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Stayed up late and got up early with no coffee as I’m trying to be as tired as possible for my LASIK this afternoon 👀

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I totally want to fall asleep when I get home and not deal with being awake as my eyes burn as they recover from the femtosecond laser. I’m not driving there, and as long as I don’t fall asleep in the doctor’s office I should be good. Rather just get home, collapse into bed with my eye shields on and just sleep it off until morning.

Honestly, despite all the scare people have around it, 👓 it really is a fairly painless and quick procedure, like 15 minutes and then just some burning eyes for a night or two, and maybe a bit of redness or dry eyes for a bit longer.

This morning, going to go for a bike ride 🚲 maybe out to Voorheeesville then back down to Elsmere to pick up my drugs ⚕️, then come home and have lunch, shower and catch the 12:45 PM bus over to Price Chopper and walk over to TLC get some TLC done to my eye balls with the the fermosecond laser. It will be nice not to ever wear contacts or glasses again, I mean I don’t mind cheap cheater reading glasses but I don’t want to have to deal with not being able to up at camp or dealing with irrated eyes as I struggle with my contacts lens. 👀 I should enjoy my day off. Maybe I won’t go for bike ride tomorrow, but I might go for a walk around the neighborhood or for a drive somewhere tomorrow. Maybe just Five Rivers or it might be nice to sit down by the river at Henry Hudson Park and read. 📚 Last Nature Bus of the year up to Thacher Park tomorrow. Maybe that’s what I could do. Don’t have to bring my bike necessarily, I could walk over to Cherry Ave and get the bus there.

I looked at the restrictions and they are a lot less strict then I thought, indeed I may very well be able to head up north for the autumn vacation next Friday. 🏕️ I have to keep my eyes dry for one week, and no extreme sports for a month but I wasn’t planning on any jet skiing or paragliding on vacation. Bike 🚲 riding should be okay, though I should wear good eye protection for the few few weeks. I might ride back in on Tuesday to work, assuming I get a good bill of health for my eyes on Monday follow up visit. I’ll drive in on Monday. 🍏 Still planning on apple picking with dad on Sunday.

I am thinking head out to the Speculator area for next weekend, 🏕️ then Horseshoe Pond for a few days, followed by the St. Regis Canoe Area to paddle and ride the Adirondack Rail Trail. If I do three nights in each of those locations, that takes me from Friday through Columbus Day. 🍁 See what the weathers like and how shitty my truck rides.

Bear Rocks View

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My camera was almost dead when I reached Bear Rocks at the end of the day, but it still has some beautiful views of the valley below.

Friday October 11, 2019 — Notes

Afternoon coffee and plans to stay up late

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☕️While I am not planning on pulling an all-nighter tonight, I think I want to stay up late and get up early tomorrow before my LASIK procedure mid-day. I’ll set my alarm for 5 AM. Seems silly, but I want to be pretty darn tired so that I pretty much can sleep it off that afternoon through evening into morning. Skipping coffee in the morning. I am thinking it will be like a bad hang-over, but then come Saturday things will be better.

xargs is awesome tool for running parallel processes

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xargs is a powerful but simple command for parallel processing. You should use it more.

#!/bin/bash

# Call dmv command on each district
# in Manhattan, processing 3 districts
# at a time

seq 65 76 | xargs -nl -P3 -I{} dmv -a {}

# Call the dmv command on selected districts
# in the Bronx, running 3 at a time
echo "77 83 85 86 87" | xargs -nl -P3 -I{} -d' ' dmv -a {}

I used to do such things with loops and job control, which is fine, but xargs is much more compact and less error prone. I used to think of xargs as a program that was used primarily for taking a multi-line text file and appending it to a command but it’s actually very useful with the -P parallel flag. Moreover, modern computers are very good at handling multiple threads at once — and actually quite slow when they don’t have threads to work with because processor clock speeds haven’t increased in decades now due the clock speed barrier.

I also use xargs now a lot with wget2 when downloading LIDAR with the parrallel flag, as you can usually download multiple files quicker then one at a time. I used to do that with multiple loops and job control, but that’s a bad way to do it as it causes race conditions and other problems with the complexity.

echo "https://gisdata.ny.gov/elevation/DEM/USGS_Schoharie2014/18TWN580400.img https://gisdata.ny.gov/elevation/DEM/USGS_Schoharie2014/18TWN595400.img https://gisdata.ny.gov/elevation/DEM/USGS_Schoharie2014/18TWN610400.img https://gisdata.ny.gov/elevation/DEM/USGS_Schoharie2014/18TWN580385.img https://gisdata.ny.gov/elevation/DEM/USGS_Schoharie2014/18TWN595385.img https://gisdata.ny.gov/elevation/DEM/USGS_Schoharie2014/18TWN610385.img" | xargs -I {} -d ' '  -P 3 wget2 -c {}

As a bonus, here’s the R script I use to create that output to download those LIDAR tiles.

library(tidyverse)
library(sf)
library(terra)
library(arcpullr)
library(mapedit)

rm(list = ls())
shape_to_download <-
  mapedit::drawFeatures() %>%
  .[1] %>% st_transform(4326)

lidar.url <- tibble()

for (i in seq(2, 14)) {
  if (nrow(lidar.url) == 0)
    lidar.url <- get_layer_by_poly(
      str_c(
        'https://elevation.its.ny.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Dem_Indexes/MapServer/',
        i
      ),
      shape_to_download,
      sp_rel = 'intersects'
    )
}

lidar.url <- lidar.url %>% st_drop_geometry()

str_c('echo "',
      paste(lidar.url$DIRECT_DL, collapse = ' '),
      '" | xargs -I {} -d \' \'  -P 3 wget2 -c {}') -> out

cat(out)
clipr::write_clip(out)