Yesterday was grueling. It was the first day of a new meeting schedule, and also release prep day, and I’m going to rearrange some things for future release days because nope not doing that again. I spent the morning rearranging the database and getting the data alpha ready to review. Lunch, then the viz meeting, a release meeting with a subset of viz, the indicators team meeting (we found and diagnosed a bug!), anomalies meeting with L, then an overdue onboarding meeting with J, and then it was five o’clock. It took another two and a half hours+ to get the release candidate ready to go out to Slack. No good. Dinner, crossword, then P and I discussed the new contract from the English department in the context of some of the policy emails that have gone out lately and their answers to his questions so far. Ultimately we’re happy with a level of risk that includes one of the “hybrid” options offered by the department, where in-person meetings can be split among smaller groups of students. This depends on a university-wide commitment to actual test/trace/isolate policy, and not just a token one made ineffective by lack of staff or optional compliance.
esspressoooo
Jun. 13th, 2020 09:13 amYesterday 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.
Layers of paint on the poor thing
Feb. 22nd, 2020 07:31 amYesterday I took apart some more old shirts. I’m maybe getting better at slitting coverstitch so it’s easy to pull out? Evelyn Hardcastle continues great — smearing from an event story, as most mysteries are, into an idea story. Recommend.
Rage-quit on lunch again. Reliable meals are no longer smelling like food and I’m struggling with what to do about that. At work I made some progress on a chart for figuring out how to assign type signatures to intent frames under the new annotation scheme, then thought about how I would set that up in a group meeting and started some diagrams showing how sempre works... which turned into a whole-ass slide deck. Mmf.
The usual shuttle was cancelled, so P was lovely and picked me up. His meeting with D went well, and he now has some soft plans for a hard discussion with his booster club on getting their act together. Dinner was good, then we did the crossword, I watched the season finale of Witcher (borderline too much misery for me, though the rest of the series is great. ymmv), and dicked around on the internet until bedtime. Dreamt, but all that remains is an old stained-glass window from a room divider, and a row of icons from defunct chat clients.
Allergies are getting worse though
Aug. 20th, 2019 07:20 amYesterday I was fully back at my usual routine. I hand-felled the inside edge of the armhole binding in place on the black top, though I might redo it narrower as it wrinkles horribly around the sharp curve at the axilla. The True Queen is starting to reveal its first set of secrets, though there’s still four hours left so there must be unforeseen complications. At work I pushed fluids and made substantial progress on the knowledge base display. It was P’s first day of class, and while he was a touch nervous in the morning everything seems to have shaken out alright. We took the shuttle home, started the AC, sat for a bit, then did dinner and crossword. I watched the last of Good Omens, then snack, meds, and sleep.
It’ll be like a wee raise
Aug. 10th, 2019 07:38 amYesterday I matched and sewed the side seams on the daisy print as plain seams, and trimmed pressed and machine-felled one side. We are in sewing room -henge at the moment, which makes it tricky to see while pinning and sewing, but I’m managing. I picked Contact back up, and it continues well. Interesting use of projecting, how the people who expect attack or humiliation show how they would treat those less advanced than themselves.
At work I finished optimizations at 2/3 the queries of when I started and no obvious duplications remaining, then started repairing unit tests. The Theo tests now pass, but the LIA ones are proving trickier.
I walked home through the park, which was gorgeous. Dinner, crossword, Gentleman Jack, snack, sleep. P’s making his CMU benefits selections, which kick in September 1. Excitement!