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hot tub and Tesla
Tuesday, October 22 2019
I spent most of my workday trying to migrate the Angular frontend of a large Angular project from Angular 5.X to Angular 8.X. It was a task every bit as soul-crushing and self-evidently pointless as it sounds. I suppose the people designing the Angular framework have their reasons for the decision they make, but the upshot of this was that I spent a lot of time compiling (and that takes time) and then pasting resulting errors into Google to get answers. I've dealt with a lot of environments where the upgrade of one component broke things that then required upgrades. But when it comes to this sort of thing, Angular is next-level. Actually upgrading the app in place quickly proved impossible, so instead I built a brand new Hello-World Angular 8.0 project, replaced its /src directory with the app's, and then issued npm start to see what was broken. The answer was: a great deal. I then had to wade into code that I didn't write and didn't understand, changing references to things like HttpModule to new things like HttpClientModule. Normally I try to avoid such messy ad-hoc editing of code, but with Angular upgrades, there is no alternative.
Despite my concerns, throughout the day the list of errors generated by attempts to run the migrated code gradually shrank. though some errors proved particularly obdurate, especially those in the form Cannot find name 'require'. Do you need to install type definitions for node? Try `npm i @types/node` and then add `node` to the types field in your tsconfig. I did lots of research on this subject and tried all the recommended edits to tsconfig.json, but all those errors would survive the night.
When I arrived home this afternoon, I found some orange traffic cones near the entrance to the driveway. There was also a tiny Bobcat backhoe with a number of attachments, though the workday was over and they'd been abandoned for the night. The backhoe had cut a deep trench along the south side of Dug Hill Road, cutting off our driveway for the time being. To allow us access, two heavy steel plates had been dropped in place to serve as an eight-foot-wide bridge. Then trench was clearly to deal with a long-standing drainage issue, where water in the roadside ditch would pond at our driveway, often freezing into a treacherous slick extending all the way across the road. The Town of Hurley would spend considerable effort trying to deal with this ice, having workers chip away with shovels to re-establish some sort of drainage and dumping enormous amounts of road salt. The environmental cost of all that salt had me thinking occasionally of engineering my own fix, but there are only so many projects I can take on. This is all to say that, though I'm usually distraught to see heavy machines tearing up nearby landforms, in this case I can say that I was in full support. My only complaint was that the two steel plates providing a temporary bridge across the trench made one of insufficient width. It was possible to cross it if one crossed in a straight line, but that's not how we usually enter and depart our driveway. I could easily see Gretchen backing out in her usual semi-distracted manner and running off the side of the thing, which would immediately destroy whatever car she happened to be driving. As it was, I had to back up at least twice i the middle of Dug Hill Road to orient myself before I could feel confident I was crossing the bridge in a safe trajectory. Once I got into the house, I made sure to stress to Gretchen how careful we had to be when crossing that bridge. Hopefully it wouldn't be there for very long.
I managed to do some more work on my stone wall project before the next event of the evening: visiting Chris and Kirsti (the photogenic vegan Buddhists) at their place on Zena Road to check out their new hot tub. As it turned out, the hot tub wasn't the only big new expense. Since we'd been there last, they'd bought a four-wheel-drive Tesla. Much of our conversation in the hot tub was actually about Tesla as a lifestyle choice, including all the things you can do when your Tesla can be controlled by an app on your phone (Chris and Kirsti were particularly fond of the ability to pre-heat their car from a just-landed airplane.) There were other topics discussed in the hot tub as well, but they fall in the "what is said in the hot tub" category.
By now, a cold rain was falling, making it unpleasant to put much of my body above the water. But by keeping my body largely in the hot water, I was making myself ill. Eventually I'd had too much and clambered out, feeling a little weak on my feet. I did the bare-minimum of toweling myself off and then lay down on a couch. I had a Gretchen drive us home, and she made it across that narrow steel plate bridge like a champ.
Together we (mostly Gretchen, actually) quickly threw together an Indian meal built around mushrooms, potatoes, kale, and a yellow "simmer sauce," an Indian curry we ate with rice.
Meanwhile, the dogs had been out in the forest for at least six hours, but by the time we came back from the hot tub, they were safely snuggling in our bed.
My walk back from the secret bathroom past the electric meters in the back of my building.
Pigeons on the smokestack and antennas atop my building. Actual fumes come out of that chimney, but nothing like what it was designed to handle.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?191022 feedback
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