|
|
|
relative brightness
Thursday, June 5 2025
At work today, I was on the pseudoephedrine, which I mostly used to power through a backlog of code reviews, something I have become very effective at selectively using ChatGPT to help with. My back isn't healing very quickly, but it is healing. Today, for example, I was able to wipe my ass using my right hand for the first time, meaning my lower torso is less sensitive to being flexed the wrong way. And even when I did occasionally flex into the pain zone, the stabbing pains weren't quite as excruciating. All this was giving me more confidence to move about. I'd even forget occasionally that I still must'n't bend at the waist to grab anything, and the pain would be there to remind me.
It was a sunny, summery day, and the Bolt was even hotter when I climbed into the it at the end of the day than it had been yesterday. When I thought to look at the temperature readout on the dashboard, it was at 111 degrees Fahrenheit, though after some driving it was down to 96. I stopped at the hardware store in Accord to buy more Gorilla Glue for the cabin, as all the CDs and DVDs I'd been gluing atop the styrofoam in the basement entrance bulkhead was exhausting a large bottle. The store didn't have big bottles, so I bought the biggest one they had, which was maybe four ounces.
I took Charlotte and Neville on a walk down the Gullies Trail, and about a third of a mile from home Charlotte started digging for a varmint, which is an activity that also excites Neville. So I left them there and returned home on the Stick Trail, doing a little extremely light work on the Chamomile Wall westward extension along the way.
My ESP8266 Remote system stores a two or three-word digest of the current weather conditions (as reported by a weather API) with every record of data it stores from the SolArk inverter. Recently I've started showing these as color-coded line segments on the graph of that data. But because I'd just been storing the words describing the conditions, I had no meta-data to help with, say, color-coding those segments. So today I converted to saving these conditions as a weather_condition_id, which is a foreign key to a table called weather_condition. There I could amass all the weather conditions the weather API comes up with. Then, using an administrative tool, I could choose their colors for the graph. I could also figure out what values go into fields called relative_brightness and relative_precipitation to provide numeric values for any algorithm that needs to know what those various weather conditions describe. (Indeed, I could actually crunch the data from the inverter to come up with the relative_brightness data objectively.)
While all these little things were happening in my life, a sudden and spectacular rupture was happening between Donald Trump and his DOGE hatchet-man, Elon Musk. Like all people who have debased themselves because they thought they could get something by climbing aboard the Trump train (think Michæl Cohen, Mike Pence, Anthony Scaramucci, Mitt Romney, etc., the list is huge), there was inevitably going to be a day when a rupture was going to happen. And, because Musk might be even more of a narcissist than Trump with an even greater lust for revenge, that rupture was always going to be explosive. It started out the other day with some mild criticism by Musk of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," (which Musk doesn't think is hard enough on non-billionaires). When Trump seemed a little displeased with this (though, perhaps knowing Musk like he does, he didn't react with his usual infantile rage), Musk ratcheted up the criticism a little more. By this evening, though, Musk had gone completely nuclear, essentially calling Trump a pedophile by alluding to things in "the Epstein tapes" and even suggesting that Trump should be impeached. In response, Trump was mostly silent. What little he said seemed to have a note of sadness in it, a rare emotion for Trump but one we've heard him also use with Vladimir Putin (another powerful man he feels he cannot cross). I'm fascinated in seeing how this all plays out. If Trump has taught us anything, it is that there is no justice in the world. So instead we have to settle for rich and powerful assholes going all-in at destroying each other.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250605 feedback
previous | next |
