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a successful curry
Wednesday, February 26 2025
I spent most of the day building out a system in my ESP8266 Remote code making it so that debugging data normally sent via the serial port is instead sent via packets over the internet to the backend, where it is saved temporarily in a file that is then read and dumped into the UI of the web-based "quick command" tool when it is open. Both the sending of the data by the ESP8266 and the display of it in a browser window depend on polling, firstly by the ESP8266 itself and secondly by the Javascript in the web tool I wrote. Getting it all to work was pretty straightforward, and the results were very satisfying. This technique can be used to turn any ESP8266 into a device you can control and interrogate across the internet (regardless of firewalls and routers) from a command line, though of course you have to write all the code that tells the ESP8266 how to respond to the commands. It's not super responsive, but having any ability to do this is a huge upgrade from having to physically be there connected via serial port.
There was a phase in the afternoon when I couldn't figure out why the "response buffer" holding outgoing text from this system wasn't clearing, and during that time I took the dogs for a walk up the Farm Road and then back homeward through the snow atop the escarpment west of the Farm Road. This time I'd brought my camera and stopped to take photographs, which allowed Neville the chance to keep up with us at his plodding-but-relentless gait.
It seemed like for the past couple weeks, Gretchen and I have been beset by bad news (and I don't even really consider the death of my mother to be in that category, as it was definitely her time to go). We had trouble with our tenant suddenly not wanting to move out, it seemed like my brother Don was about to lose his benefits, and meanwhile Elon Musk is destroying what remains of the government we all take for granted and will most certainly miss once it is gone. It seems like that horrible tenant is staying after all, but at least the other tenant we'd lined up for her apartment have a place to go. And last night we had a long conversation with the tenant and she seemed contrite and promised to pay her rent on time. It's meaningless according to Kingston's genuinely Marxist (in contrast to, say, what Donald Trump calls "Marxist") tenant laws, but Gretchen even got the tenant to sign a document to this effect. And we're raising her rent by a non-trivial amount in the process. Meanwhile, some local company seems genuinely interested in hiring me as a software developer, and I'll be interviewed by its president on Tuesday, which is the kind of job-hunt progress I haven't had in over a year. Finally, it seems like the wheels are coming off Elon Musk's assault on the government, and Donald Trump's political support is cratering as well.
There are still plenty of things that suck in the world and even in our lives, and one of those things is the veterinary practice that we, for some reason, keep using. I refer, of course, to the Hurley Veterinary Hospital. When we moved up here more than 22 years ago, it was a small mom & pop practice with reasonable people doing reasonable things. In recent years, though, it's been sold to what must be some ugly private equity conglomerate, the kind that enriched Mitt Romney or that gobbled up SCA, the small software firm I once worked at in Red Hook. Such corporate amoeboids are a big part of what is wrong with America. Behind every one of them is some Elon-Muskesque psychopath who cares only about how much money can be extracted from them. Now Elon Musk is obviously deranged to the point of disability from ketamine and spending way too much time in a fascist echo chamber, but more cunning versions of him are everywhere and they are doing whatever they can to make living in America the most unpleasant experience possible. What this means at the Hurley Veterinary Hospital is that they now enforce strict rules requiring that they examine (at great expense) animals periodically to continue writing them prescriptions, even for maintenance medications for animals whose conditions are obviously unchanging. We still have the option of getting our prescriptions filled at inexpensive online retailers, but they make that as difficult as possible in hopes we will buy our medications from them at a substantial mark-up. So today, instead of just sending Gretchen a photocopy of a signed prescription, they required somebody to mechanically drive to their brick and mortar practice to pick up a physical copy of that prescription. So that was something I had to do at around 4:30 pm today.
Back at the house, I'd been tasked with the job of making some leftover raw potatoes and canned chickpeas into some sort of meal. In the recent past, as you know, I only made three or four different dishes, and none of them contained potatoes or chickpeas. But something has changed in my entrenched habits in the last few months, and now I can take any ingredients and come up with a vague notion of what to do with them. Then I use a search engine to find a recipe, ignore all the SEO bullshit in said recipe, and produce something delicious. Things played out exactly that way this evening, with me freestyling on the recipe, simplifying it some ways (by leaving out garlic) and elaborating on it as well (by adding celery, nutritional yeast, and calypso sauce). I also substituted tomato paste for crushed tomatoes, and that worked out just fine. The result tasted like some of the best Indian curries either Gretchen or I had ever had. I think the secret to this success was that I left out all the spices that I know Gretchen doesn't like in Indian food: cumin, cloves, and nutmeg, using mostly just curry powder, cayenne pepper, paprika, black pepper, and calypso sauce.
We'd collected so much solar-heated water today that it seemed wasteful not to take a bath, and so I did.
Neville in the general vicinity of the abandoned go-cart track today. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte in the general vicinity of the abandoned go-cart track today. Click to enlarge.
A hermit thrush in the general vicinity of the abandoned go-cart track today. This is about as far north as you can expect to find this bird at this time of year. Click to enlarge.
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