infryq

Yesterday was super productive! I released a bugfix to the website, fixed a gnarly problem with surveys running out of memory on the new host, added a whole new page to the website to host our job postings, and linked to it from the footer and the landing page carousel, released that and another bugfix, and finished editing all 200-some signal descriptions for the new sheet-based metadata.

P made ma’amoul dough to bake this morning. While dinner was cooking I went out and watered the garden and picked a couple handfuls of snap peas. After dinner we did the crossword, then I watched another episode of Pose, then snack and sleep. Dreamt of our house by the lake, making little books, sleeping under the stars, arborists, a T piano recital (??), hanging out with A on the fringes, cats.

Yesterday I made another batch of lentils, this time split between wild rice and millet. We did the crossword after lunch, then I made some progress on the gearbox modifications for the White. I drilled the four new holes for shafts, and made one new shaft. I think I want to dry fit the whole assembly before I cut spacers though, since I don’t remember where all the screw clearances need to be.

Snack, then called my folks. They’d set up a sortof portable gazebo to do some furniture refinishing without having to worry about insects or pets (two of the cats came to say hello). We got cut a bit short by my internet, but it worked out.

Dinner, picked blueberries for this morning’s oatmeal, scrabble (675, 1 bingo, and a double-double with the Q), Lucifer, snack, sleep. Dreamt of military officers school, an automated mining puzzle, college groceries, a manor house big enough to have an infirmary, an amusement park ride gone wrong.

Yesterday I waded through the release of all the pending changes in our API code, had a super quick data scaling meeting, and spent the rest of the afternoon on minor repairs to the release and a slide deck for a talk I’m giving at all hands on Friday.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep; dreamt of high school friends, gymnastics meets, auto shop, potluck surprise birthday parties in caves, comparative cruciferous cookery, the merits of Asian grocery stores.

Yesterday was good. I put the laundry in right after breakfast, so it was ready to hang out on the line before lunch. While it was washing, I took apart the latest Kalustyan’s order, which includes split favas, giant lima beans, giant butter beans, Christmas lima beans, three kinds of popcorn, barberries, tamarind, and dried Kashmiri chiles. I took the tamarind apart and packed it into a jar in the fridge, put some of the limas to soak, kept out the chiles, and put everything else in the freezer. I toasted some of the chiles, along with some guajillos from the pantry and two languishing anchos from the freezer, then pulverized them and refilled the chile powder bottle. House smells amazing now.

Lunch, crossword, internet, snack, then I did a pass through the limas to shell and split the ones that had soaked sufficiently. Brought in the laundry, then dinner, internet, snack with a second pass to shell the stragglers, and the split ones went into the freezer overnight. Sleep; dreamt of some kind of blackmail scheme targeting a pregnant friend, scrabble tiles, and something lingering but wispy I can no longer grasp.

I for some reason resisted finding more Charles, and started rereading A Discovery Of Witches by Deborah Harkness instead. The pacing in the book is substantially more believable.

Yesterday I met with S to figure out how to unblock him and plan for his departure as we run out of things for him to do. The forecast evaluation dashboard meeting was canceled, so I had a leisurely lunch with P. We finished up the summer goals at team leads, and I spent the rest of the day on project specs, making some revisions to the domain model for the data scaling project, and whinging at our mobility data provider about them discontinuing our current data product and the recommended replacement being not as good.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt of some kind of epic quest with a bunch of self-aware narrative devices, a magic hospital heist, tricky teleportation, swamp creatures, an undead antagonist, projectile memory weapons, an oppressive council, a zarfian segment requiring a bunch of repetition to get right, and a mystical advisor who played cheeky games with physics to build themselves a cylindrical waterfall onto a flat asteroid.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, hard cider, mushrooms, sea beans, parsley, radishes, lettuce, pea greens, strawberries, smoked trout, asparagus, and zucchini. I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, I diced the mushrooms fine and sautéed them until deeply brown, and we did the crossword after lunch (no clue what the title was supposed to mean). Internet, snack, then I started watching Nobody’s Looking, a Brazilian comedy (Ninguém Tá Olhando) about what happens when angels discover no one is at the helm. It’s starting to bring back a pile of Portuguese, which is fun. I also had a good chat with my mentee about the frustration of fixing other people’s mistakes, not repeating mine in grad school, and what being a research programmer is like.

Dinner, scrabble (653, 1 bingo), more internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt of weird passport requirements, decoding microcultural accordion notation, color-matching crochet threads with grandma Y, encoding proofs in fillet crochet blankets, and summer camp for construction and civil engineering (what yes please).

Yesterday we had an unusually jumbled all-hands meeting, since there wasn’t one last Friday when we typically would have announced rotating assignments for this week, and we are also making a pile of changes to how the meeting and the whole lab is run but we hadn’t really decided what date all of that should take effect. Transient problems all.

