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even more remote control
Wednesday, December 25 2024
This morning I started up a fire and Gretchen and I did our usual Christmas morning gift exchange ritual. She'd stuffed a pair of her biggest socks (none of mine were big enough) with lots of little gifts, including various candies, nuts (especially Brazil nuts), canvases, brush cleaner (which she often gets me, but I never use), and a little multitool specifically for mushroom gathering. There was also a 200 mL flask of Hennessy cognac. I'd put all of Gretchen's gifts in a red cloth shopping bag, and these consisted of the two paintings I'd recently done of Charlotte, two different herbal teas, a bag of decaf coffee beans, and a Vitamix-branded immersion blender that Gretchen had told me she wanted (she'd worn out her old KitchenAid-branded one).
After spending much time down in the living room playing collaborative Spelling Bee and reading about various ESP8266-based projects on HackADay.com, I went up to the laboratory and consulted with ChatGPT on forms of sleep on the ESP8266 that are deep enough to save power but not so deep that variable values and GPIO states are lost. This allowed me to build a new feature into my ESP8266 Remote system: a means to make it do a light sleep for some number of seconds between polls. This would allow me to save power on devices that are acting as remote controllers, as they wouldn't be turning off all the devices they control during the time they spend sleeping, since that sleep would not be deep enough to change the state of the GPIO pins.
Gretchen and I began our celebration of Jewish Christmas a little early so we'd be sure to get a table at the Chinese restaurant we'd be going to, which (again this year) was Kingston Wok. There weren't many vehicles on the road or parked at businesses on Christmas night, but there was a cluster of vehicles parked near Kingston Wok, mostly other celebrants of Jewish Christmas. The otherwise empty parking lot showcased how ugly that particularly shopping center is, the one bounded by Big Lots and Staples. I told Gretchen how, back before I was vegan, I would occasionally get pizza at the pizza place just east of Kingston Wok and also buy booze at the liquor store just to its west. But now I never have any reason to shop there (when was the last time I needed to go into a Staples or Dollar Tree?), so now the only business I patronize there is Kingston Wok, and then only on Christmas. (The pizza place doesn't even exist any more.)
We easily got a seat at Kingston Wok because we'd beaten the 6:00pm rush. I ordered a large warm sake and a shitake-avocado sushi roll (as their menu is pan-East-Asian) and Gretchen ordered three main courses, one being off the "revolution diet" menu. That menu features food cooked without oil or corn meal, which has scared us away in the past. But this time we went for it, and it ended up being pretty good owing to a thick dark sauce that it is served with.
There hadn't been good choices for a movie to watch tonight. Gretchen had narrowed it down to a cult horror movie from the 1970s called Black Christmas and The Fire Inside, a biopic about a women's boxer from Flint, Michigan. I'm not into sports movies, particularly those about boxing, so initially the plan had been to see Black Christmas. But the trailer looked so bad (according to Gretchen) that I was willing to give Fire Inside a chance instead. Fortunately, it was nearby, at the mostly-abandoned Hudson Valley Mall. As always, Gretchen had sprung for the good seats, though we both smuggled in our own drinks: peach schnapps for Gretchen and that flask of Hennessy for me. Only about four other people showed up to the theatre to see The Fire Inside, and I think they were all African-American, as apparently white people aren't particularly interested in black women boxers.
The Fire Inside ended up being much better than expected, mostly because it touched on a lot of things besides the sport of boxing. The heroine of our story is Claressa Shields, raised in a broken home in Flint, Michigan. Through sheer force of will, she manages to convince a boxing coach to take her under his wing and train her. Ultimately she wins the gold at the Olympics, but even after such a massive achievement, she's largely ignored by corporations seeking endorsement deals, as they apparently don't see much upside in associating with women who beat the hell out of each other. There's a scene of her carrying her infant cousin into a grocery store to buy diapers and coming across a store featuring Michæl Phelps on boxes of Wheaties (he'd won his gold metals at the same Olympics where she'd won hers).
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