|
|
|
shit show
Monday, August 17 2015
This morning, after only a week's procrastination, Gretchen initiated a run to the Hurley dump, which is something we usually don't do more frequently than twice per year. But the last time we gone was less than three and a half months ago. I could tell Gretchen was serious when I heard her lifting the garage door below me, which a produces a sound in the laboratory like a fighter jet suddenly appearing low over head. Soon she appeared in the laboratory to tell me that it was "such a shit show" down in the garage that she couldn't even make it from garage doors to our trash stash. By "shit show," she meant that there was too much crap obstructing the path. I immediately embraced the term, which I had never before heard Greatchen utter. I would go on to use it throughout the day to describe various things, including the quality of play Phoenix gave in their home court when contesting Indiana. (Here I'm talking women's professional basketball, which I still occasionally watch with Gretchen.) For this particular shit show, though, the solution wasn't difficult. I just had to redo the horizontally-stacked pile of plywood scraps leaning against the heating oil tank. Over time, that stack tends to work its way out from the tank at the bottom, taking up much more room than it needs to.
Despite the reduced amount of trash accrued over the unusually small number of days, we took both cars for the drive the transfer station. This was the first time we thought ahead and put the recycling in one car and the trash in the other. The bulk of what we do on these errands is always recycling, so, due to its larger cargo capacity, that stuff went in the Subaru with me and Ramona while Eleanor, Gretchen, and the trash went in the Prius. As always, and to the delight of all, we let our dogs run around the dump as we did our business. Well, maybe not all. There are always a couple senior-citizen trash-dumpers who look like they'd been having their conformist views buttressed by Fox News not fifteen minutes before, and they often have looks on their faces that suggest they'd be happier (or at least less confused) if the black mongrel Pit-somethings were on leashes or safely in cages instead of gleefully frolicking amid moving vehicles, Woodchuck sightings, broken glass minefields, chicken bone windfalls, and proffered dog treats.
At my firewood gathering spot a third of a mile away on the Gullies Trail, my GreenWorks chainsaw performed so poorly this afternoon that I only managed to cut a load weighing 79 pounds. The saw seemed to overheat very quickly and work erratically, sometimes changing power dramatically in the middle of a cut.
I experienced this behavior again when I went on a second firewood-gathering foray late this afternoon on one of Tommy's mountain bike paths west of the Farm Road. I was cutting a smallish skeletonized trunk that had probably once been a Northern Red Oak. Off a small sidebranch from Tommy's bicycle path, I found a lookout (41.931776N, 74.110058W) at the top of a bluff to the west of our uphill neighbor's house. It overlooked a field that they keep mowed only because it belongs to them and I could clearly see a number of houses north of Dug Hill Road. Today's second foray yielded 61 pounds, giving me a combined haul for the day of 140 pounds.
Today I took delivery of a slightly-larger Digole LCD for use in my weather station client. I quickly replaced the one I'd been using and was delighted to find the new one had a significantly-larger display area in that it displayed graphics on a larger fraction of its screen surface, not leaving a wide margin off-limits. It also has a touch-sensitive surface that I can use as part of my user interface, though in devices that I use routinely, I prefer actual buttons or keys in my UI. (This is why I much prefer a Chomebook to an iPad.) I've also worked at improving the weather station's client code, moving (for example) a large data array used for graphing temperature plots from global to the functions that actually do the graphing. In so doing, I was forced to confront one of the more unintuitive weed patches of writing C for microcontrollers: passing arrays between functions. But avoiding the use of large global arrays is important on an Arduino (even a relatively-generous Mega 2560), since memory for variables is one of the scarcest programming resources and a global variables lower available RAM for all functions all the time. It would be nice to add a bunch of serial RAM (say, via I2C) to the client and keep my arrays (or, technically, the functionality of those arrays) there. But it turns out that there are few serial RAMs available, and the ones that are tend to be small (in terms of storage) and expensive. I could use serial EEPROMs for this, but they wear out after repeated writes. The one place where I do have additional RAM (and non-volatile RAM at that) is in the DS1307 realtime clock. But I use that to store such information as the timestamp of the last temperature log and the interval that is to be waited between recorded log records.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150817 feedback
previous | next |
