infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I ran the all-hands meeting, which went beautifully; M gives a great talk. I met briefly with HR to discuss one of our job candidates who might be complicated to hire, then I had the visualization meeting, one on ones, and took a pass through the process mapping report. Very tidy day.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep; dreamt of some kind of time dilation puzzle and helping alien creatures find their way home.

I started reading Slippery Creatures by KJ Charles, the first book in a new to me series whose newest book is getting some positive attention on Twitter. So far it’s a little slow but makes up for it in complexity and vividness.

Salty

Jun. 27th, 2021 07:29 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I did the laundry and hung it out on the line. P and I shelled and split the lima beans, and I made the broken ones into beans and greens after a turn through the garden. I tore out the last of the snap peas, and we’ll see if that helps the lima beans sprout with more sun and water available. After lunch we did the crossword, then I spent a sleepy afternoon on the internet. Dinner, brought in the laundry, scrabble (624), Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt of metro trains, swim team, miniature villages, roof and tunnel hacking, computer repair, human pyramids, auto translators, an agriculture conference.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I had the production systems meeting, data scaling, and team leads. I set up the new surveys environment to do a dry run this morning, did some prep work in the database to move the corrupted data out of the way before uploading the replacement data patch, and futzed around with the signals page in the new metadata sheet.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a bad road trip, ice and fire, some rather nice outdoor cooking, a back porch cat, a convoluted phone contacts list, chaperones, a flying bus playing fast and loose with highway overpasses.

I finished Shadow Of Night and started The Book Of Life.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday P ran me to campus so I could reboot the machine under my desk, again, for third time in two months. I spent most of the rest of the day patching the surveys pipeline, writing up the series of crashes for Helpdesk, and having B help me set up a new machine to move surveys to while we finish figuring out the production deployment system so this never happens again. I also did some prep work for loading the data patch from the June 11-13 outage, and started looking at the documentation IT put together for password-less authentication into their web publishing system.

Dinner, crossword, Pose, snack, sleep. Dreamt, but they’ve already fled.

Shadow of Night has a bunch of really patronizing moments in it that are less about the characters and more about the author. They’re not dealbreakers but they are disappointing.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, peaches, blueberries, strawberries, asparagus, broccoli, rhubarb, biscotti, mushrooms, cilantro, lettuce, summer squash, garlic scapes, and basil. I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, and made strawberry rhubarb sauce with a few stray blueberries and sour cherries thrown in as well. We did a Zoom call with P’s folks, who are all doing well. I squeezed in a snack, watched the season finale of Lucifer, then dinner. P made pasta and pesto with the garlic scapes and basil, and some of the California walnuts I’d stashed in the freezer. I picked the rest of the snap peas from the garden. After dinner I started watching Pose, a series about drag balls in 1980s New York City, which is in turns delightful and heartbreaking. Snack, sleep. The heat rode the edge of exhausting all afternoon, which was rough. We’ll see if it turns into an AC day today.

Thistle

Jun. 20th, 2021 06:53 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I gave the big-picture talk at all-hands, which was delightfully well-received by R. Proud of that. I went to therapy, and unpacked a load of stuff about self-awareness and personality; it was an unusually reflective couple of weeks what with the working-styles supervisor training, biannual update to the recruiter, getting interns up to speed, putting together that talk, and writing way more project specs than usual. Imagining how other people will interpret the communication artifacts I produce is always an exercise in confronting the ways in which I match or mismatch others. Spent the afternoon on one-on-ones and writing, going through the new metadata sheet for style, concision, clarity, and consistency.

Dinner, crossword, then I picked Lucifer back up. Such angst, many feels, catharsis withheld. Snack, sleep; dreamt of the evolutionary remains of great world-constructing elemental dragons, foiling police stings, some kind of engineering project partially reinventing compact discs (mostly unsuccessful), a college campus full of different kinds of co-working spaces and projects-in-progress.

I finished Discovery Of Witches and started Shadow Of Night, which is book two.

Names

Jun. 7th, 2021 06:21 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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).

