|
|
|
mix of toys in the box
Thursday, March 9 2017
This morning before work, I drove into town to get some provisions. Gretchen needed additional five inch sander disks for kitchen island resanding project she'd initiated and I needed some paint brushes for the laboratory floor repainting project. These things could be obtained from Herzog's, so while I was near the Uptown Hannaford (aka "Ghettoford") I also got some corn chips, mushrooms, bread, and a variety of beans. It was important especially to re-up on the beans, since we'd recently run out of dog food and had been forced to feed our dogs a slurry of beans and cat kibble (which they'd liked much more than their usual vegan dogfood).
While I was out, of course I also stopped by the Tibetan Center thrift store (even though it was well out of my way). I was disappointed (and also happy) to see both music keyboards had been taken. The only things for me, then, were an old Olympus D-540 3.2 megapixel digital camera with 3x optical zoom, some rubber door & window gaskets, and (most excitingly) a Vex Hexbug "robot" kit, complete with a motorized gear system (you know how much I love stuff like that) and a remote control. I got it all for a little over $7.
Back at the house, the camera took a conventional mini USB cable (which was a plus), though the memory cards it uses are of the xD variety and it has no internal memory. So, while it seems to work okay, it looks like I can't repurpose it as a highend webcam (which is one potential goal of buying old digital cameras for almost nothing). As for the robot kit, I was soon disappointed to discover that the remote control (based on a CC2510 MCU) didn't work when given power. Perhaps someone had put the required 9 volt battery in backwards (as I initially did) since there was no labeling at all of how it was supposed to go. Later I did some testing with a multimeter and found the CC2510 was only getting 1.7 volts from its on-board power regulator. By bypassing that and applying 3.5 volts to the correct places, the CC2510 booted up and seemed to work just fine. This would allow me to remotely control two different motors that can easily be attached to complicated Legoesque drive trains. There are lots of applications for such a gizmo. As always when I get interesting toy kits from the Tibetan Center thrift store, there was actually a mix of toys in the box, including a small functional set of LightStax (complete with battery base), an articulated Lego policeman, an articulated Spiderman, some random Lego pieces, and at least three American quarters.
Back at the house, Sylvia the Cat was having some kind of intestinal issue, because she kept leaving drips of hot brown excrement everywhere and occasionally throwing up bile. So Gretchen took her to the vet, expecting perhaps the worst. Sylvia is sixteen and a half years old and has lived here for twelve years (as of the 30th of March), and she looks like reanimated taxidermy. But it turned out that all she needed was some Pepcid AC (active ingredient famotidine) and she would be fine. She weighs six pounds, which was more than we expected. She's a small cat, and that's within the realm of normal. She's "not emaciated," at least according the vet.
In the remote workplace today, I made a series of ambitious improvements to my reporting system that were actually related to a needed task. The need was a for a system that could do a mail merge of the contents of a CSV with an existing letter template and data in the database using a combination of two different templating systems. Getting that all to work was a bit of brain-bender, since I was basing it on a system that did things in a different order and that had more straightforward access to PHP (the reporting system doesn't).
After I'd had a reasonably-conclusive phone meeting on the subject of what to do about foreign currencies, Gretchen and I drove up to Saugerties to meet our friends Jeff and Alana for dinner at Rock Da Casbah, our favorite Saugerties restaurant. It was a convenient dinner date for them, because it was within walking distance of their house. Strangely, though, this was only the second time they'd dined there. They'd been there once before and found it weird and unsatisfactory. They needed Gretchen to crack the code of the place for them and show them that the key to a great meal at Rock Da Casbah is the Hey Jude pasta dish, the only thing we order there. Today, though, Gretchen noted the presence of a new vegan item on the menu: a veggie burger with fries, and it looked really good. So we split one of those and an order of the Hey Jude. Don't get me wrong; that burger was good, and I was craving fries. But next time I'll be getting the Hey Jude.
The tail end of my workday was happening, so I was still engaged with Slack in case something came up. This got us to talking about workplace communication and to what extent we interact with it over a weekend. Jeff says weekend emails don't bother him in the least, because he knows he can deal with them on Monday. Gretchen, by contrast, hates things hanging over her and will always deal with such emails immediately. For my part, I said I didn't much care one way or the other, adding that I felt that if an email arrives on the weekend, I can also pretend I never got it. Alana works at a small non-profit radio station and particularly hates weekend workplace phonecalls (who wouldn't?), particularly when there has been some phone tag about a mystery subject that turns out to be "ideas for the next fund drive."
We got to talking about the difference between what we personally perceive and the nature of what we see, and Jeff said that he jokingly imagines Alana seeing nothing but sparkling horses when she looks at things. To this I said that even if this were true, the details of such sparkling horses would change depending on what Alana was looking at, and so over time her brain would come to "see" things exactly as everyone else does. This is how our brains work, and it's also how self-learning Bayesian systems such as Google's search engine and driverless cars work. I said that, for similar reasons, I'm largely unaware of the rims on my glasses. Jeff and then launched into the tales of their respective experience with progressive lenses which they both wear. They said that it was a challenge at first and gave them headaches, though eventually they adjusted and now they're very happy with them. This made me think maybe I should give my lenses another try; as I told the assembled tonight, "I haven't done the work." I'd given up on them after only a couple days.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170309 feedback
previous | next |
