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with two cats at the vaccination clinic
Wednesday, October 4 2017
The other day when I'd been showing off my Ahmed Mohamed clock to my fellow colleagues via video chat, I'd been reminded yet again that its audio does not work. Fucking hell, why can't cheap Chinese audio boards do the one thing they were built to do? The board in question was the WTV020M01, which accepts a microSD card containing sound files in a proprietary compressed format. It used to work okay but gradually started failing and now it just makes a click if it does anything. Today I tried swapping in other WTV020M01s (I have several; they cost almost nothing), though this did no good. Then at some point I noticed that the boards have three little solder pads on one side, with the gap between one pair labled 5V and the gap between the other labeled 3.3V. I'd been using 3.3V logic but had never noticed these pads before. Perhaps they needed to be bridged! So I bridged the gap labeled 3.3V and, what do you know, the audio started working reliably again! If those pads really needed to be bridged, why had the audio ever worked? In any case, it was great to have the clock working reliably, since it's a fun thing to show off in a laboratory tour.
This afternoon, I ducked out of my remote workplace to take two cats (Clarence and Janet) to a vaccination clinic at the Ulster County SPCA. The advantage to doing things this way is that it is much cheaper than having a vet do it. The disadvantage is that one has to wait in line in the middle of a workday. Normally Gretchen would handle this sort of thing, though the vaccination clinic only happens on Wednesday afternoons, one of the few times in the week when Gretchen is working (over the summer, she'd picked up a second day at the Golden Notebook). I showed up at the SPCA a little before when the clinic began, though there were already eight or nine people signed up on the list. Some guy tried to take advantage of an inconsiderate woman filling out her paperwork on the table on top of the sign-in sheet while I waited to horn in and get on that list, but I wasn't having it.
The wait was over an hour, but at least the weather was good. Unfortunately, things were happening in the remote workplace and I really wanted to get back to my computer so I could contribute to the collective effort, but all I could do was chime in conversationally on Slack. At some point I opened up Janet's cat carrier (which had a hinged top) so I could pet her, and she was very good about not trying to escape. Meanwhile random dogs came sniffling through, rousing her (and Clarence's) curiosity. When my time finally came, it turned out I hadn't filled out all my paperwork (a second copy of info I'd already entered on the first page had to be entered on the second) and so that guy behind me actually got to get in before I did! When I did finally get my time with the vet, the two shots took only seconds, helped in large part by how well-behaved both Janet and Clarence are. The total expense for two vaccinations was only $20, which is an order of magnitude less than this would've cost at, say, the Hurley vet.
I stopped at the Ghettoford (Uptown Hannaford) on the way home, mostly to pick up my favorite bacon-flavored tempeh (which I like to eat raw in sandwiches).
Back once more in the remote workplace, I managed to achieve a tricky thing regarding one of my existing hacks, though in a new AJAX-powered context. Unfortunately, the code repository program named git was causing me lots of trouble. In IT we have an animated emoji entitled git_can_burn_in_hell, and I was sure to make plenty use of it.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?171004 feedback
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