infryq

Yesterday we ran out of oatmeal, so I made grits for breakfast. I did a bunch of research on screw thread pitch gauges and ordered a set, as well as some other tools I’ve been missing (a steel bench block, a scribe, a more-different pin vise). I went to clear out the oven mitt drawer to make room for the new ones, and discovered some old mouse droppings 😕 and put off dealing with that for the rest of the day. P discovered the iPad is still under warranty, and arranged to ship it back to fix the dead row of pixels. I shipped the gifts to my folks. The new oats arrived. A lovely card from C&R arrived. I’ve started thinking about an abbreviated New Years zine. P did the errands; Dylamato’s is shut until the new year so he went to the coop and got carrots, peppers, mushrooms, vegan butter, gf flour, half and half, a soft-ripened cheese, mozzarella, fresh pasta, pizza sauce, green onions, poblanos, string cheese, bok choy, a nice baguette, and some other sundries. It is always rough when he has to go to a larger store for things; there’s always folks who don’t believe in social distancing. We submitted the vegetable order for Thursday. I cut out two more dish towels and started hemming over SG-1. Dinner, no scrabble, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a community effort to develop ocean-friendly soap recipes.

Yesterday I looked at options for swapping in parts from a newer-model electronic sewing machine pedal to replace the rheostat in the White. Alas, the only ones available are three-prong, which means they would not be a direct replacement. They might still work if I can figure out what they actually do, but I’m starting to think my only cost-effective options are to build one myself or wait and see what the performance with the rheostat actually is before replacing it at all. I’m struggling to think of any other household appliances that have a variable speed and load profile even remotely similar to a sewing machine.

For work I spent about half the day on R prototypes and the other half getting familiar with our deployment system and the PHP for the forecast page. I implemented some cosmetic changes and fixed a bug in the error bars display. I also wrote up a sketch for how to organize the international data so it more or less fits in with the existing history display routines.

After work there was dinner, trash, crossword, DS9, and sleep. Dreamt of an Olin edition of Repair Shop, the best chocolate biscuits, a Gibson in need of TLC, and being late.

Personal update: having more trouble with basic self-care executive dysfunction than usual, like being alarmingly resistant to shift out of an uncomfortable position. Stress is stress.

Broader COVID-19 update: Pittsburgh sanitation workers are on strike (?) not for higher pay but just so they can be equipped with better (or any) PPE. This seems entirely reasonable to me and alarming that we weren’t already doing that. PA state senate passed a bunch of useful stuff just waiting for the governor’s signature, like postponing the primary to 2 June, absolving school districts of state testing requirements, and reducing the hoops required for unemployment. If you’re looking for media that’s informative but nevertheless uplifting, I recommend Ologies. The episodes Virology and All (Washed) Hands On Deck have been great.

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 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 undoing seams on the body of the white shirt, then undid the sleeves from the lilac silk shirt. Sapphire Blue is continuing some foreshadowing from the previous book of some nasty mental powers of one of the less savory characters, and it’s starting to make me itch. I also don’t understand why the main character and her mom are just going along with everything instead of actually enforcing the quite reasonable boundaries they set at the beginning of it all. She’s only sixteen. Some of this shit is literally illegal.

I figured out how to disassemble the flapper valve on the upstairs toilet, dried everything off and put it in a baggie to take with us to the hardware store. We went to the coop first and got red peppers, broccoli, asparagus, daikon, sunflower seeds, polenta, a local wheat flour, bunny snacks, tofu, canned kidney beans, sourdough bread, and Swiss cheese. Hardware store next for potting soil, a new flapper valve, and a spare plunger. Pigeon bagel for lunch for P. Home, lunch, crossword, then I installed the new flapper valve, but there’s still water leaking into the bowl so it’s probably time to have a plumber come out. Did a bunch of research on DIY dress forms. I think my preference is still to do the paper tape method where you use the form you build on the body as a mold to then make an inner form that’s an exact twin for your measurements, but I also looked at a method using plaster gauze to make a cast with expanding polyurethane foam. The plaster cures much quicker than the paper tape (30 min vs 3 hours) but it’s also way messier and 6x more expensive even without the foam filling, so if we “first waffle” and have to do it twice it will be not so great. I’m also not into making a huge thing that won’t biodegrade, so if I’m going to be making a paper mâché cast anyhow I might as well just do the whole thing with the paper.

I got uncomfortably cold while focused on research, so spent an hour re warming under covers. Dinner, DS9, snack, sleep. The only dreams I remember are of snuggling while listening to the alarm clock radio, just before waking up to do so in real life. So that’s alright.

