infryq

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.

Yesterday we finished the flask rollout! Very pleased, it’s been a long time coming. I interviewed two more summer internship candidates, went to a pile of meetings, loaded some batch issues, and called it good.

Dinner together, crossword, P’s fever from the vaccine arrived in earnest, but ibuprofen and a cold compress worked a trick. Wynonna, snack, sleep. Dreamt of taking dance classes with A.

Yesterday I got to announce the successful restoration of all data history to the covidcast API, and it was pretty good. In the afternoon I worked on revising the draft copy for a new correlations interface for the website, fixing some last duplicates in the database, and drafting a PR to add L and V’s new paper on causal inference to our publications list.

Dinner together, crossword, Atlantis, snack, sleep. Dreamt of a terrible road trip a la that story of someone who had hired movers who showed up and found no boxes ready to go: “I didn’t have time to pack, so just... y’know :gestures:”

I started reading The Thousand Dollar Tan Line by Jennifer Graham and Rob Thomas. It’s book one of a Veronica Mars series, read by Kristen Bell herself, and it’s grand so far.

Yesterday the surveys pipeline failed due to an unexpected corner case in one of the older waves of survey data. I facilitated the all-hands meeting, had scattershot meetings all afternoon, but managed to finish my todo list at 3. I spent the rest of the afternoon interstitial time writing a recommendation letter for C. Writing rec letters is one of my favorite activities, but it was particularly enjoyable in this case just because C has been a complete dream to work with. So that was fun, and then I met briefly with my high school mentee and hear that her paper had been accepted as a finalist at regionals, which is stellar news. A grand way to end out the week.

Dinner together, crossword, then I started watching Stargate Atlantis. A major comfort. Snack, sleep, dreamt of a weird reverse version of the activities fairs from candidates weekend, where prospectives set up booths. Strange but fun.

Temple continues, with more sexual assault, oligarchy, bad healthcare, and unjust law enforcement. Adds an organized riot in protest though, so there’s some vindication.

Yesterday I wrote up a doc for S’s draft conversion of the API server from PHP to Python/Flask, summarized a Slack conversation on incremental metadata updates into a github issue, worked with B to merge three outstanding epidata PRs to help Automation drop back below 24 hours worth of work to do each day, and started an R notebook to visualize the actual empirical data. Pretty low key yet productive day.

Dinner, crossword, SG-1, snack, sleep. Dreamt of attempting to cook in an old farmhouse kitchen that had been meticulously organized but had so many cupboards and drawers I struggled to make any headway.

I finished Snuff and started Ambassador 1: Seeing Red by Patty Jansen. So far it’s depressingly misogynist, its sense of which events qualify as high stakes is counterintuitive, and the exposition is utterly artless, but the worldbuilding hints at fascinating dynamics to come. I’m going to stick with it for a bit.

Yesterday everything still worked, so I should probably ping IT and have them close my ticket. I checked and delivered the aggregations, then put the rest of the morning into further analysis of what exactly went wrong with the F weights normalization. Went to lab meeting, stepped out for thesis meeting with M, back to lab and gave the report for the indicators team. Lunch, fixed a backlog of changes to the database for the covidcast API, answered email from a team building a report for the DoD on symptoms checkers/datasets, and emailed the newest individual response data partner about our status and what to expect in future. Met with the indicators team, showed off and discussed A’s bubble plot prototypes and developed a recommendation to send to the viz team, got updates on a few dangling tasks, and released everybody to have a fairly chill weekend. Went to the team leads meeting (now the “senior staff” meeting; fancy), received some very nice compliments from R, short report. R is both exhausted and learning more how to operate hierarchical organizational structures, and has enough self awareness to know that both he and the group would benefit from someone with greater ability and stamina in that department. So, we’re starting a search for a sortof COO, first amongst ourselves, then slowly moving outward. It is good. After that, received a new set of weights from F and repeated the analysis, with promising results. Worked with N to figure out whether the community question data was sparse because of a bug or because that’s just how the F survey works; ultimately we determined it was the latter. We now have a dev demo up and I’m super pleased with it!

