Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Thursday, November 8 2018
I had the sun in my eyes for nearly all of the drive into work this morning. There was a freshly-killed raccoon on US 209 as it climbed over the minor mountain between Route 28 and Sawkill, though happily roadkills are becoming less common (particularly among the squirrels). As always, I arrived early at work, with only Morning Dave in the office ahead of me. Since Morning Dave is a part-timer, I'm usually the one who has been in the office the longest for several hours at the end of the day. I think some people wish I would take more advantage of this by leaving earlier at the end, though I generally do not leave until about 4:40pm.
As you may recall, a couple weeks ago I'd been working on a troublesome project involving a dot matrix cashiering printer. It has been used by a client to print receipts from a desktop app written in the Electron framework, which makes it possible to write desktop applications using web technologies. The old Ithaca 150 printer this app had been written for had been discontinued and the hope was to replace it with a new printer manufactured by a different company (in this case, Epson). My initial problems with the new printer turned out to have been a consequence of the fact that the Epson uses a different language of control codes to do things like change modes, alter character pitch, etc. Clearly I needed to know what its control codes were. So I turned to the resources any intelligent person would: first Epson's website, and then Google generally. But the best information i could find was a PDF hosted on a .cz domain. It purported to have control codes for several Epson printers, but none of them were helpful for my needs. For a time, I wondered if the printer could even do what I wanted it to. The PDF I'd found had been slathered with messages telling me that it was CONFIDENTIAL, which seemed promising, but if it didn't have the necessary control codes, perhaps they didn't exist. All this time, I'd been creating tickets for Epson support. They'd typically send me back a terse 30-character response, usually one containing at least one grammatical error. And the advice would mostly be to contact my software provider. In my case, that was me. Eventually, though, I made it clear that I was a software developer trying to develop some software and that the key to whether or not these Epson printers would be a viable choice for a particular multi-unit installation was whether or not I had the information to make them do the things I needed them to do. After that, Epson responded by wanting me to sign a non disclosure agreement. Why all the secrecy? Why not just make things easy on developers so they will be predisposed towards writing cool software for your hardware? Who knows! It probably has to do with one very unpleasant person making very poor decisions. In any case, once I'd gotten the head honcho to sign the NDA, I received a detailed technical document from Epson. I didn't get around to studying that document until today, but once I did, it was a fairly trivial matter to implement all the features I needed to in the Electron app. I managed to do so in a way such that both printers would be supported, and I refactored the code and added comments to guide the way should I (or someone else) need to add support for some other printer. So, all in all, it was a pretty successful day.
One the drive home, in the still-golden light of sunset, I noticed a freshly-killed deer just north of 9G's intersection with Middle Road. As I've said before, roadkills (and also fallen trees) are the main changes to the landscape, and I tend to notice them as I drive through.
I went out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store on my way home. I'd been craving a discrete calculator for making quick & dirty calculations (which I prefer to a smartphone app or a window on my computer), and I knew there was a TI-36 Solar at the Tibetan Center in their big box o'calculators (which mostly contains oversized four-function calculators with tiny, possibly-decorative solar panels and the branding of local banks, attorneys, and realtors). In addition to that, I scored a specific rare kind of power cable, a tie-down strap, and a two-to-six 120 volt outlet expander. When I went to pay for it, Rob said "a dollar." When the smallest bill I had was a ten, he said "get me next time."
Back at the house, Gretchen was freaking out because some galley proofs of her latest poetry collection had supposedly been delivered to our front door, but there had been no obvious parcels near our front door (or, for that matter, in or near our garage). If this had been something like a replacement blade chain for my chainsaw, it wouldn't've been a big deal. But she needed those galley proofs without delay. So I suggested she check across the street to see if they'd been delivered there. Occasionally new UPS and USPS employees get confused because our mailbox (and its number) is at the end of the driveway that leads to the fussily-groomed 1980s-style house across the street. So Gretchen went over there and there it was. The "delivered" note had said it had been placed at the front door, but no, it was at some small secondary door.
For the second night in a row, I ate a dinner of soup and noodles, all from that big pot of soup Gretchen had made back on election night.

Before I went to bed, I noticed that Gretchen had gotten a brand new supply of ambien pills (using the insurance that had come with my new job). I took one before climbing into bed, and then watched YouTube videos until I caught myself repeatedly nodding off.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181108

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