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collar tie rigidity
Friday, May 25 2018
Those working on sites involving contact data on the Internet will have been familiar with the event that happened at the end of today: the GDPR going into effect. The GDPR is an internet privacy convention in the European Union, and any site holding the data of any European is supposedly subject to it (though I'm not exactly sure how that would be enforced). The fines for violations are enormous, though I'm not sure exactly how those would be collected. In any case, if you were working for a website on this day, you might have been losing your mind as you strove to bring things into compliance (or at least go through the motions of having done so, in hopes of limiting your liability in the future.
At some point today, I installed the first of the collar ties on the screened-in porch. These were the first connections between the east and west sides of the porch above the level of the decking. At first the collar ties were attached by joist hangers on their west ends and simply rested on the girder on the east ends, though eventually I took some careful measurements to ensure the girder's supports were plumb and attached the east ends of the collar ties with hurricane clips.
Once the collar ties were secure on their east ends, the entire structure became amazingly rigid. The sudden appearance of collar ties made it look as though real progress was finally being made, which delighted Gretchen. This afternoon she entertained a nice youngish couple she'd met through her prisoner clemency advocacy. The female half of the couple is a lawyer who represented one of Gretchen's former students in his failed clemency bid. You may remember her from the time she and her photographer visited and shot video in our house as part of her pro-clemency advocacy (unfortunately, though, Andrew Cuomo is a dick and didn't carry through on his promises of accelerated release of prisoners in New York State).
This evening, things were kind of quiet in the remote workplace, so Gretchen and I decided to go out for dinner. This time we mixed it up a bit and went to Northern Spy in High Falls, a restaurant we haven't visited in years. Norther Spy is expensive and not too vegan-friendly, though recently they've upped their vegan game and even got approval to serve the Impossible Burger. (The Impossible Burger is only served at restaurants and then only by facilities willing to comply with various pro-vegan constraints.)
Gretchen had arranged for us to sit outside so we could bring the dogs. After getting hopelessly tangled with their leashes, they eventually settled down, only to get excited when another couple with a dog showed up to sit in the outside dining area with us. But then they settled down again.
Both Gretchen and I ordered the Impossible Burger with fries, and it was amazing. Less great was my IPA and the tofu "wings," which were errantly served with a dipping sauce made of real blue cheese.
Unfortunately, I couldn't pay full attention to Gretchen due to a minor GDPR-related crisis unfolding on my phone. GDPR, it turns out, is something of a stress test of database systems, since it demands the generation of large datasets by a hard deadline, often of contacts that have lain dormant in a CRM for years.
By the end of our meal, I was sipping on a glass of white wine and being attacked by fat black mosquitoes. They were largely ignoring Gretchen, who eats more garlic than I do.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180525 feedback
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