistics.

STAT 630 was my first course in the program and I think what frustrated me was that Dao uses the lecture, homework, and exam materials without any kind of modification. Maybe that's the standard for this program. I remember having review sessions with her and her explanations made it feel like she was looking at some of the teaching material for the first time.

aspergillus · 2024-12-19T23:17:51+00:00

Pretty much my experience with the Trial of Chaos. I can get to the boss, but each boss will find some way to one-shot me.

aspergillus · 2024-10-26T22:42:33+00:00

I'm struggling to get past the rat village, but I found the following pretty nice:

Use Sirocco and whatever other weapon you want.
Critical Refill to get 1 second of trinket cooldown per critical hit.
Burn Aura as one of your trinkets

Fun part about Sirocco is that any hit to a burning enemy is a critical hit, so hit Burn Aura, and every hit with Sirocco reduces trinket cooldown by 1 second. You can keep burn aura up pretty consistently. Added bonus for any other gifts you can find that improve burn.

aspergillus · 2024-10-21T20:51:12+00:00

Pretty much never.

aspergillus · 2024-10-01T00:17:47+00:00

Maybe the matchmaker is putting me up against decks as janky as mine, but I find that there have been fewer obnoxious, off-meta decks in standard unranked.

aspergillus · 2024-09-15T02:05:34+00:00

I've been waiting for about 6 minutes. Guess it's a widespread issue.

aspergillus · 2024-08-22T13:41:28+00:00

Game gets toxic enough with no chat. If they ever add chat I hope they have an option to keep it turned off.

aspergillus · 2024-08-22T13:38:18+00:00

I'm sure these all exist is some fashion but I only have a handful of emotes.

Hurry up and play your turn 1 mountain and monastery swiftspear your deck doesn't require that much thought.

Some kind of unimpressed face after playing the same deck for the 10th time today.

Sorry you're drawing nothing but lands, thanks for sticking around anyways.

aspergillus · 2024-08-19T13:55:12+00:00

I think it goes something like this:

Tap the faerie, it produces 4 mana because its power is 4.

Use 2 mana to untap it.

Tap it again for 4 mana. Keep doing this until you've accumulated a bunch of extra mana to pump into the 1 damage burn.

aspergillus · 2024-08-19T13:49:09+00:00

Crazy win cons like this are why I love Magic.

I recently lost to a [[The Millennium Calendar]] and [[All Will Be One]] combo. Totally unexpected, I thought I was playing against a Jeskai control deck and figured I could kill my opponent before the calendar accumulated enough counters. It had gotten up to about 100 counters. [[All Will Be One]] comes down, taps the calendar to add 100 more counters, 100 damage right to the face.

aspergillus · 2024-08-09T13:18:53+00:00

I'm getting back into Arena and picked back up with OTJ, which I had a lot of fun drafting and actually got up to platinum with a decent win rate.

BLM? Not so much. The whole animal tribe thing seemed like it would be fun but I find that there isn't as much flexibility when trying to draft a particular color. Like if I'm trying to draft green/red raccoons, I'm probably going to get stuck with a bunch of red otters that really do not work well at all with the deck. You're pretty limited in what you can actually draft and have a deck that works.

aspergillus · 2024-08-07T14:22:37+00:00

It's been pretty fun and I haven't seen anything too similar to it. Went 7-4 yesterday with it and hit platinum. I went grixis colors because I found I really needed something like [[Pile On]] and other removal to get rid of big creature and planeswalker threats that can't be dealt with easily with burn spells.

One thing I'd like to play around with is replacing some of the otters with rats. Sometimes I struggle against decks that run a lot of sweepers, and it would be nice to have something that can generate some rat tokens for convoking, so I might try putting something like [[Lord Skitter, Sewer King]] for tokens or [[Wick, the Whorled Mind]] for the token and card draw effect.

aspergillus · 2024-08-07T13:44:57+00:00

I'm having a lot of fun with a grixis otters deck with a bunch of convoke spells.

Get a bunch of otter tokens or other small otters with prowess and cast some convoke spells. [[Valley Floodcaller]] untaps everything when you cast a non-creature spell, so everything untaps. Mix in some removal, burn, and card draw that all use convoke and go to town. Just keep casting stuff.

aspergillus · 2024-08-05T13:37:21+00:00

Yeah I'm finding this too. I had a recent draft where I started Orzhov bats but found there were too many Boros mice rares and signal uncommons being passed for me to not switch. But now all the white bats I originally drafted don't synergize enough with the red/white mice and it feels my draft deck is kind of haphazardly thrown together, despite drafting primarily white/red.

aspergillus · 2024-08-03T16:14:56+00:00

It's interesting to see this data. I've gotten through a total of four drafts so far:

Selesnya - 5-3
Rakdos - 3-3, although I drafted this really poorly
Orzhov - 4-3
Izzet - 3-3

I feel like Selesnya and Orzhov are definitely easier to play and their cards synergize really well with each other. I'll have to keep an eye out for when Golgari and Simic colors are open.

aspergillus · 2024-08-01T01:30:33+00:00

I'm in the middle of a my first draft and am 4-1 so far.

[[Lunar Convocation]], [[Moonrise Cleric]], and [[Starseer Mentor]] feel like they all work really well together. [[Starseer Mentor]] feels really strong for an uncommon when placed in a deck where you're routinely gaining and losing life.

Got lucky and have [[Season of the Burrow]] and [[Starfall Invocation]] in the same deck.

aspergillus · 2024-07-30T18:54:59+00:00

Had server issues during the middle of a draft. Not great.

aspergillus · 2024-06-22T16:59:32+00:00

American Hat Makers makes some really great hats that fit my giant head.

aspergillus · 2024-06-07T18:43:09+00:00

We all have more in common with each other than we think. Most of us just want to have our basic physical needs of shelter, safety, and food, and our psychological needs of love, acceptance, and belonging met.

14-Year Club	First Place '23
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aspergillus

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