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a non-toy shopvac
Sunday, October 22 2017
Despite it being the weekend, I've been obsessively doing some job-related work to add user preference systems to the two main in-house tool systems over which I preside. The easiest such system is to create a JSON object that contains a model (or, as I sometimes call it, a prototype) of all the preferences a user could choose, complete with default values. This system is presented as a user-friendly form for users to edit at will, and if they screw things up, they can always hit a button to revert all the preferences back to prototype. I should add, by the way, that I'm more embarrassed to admit that I like to work on the weekends than to admit I like to, say, sneak out of work early to take a bath (not that I don't take a phone into the bath with me so I can remain available).
Gretchen did a shortened shift with Neville at the bookstore starting at about 4:00pm, though she ended up staying late because things were jumping in Woodstock on this beautiful late October day. [REDACTED]
Eventually I loaded Ramona up in the Subaru and headed out for my afternoon errands. This started with an out-of-the-way visit to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I happened upon a big old Casio music keyboard, a CTK-710. I hurriedly did a Google search on my phone and it seemed that the keyboard was indeed velocity-sensitive. With built-in speakers and lots of instrument presets, it would be an easy thing to play just whenever I felt like it, no setup required. For the Tibetan Center, the price was astronomical: $40. But if it didn't work, I could just take it back. They're cool about that there. I also got some paracord.
Next I drove out to 9W and did some shopping at ShopRite. I needed beans, corn chips, hot sauce, various flavors of Annie's organic soup, Annie's frozen burritos, and mushrooms (among other things). Then I went next door to the Home Depot mostly to buy some big pieces of treated lumber for Gretchen's screened-in porch project. Earlier today I'd been alarmed to discover that my northmost pillar (which I'd thought I'd positioned very accurately) was about two inches closer to the house than the southmost one. At this point, the only reasonable solution is to attach a sixteen foot two by four to the outside of that post and a corresponding one to the inside of the other post, thereby making them functionally two-by-sixes. While at Home Depot, I also bought a beefy $60 shopvac, one with a capacity of six gallons. Our existing "shopvac" is, by comparison, a toy, and useless for such tasks as flooding a dog-piss-soaked carpet and slurping the diluted urine back up again. I think it cost me about $15 when I bought it about ten years ago.
Back at the house, I soon determined that the CTK-710 does not have a velocity-sensitive keyboard. My Google search must've taken me to a related product that does have such a keyboard. This is a dealbreaker for me, so I'll be taking it back.
For various reasons, I went to bed a little after 9:00pm and fell asleep not long after ten. I then slept for about eleven hours.
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