infryq

Yesterday I met with Indicators, where we shunted Issue Dates into 1.5 to my great relief. I went to the big group meeting where we presented the new strategic plan. It went well; I think people are excited, if a little nervous about how ambitious it is. Spent the rest of the afternoon chasing pointers with various people, clearing up some remaining issues with data prototypes, the switch to the official signal names for smoothed cases and deaths, hackathon prep, and a fix for the meta cache that doesn’t quite work yet.

P went to the teaching garden in the morning but there was no one else there; it’s possible no one signed up this week (he didn’t sign up) so it was soft-canceled. Everyone’s still getting practice at the new procedures. He went to the co-op and got carrots, green beans, corn chips, pickles, half and half, granola, yogurt, mozzarella, ham, and a couple tomatoes. Everyone was in masks except the security guard.

Dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of time travel, Wakanda, surprise parties, AR perspective drawing tools, augmented speed and agility, and a card game worse than Mao.

Yesterday I submitted all the remaining parts orders for the White: from McMaster-Carr, grease wicks, springs, and electric cord; from various places on eBay, a replacement motor drive pulley, bobbin winder friction pulley, bobbins, and a wee LED bulb. Went with P to the farmers market and got peaches, honey, bonus plums, strawberries, rhubarb, parsley, lettuce, spring mix, snap peas. The market has circulation routes blocked off, traffic metering stations at both ends, hand sanitizer as you enter and leave, and one person at each stall who handles money and doesn’t touch the food. Everyone was wearing masks (thanks mom! I wore the one with the tulips) and most people were following the lanes and social distancing but a few still need practice (including us; must remember to leave more space for people to pass when stopping to think). Home, then P made rhubarb sauce, I made strawberry sauce, and we had lunch; P tried an all-spelt version of pita and we’ll need some more practice before we can get them to puff. I started the laundry, then did a bunch of weeding in the garden pulling cleavers out of the blackcurrants and the roses, and clearing all the vegetation away from the outside of the west fence. The cucurbits are starting to climb, as are the peas; the beans are doing much better now that the arugula is leaving them alone; last year’s carrots are in full flower and this year’s are getting established; the first wee baby tomatoes are already appearing. Inside, rinsed off, had a snack, hung the laundry out on the line, then watched DS9 until dinner time. A little unsteady from snack. Light dinner, crossword, then switched all the code repositories at work from “master” as their default branch to “main” because there’s no good reason to use words with grisly connotations when others are available. Sleep; dreamt of government contracts and choreography and code reviews.

Yesterday the validator caught a low survey volume issue, which caused a problem downstream at repair time with the identifier lists. Fixed it. Looked over the additional testing notes T put in the beta file, and generated a new GitHub issue for one of them.

Started the laundry, then cleaned up the back porch a bit. Took the folding table down to the patio, hooked up the hose, and washed it down thoroughly. Retired the sketchy “Vegetables” scrub brush to a life of utilitarian cleaning instead.

P went to the first farmers market of the season and got our who cooks order, a loaf of sourdough, and cheese. The radishes from who cooks are enormous; I think P’s going to pickle then. The market has some traffic control measures in place for the pandemic, but they’re going to have to add gating or something once the season gets in full swing. The workaround they have for cashless is also pretty dubious. We’ll make it work.

P and I hung the laundry out on the line, since it was a beautiful day for it. Lunch, then crossword. I hung the second load out, then switched to working on the White. I made some progress on polishing the drive wheel; a hard felt pad seems to work much better than a soft one, and I figured out how to clean the pad with sandpaper in between passes. Now I’m much more confident that I’ll be able to get a mirror finish.

City of Brass sure has some topical themes in it.

Early dinner, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of gymnastics recitals, tween girls cutting class to get milkshakes together, bending surveillance capitalism toward justice, gentle conditioning, chickening out, sewing with friends, car coats, short skirts, photography finals, finding light in dark places.

