Watch Your Back! is one of the last Dortmunder novels, Westlake’s comic series about an unlucky crook published between 1970 and 2008. Dortmunder and his crew have a sweet lead on an unoccupied penthouse apartment, but their usual planning space, the O.J. Bar & Grill, has been turned into a bust-out joint by the Jersey mob. So now they have two jobs to pull: rob the obnoxious rich guy’s art and save the O.J. Of course, com­pli­ca­tions arise because nothing ever goes to plan in a Dortmunder book.

Enjoyable.

Last weekend, I restored a number of posts that had appeared on the earlier dasBlog in­car­na­tion of this blog, but had never made it to the Acrylamid version.

I added about another 50 posts this weekend, taken from the Wayback Machine. I think that this is all the posts that are missing.

That required further fixup. I had to turn the HTML back into re­Struc­tured­Text, which I did by hand.

Some useful tips will follow in future posts.

Stephen Strange is a world-class surgeon whose talent is only matched by his arrogance. His hands are ruined by a car crash, leaving him desperate to regain their use. In Nepal, he finds a temple of sorcerers led by the Ancient One, where he learns new and un­sus­pect­ed ways of dealing with the world. Eventually he takes on the renegade sorcerer Kaecilius, who wants to summon Dormammu from the Dark Dimension to change the world.

Aside from his very odd American accent, Benedict Cum­ber­batch does a decent job with a not-great script of portraying one …continue.

Ever had a Git repository where there’s an over­whelm­ing number of branches, most of which are surely abandoned? You run git branch --remote and you see dozens of unfamiliar branches. Where to begin?

• Use git for-each-ref –sort to sort the branches so that you can identify the oldest branches.
• Use git branch –remote –merged master to detect which branches have already been merged into master. It’s likely that these are branches that weren’t deleted after a pull request was merged; it’s usually safe to delete these.
• --no-merged shows unmerged branches; these require further in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Here’s an example for fly­ing­cloud:

$ git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate \
    --format='%(committerdate:short) %(refname)' refs/heads refs/remotes
2016-12-29 refs/remotes/origin/master
2016-12-29 refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
2016-12-29 refs/heads/master
2016-12-11 refs/remotes/origin/0.1.x
2016-06-09 refs/remotes/origin/fix/salt-pip-version-problem-in-demo
2016-05-25 refs/remotes/origin/updates
2016-05-09 refs/remotes/origin/feature/documentation-improvements-3
2016-04-19 

It’s very useful when creating Markdown to be able to preview it live. For example, creating a complex pull request or a README.md. I usually use the built-in Atom Markdown Preview package in Atom. Just type ⌃⇧M (aka Ctrl+Shift+M) to see a live preview in an adjacent pane. I use vim-mode-plus to edit in Atom, which provides an acceptable emulation of Vim.

I recently discovered VS Code Markdown Preview in Visual Studio Code. Type ⌘K V (aka Ctrl+K V on Windows or Linux) to invoke the side-by-side live preview. I use VSCodeVim to meet my Vim needs.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, neither previewer gives identical results to GitHub’s Markdown renderer. GitHub itself seems to use different renderers for …continue.

Basket Case, like most of Hiaasen’s novels, is a humorous crime caper set in Florida. Quick-witted but neurotic reporter Jack Tagger has been exiled to the obituary department for mouthing off too often. When Jimmy Stoma, lead singer of the Slut Puppies, dies in an apparent accident, Tagger senses a potential story and a chance for a comeback. But he has to get the story before it gets taken away from him.

Hiaasen, himself a journalist, also uses the novel to explore journalism as a career and to rant …continue.

I started this blog 14 years ago, in February 2003, on EraBlog, a long-defunct platform. Many of my early posts expressed outrage at the imminent Iraq War. Within a couple of years, I had moved to running dasBlog on my own website, hosted at ihost.net.

I wrote a lot of posts over the next decade. With rare exception, most posts were composed offline as re­Struc­tured­Text and saved in a repository. There was no formal schema and most posts did not know their permalink.

In late 2014, I moved to the Acrylamid static blog generator and I hosted www.georgevreil­ly.com at GitHub Pages. I migrated most of the dasBlog content into a more Acrylamid-friendly …continue.

Upon hearing of Richard Adams’ recent death, I reread Watership Down for the first time in many years. I first read it not long after Penguin published it in paperback. I believe that I was given the book for my ninth birthday in 1974, or perhaps for my tenth, but I think it was my ninth. Certainly the giver was my godfather, my Uncle Gabriel, who also gave me The Lord of the Rings and the Titus Groan nov­el­s—other books which I reread many times.

I’m happy to …continue.

As I write this, it’s 2320 PST on Election Night 2016. Trump has 248 votes in the Electoral College, Clinton has 218; 270 votes are needed to win. It’s not over yet—­sev­er­al key swing states have yet to de­clar­e—but it’s likely that I will wake up to headlines about President-Elect Trump.

What. The. Fuck! America!? How could we do this? How!?

The most unsuitable, un­qual­i­fied, unfit party nominee ever to run for US President is closing in on victory. One of the most qualified candidates ever is trailing in the polls and is unlikely to win. How did this happen?

This is the US’s Brexit moment. We failed. We fucked up. This is not how I expected tonight …continue.

DI Nikki Galena and her team have been targeted by someone with a vicious grudge. One copper is dead, another is badly injured, Galena has been hounded out of her home, and civilians have been hurt too. The cops have no idea who’s behind it.

The story is over­wrought but the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion was good and the story was en­ter­tain­ing.