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nostalgia for my earlier life as a cowboy electrician
Tuesday, January 30 2024
My old boss Alex and I have had trouble getting the third guy on our team (for the spec web app I've been building) to do his part. He's a lawyer, and he's supposed to tell us what the app is doing right and what it's doing wrong so that I can improve it and possibly make it into something we can sell (or the basis of a company that we can seel). Yesterday I finally told Alex that I don't know the guy so it feels weird being a hardass so can he please nudge the lawyer and get him to do stuff. And finally today the nudging worked and he tried to use the app. Of course, he immediately discovered that the user creation part of it was broken, so then I had to fix it. It turned out there was some mystery behavior associated with mysqli_multi_query that actually affected subsequent queries in impossible-to-debug ways, something I would've never been able to solve were it not for ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, I have a technical interview scheduled for Thursday for a job where I need to be competent in ReactJS, one of those annoying Javacript frameworks (technically it's a library) that tries to make frontend development more scalable (but which, in my opinion, makes code needlessly indirect and, at least in the case of ReactJS, jumbled). I built something in ReactJS once, but haven't thought about it in over five years. So I figured I should at least go through a tutorial to refresh my knowledge before a technical interview. But it was easy to find ways to procrastinate doing that. One of these was to watch a bunch of episodes of Holmes Inspection, a Canadian show featuring homebuyers who have been misled by their home inspections into buying houses with lots of problems. And then the problems are fixed, often with unnecessarily-massive gut rehabs set to galloping heavy metal guitar riffs. Along the way, we're expected to recoil in horror at trivial issues like mold and non-friable asbestos.
Of course, some of the problems really are pretty severe, and I was particularly struck by how bad the electrical wiring often was. Sometimes a square of drywall would be removed to reveal a bird's nest of wires all spliced together without any junction boxes. This had me feeling pretty good about my electrical skills (which memorably passed inspection without modification when I wired the upstairs bedroom and bathroom at the cabin). Unlike with say, software development, there isn't much to know to be a good electrician. Still, I was feeling a little nostalgic about some of my past electrical work. This had me, as an additional form of procrastination, opening up the three subpanels of our house's electrical system to see how I'd handled the issue of neutral and ground. Neutral and ground must be be interconnected in the main panel, but they're supposed to be kept separate in a subpanel. I wanted to see if I'd done this. It turned out that I had in the subpanel in the teevee room as well as the one out in the garage's shop area. The subpanel boxes I'd bought hadn't come with separate ground and neutral buses, so I'd had to install my own in both. But then, because of the way I was supplying power to the subpanel in the teevee room, I was forced to interconnect the ground and neutral there as well, since I didn't have enough wires to supply them separately. (I was using two 12/2 romex cables doubled up in parallel to provide 30 amps, something that intuitively makes sense but I am sure is not to code.) As for the third subpanel, it's in a closet in Gretchen's basement library and only contains 240 volt breakers for three separate mini-splits. These mini-splits do not use neutral (and don't even receive a neutral wire), so I'd evidently felt comfortable combining ground and neutral on the one bus in there. It's possible this isn't to code, since someone might some day want to put a 120v breaker in that box (though there is no room for one now). Overall, though, it appears as if I (even decades ago) knew where I could safely bend and break the rules to get what I wanted without burdening the future-me with excessive remediation should I ever need to bring things up to code.
Meanwhile Gretchen was having her first-ever good poetry class at the Coxsackie maximum-security prison. Though she is four or five classes into the unit, six of her students were brand new and only one (named Omar) had been there for previous classes.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240130 feedback
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