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



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   understanding the circuit breaker ecosystem
Friday, November 15 2019
I usually bring Ramona to work on Wednesdays, but she'd missed out this week, so I brought her today. It gives her such pleasure to go, and she's so well-behaved it's not really trouble for me. Today I managed to make great progress on my automatic production of a whole C#/SQL backend. Today my biggest accomplishment was adding a search method to all my controllers. At the very end of the day, I realized my list-producing methods should include a flexible way to sort the results. Normally this would require a lot of hard-coding of column names in the operative stored procedures, and it still does. But, since I'm automating the production of the stored procedures, the necessary case statement is produced programmatically, like everything else in the backend.
On the way home from work, I stopped at Lowes to get a refund on those stupid tandem circuit breakers. Then I looked at the ones Lowes has stocked in the store, this time with the idea that I would buy any tandem circuit breaker that looked like it might fit my Siemens box, no matter what brand it was. This was how I ended up buying two Eaton 15 amp tandems, neither of which had those stupid "rejection bars" and looked similar enough to a Simens breaker to at least try.
Back at the house, these breakers did indeed fit, though it took me awhile to figure out how to reset them (they were sold in their "tripped" state, which is different from either on or off). They had to be switched farther in off direction before they go back on. I also made the pleasant discovery that all my HOM-type Square D circuit breakers also fit in my Siemens box. Evidently these things are more standardized than I'd assumed (so long as I get the kind of circuit breaker that doesn't have metal prongs sticking out of the bottom). I've been working with circuit breakers for decades but am only just now understanding their ecosystem.
This evening I ate a small (though slightly larger than in the past) lump of two-year-old marijuana bud, and, after an hour and a half or so, I had a good (though manageable) buzz going. It put me in a good mood to discover another band (this time via the mysteries of the YouTube feed algorithm). The band tonight was The Gathering, a Dutch band that had started out in the doom metal genre and then picked up elements of shoegaze and progressive rock. The result is the perfect gumbo of my musical preferenced, at least in the song "Travel." The lead singer (Anneke van Giersbergen) has a somewhat nasally Stevie Nicks thing going on, though she can break out of it into something amazing when she kicks it up a notch (and this is done several times in "Travel"). I'm hearing all kinds of stuff in this music: pre-Dark-Side-of-the-Moon Pink Floyd (particularly in the bass and keyboards), various shoegaze influences, the wail of a heartbroken mu'azzin, and (of course) melodic metal. There's a part at 6:13 into the linked video where the singer's voice interplays with the synths and guitars to sound like the plaintative last human on earth singing over the din of the angry hornets who have just inherited the Earth.


Ramona at the edge of the new solar farm being built in the field southeast of my workplace. Click to enlarge.


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