self-assembling and hackable Monday, November 21 2016
It was a cold, windy morning, and Gretchen had gotten up and headed out early, so it was my job to walk the dogs up and down the Farm Road (though I actually did a little loop at the end that involved walking through the edge of the abandoned go-cart track and down the slope very close to the north-facing exterior of the farmhouse). Here were the dogs as we approached the Farm Road's southernmost end:
I've been having leftover soup for breakfast since Saturday's dinner party, and this morning as I reached for the microwave near the end of a heating it up, I felt a tingling in my left thumb and forefinger. At first I wondered if they were being zapped by microwaves, but they stayed tingly for most of the rest of the day. There was some nerve issue happening, and I hoped it was related to having slept on it wrong last night (I had a vague memory of one of my hands being completely numb at some point in the night) but if you look up this set of symptoms online, the diagnoses range from carpal tunnel syndrome to nascent multiple sclerosis.
In my workplace, I continued my unpleasant dealings-by-proxy with a third-party service provider who was proving deeply inexpert at handling CSVs. Today I learned that they needed the CSVs to be in PC (not Unix or Macintosh) format, and that it was my job to make them that way or they couldn't deal with them at all.
Gretchen returned late this afternoon after having given at least one of her presentations at a school up near Albany. She'd visited the Honest Weight Co-op and had a bunch of goodies, including a vegan pumpkin pie that looked better than it tasted. Gretchen has already submitted her resignation for the school presentations job, something she'd done even before the indignity of showing up at 8am to a school that would be opening two hours late due to a mild dusting of snow.
Later I watched the final episode of Black Mirror's third season, the one entitled Hated in the Nation, which explored the dangerous possibility of self-assembling (and, it turns out, hackable) artificial bees. The bees were invented as a way to pollinate crops after the near-extinction of actual bees, though of course the government decided that swarms of flying cameras networked to each other could have other uses as well. The episode seemed over-long and conceptually weak, at least by the high standards set by previous episodes. But it was still great television. Black Mirror is depressing and anxiety-inducing, but it's helped put thoughts in my head that are different from the much more real and anxiety-producing ones coming out of the Trump transition. And it's also helped me process the insane (and deeply stupid) times we now find outselves in. I don't know what I'm going to do to occupy my spare mental energy in the coming months.