I spent the rest of the day on 1:1s, the data users meeting, viz, document reviews, and some data scaling projections for 2022.

Dinner, crossword, internet, snack, sleep. Dreamt intensely of chopping up a pavilion to load it on a train so we could go to a swim meet on a shoestring budget, then some kind of distant supernatural fire.

I finished An Unseen Attraction and started An Unnatural Vice. KJ Charles is just really good.

Yesterday P helped me bench-test the electrics for the White. I took the motor and lamp of the body of the machine, put that assembly and the power and speed control assembly on a tray, and took it all out to the back porch. We set up a surge protector on a GFCI outlet, had a fire extinguisher ready, and talked through the test protocol — turn on the surge protector, test the lamp switch, test the main power switch, test the speed controller. One-handed operations only for all humans involved. We clamped all potentially moving parts to the porch railing, then went for it. Good news is nothing caught fire or sparked or made threatening noises, and the lamp works perfectly. Bad news is the speed controller mechanism turns the knob the wrong direction, so the “off” position is actually full speed and the “full throttle” position is... less so, but still probably too fast. It’s unloaded of course, but I’ll need to plan to adjust the little minimum speed set pot on the speed controller while everything is hooked up to the machine, which may be tricky to arrange. At least we know the electrics are excellent, so we won’t need quite the fanfare next time. I took everything back to my work table, took the speed controller off the gearbox, and started playing with some spare gears to see if I could fit everything in the same enclosure without screwing up the clearances. I looks like I can, especially if I adjust the length of the linkage bar to the knee lever. I marked all the new holes and left it there.

Crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner (663, one bingo, didn’t draw the Q until there were too few tiles in the bag for exchanges, and one of us had all the vowels and the other had all the consonants). I finished season one of A Discovery Of Witches, and it looks like they want a subscription to a whole-ass new streaming service to get at season two, so I’m sulking for a bit. Rag And Bone is cleaning up the denouement. I dreamt of being on the Board of Directors for a college, but being too tired to stay awake through meetings; also something about a bad-ass cashier with excellent aim and some kind of floating produce section that required you to toss ping pong balls at them.

I was supposed to roast more beans, but didn’t get started until 3, and gave up and fridged them. This batch will be split butter beans, which I got as a possible alternative to favas.

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, asparagus, rhubarb, hard cider, a basil plant, mushrooms, baby bok choy, spring mix, and lettuce. P deep-cleaned his produce drawer when we got home, then lunch, rhubarb sauce, and crossword.

I took the back off the cordomatic, reproduced the missing connection, but maneuvering the board out of position so I could get to the contacts must have wiggled whatever it was back into place. My least favorite fix. I squished the connections a bit harder in case something had been loose, but they were pretty firmly stuck in there, so 🤷🏼‍♀️. Put the board back, connections still worked, put the case back together, connections still worked, so... I guess it’s fine now?

Snack, then watched a Netflix series from the UK called Feel Good, a substance-abuse -flavored coming out comedy which cut off rather abruptly at the end of its too-short first season. Nertz.

Dinner, scrabble (635, no bingos, sloshy vowels), then I found A Discovery Of Witches on Amazon. Matthew is a bit weirdly-cast maybe? Though he is meant to be Occitan so maybe it’s more that my brain is bad at casting from the peninsula. I’m worried they’ll screw up some other stuff trying to shoehorn the story into a live-action format, since her inner voice was such a vibrant part of the books. But, we’ll see.

Before bed I was checking alerts for work and it turns out my machine on campus is down AGAIN. With today a holiday I’m comfortable popping into campus to power-cycle it again, but ugh. Sucks.

Dreamt of Christmas in an art studio with H and B, playing some fascinating games with generative pattern glazing, something about cookie recipes, and reading under covers in a tent in the backyard. Dreamt separately of a nanobots puzzle with species-specific heads-up displays in outer space that turned out to be an origin story for the Borg.

I finished Flight Of Magpies and started Jackdaw.

Yesterday I had the day off for Memorial Day weekend. I spent most of it reading and sewing; I sewed a little chin pocket to one of my pointy-nose masks, and now it fits perfectly and doesn’t slide around when I talk. I washed some cobweb-bedighted stuff from the rag pile in prep for using it as patches on P’s shorts, then took it apart. It needs a once-over with some tweezers to get rid of the worst of the thread shrapnel, then a good ironing, then they’ll be ready to cut and sew.

We did the crossword after lunch, and P had a good nap, recovering from the semester. I finished Magpie Lord and started A Case Of Possession. I finished Trinkets over snack, and started watching Queen’s Gambit. Dinner solo, more Queen’s Gambit, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a weird ballet class with TVs on carts, a puzzle hunt with rubber stamps and first aid supplies, and fishing.