My Diary #231

Life

A large part of my free time this week was spent on two technical-related things. One was migrating the bot I used for my streaming setup over from Firebot (local) to Streamer.bot (local). I had played around with the latter before going on my trip, and liked its support for remote streaming and remote access to the bot, stuff that Firebot doesn't have at all. And while Firebot is technically just fine, its scripting UI is pretty horrible, requiring me to open nesting windows inside of nesting windows inside of nesting windows in order to get anything remotely complex scripted/coded, which was a huge pain.

So in the end, I bit the bullet and did a code transfer from Firebot over to Streamerbot. This was very much a manual process because they both store their code in different ways, but I was able to harness Gemini to help with this, in terms of feeding it the code that I had written and then looking to see what the equivalent processes in Streamer.bot were. It was actually really good at doing this since the latter is well documented on the Internet. Everything still was manually put together by me using Streamer.bot's built in functions though, except for two small bits that required splicing and combining strings that I had Gemini write up a C# code snippet for. I haven't actually streamed with it yet, but it's all there and ready to go and Firebot is also still there as a backup if needed.

The other thing I did was restart my migration of this very website from Elementor (local) and their invasive ads, the (ironic) AI trash they have been shoving down people's throats, and their vendor lock-in, away to the native WordPress tools, and at the same time leaving Volthemes/VT Blogging (local), the theme I currently use for the website, for a faster and more basic theme that doesn't lock away elements behind a paywall too.

Gemini helped with this immensely, laying out a groundwork plan for the enormous project and breaking it down into steps, and helping me pick a default block-based theme (Twenty Twenty-Four (local)) and configuring it, mostly by generating CSS code to gradually mold it to look like my current website, more or less. While I like being off of the Elementor trap altogether, the WordPress builder is also missing a lot of fancy steps and has its own brand of problems with the tools and elements it exposes or doesn't, especially around things like the "Previous Post" and "Next Post" buttons, and the Twenty Twenty-Four theme also shoves a lot of default crap like patterns at the user that cannot normally be disabled, so Gemini was a big help in figuring out a way around all this too. (The pre-built pattern slop in particular was disabled by putting some code in a Code Snippets plugin (local) that I had already downloaded and installed to fix something else.)

Gemini definitely wasn't a one-stop solution centre for everything though. It still made plenty of mistakes, occasionally wasted lots of context tokens, and its instructions to do this or that often differed slightly from what was actually there, so I still had to understand all the steps it was telling me and all the code I was putting in, and recognize when it was leading me astray. I don't think any of that is ever going to go away. It was also funny feeding it My Diary #230 as an example page and seeing it apologize for its predecessor's mistakes a few times. I also had learnt from my trip that it often cannot see the full context of pictures if they are too large, and from an attempt at proofreading that its web scraper will only scrape parts of a page and not the entire thing, so it was important sometimes to know whether to feed it a URL, a screenshot, a copy-pasted snippet of code, or a raw .htm file.

It's coming along really nicely though. I think that by the week after next, if not next week, I will be able to toggle this site into maintenance mode and start migrating my posts into the new framework. Every single post that I have written will need to be adjusted, so this will be a huge pain, but if I actually manage to complete this project, it will be a huge load off my chest (and a huge technical debt off of the site) going forward. It's going to take hours and hours though. I might take a few days off of work and anime just to concentrate on this. The post framework is actually just about complete, it's all the other stuff like my static pages that I still need to work on.

Work was busy this week as I was (still) covering for our usual queue monitor, who was away, and several other absences and vacations as well. I was the only analyst on the team working on Friday and just sniped tickets in the queue as I could. What really helped was two things -- one was the cancellation of most of our virtual standups in the week as we are going to have one virtual standup and one in-person standup per week going forward, replacing the old system where there was a virtual standup every day. And the second was that our in-person standup this week was cancelled due to snow. Snow in April. Right. It made the roads a mess though so we all just stayed home and had a virtual meeting instead. This still meant that for a couple of days this week, especially on Friday, I could just get into a zone and do work without interruptions though.

Thankfully, the snow was an anomaly that was over in a day or two. Next week our in-person meeting is on Thursday again, but I'll be missing that because I also have a followup with the eye doctor (from the appointment two weeks ago) on Thursday.

I did go to the mall for groceries on Wednesday this week a few hours prior to the snowfall starting though, and came back with a couple pictures to share as well.

