Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   surveillance and bribes
Sunday, January 21 2018
Neville stayed with me today while Gretchen put in a shift at the bookstore in Woodstock and then did some sort of poetry thing at the colony café. It was another fairly warm day, with continued thaw of the snow and springlike excitement for the cats coming and going endlessly through the pet door.
In order to do some work up in the laboratory, I used a remote video monitor (purchased from the Tibetan Center thrift store this summer) to spy on Neville while he slept. The monitor also has an audio channel, and my telepresence allowed me to work without the usual level of distraction. (Otherwise I'd be leaping up and running down the stairs to check every time I heard a thump, even though it might just be the Janet the Cat chasing Celeste the Cat into a broom, which then falls over a knocks a dustpan to the floor.)
Once Ramona had joined Neville and they were more active, I tried buying their distraction by giving each a small rawhide bone. But that just brought out Neville's bad side, and he obsessively guarded it from all suspected takers even though nobody wanted to take it. He kept looking nastily at little Janet, who was just fascinated in the sounds he was making. And then, when Neville had eaten the last of it (I was there for this) he somehow convinced himself that Clarence the Cat had taken it, and charged at him snarling viciously. Clarence immediately escaped and all was fine. But then, hours later, I noticed that Clarence was hanging out in the dining room, not the recuperation fort (which has been his usual haunt since we built it). Clearly the trauma of Neville's behavior had caused him to lose confidence in safety of the fort.
I had my most productive period of time in the laboratory when I carried Neville up there and placed him on the laboratory ottoman, with a beanbag nearby for Ramona. The dogs immediately went to sleep, and I had peace and focus for hours.

[REDACTED]

I'd wanted to work some on Alex's keywording app, and I managed to get a little done. I migrated its backend from the mysql to the mysqli PHP API and wrote my first MySQL trigger, which I needed to prevent the creation of users with spaces (" ") for email addresses (the origin of which I cannot find in the code). But then when I wanted to do some real work, I realized my local copy of the keywording database was corrupt and I needed a fresh dump of the live database. But none of my web-based dumping tools worked and neither did the ssh root password I had on file.

For the third month of Neville's recuperation, he will be allowed to do what he wants indoors (including climbing stairs and sleeping on furniture) but he will not be allowed outdoors offleash. To make this regime workable, the easiest solution is to have a smart petdoor that normally lets cats come and go but, when it detects Neville, it locks up. The way to implement this would be with an RFID tag on Neville and an RFID reader on the door. When it detects Neville's tag, it fires a solenoid to block the movement of the pet door. Today I acquainted myself with the basics, hooking up a simple RDM6300 RFID reader to a serial port and watching the data come in when I waved an RFID tag over it. It worked, but the sensing range was far too short for this project. I need either a larger antenna or a more powerful reader. Fortunately one of the latter is supposedly in transit this way.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180121

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