|
|
|
the vacation I want
Thursday, August 11 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
Part of what I'd hoped to do up here at the cabin on Twenty Ninth Pond was work on some long-neglected Arduino weather station code. But yesterday I'd made the unpleasant discovery that I'd brought the wrong style of USB cable to connect my weather station to my laptop. The core of the weather station is a cheap Chinese knock-off of an Arduino Mega with a USB-B connector, the kind normally found on printers. But the only cables I'd brought with me were those with USB-A connectors on one end and micro or mini connectors on the other. I searched the cabin in hopes there would be a junk drawer or box somewhere with modern cables in it, but the most modern cables I could find were phone cables with modular jacks on their ends. It's a little astounding how little modern technological detritus has found its way into this place.
In the absence of the main thing I'd hoped to do, I felt aimless, tired (but not tired enough to nap) and generally under a cloud of malaise. At some point I kayaked across the lake to the old beaver skidpath on the northwest shore. And then I did managed to take a nap. The thing that finally helped me out of my funk was to begin adding features to the reporting system of The Organization's donor database. There was a crude framework in place for adding reports by creating a .json and a .sql file. But there had been no provision for performing queries to effect the appearance of a report's launcher form (for example, there was no way to populate a dropdown menu parameter selector with items from the database), and there'd been no way to even set default values for the parameters. After implementing those two important features, my mojo was restored, and I proceeded to paint a small painting of Neville based on a photo taken earlier on this vacation.
Gretchen made a delicious dinner of quesadillas, and as usual we ate them out on the dock and then I rinsed off the plates in the pond. This delights the fish, who can then be seen swimming from one white speck of tofu the next like so many Pacmen.
This evening, I only wanted to watch a single episode of Orange is the New Black, which Gretchen found disappointing. She suggested that the reason I didn't want to watch more was because I'd been staring at a screen all day. "You go ahead and have your vacation and I'll have mine," I replied. Just because I'm staring at a screen all day even on vacation does not mean I'm not having the vacation I want.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160811 feedback
previous | next |