Firstly, an egg update after last week's raided shelves:

Look, the egg grading facility signs are still up but all the regular eggs are back in stock. I hope the people that raided the shelves and panic-bought all the eggs last week (and left me with none) feel silly now.

Next, this was completely by accident this year (although I have previously gone to collect their freebies in 2024 and 2025), but Thai Express was giving away Thai New Year freebies while I was there as well, and I also happened to be one of the first 100 customers that day, so I got this thing:

It's a free bottle keychain, and the front/back of the keychain looks like this:

I'm not sure I ever want to put sauce of any kind inside a keychain that I carry around with me though. Do people really do this? But maybe its useful for something else like taking it to the beach and smuggling home sand or something? Would something in here pass customs at the airport? I don't know. I'll have to ruminate on the possibilities.

Next, I also saw the sign with waste-friendly neighbour stickers that Nomar, the City of Edmonton Waste Outreach Educator, mentioned last week would be up in my apartment's lobby.

Oh, so that's what it looks like. As mentioned, we didn't quite resolve the question of whether I wanted to be on it or not, so.. am I actually on it? Saaa, as they say in Japan. That's for only me to know, until I move out of here, hopefully later this year. What's more interesting is that there's no one on the 5th floor on it at all. Way to represent down there, guys!

My new snack of the week this week was Yogurt-Flavoured Covered Pretzels (flavoured... covered? isn't that redundant?) from Marco's World of Snacks. I had not heard of the company/brand name until recently when I was asking Gemini about healthy snack alternatives, and something else from them came up as a suggestion. I didn't bite at the time, but I recognized their unique name when I saw this sitting on the discount shelves in Safeway this week. It also dovetailed well with a conversation in my main ZOMG Discord last week about yogurt, which came out of a comment from my blog post two weeks ago where I stated that I didn't enjoy yogurt. These yogurt pretzels were not exactly healthy (there's a Health Canada sugar warning on them) but they tasted amazing!

Those snacks are airport/airplane-themed, and I wonder if they were actually leftover stock from some airline or if they just were themed that way due to the "Marco's World" name. I think it's the latter, but because airlines love to give out pretzels as snacks anyway, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Hmm. Anyway, I'm sure they were unhealthy but they were very satisfying to chew on over the course of three days or so.

I also bought a couple other things this week, one being some foot cream that Gemini recommended. I guess because I walk a lot, especially on trips, the heel part of both my soles have always been very dry and cracked and rough. I was going to pick up some Sakura Micron pens (local) from Amazon for my archiving work anyway, so to hit the $35 minimum limit for free shipping, I also picked up a couple of O'Keeffe's Healthy Feet Foot Cream (local), and tried applying them at night before I went to bed. Wow, the results were instant and amazing. They still look terrible and webby, but they "feel" smooth instead of all jagged now, and hopefully they also visually recover over time. Good stuff. Thanks, bot. And the total came out to $35.24, hah. Well, $37.01 after tax but I don't think tax counts towards the minimum.

I also splurged on a nice little piece of kitchenware after again taking bot recommendations and then surfing around for a bit of research into the possibilities. I basically wanted a container that I could pour the Zhenjiang vinegar that I had bought last week into, and which could then dispense a droplet or two at a time, or at least small splashes at a time, into whatever I was trying to pour it into. The bottle that the vinegar came in was not very conducive for that. After floating around a bit, I ended up purchasing this glass duck container (local) from Japan. Despite the current $42.99 price on the page, it was around $28.70 CAD at the time of my purchase, with shipping being $13.67, so it was indeed around $42 in the end, but that included the shipping fee. The old price is still available for some of the other duck colours (local) as of time of writing. Cool. I do sometimes feel like I have to justify random weird purchases that I make when it comes time to write the blog, so I'll justify this one by saying that I love tableware and kitchenware and nice pieces give me mood boosts.

I also scouted out some vacuums with Gemini this week, looking for a model suitable for both my current apartment as well as my future planned house. Instead of getting an "entry-level" model, as Gemini put it, for $100-150 or so that breaks every year and a half, I wanted one that would last longer and that would also be able to be more easily cleaned. Currently, one of the more expensive Sebo vacuums (local) is the frontrunner, but those are way too expensive and I'm hoping to wait it out for a sale first. Alternatively, Gemini encouraged that I go touch vacuums at a local vacuum store and hoover up some nice pamphlet ephemera while there, so I might just go do that too.

