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laboratory fogger cat evacuation
Friday, August 26 2016
This morning I did a fairly complete mowing of the grass, including a round of weed-whacking. Gretchen and I had a party scheduled for Saturday, and the lawn would need to be suitable for hanging out in. To keep mosquitoes from attacking me, I sprayed Deep Woods Off on my exposed skin. That's the real deal, and it seemed to work great. But this evening I saw Gretchen sitting in the yard reading a book and I asked her if the mosquitoes were terrible and she said no. And she wasn't even using the hippie-style insect repellant. Evidently mosquito season is over.
In my remote workplace, I had a request to provide a very large report (one containing millions of records), but to get it, I first had copy the data from a live database, creating a huge table on my local machine, and then writing a report using the reporting framework I've been working on so much lately. But I kept running into problems; the export file wasn't importing on my local machine. Was the export corrupted? So then I made an export using PHPMyAdmin, which bogged down the server and caused it to complain about too many connections. I was able to install that export locally, but it was missing nearly half the records. Further research suggested the table I was exporting from was corrupt and needed repair. That's never good, but at least MySQL offers an easy way to repair such tables. But even once repaired, the PHPMyAdmin exports were still missing half the records. Eventually I was able to do a mysqldump from the live server and when I imported that backup, I had all the records. But I still don't know why PHPMyAdmin's backup was so imperfect. It's good to know it can be imperfect; in the past I've relied on it without question, but I'll never do that again.
Once the reporting mess was behind me, it was late in the workday. I celebrated with a recreational 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse, though I didn't have any great project for the mental energy that resulted. Eventually I would have to use alcohol to land that plane, so (in accordance with my personal consumption rules), I bought myself the right to drink by painting a picture, in this case an old based on an old photo of the late great Sally from April, 2005. Here it is, along with a the double-reflection I like to make with my paintings:
This morning Gretchen had bought some flea foggers, so this evening, after I no longer had things I needed to do in the laboratory, I closed all the windows, evacuated all the cats (Julius, aka "Stripey" had been out on the laboratory deck), fired off a fogger in the middle of the room and immediately left. I went off to the greenhouse to continue with my normal pattern of time-wasting on the internet, making it all more enjoyable by smoking pot and drinking beer. It's common on Friday nights to just chat aimlessly with folks in the IT department over Slack, and that was one of the things I was doing in one of my many open Chrome tabs. I was also listening to music on Youtube, always beginning with the song Bath White by Fifty Foot Wave (a new project from Kristin Hersh of the Throwing Muses), which reminded me a little of Black Sabbath's "After Forever." From there, Youtube would play DJ and algorithmically come up with other songs, many of which I liked.
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