infryq

Yesterday I caught up on PRs, went to one on ones and the claims data meeting, and started planning for June/July/August OKRs. My work machine went down sometime after Saturday morning, and I haven’t heard back from IT yet. So, local compute tasks it is!

Dinner, crossword, Lost In Space, snack, sleep. Dreamt of something but it’s already gone.

I finished The Galaxy And The Ground Within, and loved it, though I think the epilogue is the best part. I started reading A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet again.

Yesterday I made another batch of roasted fava beans (1/2t bsda toasted, boiled 190-200f for 20 minutes, with turmeric cumin and coriander) — less falling apart when draining and rinsing, but nonzero, and more hard ones after roasting. Not sure how to proceed there.

The additional cabling for the White arrived earlier this week, so I took apart all the bad soldered joints and put in new correct ones, using the 1-conductor cable for ground and the green wire in the 3-conductor cable for the additional hot. I’ll need to clearly label the other end for future travelers, but the 1-conductor isn’t UL-rated, and I figured it was better to keep the dangerous stuff in something nominally less likely to catch fire.

Laundry over lunch, and hung it out on the line after crossword. Face timed with mom while they worked on garden stuff, though my connection wasn’t too great. Snack, Lost In Space, brought the clothes in while dinner cooked. P made a big arugula salad from the garden. Scrabble after dinner (639, no bingos but I did play FASCIAE), then more Lost In Space, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of a cake recipe that made too much cake, too sturdy, but professed a lighter result if you then grated the cake and reshaped it. This did not, in fact, work.

I started reading The Galaxy And The Ground Within by Becky Chambers. No wayfarers so far but the story and characters are delightful all the same.

Yesterday I had an excellent meeting with R to resolve the tension from Tuesday about the summer UX project, and we came up with at least two strategies for helping prevent a repeat experience in the future. Toolbox augmentation is one of my favorite things! The rest of the day went to a quick forecast eval dashboard meeting, team leads, and writing up bugs and revisions that had been piling up on my notepad.

Dinner, crossword, Lost In Space, snack, sleep. Exhausting cringe dreams of being a frontier priest for a thousand years hearing really wretched confessions, a destination wedding in a weird old house full of secrets and bereft of decent dishware, a bathroom trash can that also flushed.

Yesterday I interviewed some more summer internship candidates, went to a meeting about how to prioritize upcoming work applying what we learned from the pandemic to our pre-pandemic surveillance systems on influenza, met with S and B for data scaling, and went to team leads. R is back, so team leads took the full hour, nobody wanted to decide anything, and we spent most of the time on topics nobody had put on the agenda. Wore me out. I then spent an hour wordsmithing a slack post on why we should hire an intern for the project I said we would hire an intern for two weeks ago. I am already tired.

Dinner, crossword, then I watched the first episode of the Lost In Space series from 2019. For people with survival training they sure spend a lot of time bare-headed and sitting on the ice when they’ve all got hoods and the tent is right frickin’ there. It helps to focus on the character story, since that seems well-developed.

Sleep; dreamt of what might have been the origins of the gym A and I went to as tweens/teens, working with younger kids, maintaining equipment, knotting lattices, pivoting little ones to clown school when the pressure made it not fun anymore.

I finished Courting Darkness and started Faerie Forged. So far, so good, though protag really needs to talk to her allegedly best friend. Bids for attention really is a useful model of relationship maintenance.

Yesterday I started on the remaining wiring work for the White. I soldered and heat-shrinked the connections to the speed controller and the cable that will carry the modified power to the motor, before picking up the connector that goes on the other end and realizing that I needed 4 conductors, not three. Well, shit.

Lunch, crossword, then I ordered 6 feet of single-conductor cable for the White plus another 6 feet of the 3-conductor just in case, and threw in an inline switch so there’s a way to shut the whole thing off.

Snack, Wynonna Earp, dinner, scrabble (641, 1 bingo), more Wynonna, snack, sleep.

