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").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   something of a mechanism whisperer
Thursday, August 15 2019
I'm a knowledge worker, so, on some level, I never really stop working. Last night, for example, as I lay in two different places trying to get to sleep, I was coming up with a testing protocol for a tough import bug I'd been unable to crack last night. The protocol I came up with was to just import a subset of the files of what would otherwise be a massive multi-file import. This would speed up the process, eliminating much of the waiting around. Then I would look for entities that hadn't successfully imported and log their parameters to tease out the nature of the problem. The second place where I tried to sleep was the living room couch, but the mosquitoes down there forced me to cover myself completely with a blanket, leaving just a hole for me to breathe through. Even with this arrangement, I could hear mosquitoes coming in and then landing on the blanket. This made it hard to get to sleep. And when I did finally fall asleep, I awoke some indeterminate amount of time later to the whine of mosquito wings as one of those bastards landed on the blanket covering my ear.
I made it to work unusually early, not much after 7:00am and immediately set to work executing the plan I'd developed. Interestingly, I discovered that I was managing to import more records using a subset of the import files. This suggested that later files were causing earlier data to somehow be overwritten. Not long after that, I cracked the problem: a data object whose properties should have been concatenating those of subsequent versions of itself was instead being replaced. Once discovered, this was an easy bug to fix.
My bad sleep last night gnawed at the edges of my consciousness for the rest of the workday, but once I'd had that bug fixed, I felt justified in relaxing. By the time lunch came around, I felt justified in giving myself my weekly restaurant lunch indulgence, this time a burrito at Bubby's.
Returning to the office, there was a woman out in the hallway who asked me for a favor. Her key, she said, was stuck in the keyhole of the door to a mystery room I'd only occasionally gotten a glimpse into. She wondered if maybe I could get it out. So I grabbed the key gently and lightly rocked it back and forth, giving the mechanism around it a chance to relax. Then I gave a light tug and it came out easily. The whole process took less than two seconds. She was amazed, but I wasn't. I am, you see, something of a mechanism whisperer.

When I got home after work, Gretchen suggested we go swim in the pool at the end of the Farm Road, so I said sure. She's swum in that pool many times already this summer. though this was the first time for me. The water was a bit colder than I would've preferred, and I probably would've been happier not getting in. I brought a bag in case I saw any chanterelles along the way, but there were none.

This evening, Gretchen had arranged to meet up with Jeff and Alana at Puttin Plus for a rousing round of miniature golf. something none of us had done in something like fifteen years. Puttin Plus is on the north fringe of Saugerties, surrounded by something of a wetland that, when we arrived, was full of real live canada geese. The place has the vibe of a carnival midway, though with much less to do. Disappointingly, it's an alcohol-free zone, catering to teens and blue collar adults who have apparently grown sick of their Xboxes. Much like the Ghettoford Hannaford in Uptown Kingston, there's a bit of a freakshow quality to the people it attracts. Much of the Puttin Plus is dedicated to a "go-kart" track, and that looked really fun, but we, of course, were there to bonk balls on tiny courses of astroturf running among tiny ponds, numerous plastic canada geese, and a statue of a crowned frog holding court on a hill labeled "Frogwarts." The woman who took our money and handed us our clubs had a warm grandmotherly demeanor, and it didn't take much to get her geeking out about the nuances of miniature golf, conclusively proving that every pursuit, no matter how trivial, has a rabbit hole one can go down.

Even without alcohol, put put golf is surprisingly fun, even when it is played as carelessly as I played it. Many of the strokes I took at my ball were of a half-hearted nature, often single-handed. Sometimes I hit the ball with excessive force just to see it bounce around. So it should come as little surprise that I scored the worst of the four of us (Jeff scored the best). As we played, we told Jeff and Alana about our recent Baltic trip, while their big story was about a house they are planning to buy off Sawkill Road somewhere in Kingston Township (not to be confused with the City of Kingston).
Eventually the mosquitoes drove us away from Puttin Plus, and we regrouped on the front porch of the duplex that Jeff and Alana share near downtown Saugerties, The weather was perfect, with temperatures in the low 70s and a strong breeze blowing from the southwest. Topics discussed included my risk aversion, but only in the face of real dangers.


Charles (foreground) with Celeste this afternoon.


Neville near the pool at the end of the Farm Road this afternoon.


Gretchen and Jeff at Puttin Plus this evening.


There was a crazy moon tonight at Puttin Plus.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190815

feedback
previous | next