Local Jewelers

I picked up some jewelry for my wife for our anniversary, and this ended up being the first time I was looking for a jeweler in this area. After a short round of poking around I landed on Folco Jewelers in New Bedford (1). I certainly don't have a lot of knowledge to gauge jewelers but the experience was very smooth with the staff/owners helpful and a selection of nice pieces (the one I picked was relatively local which is also an advantage in my book). They seemed to keep a relatively low footprint on hand, so it may not make as much sense if looking for a wider range of potentially less expensive options, but will definitely return when looking for things that are somewhat significant.

No-Touch Thermometer

Several years ago I ended up signing up for an FSA account, only to have what is seemingly a typical experience of reaching the end of the year with money to spend or lose on unneeded medical gear. Among a range of supplies which are jammed into bathroom drawers I grabbed a nice no-touch thermometer - likely not something I would have otherwise picked up but it seemed particularly appealing with my children being very young at the time (it may have been before my daughter was born).

Generally it's very convenient…but one major nuisance is that if the ambient temperature is too cold it immediately returns an error message (2). Given that sickness tends to pop up during the coldest months and often first thing in the morning before the house has warmed up - it can be very frustrating. It certainly makes sense if its expected to typically be used in a clinical setting (and it presumably makes sense from a physical reality perspective), but for home use it's never a great experience when something is intended to serve a purpose during a time of stress and has fickle behavior.

ido Mode Experiment

As mentioned while getting citations working, I'll be looking to use one of the Emacs libraries that enables more efficient selection of choices. Based on past preference I'll start with ido since it is seems to be the lightest weight and most native option (for example I think it is the best documented in the standard Emacs user guide). I had issues with misbehaving extensions for solutions like helm in the past…but that was a long time ago so they've likely been resolved and I'd also be more willing to dig into them at this point.

The one aspect I was really looking for help was the citation insertion, but that doesn't seem to work out of the box. For now I'll leave ido-mode enabled but not persisted as part of my configuration while I look through some of details for citation insertion.

The insertion logic itself calls into completing-read in minibuf.c, and there is an ido-completing-read which could presumably wrap that though I'll need to find the right incantation to override the function that is called.

Based on one of Mikey Petersen's posts on masteringemacs.org (which is on my list of sites to start reading) I tried fido-mode and that seemed to do the trick.

Unfortunately another problem I've had with these tools in the past also just reared its head in that I end up wrestling with the tools - where some of the DWIMmery they provide complicate basic usage. In this case I could select the citation but it would want to keep collecting rather than insert it, so I'll have to spend a bit more time figuring this out. In attempting to force my way through it is also resulted in load issues which are causing me déjà vu.

For now this will be once again disabled while working through using some of the more standard options more efficiently. For the citation flow the ~switch-to-completions~(M-v) command makes the interaction fairly smooth.