Yesterday I met with indicators and introduced our second new intern W. I went to the big group meeting and we went over all the tickets for the 1.3 release next week, checking off what will be ready vs what won’t. Viz also gave a great rundown of the solutions they’ve been pursuing for displaying counts data, which is challenging because urban areas behave so much differently than rural ones. I’ll be joining the weekly viz meeting to help give them better awareness of what the priority tasks are and why starting next week. The afternoon went to checking the output of the new F pipeline against the old, and as expected the community signal does okay but the household ones are a mess. To help with debugging I ran the synthetic dataset through the old pipeline and posted the results to the thread, so we don’t have to keep bouncing back to a CMU person to check T’s work. The rest of the day was debugging the individual responses, which turns out to mostly be a missing set of full-complete weights files; and then writing a thing to drop duplicate tokens from the weights files after May 5 when the incremental bug came online. I went to a meeting with the PIs and we discussed staffing; we need at least one stellar project manager compatible with academia to take on the forecasting team and/or take on the whole of Delphi so A can handle forecasting, and a couple of developers for viz.

P went to the garden and the coop in the morning and got red lentils, puffed rice, yogurt, half and half, cheese, pizza sauce, salad vinegar, and the most gorgeous rhubarb I’ve ever seen. He was nervous about the garden because the person running it is one he’s had conflicts with before, but it turned out to be a different person with the same first name! So all good.

Dinner, crossword, then we put together a Who Cooks For You order and got mesclun, romaine, radishes, and seedlings: rhubarb, peppers, cherry tomatoes, and paste tomatoes. DS9, snack, sleep; dreamt of lion anthros, J, baseball camp (???), and two of the older ladies in my department over the years falling in love.

I finished Bone Witch, which uses a “accelerate off the end of the last page” approach to endings I don’t particularly care for. It was just turning decent, so hopefully this book was the author learning to write and the next ones will pick up stylistically where she left off.

Yesterday was excellent; I met with Indicators and got updates, went to the group meeting and got a priority list for things to do for the next release, organized my thoughts on hackathon ideas for the INI, met with A about that and introduced her to AR. Coordinated the final transfer of the map code repository into the Delphi GitHub org, in spite of some gnarly GitHub outages. In the gaps between meetings I thoroughly organized the issue tracker for 1.3, fixed the script that generates the process controls files for L, and fixed the aggregations scripts so that an error with one source doesn’t block the other sources from running, and so that we’re no longer using so many significant figures in the csv files that the last few digits fluctuate from floating point issues. A big pile of data access permissions came in, so handled those as well.

P did the shopping, and got carrots, zucchini, asparagus, coconut, parsley, and a tomato. The Penzey’s order arrived, so we now have smoked paprika again, a bunch of different kinds of dried peppers, and sea salt, and I won’t have to look anxiously at the descending levels of chipotle and ground cardamom anymore. H inquired about yarn, so I put together a package for him and popped it in the oven to de-moth.

Dinner, crossword (hoo boy but we got it eventually), DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of labeling nail polish with samples, rare seed varieties, rush week, bee hives, gross bro-y gyms, alternate universe Kenya, rooftop hijinks, parabolic microphones.

Yesterday I had a teleconference with R and C about the new vision for Crowdcast. Basically they want to switch to having users do either regions or states but not both, and then they want to incorporate international COVID-19 data into the hints display. C is handling the assignment of states to users and pulling me in for testing when she’s done. We’re waiting on international data from the API team. In the meantime I’m playing with displays in R.

I also upgraded CUDA on the penultimate GPU machine, and edited the summer student project prospecti. T won’t have time to look them over until later in the week, but that’s fine.

After lunch we had a small field trip to Dylamato’s for groceries, curbside pickup. Worked great, somehow both old-fashioned and highly civilized.

I didn’t manage to put hands on the White but I am learning about universal motors and speed control. There is a great guy on YouTube who takes apart broken treadmills and washing machines and things and turns them into new stuff, and he has some excellent explainers on different kinds of motors. Jeremy Fielding, look him up.

Lunch was slightly delayed because meeting, dinner delayed because my brain is goo and I’ve been playing a lot of Two Dots. Otherwise fine. Crossword after dinner, DS9, sleep. Very weird dreams about Regency living history, currency exchange, chestnut sweets from chestnuts that grew like a head of garlic, car vs train journeys to Disney, school buses with bad parking brakes, getting smuggled in and out of fascist high schools.

