2019 hatsu basho – final four days

I had hoped to write about sumo after the middle day of the tournament, but life got in the way. Let’s look back at my predictions and comments a month before the tournament to see how I did.

My list of three disappointing wrestlers was Kisenosato, Ikioi, and Goeido. Hopefully I won’t have to add Kakuryu and Tochinoshin to this list in March. Kisenosato pulled out of several tournaments after injuries and bad starts. He continued that trend this months and even did one better by retiring. Honestly, this move comes half a year too late for the embattled yokozuna. Ikioi, way down at M11, should be cleaning up this tournament. At 6-5, his chances at a winning record are looking good. As an Ikioi fan, however, I’m still disappointed. Goeido has to win three of the next four days to get his winning record. I won’t be surprised if he resorts to the henka (sidestep) maneuver to beat better wrestlers than himself the next few days, though he usually starts doing that when he is katoban.

If you’re not up on sumo-speak, M11 means maegashira 11. Maegashira 1 is four ranks below yokozuna with higher numbers going down the ranks.

My “wrestlers with something to prove” were Takakeisho, Abi, Mitakeumi, and Asanoyama. Sekiwake-ranked Takakeisho and komusubi-ranked Mitakeumi absolutely proved their worth. With eight wins already, Takakeisho could finish the tournament in double digits, putting him in great position for an upgrade to ozeki. With so many wrestlers ageing and falling down the ranks, I have come to believe that young Takakeisho is the future of the sport.
Mitakeumi sat out for four days of the tournament with injury — certainly a cause for concern — but came back with a surprise win over Hakuho. In good health, that’s quite an accomplishment, but limping it become a miracle.

So did Abi prove anything? Not yet. At M10, he isn’t taking on the most dangerous opponents. At 7-4, he’s poised to move up the ranks again. If I can say he proved anything, it’s that he belongs in the M5-M7 area. Asanoyama, for his part, is proving that he also belongs in the M7 area. Not as good as I had hoped.

My final comment in my first sumo digression was about Onosho, and I see no reason to change that in this digression. Onosho is looking good this tournament. I hope he finally found the consistency he has been lacking.

Old hardware, new life

I recently received two old Windows laptops from my mother, who was clearing out some old storage in her house due to renovations. One, a Toshiba, was an XP era machine and the other, an HP, has Windows 7. The HP is pretty beat up and missing its AC adapter, so I put it to the side for now. The XP machine is the focus of today’s digression. For reference, it is a Toshiba Satellite M115-S1061.

The venerable Windows XP. I used it almost exclusively from the year of its release to the year Microsoft stopped supporting it (for the nitpickers, this statement doesn’t include extended support for enterprise & military et al.). Trying to extend the life of the machines I had, I looked into Linux to bridge the gap until I built a new desktop. My first build is a separate digression, so I won’t get into that here. In researching Linux, I wanted something well-supported, stable, quick, and approachable for a new Linux user. What I landed on was Linux Mint.

Linux Mint mirrors Windows XP in many things. XP never ran particularly fast on my Acer netbook. Neither did Linux Mint. XP wasn’t particularly pretty. Neither was the flavor of Mint that I used. XP worked well enough for SD video, light internet browsing, and old games. Mint could do that well enough, too. XP had Microsoft Office, an absolute necessity for my job at the time, but poor security. Mint had LibreOffice, which was terrible, and decent security.

It was, in short, an imperfect solution.

So when I received the old Toshiba, which has only half a gig of RAM, I knew Mint, even the Debian edition, would be a terrible fit. Thus began the search for a lightweight Linux distribution.

First distro: Lubuntu. Supposedly runs on half a gig of RAM. Excellent support. Fits on a DVD (but not a CD, sadly).

Second distro: Bodhi Linux. This distro has even lower requirements than Lubuntu while not compromising on visuals. Also fits on a DVD but not a CD.

Linux veterans (and novices like myself) will know about Live USB installs. I tried those, too.

