elainegrey

Post holiday social: Friday noonish i met up with someone in Carrboro i know from the national advisory board i used to serve on and from conferences. It was wonderful and must do again. I also feel i can write it off as work for Reasons.  And, she and her spouse might be interested in playing poker with Christine and i sometime, although likely to be better players....

Friday evening i drove to Hillsborough to see my sister in law in a gallery opening that turned out to be a bigger thing than i expected and met up with a friend. I hope we will see each other a little more this new year.

I was, however, up late, and could tell. I was very weepy around the vet report about Luigi's probably myocardial something or another: enlarged heart? The good news is that the hormone that signifies this issue causes increased urination. Would treating this reduce the hormone, reducing the urination? But the vet bills. I was very invested in making sure Christine and i were on the same page about goals. Luigi is such a sweetheart and companion, but such an old little man cat. We need to let him go at the right time.

Saturday midday i had a good visit with my sister and went through my great grandmother's jewelry (most of which was clip on costume earrings, ohmigod ouch).

Then Christine and i managed to finished wrangling family for invites and in the evening hosted my brother and his daughter for poker. It was fun. I also made a little booklet with the hands for reference and put the date and a cool Las Vegas inspired "[our home] poker night" logo on it to make it special for S--. My sister has told me in what way S-- is not like most people (while expressing anger at my brother's family for how they don't help her navigate things).  I feel more connected to S-- than to the older boys, perhaps because she seems enthusiastic about visiting us. On the other hand, she's not quite a teenager yet at twelve. So, who knows when we will no longer be cool.

Today i worked on the new computer. I am so thankful for ChatGPT today, because troubleshooting getting a remote window connection going and working would have taken me far more energy than i had. It was still hours to get done. ChatGPT was helpful, i think, because of the vast amount of documentation for linux administration on the internet and the interconnection across different systems (Xwindows, vnc servers, the systemd automation, the weirdness of new fangled things that weren't around when i was using linux mumblty decades (what? that long?!) ago.

To reward myself i sat down to play with the new ham radio thing, but it didn't work, and then the original config didn't work, and then i realized i must have had something working in membor but changed something else and after -- maybe rebooting? -- the eariler state is gone and now i need to figure out how to start over. Bleep.  I don't think ChatGPT is the answer there.

It's been a muchness of socializing for this hermit. Good, but muchness.

I have had some ADHD reflections. I'm a little more clear why i am stalled on replying to some things. Part of it has to do with the distraction/interruption and trying to stay on task -- and i really don't have time set aside well for correspondence.

And i wonder about the Quaker sense of being led bu the Spirit, and how differently that might be perceived by neurotypical folks and neurodivergent. Wish i had time to go more deeply but it's bed time.

The owl cried in the distance as the first light from the sun turned the top of the pine snag red. It was one long hoot, but the end of the crickets evening chorus and the dehumidifier running to finish off three sheets of fig leather made it hard to capture as a recording. The crows, too, were hard to catch on Merlins, but then the Arcadian flycatcher set off and traffic picked up. There was no way Merlins was going to isolate those single haunting calla.

When i came out this morning to just cricket song, Jupiter shimmered in the top of the black cherry tree -- it's loosing its leaves already, as it does. (Which is why i hope it will be OK for solar if they stayed.) [At this point, search and read about black cherry log values.]

The tulip poplars to the west of the orchard have a few yellow leaves. I think the dogwood next to the deck is putting on such a vibrant show this year because we thinned the trees around it, and it gets much more sun. I ponder the tulip polar at the north east corner of the house. It does a good job shading the vegetable garden in the summer. I like that for working in the garden, but that might be why okra and tomatoes started dropping off. This summer, i've grown nothing but the native perennials and the strawberries and some dahlias. The dahlias either haven't bloomed yet (two new heirloom types that i suspect might have good tasting tubers) or have been swallowed up by the native kidney bean (which appears to have also overpowered the sunchokes).

I get a whiff of the overripe figs.

( Digression into rumination )

We are currently at the point where if the forecast is inches of snow, we think "maybe we will see a flake or two." As i headed to bed last night, there were fat flakes falling occasionally. I think if a cluster of snow crystals found each other to fall together, they could stay cold enough to hit the ground as snow.

Tonight's prediction is 2" of snow. Yeah, right.

So are the grocery shortages supply chain or snow panic, i wonder.

