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deferred commands
Sunday, August 3 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today was even warmer than yesterday, though Gretchen was still dealing with the Rochester house, remotely communicating with the tenant while she showed it to various promising prospects. When she got to a lull in the activity, she could finally go down to the lake for awhile.
Meanwhile, jacked up on a rare Sunday 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine, I was trying to fix a bug in ESP8266 Remote's new instant command system. The problem came when I issued a reboot command, because it would cause the ESP8266 to immediately reboot without ever acknowledging receipt of the command. So when it would come back up, the backend, thinking the command was never received, would issue it again. This would trap the ESP8266 in a reboot loop. The solution was to implement a system where the execution of some commands could be deferred until after they were acknowledged. This completely fixed the problem, though along the way I had to learn more about how exactly cstr pointers work within functions, something I never imagined having to know until I saw some deeply strange behavior.
Again I celebrated my success by heading down to the lake with a beer. I also brought the Ryobi battery-powered pole saw so I could trim away some red maple limbs that, to Gretchen's discomfort, start blocking sun on the dock at around 3:00pm. To get up high enough in that tree to be able to reach the target limb even with a pole saw, I had to use the 20 foot ladder that was still down there from setting up the pulley system for winterizing the dock. It needed to reach about six inches higher than it was reaching, so I had to set it atop concrete blocks, which made me nervous. So I leveled those blocks as best I could with rocks and then buttressed them with additional concrete blocks. I then tied the top of the ladder to the branch it was leaned against to make it more stable. This worked for awhile, although it slipped a few times while I was wielding the pole saw, which was terrifying. Because of my angle of attack, I couldn't easily cut through the target branch; all I managed to do was weaken it a somewhat before the battery was exhausted.
At that point I climbed on the inner tube and cracked open my beer for a nice relaxing float.
Later after I returned to the cabin, I did the usual Sunday afternoon cleaning ritual on my own while Gretchen continued reading out on the deck. Then she talked to Dina in Tel Aviv for a time while I went on a mugwort-destroying jihad out in front of the cabin. Mugwort is apparently full of unpleasant chemicals, so nothing eats it, and it can easily form a monoculture unless something is done. So I selectively attack it, snipping it off with clippers and sometimes laying the stalks along the cabin's foundation wall.
I was the one who drove us back to Hurley, this time via the Middleburgh route. I made good time, and it took almost exactly two hours. Along the way, Gretchen and I selected the best tenant for our Rochester house, a couple from Dallas who are moving to Rochester.She's pregnant yoga instructor and he's a software developer working for oil companies, and they seem to have the necessary income (which is $2700/month). Gretchen called them from the road and they seemed okay, although we glared at each other when he mentioned "God" at one point.
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