To counterbalance all that, I also did get a payout from Twitch this week, my third one, as I think a couple people are still politely subscribed to my channel even though I haven't streamed since I left for vacation in early February. Soon we shall resume streaming activities, soon. The payout threshold is every $50 USD or so, and I got $54.95 this time, which converts to around $75.28 CAD. Or it would, except I leave it in my Paypal account as USD, together with the amount that Steffy's still sending me every month in lieu of some rent payments I made for her a decade ago. I have over $300 USD in there now and it's nice for the occasional payment for game bundles or subscriptions or other things which default to the USD currency, so that I don't have to lose money in multiple currency conversions. In practice I don't seem to charge a lot to it though, since it's piling up faster than I'm using it. I don't consider my Paypal account a safe place to park a large sum of money in the long term, so I should be more vigilant in charging purchases from American companies to it in USD form. Thanks for the support, Jah, WingBenny, Satinel, Rinuruc, Emmy_, Flo, osmiiri, and others who may or may not have floaty tooltips yet.

Oh, I also need to have Gemini rewrite/modify the floaty tooltip plugin I use on my WordPress site at some point to fix some of the issues with it. I guess this is basically vibe coding, isn't it.

The week ended with a cool sidenote from Jah that I wanted to immortalize on the blog too. Apparently he has a local musician friend who releases under the name YH Sound, and he released a song called 22 Fernets (house sessions) this week. According to Jah, why that is significant is that around the 2:30 mark or so, the singer weaves in a line that goes "Hey Thomas, stop dropping shit man!" and that was an inside joke that came about because Jah was taking shots of fernet with a group at a local bar, and another guy bumped Jah's hand, causing Jah's drink to spill onto the head of that guy's girlfriend. That guy apologized, but it became a funny inside joke to their community. That story made it to our Discord, and from there to here, because I feel it's important to preserve that kind of origin story that no one else who ever listens to that song outside of our community would know about. Until they Google up the name of the song and find this blog post, anyway. Hi.

Finally, here are the balcony pictures of the week as always. Firstly, Mon, Apr 13 at 7:34 pm, during a showery day. I love the wispy clouds that show falling rain in the distance.

A little later the same day, at 8:45 pm, there was a moderately nice evening sunset sky.

Two days later, on Wed, Apr 15 at 7:50 pm, there was that horrible snowstorm I mentioned earlier:

All that snow gradually melted over the next few days though. Thu, Apr 16 at 3:55 pm:

Fri, Apr 17 at 12:49 pm:

And Sat, Apr 18 at 8:38 pm:

Games

I continued to have lots of Satinel co-op game time this week, and we concentrated on Orcs Must Die 3 (local) at the beginning of the week, working on endless mode achievements and the harder Rift Lord difficulty, before breaking off to do some Streets of Rogue (local) at the end of the week. Both games are still fun, and we played around with a mod for the latter game too. We're still hoping against hope that the sequel to the latter game (local) will come out sometime before we pass on to the great beyond. They don't have great Internet there.

On the solo side of things, working on the streaming bot and the blog site meant that I didn't have much guilt-free time to spend on gaming. What time I had mostly went into Backpack Battles (local), and I now have all the achievements again after the newest big patch, minus the two longevity ones ("Buy 10000 items" and "Win 10000 trophies"). Those will come over time. Melvor Idle (local) got a bit more time, but that's just investing idle currency every day now, so is that really playing a game? I also tried out a little Fallout 76 (local)... but it's so hard to get back into games like that after a long time away. I just did a daily then logged off again.

I also went back to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate (local) and got all the remaining achievements there except for one that requires a DLC. Maybe I'll get that DLC next sale so Satinel and I can go back and finish it up, we'll see. Not sure yet. Or we can wait for the game to appear in some bundle. The achievements I went back to get were mostly ones that had to be done solo, to "enter" each zone in the game, which is yet another random minor bug in the bug-ridden game. The sole exception was the rarest achievement in the game, to get defeated by a friendly mouser, and the reason that one was "better" done in solo is because it allowed me to save scum much more easily to get it. Basically set everything up and start a map with low health, and save that map and do it over and over until mousers spawn and I manage to die to one of their self-destructs. I did learn that the larger mousers also count for this achievement, since I died to one of them instead of the smallest ones. It took me a little over an hour to Achievement Get!

And I want to play something long form, but I'm not quite sure yet what.

