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inspection passed in Woodstock
Wednesday, December 5 2018
Ramona came with me to work today and was pretty well behaved in the office, if only because there were no other dogs there. On two of the times I took Ramona out for a walk back behind the building, she found things to roll in. On that first time, I couldn't see any evidence that she'd successfully gotten anything on her fur. But on the second time, she rolled in what looked like freshly-shat diarrhea from a carnivore roughly the size of a cat. I used leaves to brush off what I could, but that was insufficient for bringing her back into the office. So I took her up to the men's room so I could use soap (antibacterial, naturally, is there any other kind in workplace bathrooms?) and hot water. One of my colleagues happened to be there pissing at the time, and it must've been a bit of a shock for an energetic 70 pound dog to come bounding in.
The day played out similarly to how it had yesterday, with more gratifying success with my Electron App and another late-afternoon of surprisingly pleasant kratom tea. I should mention that I've been generally dissatisfied by my current batch of kratom powder, and until yesterday had found tea made with it mildly dysphoric if anything at all. But it's possible that kratom is just an amplifier of existing mood, and I haven't been as pleased with myself as much in recent months as I had been in months previous and in recent days.
I should mention that I'd been using the Atom text editor for most of my work in this new workplace, mostly because it had worked so well with recent Javascript frameworks when I was trying to land a job this summer. But today I was forced to abandon it due to terrible typing latency (that is, there was an annoying lag, sometimes measuring seconds in length, between typing something and seeing it appear on the screen). Of course, I knew what the problem was: Atom is designed to be hackable, and so was written mostly in Javascript as an Electron app (similar to the one I am currently working on). And as I've said before, Electron is a bloated software stack that encapsulates a modern web browser and a web server as a unit, with far more going on than the needs of any specific application requires. This is why Atom is nearly two gigabytes in size, whereas a leaner text editor like Sublime Text purpose-written in C++ occupies less than 24 megabytes. I actually remember running across problems with Atom in the past, but evidently this hadn't been a problem on a computer like Woodchuck, with its 32 gigabytes of RAM. Bunny, my workplace computer, only has 8 gigabytes, and evidently that wasn't enough, at least not with all the windows I tend to leave open. But it's just as well; Sublime Text is a great text editor, and Atom wasn't giving me any functionality that Sublime can't provide with a much smaller footprint. There is an æsthetic side to the way I use computers that makes me abhor bloat, waste, and misue of resources. This is why I prefer, say Foobar2000 to iTunes and anything to Microsoft Word.
On the drive home, there was some sort of chaos involving flashing police cars and fire trucks bringing traffic to a complete halt on US 209 between 9W and Enterprise. This forced me to take the 9W exit and then back out to US 209 via Boices Lane and Enterprise. It's a wonder there aren't more accidents in the construction area around the bridge replacement, since people are often a bad combination of impatient and inconsiderate as they drive through there.
Back at the house, I got the excellent (and somewhat surprising) news from Gretchen that she had taken the Subaru to a garage for inspection and it had somehow managed to pass. I'd expected it to fail for lots of reason: lingering exhaust leaks from an ill-fitting exhaust pipe replacement, issues with the brakes (when they'd gone bad, I'd only replaced the front ones), and, finally, the lingering imperfections of my oxygen sensor hack. The latest on that was that I'd gotten P0420 error with a 4 microfarad capacitor in a place where I knew a 4.7 microfarad threw a P0139 error. At the ~20 tolerances of electrolytic capacitors, there's no predictable difference between 4.0 and 4.7 microfarads, yet somehow I'd had to split the difference. In the end, I'd gone with another (different) 4.7 microfarad capacitor, hoping its actual value was a bit less (but not as little as 4 microfarads), and this had managed to keep the Subaru from throwing an error for over 100 miles, which is good enough, at least with regard to error code problems, to pass an inspection. Here I am 50 years old and in a household worth over a million dollars, and I'm still driving the kinds of cars one drives as a teenager. Such frugality is a hard habit to break, and that makes me happy.
Final values of my now-inspection-passing oxygen sensor hack.
I was a little confused by how Gretchen had both managed to work her Wednesday shift at the Woodstock bookstore and get the Subaru inspected. But it turned out that she'd taken it to Woodstock Automotive, that mysterious gas station that doesn't actually sell gas and that, ever since 9Eleven, has flown an increasingly-tattered American flag in honor of some particular woman who had died in the tragic events of that day. (That flag has since been replaced at least once.) The folks at Woodstock Automotive only found one major issue with the Subaru: apparently the passenger-side bottom ball joint (which is part of the attachment system for the passenger-side wheel) is in bad shape and needs to be replaced "or the wheel could come off." (I looked at it later tonight and couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it beyond the usual light layer of corrosion, though I know the control arm (which holds the ball joint) had failed on our old Subaru while our friend Robert had been house-sitting for us.)
Gretchen had ended her communication by saying she would be coming home soon and that she was hungry. So I quickly assembled a pot of brown rice and a pan of bean glurb.
This evening before going to bed, I took a semi-recreational ambien. This time, so as to keep Gretchen from worrying about my druggy ways, I made sure I was done watching YouTube clips on my laptop before I passed out.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181205 feedback
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