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blizzard outside the thrift store
Wednesday, December 10 2025
Gretchen took Neville with her to work today, so I brought Charlotte with me early this afternoon when I drove the Chevy Bolt to VanKleeck's tire for an inspection, a tire rotation, and a replacement for a tire pressure sensor (due to where they are inside the tire, these are battery-powered, communicate via radio, and last about ten years). Charlotte was extremely nervous about being in VanKleeck's, but one of the staff offered her some little non-vegan treats, which didn't interest her at all. It was only later after she'd laid down on the floor (which is carpeted) did she calm down enough to eat them. I'd brought my Chromebook, but all I really did with it was play Spelling Bee. Then it turned out that the front tires of the Bolt were too worn for it to pass inspection and there were no new tires in stock.
On the drive back home, I decided to swing by the Tibetan Center thrift store, which I hadn't been to in many months. The last time I'd gone there, they'd just moved into a building next door and didn't have all the sprawling boxes of electronic detritus that attracts me. So I hadn't been back. But when I returned today, that organic chaos had reasserted itself, and there were more chaotic boxes to paw through than I felt like spending the time pawing. I quickly selected three simple wine glasses to replace some recent breakage ($1 each), two electronic hose valves (I'm always thinking of ideas for those; they were maybe $2 each) and a little ukelele strung with nylon strings (it's a very portable stringed instrument which might be good for the cabin; it was $5).
When I stepped back outside to get to the car, a blizzard had started and there were already visible patches of opaque snow on the ground. I knew I had to hurry if I wanted to make it up Dug Hill Road. Sure enough, I lost traction on the steep slope just below our downhill neighbor's driveway (the first driveway as you're leaving land belonging to Catskill State Park). Fortunately, though, for some reason the tires managed to melt their way through the snow every time I stopped, and this gave them enough purchase on the asphalt to launch me a little further up the slope. I also found some patches of bare asphalt to aim for, and in so doing I just barely managed to drive the car back home.
The snowfall continued until about 5:00pm. Gretchen left work early and drove very slowly despite being in the Forester. It was good she did, because when she went to make the turn into our driveway, the Forester continued in a straight line. Since she was going so slowly, this didn't really matter, and she was able to back up and try again.
Meanwhile I'd made another of my low-effort chilis. We still had leftover spaghetti, and when Gretchen opted to put that in her chili, I decided to try it too. It wasn't a great combination, but it wasn't horrible either. We watched Jeopardy! and the final episode of the second season of A Man on the Inside.
Meanwhile, I'd solved all my pending I2C slave issues and turned my attention to a long-running flaw with the ESP8266 code: most of the time it refuses to respond to commands sent via serial. (This system works great, though, when I send commands over WiFi using a web-based tool.) I would like for it to respond reliably to serial commands, especially when I am trying to locally debug some issue. Unlike the tool for sending commands via WiFi, there is no latency with the serial commands, and it behaves a lot like a Unix shell or the Python REPL (though it's nowhere near Turing-complete). I spent hours narrowing down where the issues with serial reliability were coming from, adding new configurations along the way to allow me to turn on and off various components of the polling system (how the ESP8266 repeatedly communicates with a web server). Eventually I found the cause of the reliability issue was in a function called setLocalHardwareToServerStateFromNonJson(). If I made it return immediately, the serial communications stayed reliable. If I didn't, they died after a couple backend polls.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251210 feedback
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