COVID-19 news: first death in Allegheny county. The governor put us and several other counties on a stay at home order around 3.

Yesterday I made another batch of nut and seed bars, almost a double batch to use up the last of the nuts. I attached stretch lace for waistbands and foldover elastic around the leg holes. We went to the coop and got lemons, onions, garlic, peppers, zucchini, asparagus, broccoli, nuts, coconut, pepitas, flour, rice krispies, brown rice syrup, frozen hash browns, frozen blueberries, coffee dairy, mozzarella, and eggs. Had a lovely chat with the cashier about hobbies. On the way home we went to Five Points for lunch and snack for P, then home to put everything away. Lunch, crossword, then more sewing, with Justice. Delayed snack, eventually dinner, DS9 and a vague haze of sub-nausea and associated sub-panic attacks. Sleep.

Yesterday I took apart another few seams on the white long-sleeve tee, and finished Ruby Red. The ending was rather abrupt, and it’s not terribly long, so I’m not sure why the story is in a trilogy instead of a big chunk. Started book two: Sapphire Blue.

At work I checked out a copy of the sugilite parser and got it to compile, battling missing jars and the whole java 8 vs later versions jaxb and javafx issue. I also downloaded and started learning Postman, a neat little environment for testing web APIs.

P had the car on campus so we went home via geagle and got citrus, a red pepper, dried cranberries, grapes, short-grain rice, tortilla chips, gf animal crackers, and frozen blueberries. Dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of waiting on an endless stream of buses, none recognizable; sewing piles of short zippers, a sewing podcast publishing a recipe for pickles for some reason, an expensive game we never ended up playing.

Yesterday I sewed the side seams and corners on give bulk bin bags, and prototyped a different hem finish using the cotton twill tape. Neither P nor I can decide, so we’re going to wash them up and see if either one performs better scooping beans.

After lunch we did the crossword. We went to geagle and got carrots, red bell peppers, zucchini, soup, tortilla chips, seltzer for work, swiss cheese, beer, butter, frozen green beans, frozen homefries, and some cleaner for the washing machine. Home, then I ran the stuff through the washing machine, which seems to have worked great. Snack, and P made pizza dough. We flipped the mattress and I changed all the sheets. Imager’s Intrigue continues well. Dinner, Repair Shop, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a weird car escalator and navigating around Harvard Square.

Yesterday I started making muslin bags to take bulk shopping, since the new recycle parameters exclude the kind of plastic tubs we usually buy loads of stuff in. I’m hand-felling everything and only have a rough plan for sizes and closures so we’ll see. We went to the co-op and got carrots, bell peppers, snap peas, citrus, onion, turnips, pecans, walnuts, pepitas, raisins, chocolate chips, spelt flour, brown rice syrup, cinnamon toothpaste, an interesting dry sausage, mozzarella, chestnut biscuits, and bunny snacks. We stopped at five points on the way home for a baguette and pastries. Home, lunch, crossword, then more sewing. I started the next Imager book, Imager’s Challenge. Good so far. My arms got tetchy with me after a while so I had a snack, then reviewed how to do fingerloop braids, and made one to act as a drawstring. Dinner, then I started a new show, The Repair Shop, a BBC reality tv production about same. It suffers a bit from artificial “Will it be done before the customer comes to pick it up” drama, and is a bit heavy on the dudes, but is otherwise perfect. There are a bunch of different experts and they all adore each other’s work. Mechanical problems and puzzles that all have solutions. Getting emotional about seeing a favored family heirloom restored is supported with grace and a sense of normalcy. Love it, do recommend.

Snack, sleep. Bizarre dreams of a Stepford authoritarian Olin and a show that combined live-action opera with a weird postmodern animated story composed of clips of old video games, and anime-style commentary in a separate projection. People got wild over it. Went hiking with the incoming class of students along a steep/cliff shore, where some kind of water spirit possessed the tides and washed out the trail tsunami-style on two occasions. Visited my parents in the old house, where the alarm clock had been replaced with a creepy recorded message and a sortof open hourglass sand puzzle.