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horsefly season is not quite over
Tuesday, July 16 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
A powerful storm blew through last night bringing some much-needed rain and strong winds. This morning Gretchen found that umbrella that had been above the table out on the east deck was now down on the ground below with a couple rail-mounted planters that had fallen onto it. It would take a very strong wind (with powerful updrafts) to dislodge one of those planters, since they sit on the deck rail in a deep slot. I managed to clean up the mess and even get the fallen plants back into their pots.
Despite the rain, the brown patch of dormant grass in the lawn was dry to lie on, which I saw Neville doing and decided to join him. As I lay there looking up at the pine boughs and the sun, I heard the first dog day cicadas of summer. It's possible they'd been calling earlier, but this was the first time I'd noticed them.
Don called at some point late this morning and mostly wanted to talk about the attempted assassination attempt on Donald Trump. He'd tracked down all kinds of information about the killer, about whom all I knew was that he was a gun nut and registered Republican. Don expressed surprise that the programming he'd been watching on television hadn't been interrupted with the news of the assassination attempt. Evidently television these days is so automated that there isn't any system allowing for a human to interrupt a broadcast. But it wouldn't be impossible to have an artificial intelligence break in to recite news stories when some threshold of importance is exceeded.
This afternoon, I felt the need to get a automotive bike rack, and I was aware of seeing one at the Tibetan Center thrift store. Gretchen was down in her basement screened-in porch when I was about to leave, and when I told her I was going into town, she gave me a list of groceries (frozen fruit, two different kinds of non-dairy milk, and marinara sauce) that we needed. This caused me to have to drive out to the Hurley Ridge Hannaford. There was indeed a Thule-branded automotive bike rack at the thrift store, and Rob sold it to me for less than $9.
I made great progress on the reporting component of my ESP8266 Remote Control system. This is similar to several such reporting systems I've built or extended, starting with the Mercy For Animals contact database back in 2016 (which, due to overly paranoid security concerns, started out as a system where new reports had to be uploaded as a pair of files). Such systems have two main components: a JSON string describing a form for parameters and perhaps other things and a parameterized string of SQL that the values of those parameters can be substituted into. My systems always allow for new reports to be created quickly from a web form, something that is easy if you understand both JSON and SQL. I'd already gotten the SQL part working for simple non-parameterized reports. But I needed more flexibility to fully explore some mysterious values found in the main data packet that my SolArk Copilot parses. So today I added both the parameterized form functionality and the saving and retrieving of old report runs via a report log. The report log is especially handy for re-running or otherwise experimenting with the parameters of reports, since it allows a report to be re-run with the same parameters from some past run. And it allows you to tweak one or two parameters in the process for zeroing in on some particular data issue. For now my reports only return tables of data displayed on a web page, though the first system like this that I worked with only produced .CSV files, which are not conducive to much "what if" experimentation.
This evening Gretchen made an Asian noodle dish with lots of various greens cooked into it, which we ate while watching a somewhat-dated Jeopardy! episode where an archivist from Indiana continued her more-than-ten-day streak of wins.
At around sunset, Gretchen wanted us to go to Georges' pool at the end of the Farm Road for a swim, which we did. There were a few horse flies trying to make us miserable, but they were kept in check somewhat by an impressive airforce of post-sunset dragonflies. Our neighbor A and her kid and dog had stopped by briefly earlier today on their way back from that same pool and A had declared "horsefly season seems to be over," but evidently she spoke too soon.
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