Okay, and another by my gym bag?) might be a neat way of tracking how much exercise and sleep I'm getting.

(What's preventing me from just up and making these things straightaway? My tools - both mental and physical - aren't as accessible as they should be, and the activation barrier is sufficiently high to discourage this lazy bum.)

Also, I should set up ctrlproxy when I have an always-on desktop/server of my own. Many things I want to do - for other project days. Today, my project is my inbox.

652/763 emails left. Time to pick up the pace.

In some of the blues and jazz songs I'm listening to, the guitar strings are slapped so that it sounds like there's percussion even if there isn't percussion. At least I think that is what's happening; I've seen street performers do this before. What is this called? How do you learn how to do it? After several minutes of experimentation with a guitar, it seems like you can make this sound by strumming the guitar with your right hand and then abruptly whipping your left hand onto the strings to damp them, but this is extremely awkward when trying to play any sort of song. Damping with your right hand doesn't appear to have the same effect, but perhaps I'm doing it in the wrong place.

New vocabulary words: surd and vinculum. When you have nth roots of numbers (like the square root of 5, or the 4th root of 3), the whole thing is called a surd, and the little number above/to-the-left-of the radical symbold is called a vinculum. I never knew. (Wikipedia did.) I found this out while reading through some links from an email from Matt Ritter.