I finished reading A Drop of Magic by LR Braden, which is an urban fantasy set after a war between the humans and fae, and a commentary on authoritarianism. It had the opportunity to be a commentary on blood quanta as well, but alas treated it at face value. The magic system is good though and the protagonist kicks absolute ass, so I plan to continue with the series.

Yesterday I interviewed another summer internship candidate, tracked down a problem with a batch issue upload I did on Wednesday, did a first pass analysis of why one of our nightly jobs suddenly increased in running time by 50%, and went to the forecast eval dashboard meeting and team leads. We went over OKRs progress and managed to fit everything Roni needed to weigh in on into 45 minutes, and the rest of it into the remaining 15.

Dinner solo for the last time, Wynonna Earp, then hopped on an impromptu call with R to see if he had any theory magic to offer for a tricky problem about doing set membership at database scale. His pet idea turned out to not make sense in our environment, but he did help us identify clearer tradeoffs for some of our other options. Crossword when P got out of class, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of pedestrianship, college campuses, and making shirts with vegetable puns on them.

Yesterday I sat in on a chat with D and R, interviewed a summer internship candidate, ran a very quick team leads meeting, and popped into the forecast operations meeting to discuss task handoff for E when he leaves in a week or two. In the gaps I put out a bunch of small fires and made some progress on the flask server rollout.

While lunch cooked I set up another batch of lentils and wild rice, and set it to soak until dinner as an experiment in quicker cooking.

P got his second Pfizer shot in the afternoon, and the fuzz descended during his design drawing class. I had dinner solo, packed up the lentils (soaking worked, probably?), then watched Wynonna Earp, did a crossword with P when he got out of class, then more Wynonna, snack, and sleep. Weird dreams of bad classroom activities that required decapitating snakes.

Yesterday I washed more sheets and hung them out on the line, and made another batch of crispy roasted fava beans (no baking soda in the soaking liquid, but I did throw half a teaspoon in the pot and toast it for a minute before adding water salt and a touch of turmeric and paprika; poached at 180 for fifteen minutes was insufficient, raised temp to 195 for another fifteen and was probably too much; rinsed in cold water, roasted with olive oil at 325-350 for like an hour and a half until crisp). After lunch we put in the rest of the laundry, did the crossword, then I washed my hair, took in the sheets and hung out the rest of the clothes, made a snack, and spent the rest of the afternoon watching Wynonna Earp. Definitely spent ages prancing around the backyard with a yardstick flipping the sheets back over the clothesline to untangle them; glad the neighbors already know I’m a bit odd.

Scrabble after dinner (682), then more Wynonna, snack and sleep. Dreamt of a K12 with ridiculous dress code/uniform, and someone trying novel pedagogy techniques that somehow resulted in flooding but also more naps.

Yesterday I drafted an announcement for the surprise deactivation of some of our mobility signals, went to the all-hands, had some one on ones, talked to a student interested in summer internships, wrote up our internship projects and sent them off to T, ran the viz meeting, and had a quick check-in with J to re-record some statements about their governor STEM project.

Dinner together, crossword, Good Place, snack, and sleep. Dreamt of getting some fiber processed at a small mill, and taking good-natured trash about supermarket brand loyalty while setting up the machines.

I’m listening to podcasts, and if you need to hear a bunch of political history nerds gush about the Library of Congress (and you do, it’s wonderful), grab the April 25 episode of This Day in Esoteric Political History, “Our Library”.

Yesterday I went back to work! I had 1:1s, caught up on meeting notes, caught up on email, did a first pass through my GitHub notifications, and caught up on Slack messages. We had the claims data analysis meeting and the process anomalies meeting, then I wrote a PRD for revising how we approach data versioning. Ser gut.

I did a turn around the garden: the radishes and greens are up, so are the ramps, and the arugula is already strong; there’s good fruit set on the sour cherry and okay set on the bing; there’s some excellent mint behind the winter savory. Dinner together, The Good Place, crossword when P got out of class, snack, sleep. Dreamt of baking weird desserts with apples and jam, a convention by the shore but the tide refused to go out, imaginary old console games for small children.