infryq

Yesterday I took more things off the hand wheel assembly and thoroughly cleaned them. I got into the rearmost back panel and cleaned what I could reach. Around the main drive shaft I found what is either decades of congealed oil and dust, or old grease. It’s too dark in there to tell, and too cramped to really get it all out, especially from the surfaces behind the shaft. If it’s grease I should replace it with fresh. It looks like it should be possible to remove another part from the exterior and at least expose the bearing, but P and I couldn’t figure out how. There is a pin maybe? Or it might be press fit, which I’m not prepared to deal with. I spent the rest of the day on the head of the machine, removing and cleaning the presser foot lever assembly, the little retaining finger that holds in the top tension plate, and the takeup lever.

I finished Anthropocene Reviewed and went back to mixed podcasts. I’ll be needing a book next, something new.

Meals were all fine, crossword, DS9, then bedtime snack went haywire and I spent a few hours nursing nausea and panic attacks. Fine now.

Yesterday I struggled to get the rust and pitting off the underside of the throat plate with the dremel and buffing compound, so I broke out the sandpaper. 80, 120, and 160 grit, worked great. I cleaned the top tension mechanism, including taking apart everything not attached to the spring, and found that a previous restorer had put the curved washer on the wrong side of the face plate. After cleaning I reassembled it properly, then reorganized my work area to start on the body of the machine. I took off the knob on the reverse lever so I could remove the face plate for the stitch length selector panel, which has a pebbled finish full of gunk. So that’s today.

My new alarms for “eat something” are starting to work, as I stayed more or less on schedule all day. Dinner was rice berry and vegetables, which worked great. Crossword was after lunch. DS9, snack, sleep. Dreamt of crushes, some kind of urban quarter in the Caribbean, a literal hole in the wall Chinese restaurant, a hybrid X games speed skating community, grange fairs, birthday champagne, Russian pet shops and dorms, pez dispensers, the school from the Madeline books.

Yesterday for work I filled in more symbolic expressions for the knowledge base inferences. I met with M and the advisor crew; he’s got a good paper on sequence-to-sequence models for semantic parsing that utilize conversation history and can do coreference. I met with T and we picked out a CS student project to pursue for summer, then dipped a tiny toe into the scenario annotations I’ve been working on. That document is currently 50 pages long and isn’t complete yet, so I wanted a confirmation or course correction. The particular scenario scripts are not what T considers central to LIA‘s interaction mode (though they were fine before break?) but he agreed we should be focusing on integrating demonstration while TL is still here, rather than trying to first create the asynchronous monitoring machinery that would be necessary for the rule-based instructions he thinks are typical but have never actually been supported by code. More saga. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get CUDA upgrade on one of W’s machines. Unfortunately the script I prototyped a month ago didn’t work, so there’s more to do there.

I had a telehealth therapy appointment that was a half hour of actual therapy followed by a half hour of bullshitting about politics when I ran out of stuff. I am not the greatest at functioning under this world’s typical rules set, but I am way better than average at rapidly adjusting to arbitrary new paradigms. I am fine. Other people I care about are struggling — which is understandable, things are very different, I just don’t seem to need the same kind of adjustment period as others before carrying on. Luck of the nature+nurture draw.

The polishing compound arrived, so I spent an hour after work buffing the rust and pitted areas off parts of the White. There is some learning curve, but the shuttle face is now mirror-bright. Very pleased.

Dinner, crossword (fun trick!), DS9, snack, sleep. Horrendous dreams about authoritarian regimes, human trafficking, a quashed uprising, and some sort of alarmingly violent golem made of ritz crackers. Wat.

COVID-19 update: we got mail from the university president saying to prepare to close campus by March 25, then a couple hours later the governor shut down all non-life-sustaining everything with enforcement starting Saturday. I am both cheering because it’s about goddamn time (if no one will die if you stay home, stay home!) but also frustrated because if CMU had been more on top of this, labs with irreplaceable long-term wetlab experiments wouldn’t be scrambling right now. Reaping the rewards of unreasonable campus uptime expectations.

Yesterday I was up early enough to put an hour into cleaning the needle and presser bars on the White. The needle bar is substantially easier to maneuver and is now satisfactory; the presser bar is still a bit stiff and scungy around the back. There’s more stuff I could unscrew on it that might free it up to give me more access, but I’m hesitant to do that as it’s not clear whether I’d be able to get the alignment right on reassembly.

