|
|
|
ugly Greek pie
Sunday, June 7 2020
It was a sunny, cool day, with temperatures reaching only into the mid-70s, a great day for ammosexuals. There were some at 9:00am this morning, but then they stopped. Gretchen had me walk the dogs, and the gunfire had started up by the time I returned, so as Gretchen was going to work this morning, she made a detour to the bus turnaround to leave some friendly notes under windshield wipers. These didn't seem to have any effect.
It seems I'd given up too soon on the light cube I'd been working on Friday and yesterday, because today I couldn't help myself and hooked its controller board up to a USB serial cable and used a program called stcgal to flash its STC i2c5a60s2 microcontroller with a .hex file I'd found online. stcgal is a command-line program written in Python, and it's actually easier to use that similar such tools for AVR (Arduino) microcontrollers. I didn't have to know anything about my controller other than what COM port it was attached to. With the command stcgal -p com43 -P auto 8X8X8.hex, the program figured out the baud rate and the flash size of the microcontroller and reflashed it in a few seconds. After that, the LEDs I'd experimentally attached to some of the light-cube rails started behaving as they should have when controlled by demo light-cube software, blinking on an off in a complex pattern over a number of minutes. If STC i2c5a60s2 microcontrollers are going to be this easy to work with, I might want to know something about them after all.
In the mid-afternoon, I decided to take an extravagant hot bath in the upstairs bathtub. Unfortunately, this happened during a period of intense gunfire from the bus turnaround, sounds that even submerging my ears beneath the water couldn't silence. The shooting had completely ended by the time I got out of the bath. I was so light-headed and woozy from the hot water that I lay down in the bed with the dogs and slept for some unknown period of time.
After she got home from the bookstore, Powerful and I helped Gretchen make a sort of Greek pie from a recipe she found in a cookbook. But she had to alter the ingredient balance to match what we had on hand, which was a lot of mushrooms and not many leafy vegetables. The pie turned out soupy and gross-looking ("probably like prison food," Gretchen suggested, to which Powerful agreed). But it tasted really good, and I ended up having thirds.
Later this evening, after Jeopardy! (sadly, Meggie lost the Teachers' Tournament), Gretchen, Powerful and I had a Zoom conference with Gretchen's family. As always, I was in the laboratory, and I didn't contribute much, though I found it exhausting (as Zoom conferences always are). One highlight was my brother-in-law admitting that Washington, the county he and his family live in in Arkansas, has become something of a Covid-19 hotspot, due mostly to chicken slaughterhouses. Another was my sister-in-law revealing that a peaceful black lives matter demonstration in nearby Bentonville was brutally suppressed with tear gas and rubber bullets, evidently to be in tune with the fascist sentiment coming these days from Washington, DC.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200607 feedback
previous | next |