The first issue: the Toshiba won’t boot from USB. I tried changing boot order and using the boot manager. Changing boot order didn’t work, because it wouldn’t recognize the USB and just booted from the HDD. I formatted the drive completely to wipe out the Master Boot Record. Still no luck. With the boot manager, it still wouldn’t recognize the USB.

The first fix: plpbt. This is a tool that will fit on CD or floppy drive and force an old PC to boot from whatever device you select. Finally, the Toshiba recognized the bootable USB. Great tool. Would recommend.

The second issue: USB boot still didn’t work. Yes, I got to the boot screen that I wanted, but I was unable to get into the live environment to actually install either Lubuntu or Bodhi.

The second fix: DVD install. Not having any DVD-R on hand, I bought a reel of 25 and got to work. Lubuntu completely failed here, never reaching the live environment or even getting past the boot selection screen. Bodhi Linux did much better. From the DVD, I was able to reach the live environment. Great.

The third issue: Bodhi live install fail. On my first try, the laptop hanged inside the live environment. The old DVD drive couldn’t keep up. Second try, I went straight to the install instead of looking around the live environment first. An hour later, it blackscreened. Half an hour after that, I gave up. I next tried reduced graphics mode. Third time’s a charm? No. Fourth time? Crashed at user/password creation.

The third fix: give up on Lubuntu and Bodhi. I looked for the smallest & simplest distro I felt comfortable installing.

Third distro: Tinycore. I settled on Tinycore, because it fit on a CD, is super small, and has such low requirements that I was certain the old Toshiba would have no trouble keeping up.

It worked. It installed. It’s rather fast.

The fourth issue: I am nowhere near skilled enough with programming & coding to do anything with Tinycore. If I want to get any files onto or off of the laptop, I am completely unequipped to do so. And surely a laptop that could run XP can do more than this modest distro.

Fourth distro: Vector Linux. More lightweight than Bodhi but more features than Tinycore. While it doesn’t look like XP, the system requirements aren’t terribly high.

The fifth issue: same as the third. Vector would hang on install or fail to get past a certain point after multiple tries.

The fifth distro: bunsenlabs Helium. Rather than being a lightweight Ubuntu or Slackware fork, bunsenlabs uses Debian. Some flavors of Linux Mint also use Debian, but Mint’s RAM needs are much higher. Bunsenlabs Helium can run on as little as 128MB of RAM (not comfortably), so it should be good on four times that. It also fits on a single CD rather than a DVD.

The sixth issue: slow install. Bunsenlabs wants to check the install against an online mirror DURING the install. Seems like a good feature, but a poor connection to the mirror made the install hang.

The final fix: Starting over, I skipped connecting to wi-fi during install (press Esc and choose a different step) and then skipped the mirror check when it popped up.

And. It. Installed.

Networking works. File management works. Graphics work. The word processing works. It’s stable.

Unfortunately, it does not like Firefox. So the search is on for a more modest browser.

So thanks to the bunsenlabs community for building a functional little OS that brought an old laptop back to life. Maybe I’ll use it for script writing or something.

Christmas cookies

Face it: most Christmas cookies aren’t all that good.

Maybe your cookies are good. Maybe you love Christmas cookies. I do, too… but not as much as I ought. As far back as I can remember, my grandmother has made cookies at Christmastime and had them set out for all to enjoy and ruin their dinner.

We usually had sugar cookies, chocolate haystacks, almond snowballs, peanut butter kiss cookies, and magic cookie bars. I have come to the conclusion that they’re all pretty boring. For different reasons. Let’s start with the two most Christmassy cookies on that list: sugar cookies and almond snowballs.

Sugar cookies cut into Christmas shapes and decorated in red and green is a timeless tradition. Roll it, cut it, bake it. Simple enough, but a lot of work for something that isn’t particularly impressive. The cookie is itself rather basic, with just a hint of vanilla flavor. Decoration either creates a wow factor or leaves you with a mess of colored fat and powdered sugar that will rot your teeth and gut.

