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good technology, bad technoloy, and unhappy hosts
Monday, November 15 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Last weekend I finally set up a MySpool device at the Adirondack cabin, which was a requirement of our homeowners' insurace. The MySpool device transmits temperature and humidity data regularly via WiFi to the internet via the Moxee cellular WiFi hotspot. I have it powered by the same 12 volt car battery that is powering the hotspot. Between the two of them (and the makeshift power source, which is just barely able to run the two devices for a week), I'm able to keep track of conditions in the cabin from 100 miles away. This is similar to how systems I've built based on the Raspberry Pi work, though I've found Raspberry Pi solutions tend to be unreliable over time; typically their SD-card boot volume experience some sort of corruption and they become unreachable until you go to them physically and replace the SD card with one you have freshly prepared. (That's a shame, because a Raspberry Pi is a much more capable platform than a proprietary MySpool devices, as I can easily add such features as the ability to transmit video and even implement ways for it to take actions such as starting up other devices and reporting data from practically any sort of sensor.)
I monitored the temperature at the cabin all day, wondering when it would fall low enough to trigger the mercury tilt switch thermometer, which would power up the generator and produce a tell-tale spike in cabin temperatures. That spike never came, leading me to fret that perhaps the generator's starter battery was already dead.
In work related news, today I replaced the 1TB SATA SSD in my work-issued laptop with a 1TB PCIe M.2 drive. I was hoping this might speed up Javascript compilations, since I knew from tests I'd conducted that PCIe M.2 drives have about five times the performance of a SATA SSD, which is a much bigger boost in performance than just about any made possible by a new technology recent years. Interestingly, though, I found that, if anything, the performance with the M.2 drive was actually a little worse. This means that either there is no relationship between drive speed and Node compilation times (and the differences I was seeing were due to something else), or if there is a relationship, it's counterintuitively negative. This sucks, because when I'm working on frontend code these days, I'm not actually doing very much work. I'm watching YouTube videos or writing while watching a Powershell window to see when (if ever) the damn compilation completes. Then I spent a couple minutes changing something else only to wait again (such waits can range from two to twelve minutes) for another little piece of information. It's about the slowest software development can possibly go and reflects a profound failure in the promise of newer technology. Just the slow speed of the compiles is making me hate my profession and gradually burning me out. And things didn't have to be this way; had I been working with a straightforward vanilla Javascript implementation, everything would be obvious to me and simple changes to the code could be tested without appreciable waits at all. Best of all, there wouldn't be this weird repeition throughout the codebase of declarations of column names and relations, things that could've easily just been declared or configured once. I've worked with codebases that were a pleasure to interact with. This one, on the other hand, seems designed to make software development unnecessarily difficult for whomever has to work with it, causing them to want to flee the industry and thus, with their absence, impoverishing the software development community. I might blame the Ukrainians who wrote the code, but they're just following practices put in place by the folks who developed Angular and, most egregiously, NgRx and its Facade pattern. Those developers might've thought they were building something amazing, but instead they created a dead-end development stack that will hopefully be abandoned for the junk it is very soon.
This evening, I tried to get away from the horror of that frontend code and the relentless neediness of the cats by taking a bath (cats will not climb on me when I am under water!). But something was wrong with the just-in-time electric hot water hearter, and my bath was luke warm at best. Further troubling what should've been a relaxing soak were the dogs, who have a real talent for losing their minds about something outside just when it's least convenient, forcing me to climb out of the water and go dripping through the house to find out what terrible thing is afoot. (But it's almost always nothing.)
Meanwhile today, Andrea, our friend from Washington DC, came up to the Hudson Valley to help out with Powerful, who has been living for the last five or six days with some young people in Tivoli. Gretchen was with Andrea at the Tivoli house today, and the two of them didn't like what they were seeing. The energy was all wrong. One of the people Powerful is living with was freaking out about the situation, talking loudly about how living with someone recovering from a heart transplant was triggering her post traumatic stress regarding her own hospitalization earlier in her life. This is a young woman who, when Powerful needed a place to be released to, had assured Gretchen that she and her boyfriend were "all in" on taking him. "Are you sure?" Gretchen had asked, adding, "Do you want to sleep on it?" No, this young woman claimed she was "all-in." Now, though, her attitude is one of having been imposed upon. Gretchen attributes this to her being young and white, which can make minor inconveniences seem like major burdens when you've never really dealt with much in the way of adversity. In any case, now Gretchen and Andrea are busy trying to find some other place for Powerful to live, since his present hosts are clearly not working out. It's a stressful turn of events, but, as Gretchen noted with amusement, it has completely driven from her mind all the fretting she'd been having about one of her bosses being upset about her having snagged an interview with a local newspaper that he'd thought should've been of him. Further exacerbating all this was that Gretchen got her Moderna booster shot today. Unlike with me, the shot started kicking her ass some hours after she received it, making her feel pain all over her body and inducing waves of nausea.
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