I read the announcement of a late February pub crawl in my town with a sense of wonder. The Omicron case rates shot up so fast: could they come down fast enough in the next four weeks for a pub crawl to seem not insane?

In other wonders, i wonder if the tech folks among us have a guide to using git they like. I am really fuzzy on the different ways my colleagues use it, and i am wondering if i should be using it in my personal data repository more cleverly. I use Visual Studio as my editor these days (since the mac changed permissioning, and i would have to recompile emacs to run it). Is it easy to bob back and forth between branches? Right now i use it like i used code repositories in the 90s. At least my coding is slightly more sophisticated than my Fortran coding was, but not by much.

(Feeling like a brontosaurus.)

Signs of ebb in the pandemic: Christine’s first trip to the grocery un-masked, we’ve bought new paper towels for when we run out of the terrible generic paper towels, and I had my hair cut and will send the snipped parts off to make wigs for kids. Chatham and nearby Orange Counties are currently classed as "low risk to the unvaccinated" and many other nearby counties are only moderate risk... although some have shifted back to high. I've gone unmasked a few times in public now and recognize that the ebb may not be the end, but i will take the ebb.

I heard from tx_cronipo this morning and will continue to be concerned about her health post acute COVID. A reminder that the personal impacts of COVID will be severe and long for some people.

Talking to the stylist for hours was exhausting, but i like her. Somehow, i do manage to remember details about her life to ask after.

Spent hours over the past few days crating a grocery list database to replace the list on Evernote. We had kept a list of all the things we often buy with them crossed out, and then would uncross and bold them as we needed them. It had some maintenance overhead and fussiness that made it less than ideal, but it had evolved over time. The new system hit some data structure corruption and when i was demo-ing it to Christine. A duplicate database ans logging in and out resolved the snafu, but there was an emotional weight that sank over me as things failed and flailed.

Using the ticky boxes as we put things in the cart though was lovely: the items disappeared from the shopping view. I don't have a design that keeps track of what we buy and when -- it feels it should be possible, but it also feels silly to spend time trying to get there when there is so much to do.

My throat aches, i feel terribly behind at work (due to various outages), and i can't keep up with personal things.... Whine over.

...Tuesday felt like Monday

The new phone (because i smashed the screen of the previous) has led to new headsets because there are no more audio jacks (because "everyone" hates wires, sigh) . Because of skin issues in my ears (ugh) i don't like earbuds. So i bought bone conducting headphones. I think they might work out OK. I teared up when i tried them out — the pleasure of listening and not having anything shoved in or clamped over my ears. Tuesday morning i listened to music for an hour or so: i did have a slight sense of nausea and small headache, and i can't tell if that's due to my cranky digestive system and sinuses or the headset. I wore it all morning on Wednesday -- a couple of meetings -- and then some in the afternoon, including a little music. Again, i was feeling a little out of it on Wednesday and it was noticeable pre-work that i believe malaise is not headset triggered. THis morning, i realize i should take antihistamines and see if i feel better. I want to pretend i have seasonal allergies, but they are 24/7/12.

In other new phone news, major fail applying a screen protector (twice). Despite the bubbles, the stylus glides even more effectively across this new surface, so i'm delighted. I've ordered more to try yet again. I feel a little guilty about the plastic, but electronics waste is also a concern.

--== ∞ ==--

A squirrel and multiple bunny rabbit sightings Tuesday morning. (I rarely see squirrels except when birdseed is out, despite the evidence that someone buries black walnuts in the garden.) Sunday i noticed someone ate all the larger violet leaves at the front door garden, but this time they left enough to act as groundcover. Only observant folks will likely notice all the denuded stems. I'm guessing that it's the rabbits, for whom all the ferns act as fine cover. Seems more trap-like for a deer. Still, some deer bedded down just off the back porch between the fence and the water tank, leaving a flattened bunch of stilt grass.

Tuesday afternoon, the bunnies got even more crazy, doing loops around various yard features and dashing across the fenced in garden. Yeah, i knew it wasn’t fenced against small critters but this was like they passed through the fence like it was air. Eventually four raced by in a line, reassuring me that it wasn't two with teleportation powers. They were adorable to watch. I assume that was their teen age play, and they'll be off to find bunny jobs by Friday.