Dinner, crossword, sleep. I started re-reading All Systems Red and have no regrets. P went on expedition to Dylamato’s and got carrots, asparagus, and some local bread flour.

Yesterday I made another batch of nut and seed bars. These were an experiment; the least weird sunflower seeds at the coop were roasted salted, but they were brined? Anyway the resulting bars taste a bit like butter left unwrapped in the fridge for too long but they’re minimally acceptable. I’ll try pepitas next time. Emerald Green... seriously judging these characters.

At work I organized all the fixes I made to get the sugilite parser running Friday into a pull request, then spent the rest of the afternoon writing scenarios that make use of both LIA‘s knowledge base building functionality and sugilite’s UI capture capabilities. Wore me out, but fun.

Home, folded laundry, dinner, crossword, DS9, snack, sleep. The bars are less weird with almond butter on them.

Yesterday at work my machine was delivered! I started unpacking my data and installing my usual environment. I finished the PEG implementation of partial conversations and started a Visitor to generate the agent responses. I got a request from W to investigate upgrading CUDA on one of the GPU machines, and a request from B to see if I was okay with releasing some of my lucene code as part of their publication repository. Met with M to kick off his spring semester work. Chatted with C over txt about the PEG stuff, as a social check-in; part of my brain is like “whoa amazing everything seems possible now” and another is “this is not news. talking to people is good for you, even if/especially if it’s non-instrumental” so. thing.

Home on the shuttle with P, who is struggling a bit with first week of classes teaching full-time for his second ever and first winter semester. Put soup in him, did the crossword, sent him off to his evening class. Made tacos, which worked great. P got home, and we decompressed over the dishes. I watched some Voyager, then around 8:30 had an unusually intense panic attack. Echoes were all manageable, but I was up until 10:30 waiting for them to fade. No snack, just sleep. Long involved dreams about road trips in the Cascades, a rising tide that wouldn’t stop, childhood play dates, and gritting my teeth through a loop stunt pulled by a cheeky pilot. Also, rabbits doing headstands. That bit was pretty great.

Yesterday I made another batch of nut/seed bars using a sugar/honey syrup instead of brown rice syrup, and it mostly worked. They’re crisper/more crumbly but I got the salt balance bang on. Close to publishing. I trimmed, pressed, and machine-felled the side seams on the black shirt. Worked great; will duplicate on the others. I’ve gotten to a dense knot of mutual contempt between religion and science in Contact, and it’s stressing me out to the point of interference so I’ve switched to podcasts for a bit. At work I finished the first pass of extracting what’s going on with theo and sql, tweaked the logging, did a refinement pass, and started fixing things. Home, dinner, crossword (fun trick!), Gentleman Jack, snack, sleep.

Dreamt of turnips growing as weeds, and fire dandelions you could get matches from. A group house where some members were faeries and you couldn’t thank them. A pottery studio where I kept accidentally knocking over my own work, and someone had walked off with the slip-trailer.

Yesterday I stay-stitched the yoke and armholes of the black shirt, and cut another front after realizing I’d cut the original apart to do my prototype 😕. I laid out the daisy print on tissue and pinned it for staystitching. Ruin continues well; I like the treatment of the fae.

The shuttle wasn’t running because they’re setting up for the Prix, so I ate lunch at home and took the bus in. At work I finished fixing the LIA server, wrote it up and sent out a notice to T and F. I organized the Trello and wrote notes on all the open todos. Went to a meeting with F and M and talked about debuggers. P had the car on campus and drove us home. Dinner, crossword, Legends, snack, cold shower, sleep. P has been needing to keep an eye on his heart rate with the heat. I didn’t have any trouble sleeping, but we might end up moving the AC unit directly into the bedroom after today. Heat index is going up near 100.