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dogs love fries
Sunday, May 24 2015
Again I spent a little too much time indoors when the weather outside was gorgeous (and a bit warmer than yesterday). This was because I was all wrapped up in the web-based console for Amazon Web Services as I did what needed to be done to bring up a new copy of that server whose PHP I'd failed at upgrading. This time, starting from nothing, I managed to "build" a server with the latest version of all the software in the LAMP stack. I also sped the deployment of website code by using direct server-to-server SCP, which works a lot better than depending on my crappy DSL for two stages of a massive file transfer. (I'd sold myself on SCP several projects ago, but its speed and power still impresses me.)
Meanwhile Gretchen spent the day working at the bookstore in Woodstock. After that, she met up with Susan and David and went to the annual Bob Dylan tribute at the Bearsville Theatre, an event that would prove significantly less star-studded than it had been last year, when Gretchen successfully dragged me to it.
This evening Mark called me again from Ray and Nancy's place down in Old Hurley to invite me over. By that point I'd reached a stopping place in my server work, and I needed to blow off steam. On the drive down, I stopped at the Hurley Mountain Inn (there weren't many people there at 8:30 on a Memorial Day Eve) to buy an order of regular fries and an order of curly fries to go, mostly so I'd have something when I showed up. Mark and his family had just eaten, of course, but I hadn't. I found Mark out in the driveway tinkering with his car; some cop had pulled him over earlier today up near Tannersville because supposedly one of his brake lights had been out. But now it seemed to be working and he hadn't done anything to fix it.
I went into the house to put a few beers in the fridge and set down my french fries. I called out to Mark's wife Lynne and his "one and done" kid Vivienne just to say hello. They were on a couch at the time, perhaps lost in devices with LCD screens. They looked up, saw me, and then they both screamed. Evidently they'd expected to see Mark, and before their brains could search their internal databases for who I might be (and admittedly, my hair is always growing or being cut between the times they see me), their reptilian brains hit the panic button. It was all pretty funny after they came to their senses.
I wasn't actually down there very long. Mark and I hung out for awhile on the screened-in front porch with our dogs (Ramona and Eleanor and Mark's huge Rottweiler "Cheddar"). But Cheddar is overly-aggressive and was being a pain, so he had to be moved indoors. As I was eating my fries, I kept also giving them to Ramona and Eleanor, who really seemed to like them. Dogs have a mutation in the genome they inherited from wolves that allows them to digest starches.
In other news, I've been gradually working on the barometric array that will one day (hopefully) measure wind direction and speed. The other day I drilled a hole through the cover of an electrical junction box, allowing me to attach the array to it and then secure it with epoxy. Today I figured out a way to penetrate the box with five pins in a line on 0.1 inch centers, allowing me to attach a TTL-level serial cable (and an additional reset line), allowing me to both transmit data from the box and receive software updates in the future using the Arduino IDE.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150524 feedback
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