Yesterday I topstitched the zip panel, sewed and felled the side panels, and sewed and felled the front and back panels. The second couch back is now ready for piping. I’ve been reading Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys, a lovectaftian story set in the Cold War. I never managed to read any actual Lovecraft, but this has been quite enjoyable so far.

At work I sketched out some possibilities for a more detailed way to specify how references into the knowledge base had been parsed, as well as rough plans for mixed initiative frames and for more intelligent disambiguation. For the latter I realized what I actually needed was more data on the kinds of disambiguation we actually do, so I spent the rest of the afternoon going through a log file and coding for which candidate was selected and how ambiguous candidates differed. At the lab meeting I showed Inform7; it was a good time. Once folks got into it they all had great questions. There was some confusion about what kinds of things go in the source vs during gameplay, which makes sense given that one of the primary LIA activities as an end user is teaching it about things in the world. Implementing what would amount to an inform7 parser in inform7 might be amusing; hooking something up so you could pull common sense reasoning consequences out of COMET instead of having to code them manually would be similarly so.

Home, dinner, crossword, Elementary, sleep. No snack; I’d partaken of a chocolate sesame confection B brought back from Hong Kong which apparently had a pile of dairy in it, and was having regrets.

I’m researching different kinds of insulation to use for interlining in a coat, which is shaping up to be this year’s winter project. FabricMart finally put their tie silks on deep sale and I scored a nice goldenrod one to use for lining that will show up great against the purple wool I have in stash. So: wool batting? bamboo batting? thinsulate? Something light but warm, and the battings will have to be quilted or regularly tacked down to prevent them shifting and bunching. I need something, as the last wool coat I had was not interlined, and was not warm enough for Pittsburgh winters.

Yesterday I baked the nut and seed bars. I sewed and felled the piecing in the back panel, basted the zip panel, and sewed the zip to the seam allowances. I finished Crown of Renewal (nicely concluded) and switched to podcasts. At work I did some reading on Inform7’s design, trying to zero in on how the program text is parsed, as opposed to how gameplay is parsed. Tricky to google, but I located Nelson’s 2006 whitepaper and his talk at this year’s NarraScope. I wound up down a rabbit hole about GOAL, a language for cognitive agents developed by a lab in Delft.

Home, and P had a late meeting on campus, which tends to accelerate my evening schedule. Dinner, P got home, we watched some things together, then did dishes and trash and crossword. Elementary, snack, maybe too much snack, some quality chatting time, sleep.

Yesterday morning my phone freaked out, rebooted itself, then shut itself off. I think the battery is going. I’m working on coming to terms with having to get a new phone which I will no longer be able to use one-handed. boo.

I put some time into the draft of the alumni letter in support of the trans and nb students demanding Olin finally do something about the horrendous state of Title IX and supporting services in student life. Makes me mad that rather than turn its considerable problem-solving powers to this issue when it was first raised seven years ago, Olin essentially sat on its hands. The same failing policies are in place today, placing the same onus on harassed students for actually making any changes. We built a whole school in less time.

At work I gave up on the free tier test and got everything to run on a t2.medium machine with small tweaks to the readme and installation files. Next is tackling the walkthrough, but I don’t wanna. I spent the rest of the afternoon on a literature search for surveys of work task in administrative assistance. A surprisingly sparse field.

Home, dinner, trash, crossword, Elementary, more edits to the alumni letter, snack, sleep. Dreamt of murder mystery theater at living history sites, trans friends from high school, dyeing my hair, and riding horses in full historical dress.

Yesterday I sewed a few more steps on the black placket, and started hemming the burgundy floral. After lunch P drove us into Oakland so I could go to a therapy appointment and then to a meeting with a liaison at Sorrells library on campus. I had hoped there were some magic words I just didn’t know yet that she could give me, but alas. We went over library science -style information need resolution, refining queries, keeping logs of where new terms come from, and she gave me a few new databases to search I didn’t know about. In particular, Semantic Scholar is intriguing since it gives you an influence-sort on the references list, which is very helpful. We went to geagle and I got snack bar supplies. Home, a couple episodes of Blown Away (over-edited, crappy pacing, but glass!), dinner, crossword, Sherlock over some embroidery to patch Monster. Snack. Sleep. Enna is wrapping up. Overall I’d say worthwhile, but I wouldn’t give it to a child under 9 at all and would be sure to discuss grooming first with a 9-13 year old. He gets his desserts but it’s rather abrupt and that shit is dangerous in real life, no magic required.