Snowballs aren’t much better. A typical cookie batter with ground almonds subbed in for part of the flour, baked, and then tossed in powdered sugar to more closely resemble their namesake. Sounds good. Comes out too sweet on the outside and too bitter in the center. Not to mention messy.

Haystacks? Coconut and chocolate. Good start. Adding other ingredients will make them cookies rather than chocolates. Here’s an idea: Don’t add other ingredients. I believe my grandmother uses cocoa powder and condensed milk, with some nuts tossed in for texture. They either cook or dry into a chewy pseudo-cookie. Sound good to you? Well it is, somewhat. There isn’t anything Christmassy about it, however.

My grandmother’s magic cookies bars (an old Borden recipe, with butterscotch chips subbed in for half of the chocolate chips) and peanut butter kiss cookies have that same problem: nothing Christmas about them. Which leads me to the point of this digression.

I need to embark on a project of making Christmas cookies more Christmassy.

In fact, I’ve already done it with one recipe. Do you like oatmeal raisin cookies? Have a good recipe? Well, take that recipe and substitute dried cranberries for the raisins. In fact, use more cranberries than the recipe calls for to give extra color. These will be the red part of a red-green-white Christmas cookie trio. Oh, be sure to add nutmeg if your recipe doesn’t already call for it.

2019 hatsu basho – 1 month out

For my first digression, a word on sumo. As luck would have it, the first sumo tournament of 2019 is exactly a month from the very day I started this blog.

Sumo has few fans in the west. Steeped in Japanese history and culture, much of what makes a sport popular in America — showmanship, quick pacing, long breaks to go to the bathroom or buy a beer — are severely toned down in sumo. How does one compare spiking a football or dunking a basketball to throwing salt and slapping a mawashi?

A mawashi, for the uninitiated, is the sumo wrestler’s diaper.

I am, nonetheless, excited for 2019 sumo. 2018 saw stubborn injuries among all the yokozuna as well as disappointing performances among many of the high-ranked wrestlers. We know, however, that Hakuho remains a force in the sport; in the one tournament he finished in 2018, he won every bout. Kakuryu, if he can return in good health, still has a few yuushou in him. New ozeki Tochinoshin of Georgia (the country) could look better, but he has yet to have a losing record in a completed tournament. Takayasu was also solid and consistent throughout 2018. 

The list disappointing wrestlers will depend, in part, on what kind of sumo fan you ask, but for me it’s these three: Kisenosato, Ikioi, and Goeido. Yokozuna Kisenosato lost more than he won for the year, winning only 11 bouts out of 26. Even if we remove the walk-over losses, that’s still a record of 11-13. It’s about time for him to retire. Ikioi, of whom I’m a fan for no reason in particular, finished the year with two terrible performances. The autumn basho was a train-wreck 3-12 performance, followed by a 6-9 at the Kyushu basho. Goeido… I never liked the guy. He likes to screw around with the tachiai (the initial charge) and loves a cheap win. Pulling out of Kyushu after a few such cheap wins (just enough to hold his rank) cemented to me that he doesn’t deserve to ever rise to yokozuna. 

The wrestlers with something to prove: Takakeisho, Abi, Asanoyama, and Mitakeumi. Takakeisho and Mitakeumi both have to prove that their yuushou weren’t just flukes. Mitakeumi has been a solid sekiwake-ranked wrestler, and Takakeisho should join him there. The question will be if they’re good enough to become ozeki. Abi and Asanoyama have a different question to answer, which is “Are they as good at their fans think they can be?” Abi has risen through the ranks quickly but has struggled with more experienced opponents. His tactics are lacking. Asanoyama, for his part, can’t beat the guys in the upper ranks. A mental block, perhaps?

A word on Oonosho, and then I’ll stop. His 2018 was a rollercoaster. In the lower ranks, he cleaned up. When he’s ranked higher, he was the one being mopped up off the floor. Hopefully he will be more consistent in 2019.