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second source of truth
Friday, April 12 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
After weeks of nothing (partly because I've invested no effort), I had a little interest expressed in my candidacy to resume employment. One was actually a first-round interview with some guy who works for a well-known generator manufacturer in the Midwest. He was an Indian gentleman and not especially warm. Such people don't really give me a read of how the interview is going, though I felt like I did good enough from my side. But the chances of getting that job are so low that I don't mind my trolls immediately informing them about who I really am (yes, the only readers I have at this point are people who do things like that). Then, just as I was planning to leave for the cabin, another Indian gentleman wanted to talk to me about a different job. I could tell from his poor English pronunciation that his job was very basic screening. (Generally speaking, the easier someone is for me to understand, the more interest is being placed on me as a job candidate.)
Gretchen had some poetry thing she wanted to attend this weekend, so she didn't go with me to the cabin. That poetry event also scuttled a plan she had to perhaps drive all the way to Rochester to look at investment properties. She's getting distressingly serious about perhaps selling our cursed Brewster Street property and buying a cute cream puff house in Rochester. As for me, I'm mostly opposed to the idea because of how difficult it will to be manage properties that far away. But Gretchen is convinced that Rochester will be a much hotter market once climate change squeezes people out of the Sun Belt.
Because there was no more snow and the possibility of some surplus solar electricity, I drove to the cabin in the Chevy Bolt for the first time this year. As usual, I took the scenic route through Middleburgh, stopping at the Cairo Hannaford on the way for provisions, including a four pack of Skull Frog Double IPA. (Is "Skull Frog" a reference to that frog hidden on a skull in a frieze at Salamanca University?)
It rained for the entire drive, occasionally coming down so fast I had to use the windshield wipers' fastest speed. Charlotte was farting and a little restless in the backseat, so I would've stopped (maybe at the edge of the big vlaies in the Town of Broome) to let the dogs walk. But nobody wanted to be out in that weather.
The temperature was almost 60 in the cabin when I arrived, so there was no need to run the boiler. But I did start a fire in the woodstove.
Eventually the rain let up enough for me to take the dogs for a walk down to the dock. But temperatures were in the 40s, so, after noting that Throckmorton the Loon had arrived and seeing a pair of mallards, I just kept walking, going south along the shore briefly and then returning to the cabin mostly along the boundary with Shane's parcel, marveling at landforms the temporary brooks along the way.
I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning in hopes it would help me with my job interview and then later with some software work I wanted to do on my remote control system. But usually the end result of taking that drug is a hangover, since it makes me drink too much. So I wanted to see if I could somehow limit my alcohol consumption while on it. I did this by spacing my drinks with cups of kratom tea as I sat at my computer in the loft watching YouTube videos (I want to use more of our 20 GB monthly limit) and working on the system for making local changes to the data in the remote controller. Eventually I ate some cannabis, which I find helps me not drink as much.
As for the work I was doing on the remote controller, I was soon immersed in a tricky programming problem, since adding a mechanism to allow for local changes to the data introduces a second source of "truth." My solution to this was that when local changes are made, the ESP8266 sets a flag that doesn't allow data to flow from the server (as it normally would). Instead the direction reverses and the local changes flow to the server. Once that is confirmed to have happened, the data direction flag is unset and normal operations resume.
Charlotte got so excited before our walk to the lake that she started howling and barking. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte racing around in excitement as Neville tries to plod forward. Click to enlarge.
"Isn't this the most exiciting thing ever, Neville?" Click to enlarge.
Charlotte is really interested in where we might be going. Click to enlarge.
Rough bark on tree on the walk down to the lake. Click to enlarge.
Throckmorton the Loon is back. The lake was still mostly frozen two weeks ago. Click to enlarge.
The dock. Click to enlarge.
A pair of mallards. Click to enlarge.
The little mystery canyon that cuts across our boundary with Shane's parcel. Click to enlarge.
That temporary brook drains a little pond along the side of our driveway just above Ibrahim's A-frame. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240412 feedback
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