(no subject)

My manager and I have been communicating poorly. He's under a lot of stress, and there are cultural differences that make for some issues. (He is not good at consistency: he'll lurch from pushy, temperamental boss to friendly discussing shared interests boss way faster than most of his employees can handle.) I was behind on a project, and he has in the past expressed his frustration that I'll focus on a problem for a lot longer than he thinks I should before asking for help. I'd focussed on a problem that was fairly complicated: I'm trying to use commodity hardware to interface with one of our chips, and write the driver to do that, and my diagnostics is pretty much does-it-talk? and the answer was no. One issue, that I worked out early on, was that I needed to power part of the chip that generally doesn't need to be powered because it's handled by external hardware, which I didn't know. Another part was that the interface I'm using assumes I'm typing in decimal and then converts that to hexadecimal for me, silently. Well, I was typing in hexadecimal that just happened to be numeric, so it wasn't clear that the result was hexa-hexadecimal. I'm not even sure what that is. (Aside: I realized this morning that we American English speakers count in base ten-base three: a thousand, a million, a billion. Japanese count in base ten-base four: they advance their counting word every four significant digits rather than every three. We were learning big numbers in japanese class today.) So, I asked my manager for help, he came in, we sat down with an oscilloscope and graph paper, and went through exactly what we were typing in and what was being transmitted and found the relationship between them and realized the hex/decimal weirdness, and thankfully it took him a long time to realize it, even as he worked through all the other things I'd done and found them all correct. When he did realize it, he was too busy being pleased at having figured it out to be frustrated, but then he left in a hurry, and having finished that I was actually at a decision point about where to go next, so I sent him a flurry of email saying should I do this? or that? or pursue this other line of development? and he didn't respond to any. I'm sitting around being nervous about this.
Lunchtime ride, and he came along. There are four of us who are quite fast, and another four people who are definitely junior varsity, including him. As I've written about before, I think he actually believes that people who work for him should wait for him, which two of the other fast guys think is bunk, but I'm willing to take the hit, for the simple reason that I get a serious workout any way this unfurls. The three fast guys take off, I get my manager and the other managerial person in behind me, and I try to catch the fast guys. I could have done it, too, but one or the other of them kept dropping off behind me, so I'd slow a bit, get them back into the draft behind me, crank it back up, and did that for 40km. It was fairly hot: above body temp, and nobody but me really excels when it's that warm, so I had an advantage.
However, the overall result was, after the other guy turned around at a reasonable point, that my manager and I were taking turns leading, with me taking about 65% of the lead, and we were able to keep the lead group in sight and even sometimes catch up a little, and that's a thrilling, if exhausting, feeling. When we got back to work he was simultaneously barely able to walk and completely filled with adrenaline and enthusiasm.
About ten minutes later he came into my office and basically said I was doing fine, my questions were great, we set out a list of goals and plans, and I think I have about two weeks of very low-stress development, that'll actually be fun, ahead of me. It's all in labview, which is kind of a silly programming language, but it's something to learn and could be of significant benefit to me if I end up heading to another job.
I was pretty knackered after that ride. Heart rate averaged 170 over the entire hour and change, and I was losing consciousness every time I stood up for part of the afternoon. (Not full-on fainting, just blacking out a bit and having to sit on the floor for a moment, before trying again.) But, yeah, it's definitely exhilarating.

I got home and started picking tomatoes and immediately noticed that one of the tomato plants was missing a LOT of leaves. That means there's a tomato-and-or-tobacco hornworm chewing on it. I asked threemeninaboat if she'd use her superior visual discrimination skills to try to locate it, because I was not seeing anything.
She walked out of the house and from halfway across the yard said "it's right there."
Of course she was right.


Today I scraped the fascia, eaves, and soffits all around the house in preparation for repainting them. About 3/4 the way through, I ran across a wasp convention. They don't even have a nest. They're all just hanging out there together.


I found this building the other day, while we were having mango chelatas.

This is mostly for basefinder: it's on South Federal, maybe 9 blocks south of Alameda.
I was doing research for places to take rhiannonstone because she has a strong, new interest in mango chelatas.

What else. I did a bunch of work on the Triumph today. The brake master cylinder had worked itself loose. The speedometer cable had failed and was kinda thrashing around under the hood. Stuff like that.