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slimy boletes in the forest
Monday, October 13 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
At work today I learned that I needed to somehow push some code I'd been modifying back into the repository from which it had come. But that repository used an unfamiliar technology, something called Team Foundation Server Version Control (TFSVC), not git. It's a Microsoft technology similar to svn and (in keeping with how Microsoft prefers to do things) is not distributed but instead depends on a single canonical copy kept on one particular server. As always with such dead technologies, I wanted to know as little as possible about it. I hadn't had to know much up until today; so long as I could browse the files within it, I could get what I wanted. The problem came when I was tasked with the job of returning the code. The web interface I'd been using had no support for that whatsoever, so it looked like I was going to have to install something. So I turned to ChatGPT asking what was the minimal software I needed to install to be able to push to a TFSVC repository. This sent me down a fruitless multi-hour rabbit hole, something I should be more wary about when asking ChatGPT to solve my problems. At first I tried to install a Java-based command-line tool that Microsoft had released back when it was attempting to provide multi-platform support but had yet to develop Dotnet Core, but that couldn't authenticate me successfully. So then I installed a version of Visual Studio from 2008, and that didn't work any better. Finally I asked Mitch what he does, and (in text form) he seemed a little irritated that I'd been trying these irrelevant technologies. It turned out that my copy of Visual Studio from 2022 had the necessary code to read from and write to TFT repos, but it needed configuration information. That part wasn't easy either (for unexplained reasons, I needed to supply a directory path with a dollar sign prepended to it), but I eventually got things set up. Even then, though, I had to do fucked-up hacks to get the repo to accept new files, like changing the name of a file temporarily, committing, and then changing it back. For much of the day, I found myself tempted to either rage-quit or hoping I would be fired. I'm a good software developer if I can fucking develop, but this company is so full of obstacles and jankiness that developing is something I rarely end up doing (unless it's on code in my mostly non-janky ESP8266 Remote Control system). Making matters even worse, my drinking last night had given me a noticeable (if relatively mild) hangover.
A Nor'easter had passed through today, dumping occasionally-torrential rains on the roof of my office building. By the time I got home, though, the rain was over, and I managed to get both dogs to come with me on the usual walk (Up the Farm Road and then back homeward atop the escarpment to the west). I then made spaghetti with cauliflower and a pan of tofu fried up with mushrooms and onions. The only spaghetti I could find was a box of "sourdough" spaghetti, which behaved strangely, breaking into pieces prematurely and clumping, which I didn't like. The rain had brought out some species of slimy-capped bolete, which I had gathered in the now-slimy left pocket of my hoodie. So I cooked up a bunch of those in a separate pan, knowing Gretchen would find them disgusting. I'd run out of avocado oil and was forced to use olive oil, which was definitely suboptimal in this application. The pan filled with a slimy fluid, though with a little salt the boletes tasted okay. But they didn't really work well with the sourdough spaghetti and red sauce when I later added a few boletes to that.
Later I took a bath, though I had to run the water slowly in order for the electric just-in-time heater to boost the temperature to a comfortable level.
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