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well-hydrated ferns
Tuesday, October 1 2024
Down in Virginia, about five miles south of the city of Staunton, my brother Don continues to live in Creekside, a trailer across the street from our now-abandoned childhood home. He calls me (or tries to call me) almost every day, and, if I'm around, I usually answer his calls. This morning he sighed and said "it's October!" It was, so I muttered something affirmative. Then he asked me if we were going to have to switch to time again (that is, he wanted to know if the Daylight Savings Time would be ending, as it had ever Fall of our lives). Last year I remember there being a real chance that Congress would pass a law ending Standard Time forever, and I think Don was hoping this had happened. I did a quick Google search (as I don't pay close attention to news about this) and found that Standard Time would be returning this year on November 3rd. Don seemed bummed out by this, which didn't make any sense to me. "But this doesn't really matter to you at all," I said. "Well, I have a time on my phone," Don replied. "But you don't have to be anywhere at any specific time," I elaborated, adding, "and neither do I."
When I took Charlotte for her afternoon walk, it was the first time we'd gone up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then over to the Stick Trail since recent rains. The deciduous ferns had all been terribly wilted from unusually dry conditions (perhaps exacerbated by gypsy moth defoliation and japanese stilt grass sucking up so much water in all the moist places), but now they were all looking well-hydrated.
This evening I turned my attention to figuring out what was wrong with the Local Remote, a device I can use in place of a web browser to control all the remotely-controllable devices in my ESP8266 Remote system. The Local Remote would often hang during the process of booting, never producing the screen where device features can be turned on and off. In debugging what was going on, I soon discovered that the problem was that the ESP8266 Remote Control (the device that actually turns things on and off) was spending so much of its time polling the Apache server (to which it both sends and receives data) that it didn't have enough time to service HTTP requests coming from the Local Remote (where the ESP8266 Remote Control acts as a web server). I found Local Remote started working again if I just changed the polling interval to the Apache server from four to eight seconds. But if I did that, it would increase the latency (that is, it would decrease the responsiveness) of the the system. The solution turned out to be a pretty forward one that I stumbled upon by experimentation: putting the server.handleClient() command, which is in the Arduino loop function, inside a four-iteration loop. Evidently it needs to be called several times to complete a web request coming from the Local Remote, and if there are big delays between the individual requests, they end up being ignored.
At 9:00pm came the big vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz (yay!) and J.D. Vance (boo!). Watching such things is inherently stressful, so I decided I to allow myself to drink. In my mind, I'd probably built Tim Walz into a better candidate than he actually is, and I'd definitely done the opposite to J.D. Vance. But in this debate, Vance went out of his way to come across as agreeable and even somewhat friendly. He's much younger and has much more self control than Donald Trump, so it shouldn't've been surprising that he was able to present himself as something other than the feral incel-adjacent Christianist that he's been playing these days. (What he actually is in his soul is impossible to tell, given how often he has changed completely over his relatively-brief existence.) True, much of what Vance said was lies that he told with a straight face, but it probably came across well for those dumbasses out there who don't know much about anything. As for Tim Walz, well, he didn't do a great job. He was a bit stumbly here and there and didn't handle the little lie he'd once told about having been in Tiananmen Square during protests of Spring, 1989. (He'd arrived in China later that summer.) He had few good moments here and there, such as when he pointed out that Vance's refusal to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election was "damning." But overall he wasn't as good as I'd expected. It probably doesn't matter much, since vice presidents themselves don't matter very much.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241001 feedback
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