Woke up late, got (spac)emacs running, some chess, and a gala.

I woke up at noon today since I was out so late last night. My mild hangover prevented me from getting anything meaningful done before 4pm besides some laundry and watching AoE2 games. But after I got my tea and some McDonalds, I got emacs going.

Some problems I’m running into with this setup and workflow:

• I do most of my coding work on the linux subsystem since that’s the environment I’m used to. So in order to access my git repos (which includes the repo for this blog), I’m needing to navigate to some unwieldy directory like ~/AppData/Local/Packages/CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc/LocalState/rootfs/home/username/git/blog/content/post/journal/20181216.md to edit this file. Spacemacs history makes this pretty easy but it’s still a mess of a path! Also when creating files in spacemacs at this path, it shows the files in windows but not in my linux instance. Scary workarounds are incoming, or I’ll have to work in an all-emacs environment with everything stored on the Windows filesystem… Or when I get out of china I can go back into full linux.
• My muscle memory of :wq can close out of all of spacemacs.
• Spell checking requires me to enable something in the configuration and find ispell, which I haven’t had time to look into yet.
• Changing configuration and then loading packages blocks text editor. In my old i3 instance with multiple vim window feels more like commanding a fleet of jet skis vs. piloting a battleship. I’m used to typing “set number” to enable numbers when I want!
• Errors everywhere! Again with this battleship analogy, it feels like every time I turn on the ship there’s a panel with “AN ERROR OCCURRED WHILE INSTALLING FONT-LOCK+” and enabling functionality leads to googling things like “spacemacs windows spell checking.” A lot of this is probably because spacemacs is installed in a windows environment.

Anyways, enough complaining about a text editor and let’s talk about this gala!

Chinese Galas are a time to celebrate with song, dance, and skits. This gala was celebrating four colleges at the Gulou campus of Nanjing University: Physics, Medicine, Education, and Engineering. We were given a schedule of the event which had a number in the corner, and during the show there were prizes for certain numbers. I didn’t win anything.

One thing that surprised me is they had what my puritan home country of the Midwestern United States would describe as “suggestive dancing” with “revealing outfits.” I had no problem with it and most western peers wouldn’t either, but it was a shock to see the kind of dance moves these groups of girls would do with all of their professors watching in the front row in a pretty conservative country.

And the night was ended in a quaint ballroom dance.

As for chess I just played an IRL game with an inexperienced friend, and continued some correspondence matches.