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday P came with me to campus to power cycle the machine under my desk. It was constantly filling the terminal screen with notices about full disks and trying to write to read-only volumes, and wouldn’t take any keyboard input. On reboot, there was no record of any such thing in any of the logs, and all the local disks had plenty of space, so, ydifkjcxsrskghgibbbt. 👻 I guess. Home, lunch, put the laundry in, crossword, then started patch runs of the surveys pipeline. Ordered a clothes experiment for summer: lightweight merino tees. Went out to the garden and ripped out most of the arugula so I could plant squash, beans, nasturtiums, borage, cilantro, basil, carrots, and a pollinator mix. I have new gardening gloves that go nearly up to my elbow and they are fantastic for ripping out cleavers too.

Inside, hung the clothes out on the line, made and ate snack, watched more Discovery of Witches. Late dinner, scrabble (650s, no bingos, but we did build DEFUSING which was quite satisfying), direct to sleep. Dreamt of accidentally and unwearably shrinking all my favorite summer clothes, largely because dream-me had sewn them (1) without prewashing the fabric first and (2) on the cross grain. In real life I shrink the snot out of everything first, even wools and silks, so I’m not sure what that’s about.

Finished Jackdaw, which is incredibly sweet and soft if you need a gay criminals-to-innkeepers story in your life (and who doesn’t). Started reading Rag And Bone, the last I have from this series.

noooooo

May. 31st, 2021 07:51 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

yes and

May. 30th, 2021 07:00 am
infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I did a tiny bit of ironing, cut a patch to fix P’s shorts, and started sewing it in. I finished A Case Of Possession and started reading Flight Of Magpies. We did the crossword after lunch, and scrabble after dinner (613, 1 bingo). I finished The Queen’s Gambit. The final episode was a work of art, and the rest of the series is built to support it. I’m not super amused that a story largely about women struggling with isolation was written, produced, and designed entirely by dudes. If you can envision a world in which men in professional chess can band together to elevate and promote one of the only women around without molesting her, surely you can hire a few yourself.

Dreamt of a vacation in Fava Bean, Oregon, where gnus were twenty feet tall and had six legs, and I was constantly worried about being dive-bombed by angry mother eagles because I kept finding eaglets just chilling out on the rocky ground.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

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.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I wrote up a brief spec for how to edit the new meta data table we’re proposing, which was good because it turns out a table in the database will make testing changes difficult and we really just want, like, a spreadsheet. I went to forecast eval and watched K wrangle researchers like an absolute boss, I went to team leads and presented the new menu structure options, briefly introduced the new meta data idea just to get a rough temperature (R will review it in more detail for next week), and then we got into the grungy details of how Rt’s new restructuring plan will affect OKRs, meetings, and the org chart. It was good. I spent the rest of the day planning OKRs for Engineering. This is the first time we’re doing a three-month period, and I’m a little anxious about being able to make accurate estimates. I guess experience is the thing you get just after you need it, so I’ll get better over time.

Dinner, crossword, Trinkets, snack, sleep. Long involved dreams about my Olin mailbox combination, a striker that created black fire, a wooden sailing ship, a shed that never existed getting infested with seriously brazen raccoons, and trying to get my folks’ dogs to uh take care of the problem but finding they’d been replaced by pom mixes and the size difference was just too hilarious.

I finished Record Of A Spaceborn Few and ripped through To Be Taught If Fortunate, which it turns out I barely remember. A series of vignettes about the wonder and possibilities of space travel woven into the imperfect fabric of human strengths and weaknesses. I started reading The Magpie Lord by KJ Charles, as there’s some new books out and I want to refamiliarize myself with her voice.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I set S on two design projects, with excellent results; one about reorganizing the menus on the website, and one about a system to standardize naming for the indicator status site. I lurked in the claims data partner meeting, ran the Engineering meeting (S gave a pair of talks on the web deployment system and Flask basics), interviewed a very promising masters student from Heinz, and ran the high school robotics volunteers meeting. The nans rollout mysteriously failed some time the night before, and I did a small amount of investigating there but it looks to have somehow resulted in extra rows rather than fewer rows, so not actually on fire. Today is pseudo-Friday due to an extended CMU holiday weekend, so we’re picking it back up next week.