At dusk, a doe was visible through the back deck glass doors, just outside the orchard fence near the “water feature” (aka in the ground wading pool lined with rocks). I think she drank from it, so i feel a motivation to keep it going as a wildlife amenity. I had just been reading books about water gardens and feeling it was Way Too Much Work. I need to flush the pool, i think, or at least give it a good bit of fresh-er water (from the rain tank, which also has algae).

Later Tuesday night Christine and i went out and watched the ISS pass over head and then the diversity of firefly lights -- some high up and blue, with a stuttering flash, others lower and more yellow and bright and sustained.

Rain Wednesday night, including a nice downpour. Almost an inch is predicted today, although if it's from storm cells, it's a lottery whether it will pass overhead. This weekend looks like the beginning of humid weather: time to get the sweet potato starts out and mow the wildflowers i planted along the front border.

Such happy news: Dad's exhaustion is gone and i am not taking next week to do respite. Dad has been taking medication for tachycardia for years. Years ago, if i recall correctly, he had an adrenaline attack, and following up found he'd had an unobserved, unidentified heart attack (years before that) and he was diagnosed with tachycardia, and went on meds for it. It was astounding how stressed out in reacting to things he would be with the higher pulse rate, and how much more pleasant (patient) he could be on the meds.

In the past few years he has intentionally lost MUCH WEIGHT. (Me, yes, there's some weight i want to loose but, i dunno, i don't think i want to be skinny or thin or lithe.) Turns out the tachycardia meds are too much, and slow his heart way down, and he is now back to himself. I do wonder about emotional regulation and whether he'll be accessing his patience as well, but fingers crossed.

He's still going to have the person he's hired, B, in three days a week. And i'm trying to encourage him to budget his energy to take care of himself first and of strategic planning and let his hire take care of house cleaning etc.

--== ∞ ==--

Do you care about IETF RFC's? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wkumari-not-a-draft/ is a work of art.

Meanwhile the brief

Farrell, S, and H Tschofenig. “RFC-7258: Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack.” Best Current Practice. IETF, May 2014. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258.

underscores what i came to realizes in a workshop this week. The IETF (the architects of internet protocols) and the W3C (the architects of the web, depending on the IETF work) belive the web is broken by the pervasive tracking so if they implement something that breaks stuff that has been working for 20 years to mitigate tracking, that's OK because the web is already broken.

And authentication looks like tracking.

I am tempted -- based on a respected colleague's idea raised in an argument with a couple leading browser manufacturers in a meeting leading up to the workship -- to submit an RFC to suggest a new cookie tag. Authentication space folks were frustrated when browser manufacturers made understanding the lifetime of what were called session cookies (cookies that did not have a lifetime or explicit expiration date) very hard. Well i don't want to name the flag and it really isn't in my work remit.

It won't fix RFC-7258 either, so i will leave that unless someone brings it back up.

Meanwhile, this workshop had the people involved in authenticating you -- someone with a diverse 20 year history now at Facebook, a Microsoft guru, folks who define the standards for OAuth, some SAML folks, Google authentication -- AND the browser folks -- Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge.

The browser folks are full in on stopping tracking, which i appreciate every moment i am not working and sometimes even while i am. For meeting the demands of getting library patrons to resources i am pretty worried ... but do see some opportunities and some costs other companies might have to bear. It's a weird swirl of emotion and ideas. I have succeeded in raising the NISO OpenURL standard to a little visibility (and the NISO folks have said they'd engage with the W3C Privacy CG to raise awareness), but i think that cross-site functions mediated by the browser are not long for this world.

Thank you greedy advertising marketing people and scammers. Between spam and pervasive monitoring, you are (part of) why we can't have a nice internet.

Of course, the problem is not just the browser. Apple's iOS policing is one thing; but who is policing all the smart devices. A colleague explained how he was using DNS in his house to block calls from his TV to tracking services, and how the software is smart enough now to know to call around the configured DNS to one like Google's 8.8.8.8.

Spent all day coding Friday. I'm not certain it is the best thing for me: it's hard to track correlation vs causation. The seasonal quiet at work is pleasant, but perhaps i miss the sense of progress.

I called Mom and Dad after work while i had a beer: i really really didn't want to go outside. I'm struggling with some feelings around the plants -- i finally filled seed pots but haven't put seeds in them: i'm sending myself lots of negative messages around my plant stewardship that i should just stop.

Saturday had some ups and downs: i researched permitting requirements for building a shed. There's a question on the form whether we are in an overlay district. Best i can tell the only one overlay district is approved and all the others are in a proposed land use plan for the town in whose planning control we are in. Other than that i was happy to find that the main purpose of the permit is to identify where we are building something, so i don't need formal plans completed.

