randomdreams

I got up at a reasonable time, intending to actually do stuff rather than just lie in bed feeling awful.
I got about half of one stuff done, and am back to lying in bed feeling awful.
But hey: progress.
Today my aspirations are to clean the hair clots out of the bathroom sink and shower drains, put all my clothes away, and if I'm really full of energy, make it two blocks to the grocery to get stuff to make dinner.
This was a lousy vacation.

I think my first project of the day is to go to an urgent care clinic and get tested for pneumonia. Whee!

In other news, I've lost my password to livejournal. Dreamwidth still has it because I'm still crossposting, but I haven't been able to log in to LJ for a while. I'm working on recovering it. (Initial attempts to recover it through email haven't worked.)

I've gotten behind on posting dreams. Well, let's face it, I've gotten behind on posting.

anyway. I don't remember much of the dream. I do remember I had a bodyguard who looked like Keith Richards. He kept mentioning he used to be a harpoonist for a whaling ship. That did go a long ways towards explaining why he kept throwing spears at anyone who got too close to me. He was wickedly good at it, and he somehow had a seemingly infinite supply of harpoons secreted about his person.

Work problems, which aren't real problems:
1. Looking at a huge stream of data and an eagle-eyed coworker pointed out a lot of repeated numbers. The instrument producing these is supposed to provide six significant digits: 1.23456. It's doing that. But between, say, 1.23456 and 1.35000 it's only providing (multiple instances of) 1.23456, 1.24567, 1.26789, and 1.31234. If you have twenty megabytes of data and plot through this and do a linear regression it looks completely uniform: nice, well-behaved data. If you go look at the individual data points after sorting them, you see this stair-step behavior that is for sure not what's actually happening.
The instrument that's producing this is introducing digitization artifacts, even though I've set it up to not do so, and I ended up having to rewrite the driver that interfaces with the instrument to get it to improve (but not entirely solve) the issue.
2. So with that hammered out, now I can look more carefully at the actual data, and I see all these weird dropouts, where a very small value that should be increasing monotonically is instead increasing monotonically with a second monotonic line somewhat below it. That took a huge effort to track down and I still don't understand it: when I agitate an output controlled by a relay, the relay control line stops working. They're not connected that way. This doesn't make any sense. It's like if you unscrew the lightbulb suddenly the wall switch physically snaps down into the off position. That's not supposed to happen.

So all this is going on while my manager's wife is just about to have a baby, and another project that I'm not on is turning into a huge flaming dumpster fire that I can't talk about but is absolutely catastrophic both for how badly it's going, and for how badly it's going to affect our group, and my manager can't do anything to make his wife's situation better (she was due today) and can't do anything about the dumpster fire so instead he was running over to try to see why my setup was acting up, because it's both interesting and potentially easy to fix. Except he doesn't software and when he looks at my code he clutches his head.
(I have no idea how to run my oscilloscope. I know exactly how to set it up to produce the measurements I need by programming it. So he sits down and says "how do you put cursors on the screen?" and that's not something I would ever try to use, so I have no idea, but I can quite literally get the oscilloscope to play a recognizable song by beeping a series of data points I send to it.)
So he's channeling all his frustration with all this other stuff into handling what are really fairly simple problems I'm having, because then he doesn't have to think about what he's not able to do.
Which isn't the worst thing in the world.

My coworker who sometimes drives me bonkers interrupts me about every ten minutes to tell me something he's done, mostly because he wants recognition that he's doing things and our manager no longer gives him that recognition because he's too busy and knows he'll just snap something unkind. So, repeated talking, while I'm trying to teach myself how to use excel to compare linear regressions to see if I can say with confidence that they're statistically similar.
Then he puts on a pair of hearing protectors "so I can concentrate".
AAAAAUGH.
SRSLY.

The last two days, I've gone for quick road rides at lunch, as we're in fall gloaming and every day seems like the last chance we'll have to ride.
Both times I've run into enormous flocks of enormous wild turkeys.
I mentally model turkeys as "a bit bigger than a canada goose".
These were "a bit smaller than an emu".
Tomorrow is Veloswap, my version of Christmas, where I go to the world's largest bike swap meet and schmooze and fondle bike parts.
My acquisition list is lamentably soft: gloves, more gloves, a helmet, because my bikes have been rock solid.
However, I am carrying some extra money because my coworker wants a bike and she's flying to a wedding in Arizona, so I'm distance-shopping.

Work is less awful. My manager's wife is due in a week, and he's so worried about that he doesn't have time to get stressed by all the problems at work.
My poor coworker is stuck with a project that involves repeatedly, like dozens of times a day, cut-and-pasting a section of a text file into a window where he can use perl to strip out all the alpha characters in the first column, only print the numbers in the second column, then he takes the output of that, pastes it into another program that collates those into a column of bytes, and then he pastes that into a GUI where it fills an array and gets sent off to the target.
This is what happens when hardware people try to manage software.
There are approximately 30876098345 ways of doing that better than he's doing it.
I chose to write a string replacement function that just operates on the final column of bytes and then feeds it directly into the software underlying the GUI.
My estimate based on observation is this should save him 90 minutes a day for the next three months solid.
awk wept, man, wept.

In other news I am so tired.

We went to a place that, I suspect, caters to a much younger clientele: the walls were covered in selfies, as they have a service that allows you to take a pic and send it to their printer and then tape the result up on the wall.
What they serve is a half a cup of cream and some sweet material minced up on top of a cryogenic surface, then scraped with a spackle knife to form a curled-up chunk of demi-ice-cream, and stuck in a bucket.
The spoon changes color as it gets cold.
The result is delicious but ridiculously expensive for what you get.


I found this little diorama of railroad hardware when walking along the tracks today.


Monty has entirely too many feet. No wonder she sleeps all the time: her feet smell like sleepiness.


The collection of railroad spikes people leave on my desk continues to grow.

Morning emergency plumbing project. Gah. The bathroom sink has never drained well, and this time it was particularly unwilling to drain, so I had to pull everything apart and run a snake through it all.

The Spitfire runs out of gas the moment the gas gauge needle touches the empty line. Nothing else on that car is even slightly accurate, but boy the gas gauge is RIGHT ON. I learned this in the driveway, thankfully.

I walked the legs off Monty, along the Sand Creek Trail, which is nestled between an oil refinery and a truck junkyard. She walked in the door and fell over sound asleep.

New starter in the Spitfire. In theory this is the easiest job around: unscrew nut, remove battery cable, unscrew two bolts that mount the starter, remove starter. It's also right on the side of the engine where it's easy to get to.
In practice, Nissan decided to use a different bolt size for the bolt on top, that I can see, than the bolt on the bottom, that I can't see, so I remove the top bolt and can't get the socket to unscrew the one I can't see, that I've placed by feel. They did this for a decent reason: the top one is huge because it's the negative ground for the whole car, with the battery cable tab attaching to it. But it's a drag to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why the socket won't turn the bolt when it's clearly over the bolt head.
However, the car sure starts nicely with the new starter motor in place.