Photo of Andy Arthur

Andy Arthur

October and already the leaves are fading away in the Adirondacks. 🍂 Most shocking to me is that we are less then a month away from November, which in many ways should be a sigh of relief with the craziness of work and with the deep blue skies and crisp days of that month.

I get it that they call it remote work for a reason 💻

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This was such a busy day from camp, I barely found time for lunch and to set up gear a bit. Now it’s getting dark so quickly but it’s a mild pleasant evening with the cricketa in the background humming. Cool enough to sit by the heater – I should start a fire but I’m in no rush as it gets darker and darker out.

It’s the weekend before Columbus Day Weekend. 🍁 My parents are off leap peeping, out in the woods working remote once again. The data jobs started before nine, I worked from the Westerlo library until I had to go pee and by the time I got Rennselaerville State Forest I sprayed a tree with poop 💩 and had to change my pants 👖 when I finally got to camp and wash up. I think that salad 🥗 I found in the fridge at the campaign committee on Thursday evening was kind of slimy. Or maybe it was slimy onions 🧅I chomped down. Or all the coffee ☕ with breakfast. I’m fine now, and despite what the internet advertisers think, I don’t have Chron’s disease or liver cancer ♋ my doctor checked me out last year. 🩺🩻

People think it’s all fun and games with the travel 🍀🛻 but it’s actually a lot of work to set up and take down camp 🏕️ plus all that packing and fuel ⛽. It’s not all that much money, 💰 bar the extra cost of gasoline, beer and weed. 🍺 Or propane. And I’m having a lot of fun when I’m not working which is less and less of each weekend. It’s fine, election day is in about thirty days and then I can deal 🤝 with all the stuff I’m supposed to be doing with my state job but are neglecting. I’m going to be in the office Monday as it’s going to rain ☔ and there is a list 📃 of things to do and review. Plus I need to get to the laundromat, I have so much dirty clothes 👕 and if I plan to be in the office four days next week I need to look halfway decent. And my whole apartment like usual needs a good scrub 🧼 but by the time I get home I’m much too tired 😴.

I’ve tried to be learning more about the rust programming language 💻 but to really master it, I just need to sit down and write code. ✍️ The best way to learn is to do. Do some cool things with data using Polars and Rust I tell myself would be a good way to learn. I mean I do many great things with R but it’s slow and I know it’s not a real programming language even if colleges 🎓 love to teach it these days. I know enough Qt from writing QGIS plug-ins I could certainly write apps in C++ or Python if I really wanted to. Or probably better yet in C with GTK+ or even Rust. I’ve studied enough C and C++ over the years with some Stack Overflow I could certainly build cool things if I knew what I wanted to build. Then again that’s true with so much of life.

Today was a weird day 🃏

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Maybe because I cast my vote for the rodeo clown. And maybe it was a mistake but the decision is done. It’s just one of millions. And I left my belt at home when I was getting dressed, not discovering it until I was home, so all day I felt like a prisoner, a sucidial patient, somehow just off — though these were nice new, tighter jeans that at least weren’t slipping off.

Am I fully comfortable with my voting choices 🗳, probably not but the decision has been made, my lot cast. Truth is I’m more alienated then anything else from all the politics, even if it’s how I make my money 💰, it’s what pays for the toys, the guns and cannabis — and some day in the not too distant future my off-grid cabin. 🏚I just hope whatever happens, the economy remains strong and we have good leadership for our nation, even though I know I’m pretty much powerless to change it. I can change myself, but I can’t decide who is going to be the next President. 🌍 I wish the politicians would do more about climate change and inequality in economy, but it seems all they do is cut ribbons on infrastructure projects and attend kids science fairs.

The belt thing just through my off today. 👨‍💼 It just felt so werid. Then I accidentally left my wallet in my bike box when I was in an hour long meeting. Which was fine but I was nervous the whole meeting not knowing where my wallet was, 👛 and my laptop charger is dying. I ordered another one. 🔌 It is what it is. My bike kickstand bolt came lose, but I found it on the road and just need to reassemble it. And tomorrow I’m planning on remote working and heading back out to the wilderness for a long weekend. 🏕 But I’ll probably be back in the office on Monday, as while I like remote work, I’ve come to realize my office needs more supervision. Things are happening and I’m not always finding out on the email or phone. Plus it’s going to rain on Monday. Columbus Day Weekend looks great though if I plan to go out to Madison County to ride trail at Charles Baker.

And it just a werid day in many ways. 🏇 Sometimes were super busy and other times were dead silent. Some of it was my fault, there was so many emails and so many data jobs to run the past few days, 🔢 that I would think I was all caught up but i missed an important email that needed to be run. When I had downtime though I’ve been reading up on the Rust programming langauge, which I think is the thing i want to learn next. That and POLARS data libraries. For some things, interpreted languages like Python and R are great, but the more heavy data stuff I do with R, the more I realize how slow and clunky it is. Surprisingly, I really like Rust, it doesn’t have a lot of boilerplate and it uses method chaining and function programming in ways that are so elegant. 🤓 I think it’s the future and while I’ve been mastering C for work, I think Rust is vastly superior in many ways. I know Java and C++ are very popular these days, but I’ve never been a real fan of classes.

Well, I should head home and get packed for heading out of town tomorrow morning before work. 💼 I don’t need a ton of things for camping locally through Sunday, but I do need to get some clothes and I might as well load some of the gear tonight so I can get an early start tomorrow and get camp set up before getting down to work tomorrow remotely from the wilderness. 🌲