Sunday morning i wasted an hour before realizing my internet woes were due to a global issue by autonomous service AS3356, aka Level3 aka Centurylink. Part of that is because my work computer takes forever to reboot due with no internet connection and when my work computer is down and plugged into the hundred foot ethernet cable, the reflection crashes our router. (Support on that issue, "Huh, that would do it.") Now i've wasted another hour (at least) poking around to see the resolution.

We have struggled a bit but it appears we may have set up Microsoft's live.com to share calendars without forcing email on to us. It's a bit of de-Googling ourselves, and we were paying Microsoft for a family subscription anyhow.

Nutella: any more nutritional value than cans of grocery store icing?

--==∞==--

I've been puttering this morning with Amazon's Cloud Services. It seems to be one of those simple tasks that spread into a web of to-dos. Ah, i can't simply do what i want with CNAMEs, i'll have to use Amazons DNS service Route 53. Ah, i should use the multifactor security: let me download the app. Ah, i'm going to need their particular barcode scanner because i won't be able to type in the manual string precisely.... and so it goes.

Ugh, i've forgotten how long the TTL (time to live) on name servers could be. I have no idea how long the TTL is on previous DNS host; it's 48 hours at Amazon. Ah! But until it propagates the mail records from the old server will continue to route mail. *whew*

Well, Sometime early next week Google will crawl the new "underconstruction" stub.

--==∞==--

In Career Counselor news, i spoke with "Mikey" last night. I think there are some very specific ways he could help me at a later date, so i'm glad i chatted with him. If i was to bail from the Whale asap, i think he could help me make a rapid transition. I think i first want to do the deeper discernment process with the Purpose Clarity Coach. And given she's much less expensive than the original coach, all is good.

--==∞==--

... and i forgot to post before getting working today. However, my DNS nameserver change seems to have succeeded pretty quickly and my website has a minimal greeting up now: http://wheresitup.com/results/51159de4d33116994f0001a2

So my livescribe smartpen arrived yesterday afternoon. It is rather magical to go through the guide book and be able to tap areas and have explanations read to you or directions provided in the tutorial. The pen has a camera focused on the tip, the camera interprets the dots as both instruction and location. There are special printed buttons that the pen interprets for recording and playback of audio, other buttons, like calculator keys, that can be pressed to interact with programs on the pen and results are displayed on the pen's display (calculator results). As an audio recorder, it can also be an mp3 player and has an audio jack for headphones.

I can imagine an alternative universe where instead of QR codes and camera phones, the dot paper technology and these pens had become pervasive. The pen, given a wireless connection, has the audio capabilities to be a phone, and once the pen had that wireless capability, i could imagine the dot paper technology being a far more elegant interactive interface than the QR codes that are printed hither and yon. A culture that adopted the pen as its interface would be far intimate than our culture that uses the phones and the cameras. You need to bring the pen/stylus in contact with the surface to register the coded dots. Blaring visual advertisements wouldn't be interactive, but any surface could speak to a person and could be interactive.

But these pens will not be pervasive, so i'll be a lone user. I think i'll find it useful, but i do hope that i'm able to resolve my current issue which is getting the pen to register over its desktop interface. I will use it tonight in note taking and see how it goes.

--==&infin==--

Meanwhile ... Oh LOOK! Another post i wrote in the morning and forgot to post!

I had hoped to attend to some of my work backlog this weekend. Instead, after a Friday afternoon that i frittered away, and a Friday dinner of pizza and oreos, i spent the weekend going through the digital notes that had piked up since the beginning of December. I spent time thinking about what i want to do between now and my birthday. I know i want to use it as "seed in winter" time, but there's also an opportunity to take a class on Software as a Service starting late February.

So, that's put me on a track where i'm taking advantage of a "learning track" offered by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). I'm going to at least skim through using python (a programming language) before the the class begins.
( Geeky i love emacs section )

One small note: if i picked up enough lisp to help with the emacs evernote mode, would that help bring me to the attention of evernote folks?

I didn't spend that much time with emacs: where i spent most of my time was sorting out my expectations for myself in evernote, where i had been dumping aspirations, goals, and to-dos for over six weeks. All the @followup, attention on 2012-01-15, and untagged notes have been reviewed and sorted.