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		<title>Julian days &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2017/03-March/17.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>Julian days</h1>
			<p>Day 00741: Friday, 2017 March 17</p>
		</header>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		I discovered today that my new bike came with a combination lock already attached to it.
		If I lock the bike up with a second lock, the bike&apos;ll look stolen.
		Great.
		I&apos;d have to try every combination until I could get the lock off.
		Thankfully, I found the combo after 561 tries; less than half the 1296 possibilities.
	</p>
	<p>
		I headed to work early today, hoping to drop off my backpack and run errands, but instead, I was asked to clock in early.
		I put off clocking in long enough to buy a helmet at Saint Vincent&apos;s next door, but I did clock in way early and wasn&apos;t able to return the bike lock I bought yesterday.
		Hopefully I&apos;ll have time tomorrow, but I have another errand tomorrow as well.
		I might not get to the bike lock right away.
	</p>
	<p>
		That customer that wants me fired showed up again.
		As usual, I pretended I didn&apos;t recognize them and served them as politely as always.
		They seem to be grumpier every time I see them though.
		I think they&apos;re <strong>*wanting*</strong> a reason to complain, and since I&apos;m not giving them one, there&apos;s nothing they can hold against me.
	</p>
	<p>
		One of my shift leaders offered to give me piano lessons.
		I&apos;d <strong>*really*</strong> love to take them up on that!
		However, between work and school, I&apos;m not sure I have the time to commit.
		If I could get a four-year rain check, I&apos;d almost certainly take them up on it, but I probably won&apos;t even be working there that long.
		I had to turn them down.
	</p>
	<p>
		That same shift leader and I were discussing birthdays and other anniversaries.
		Anniversaries are not the same day as the initial event, so celebrating an anniversary isn&apos;t the same as celebrating the day of the initial event.
		Anyone that disputes this is dead wrong.
		However, my shift leader has the view that celebrating birthdays is a celebration of life.
		This is a very typical view of birthdays, and is arguably valid as long as you don&apos;t claim to be celebrating the actual day of birth (which would be the <strong>*birth date*</strong>, and not the <strong>*birthday*</strong>).
		A yearly celebration of life planned to coincide with the anniversary of your separation from your mother is well within the realm of sanity.
		However, because each successive birthday is one year further from the birth, each birthday is necessarily one year closer to death.
		For this reason, I find the celebration of birthdays to be incredibly morbid.
		Each time, you&apos;re pointing out that another year is gone and the person is closer to their own expiration date than before.
	</p>
	<p>
		During this conversation, my shift leader brought up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day">Julian days</a>.
		I&apos;m still not convinced that Julian days have anything to do with the matter of birthdays and other anniversaries, but I&apos;d never heard of Julian days before.
		They&apos;re an interesting concept.
		Every day is numbered.
		Months and years aren&apos;t mentioned, so a single integer can represent the day.
		The concept&apos;s very similar to Unix timestamps, but for days instead of seconds.
		I&apos;ve been using day numbers since the beginning of this journal, though my day zero is at the start of the journal.
		I didn&apos;t know there were any existing day number standards to choose from.
		When I have time, I might switch my day numbers over to this system.
		I don&apos;t calculate my day numbers by hand.
		Every instance of a day number on this entire website is inserted by calling a class instance as a function.
		All I&apos;d have to do is change the <code>__invoke()</code> method of the class, change the object instantiation like to use a different class, or swap the instantiation out for a string variable corresponding with a function name.
		After doing that and building the new day-number-calculation code, every instance of a day number would change without any further effort.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
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