deathmtn

Ate lunch at 10:30. Killin' it today!

Objects removed from house today:

- Old homework (and the huge pile of papers on the guy’s desk is finally cleared)
- Toy piano
- Technically working but old and unnecessary roomba I picked up from the sidewalk a few months ago
- Old scooter box

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off, picked up early.
- Did about 1.5 hours on my newer contract.
- Cleaned the bathroom and put down some grip stripes. I had a surprisingly hard time deciding what their layout should be.
- Read some Piketty.
- Read some Blindsight.
- Started making my "Flooding" piece in Pure Data.
- Made dinner. Also, made some popcorn for the guy to eat while watching his earned Batmans. 25% of it was burned, but he didn't mind.
- Reviewed and adjusted some D&D stuff.

12-4-4-1. My…collar muscle? felt weird on that last one, so I stopped.

Sorry about not noticing recent comments! My comment alert system is extremely stupid.

Probably because of finite free development time, isso doesn't email via the local mail system like cron does. Instead, it uses smtp and asks you to put your password in plain text in a config file. The developer suggests you use a throwaway email.

So, I do just that with a Gmail account. However, Gmail considers this "unsecure access", so every time isso sends a notification to me about a comment via smtp, I don't get that message. Instead, I get a "critical security warning" from Google.

This is how I know someone has posted a comment.

The warning asks me to go in and verify that the SMTP access was actually OK. Until I do that, it passes on no further SMTP messages. Usually I do this, but sometimes I forget, then I don't get Critical Security Warnings telling me that someone's posted a comment.

I think the easiest way to get reliable notices is to write a job on the server than counts rows in the comment db, then uses just plain `mail` to let me know if the count has change.

- Did some logistical housekeeping.
- Had lunch with a friend. We ate outside; it was that nice out.
- Went to the Pure Data working group and started on homework 5. Got to the point at wihch I need to watch the lecture because I do not know why adding something to a signal before getting its cosine changes the sound.
- Picked up, dropped off.
- Went to the conference with the guy's teacher. Turns out he's doing great! Socially, he's better able to navigate the second grade waters than at the beginning of the year, and he's getting better at task initiation and time management, which we constantly struggle with at home. Apparently, other kids get his jokes, many of which elude me. He continues to be good at reading and math.
- After two weeks, I've passed my criminal background check and have been declared a non-crime individual by some online service. So, I was able to start my other contracting thing and did an hour of work on that.

I just posted this elsewhere and thought I'd post here for posterity (accidental pun) because it has the epilogue to something I wrote about here earlier:

I had an incident like this in which I did an intake screening over the phone so I could be accepted as a new patient. I happened to mention my RSI because it's part of my medical history, and the doctor tossed out advice (which I didn't ask for and had already heard).

Later, I got billed around $200 for it because I had "received treatment" (the RSI advice on the phone) that was not considered the "preventative care" that does not count toward my deductible.

So, I made several phone calls and got it resolved over the next week, talking to some people that weren't cooperative, and some that were. But I was stressed out about it because I was worried that this would hang over my head for months or I'd have to give up on a charge that was wrong. (And I was robocalled for months about owing that money, even after we resolved it. Thanks to your post just now, I realized they have stopped!)

36-minute run, 12 pull-ups. It was hot out!

- Took a surprisingly long time to write up what I'd learned about local vaccination numbers and about per-directory vim configuration.
- Watched some of lecture 6.
- The guy wants to keep his old homework from last year, so reluctantly, I collected it in a box and put it in the basement. There's less loose paper on his desk but a lot of stuff is still out there. Ideally, we'd get him to clear it up, but there's space for only so many battles.
- Looked into why my scraping service proof-of-concept wasn't working. It seems consumer sites can detect bots that aren't even hitting them all that much. Mine was going once per hour, using user agents, etc. that should have been more or less the same as a manual visitor would have. I'm guessing that it's that it hit at the same time every hour and from the same IP. I could vary the time, but getting a pool of IPs is expensive, either in effort or money. I'm going to have to pivot away from hitting sites that aggressively don't want to bot visits. But I'm not sure what is left after dropping that and what kind of market demand there is for that. Maybe sites that just don't want to have an API but don't mind programmatic access happening by other means?
- Wrote the D&D recap. I sadly spent a really long time looking for screenshots of Sub-Zero about to finish Scorpion and vice versa.
- I dreaded doing this, but now that our condo bank account has moved banks again, I tried logging in and…it actually worked! I can see money coming and going from our account, which I've been trying to get for half a year because the one person with access to the account previously never issued regular reports about the account.
- Emailed my mother-in-law back.
- Emailed two friends back.

A lot of today didn't go quite how I wanted, but it wasn't the worst!

12 pull-ups. Was planning to not work out today, but I felt weird about not doing anything on a Wednesday.

At the clinic at King Open we went to, 890 kids in the 5-11 age group got vaccinated that day, according to a pdf that Marc at Cambridge Day sent me. (Still trying to find out how I could have gotten it from the city site.) Assuming that there's a total of 5,236 kids total in that age group in Cambridge (given 576 being 11% of the kids, from this article), that means 17% of the 5-11 kids got their first shot at the clinic.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Got groceries.
- Wrote my public comment for the school committee.
- Signed up for climbing early enough to not sweat whether or not there were spots left!
- Got rid of a wall full of drawings from when the guy was 4 and before. Put up a pinboard someone was getting rid of and seeded it with a single old drawing. (The dark train one, which I still like.)
- Did some laundry.
- Got my hacked pd external to work! I modified `tabdump` to write the array to a text file named after the array. (It was indeed as easier to do this in C.) Then, I factored out the part of the patch that takes array snapshots and logs them into an official abstraction that takes a name so that I can hook many instances of these up to many parts of the patch and get all of these signals logged at a specific block. (I haven't tested the multi-instance part yet.) Another step toward clean, apples-to-apples intermediate signal comparisons between the pd and C++ versions.
- Chatted with someone that is actually working for a DAO (a workers' co-op with blockchain attached). He likes it so far, but is not clear on how much the workers actually own vs. how much the board of directors owns. We also talked about podcasting and about how much podcasting is podcasting into the void.
- Made dinner.
- Read my public comment for the school committee.

5x5 deadlifts.