Plushie of the Week #224

As mentioned last week, the featured plushie this week is very much related to the one from last week, which was a plushie that I got on a Spring Airlines flight from Guangzhou to Shanghai. This one, conversely, was on my outbound flight from Shanghai, a red-eye midnight flight to Tokyo on Mar 19 2026. Unlike the very cute horse on plane that Spring Airlines had on sale though, this one was a teddy bear, and she cost me 68 yuan instead of 49 for the other one, so about $13.63 CAD all in all. There was a little bit of weird cross-currency conversion there that ended up with me paying a little less than I should have, and I detailed that in the blog post above. I'll reproduce the catalogue page from the airplane, that I had captured for that blog post, here though.

This one was the smaller bear that cost 1,400 JPY, but I didn't pay for it in JPY. I'm also not sure why it was called "Revival Edition". Maybe it was discontinued for a while at one point?

But either way, this one was more expensive than the Spring Airlines horse. And yet... and yet, this bear was so scruffy and tiny and... emaciated. Like look at this girl.

Front:

Back:

I did end up bonding slightly over her with Zian though a couple days later, since she was also taking a Spring Japan flight over to Japan from Beijing, and their catalogue sold the same bears. Since she was forewarned, she didn't purchase them, but I took the bear to meet her that evening anyway, so it took a nice detour through Fuchu Racehourse in Tokyo and wherever else I went that day as well, something most of the plushies I purchase, even while on vacation, don't really get to do. Only Tigey normally follows me around.

Tag front:

Tag back:

Her tag is pretty amazing too. You can see the original logo of the Spring Japan airline here on the New Chitose Airport (local) page, for example. It clearly says "Fly With Smile". Bad English notwithstanding, it at least is spelled correctly. But then what does the Tag Front read?

Fly With Shile.

I don't even know whether to blame the Chinese or the Japanese for these. They're both equally inept at English. But come on, this is your company's slogan.

That being said, I did discover much to my delight that the bear's clothes are actually modular and come off. They're a very tight fit to get off and back on though.

I then realized that this looked a school uniform outfit, and so when I was putting the clothes back on, I put the yellow piece of cloth (which is a scarf on the actual stewardess uniform, but the bear's manufacturing was suspect at this point) down the back of the bear's uniform instead of the front.

Here's a size comparison between the Spring Japan bear plushie on the left, Tigey in the middle, and the Spring Airlines horse plushie on the right.

Yes Tigey, they're both your problem now.

Dreams

Apr 14 2026

• I was with my family at an overseas shopping complex and we walked around the various buildings looking for places to eat at. Mom eventually found a building with three whole levels of food stalls and restaurants, and even an outdoor section, and she gestured toward it while we were standing at a nearby 3-way corridor intersection. Dad didn't want to spend too much on food though so he held back and hovered around while Kel, Jon and I went to pick a spot to sit down and eat.
• A little later on, Dad and I went looking for the washroom together, and once we were alone he asked if I had spoken to Geeyong recently. I told him that I had tried to invite him out on a school outing but had trouble reaching out to him as he hadn't been answering his phone. Dad said to give him Geeyong's address and he'd stop by the next time he went to Bishan in Singapore to ask for his phone number. I said that that wasn't necessary and that I would email him instead.

Apr 18 2026

• Snippet: There were 4 items on a work ticket list that came about after a presentation to some tourists, but three of them were long-term items that would take weeks. But I was told to just do the fourth one instead, which was a task related to the presentation with a strict 24 hour time limit imposed on how long we could work on it to protect us, and that that would somehow work towards checking off one of the longer onerous tasks that was related to it.
• Snippet: I was playing a Minecraft-like game with Trin where we arrived at an area in advance of other groups that we knew would be eventually coming. We did not want them to find our base, so we dove underwater and swam around to look for a natural cavern with air pockets, or a suitable place to dig out one. I asked if we wanted to invite Mell along too but Trin said that while Mell was great at adventuring, she wasn't really into PvP games and so would not enjoy this one.

Apr 19 2026

• Snippet: All I remember is standing in front of four different pictures of a pavilion housing an object that represented the front page of a website. I could select one of the four pictures, which would upgrade the website in different ways -- the first two pictures just upgraded the main site object itself in some way, the third one upgraded the object and the paviliion it was housed in, and the fourth one upgraded the object, the pavilion, and the entire garden around it in the picture. These options would then give me a different answer to a question that I could then give to someone else within the dream, as part of a larger plotline that I do not remember the details of.