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Yesterday the aggregations failed, and ultimately couldn't be repaired, more on that later. I met with Indicators, welcoming M to the group; she's been doing the engineering for the healthcare data all along but hasn't officially been a member of our team until now. Went to the big group meeting and did the planning for the 1.4 release. Spent the rest of the afternoon fixing the aggregations and respondent ID lists, which turned out to be a series of thoughtless mistakes; I'd inadvertently left my git environment on the wrong branch, then forgotten that we'd added metro areas for Puerto Rico so the validation error the new metro areas generated was only to be expected, and should be listed in the exceptions file. By the time I had everything sorted out, the API got stuck on a larger than usual dataset from another group, and basically hung for three hours. Without the API, the validation checks can't run, so no F data updates went up at all yesterday. While waiting for scripts to finish failing, I added the style fixes D recommended for the issue date PR, generated and merged a PR I'd forgotten about to remove the universal sample size minimum, finished a first pass at the task descriptions for the hackathon, tracked down contact information for two possible longer-term hires, coordinated with A on the procedure for giving a new research group access to the individual response data now that he's taken over as survey czar, and wrote a welcome guide for Z and G, who are joining us to help with not-sure-yet-but-I-hope-to-rope-G-into-the-backend.

Dinner, crossword, then P and I talked about the contract the english department has belatedly offered him for next year. They waited until his health insurance lapsed, which is. Not great, since in order to put him back on my insurance, we had to have him officially terminated, which nullifies all his benefits vestiture for tuition and retirement funds. If it turns out that was an error and can easily be fixed and backdated, fine, but if not, well. There's also the question of how small classes (which are the only kind the department teaches) are being handled in the fall; P would obviously want to teach remotely or online, because he's a reasonable human being who values life over university profits, but the current draft of university policy is to hold all such classes in person, with 30-minute gaps in between so the classrooms can be cleaned. This is a terrible idea and people will die, but our society is so bloodlessly capitalist that I doubt any institution of higher learning in the country has the financial wherewithal to survive taking a year off and reopening in fall of 2021. That kind of forethought requires a level of public stewardship we haven't had in the US in almost a hundred years. Anyway P had written a letter in response which laid out his concerns, which I read and only lightly adjusted. He'll sleep on it for the weekend and respond to the contract Monday.

DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of soccer games, barbed wire, cafes, caesar salad, rowboats, thick coffee.