For work, I finished the first pass of inference annotations and started fussing with how the information is presented. There’s the script, which is linear; ideally we could show just the script as a sort of summary of the scenario at hand. Then for each line of the script there are three kinds of annotations, some of which are extensive and/or have long lines. The inference annotations in particular can be expressed in natural language or as symbolic expressions. It makes sense to consider each kind of annotations in isolation or in various combinations. I played around with a spreadsheet layout, but the lines are too long to be wieldy. I almost want to make it a web app but that’s too heavy for this early in the project. I’ve sortof satisficed with a landscape document, an extra un-annotated copy of the script as an introduction to each scenario, and using tables for the natural language/symbol duality bits, which isn’t great but is probably good enough.

Over lunch and snack I found a couple video series from someone repairing an actual White Rotary 77 as well as a rotary from another brand but quite similar. He rambles quite a bit but that seems to be the price of admission for all these vintage sewing machine repair folks. I captured some good stills of his machine’s original knobs, and watched him demo removing and reinstalling the top tension mechanism, which definitely would have given me some trouble if I’d attempted it cold.

Dinner, crossword, DS9, no snack as it was late, sleep.

Yesterday I did a second pass over the under carriage of the White, then started cleaning disassembled parts. I may need to break out the buffer wheel on the dremel to polish up some of the bobbin/shuttle area. I definitely need to start setting timers when I sit down at the bench, because I’ve been losing track and throwing off my eating schedule.

After lunch we did the taxes and the census (ugh aggressively gender and sexuality binary, prepare yourself).

Watching videos about how to rewire and recondition electric motors, reading articles on how to set the timing on vintage machines (since I’m pretty sure I pulled all the operative bits off the needle bar, whoops), and a fun community of treadle and hand-crank machine enthusiasts who are still using the internet like it’s 1995, going strong and no sign of stopping.

Late dinner, DS9, no snack, sleep. Dreamt of napping with cats, a board game based on building up complicated hairstyles, a husky colony in symbiosis with a set of beehives, and alternate-universe highly-flammable honey.

Yesterday I finished disassembling the attachments on the rear of the machine, and started in on the head and bobbin area. There are a couple stuck screws and joints, and I’m using sewing machine oil as a gentle penetrating oil to start. Building up an order for parts and supplies, including a more serious penetrating oil called liquid wrench, a new rubber friction pulley for the motor drive wheel, a new rubber friction pulley for the bobbin winder, an LED replacement lamp, and some updated cabling. My goal for this repair is similar to how I treat my antique spinning wheels: not a purely faithful restoration but to bring it back into workhorse order. Learned a new word: rheostat.

I went to a doctors appointment after lunch for a meds follow up, which went fine (don’t touch your face). When we got back, I helped P debug and verify his remote teaching setup, then went back to the White.

Major bummer: while locating the house micrometer, we discovered the drain in the basement has been backing up the whole house sewage line. P cleaned up the affected area, but basically no flushing toilets or other large waste water usage is allowed until we get a plumber out; still waiting for a callback on that. Bad timing.

COVID-19 update: spring carnival is cancelled, club events are cancelled, cmu library due dates and fines are also cancelled. MLD is completing its current round of faculty interviews remotely. We haven’t been directed to wfh yet, which seems short-sighted, but I plan to arrange that with T. If we end up on campus today I’ll be picking up my spare keyboard. Olin students have, endearingly, staged a faux-mencement before everyone is sent home next week, with academic regalia cobbled together from trash bags and campus clutter. It’s a good place.

Dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. Dreams were an exercise in gross dude-appeasing dubious consent in a variety of (thankfully platonic) contexts. Do not recommend.

Yesterday I ironed some handkerchiefs. The little ball valve part of the spray nozzle assembly wasn’t dry yet, so I pinned it open on my tailor’s ham. Imager’s Challenge is almost done, with justice for all. At work I fixed some issues in the parser, and am now up against an incongruity between the way frame signatures are currently expressed and the additional information we now have from the frame argument annotations. Home, exhausted snuggles, dinner, trash, crossword, Repair Shop, snack, sleep. Dreamt of turning Build Week activities into a series of illustrated children’s books.