Dinner, crossword, Trinkets, overdid it a bit on cider at dinner so no snack, just sleep. Dreamt of moving a computer lab full of a mishmash of hardware, a steady stream of flower bouquets some of which included glass tubing as accents, and some kind of spaceship wormhole puzzle involving regency LARP and not-nice aliens. I don’t know either.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday I had a good chat with R about why their discussion of the data scaling project last week while I was gone made me super nervous. It turns out it was largely meant to bring Rt up to speed, taking advantage of the extra time, but he also took my point that they did cover some items I was previously unaware of, and it did rob me of the chance to infer priority from context. I also took the meta-point that while it’s fine to review these kind of corrections in a group setting to make sure everybody’s aware of any shifts in expectations, it’s important to prep the parties involved one-on-one first. Fair. The rest of the day went to a very productive data scaling meeting, team leads, PR reviews, and finishing edits on the job descriptions C will be sending to HR.

Dinner, crossword, Trinkets, snack, sleep. Dreams have been fleeting lately, not sure why. To Be Taught If Fortunate has hit its inflection point, which is always a punch in the gut.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday it rained aggressively in the morning. I’m happy for the peas but the flooding at Frick was pretty intense. For work I did a bunch of goals planning and alignment for the data engineering project, submitted copy edits on a documentation PR that S put together now that all our API servers are running Flask, went to the claims data meeting and the process mapping meeting, and marked up a draft process map L had made for how to publish updates to Python libraries.

Dinner, crossword, Trinkets, snack, sleep.

I finished A Closed And Common Orbit and started To Be Taught If Fortunate. I never tire of these. Becky Chambers is a national treasure.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday we went to the farmers market and got Bulgarian pastries, hard cider, rhubarb, asparagus, mushrooms, parsley, pea blossoms, and lettuce. After shuttling foods home, we went over to C’s. We visited briefly indoors to see the progress on their new kitchen, then P went off to pursue other errands and D and I retreated to the porch to lay out a more detailed plan for what has to happen to stand up what essentially amounts to a data warehouse before the RFP goes out on the national epidemic tracking and forecasting center. It’s a lot, but we can do it if we don’t wait around. P came back and got a tour of the garden from C, a bit of additional chatting then we fled for lunch.

I did the laundry and hung it out on the line, made rhubarb sauce, and made roasted broad beans (six hour soak, 45 minute poach at 180F with salt but no bsda, better structural integrity but no clue if they’re too hard).

The latch on the screen door to the porch has been flaking out more and more often, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I fixed it. All the parts were encrusted with forty years of paint, but one of the early layers was shitty paint, which made the whole stack pretty easy to peel off with a razor blade. Sliced between the metal parts and the wood to cut everything free, cut the paint out of the slots in the screws. Needed pliers to get the set screws out of the doorknob, but it succumbed eventually. Inside the mechanism, the spring had started to go brittle, but I had extra springs from the grease wicks for the White, and one of them fit perfectly. Had a minor moment when the little cam thing fell out and I wasn’t sure what orientation it was supposed to go back in at, but I figured it out eventually. Everything went back together nicely, and now the latch works perfectly. Very pleased.

Dinner, brought the clothes in, watched a couple episodes of Trinkets, snack, sleep at like. 9. I did a lot of stuff.

infryq: Kitchen scene at dawn, post-processed to appear as if painted (Default)

Yesterday was day two of recovery. Fever was less, exhaustion was less, spent the day reading and chatting with D about delphi dynamics. Mostly-normal food schedule and menu, just reduced spices. I bounced around on Netflix a bit and landed on Trinkets, a queer-flavored teen drama about shoplifting, loss, and loneliness. Ready to come back to work today. We did the crossword after lunch, scrabble after dinner (738, two bingos, not shabby at all). Dreamt of bus routes and rain, games designed to be math pranks, sword-style kebab skewers, tagging along somewhere with A.

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