Notes

Good morning, Happy Inspection Day 🛻🔍️

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And tire rotation day. Not raining so hard, though I expect to get fairly wet after dropping off my truck. I guess it best to walk home rather then ride, I’m a bit on the fence. I think by the time I unload the bike from truck, ride back, I’d get wetter then just walking home. If necessary, I’ll I can catch a bus. I won’t melt in the rain.

Fingers crossed that things will go well with the inspection. 🤞 I know the lights, tires, and windshield wipers are good, so that’s two thirds of the inspection. I worry too much but if there is a deficiency in the suspension that needs to get fixed, it will get fixed. But it seems okay, things haven’t really gotten worse this year, and the truck is old at this point. Who knows, this might be the last inspection or maybe not. Just got to get through it.

Cornmeal pancakes this morning, 🥞 along with shredded oatmeal and a banana. 🍌 I also kneaded up some apple-cinnamon bread which is rising in the oven, and I will bake later this morning. Thinking about also making some red-lentil soup on this cold rainy December morning. 🍲 This should be a good day taking off, not having to worry about getting dressed up for work. Besides cooking, I want to do some reading 📚 and working on code. Albany County published their official results — in an Excel file — yeah! so I may want to make some maps up. 🗺 I might go down to the library when I pick up my truck this afternoon, as there is some data I would like to pull off the internet and don’t want to use too much mobile bandwidth.

Weekend still looks like rain, 🌧 at least come Sunday. Not going to camping this weekend, just because I want to do more then one night, and not in the rain. I might take off the second half of next work week, depending on the status of the database update at work. 💾 I was looking at a photo I took of my bike 🚵🤳 and realized that the lock wasn’t on the hanger fairly on, so that narrows down the places I could have lost the lock. It’s possible — maybe even likely — I took it off when I started riding due to the rough terrain and it falling off, and it’s somewhere in my apartment. I’ll go back looking on the bike trail on Saturday morning. 🔍 Once the snow and ice melt today, along with the much smaller area for search, 🔒 I think that will increase my chances of finding it. Without the key it’s not likely particularly valuable to most people to be stolen..

jq

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jq

jq is like sed for JSON data - you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text.

jq is written in portable C, and it has zero runtime dependencies. You can download a single binary, scp it to a far away machine of the same type, and expect it to work.

jq can mangle the data format that you have into the one that you want with very little effort, and the program to do so is often shorter and simpler than you'd expect.

This library is really handy and I was able to build it with ease on the server at work with ease and it was pre installed on my laptop. 

Lost my bike lock 🔒️

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That’s how I started out my day.

I went to leave for work and discovered my bike lock was missing from my bike. It must have fallen off when I was riding that rough, icy bike trail on Saturday and I did not notice it missing until I was leaving for work today. I rode out to Voorheesville in vain searching for it, and then I drove the entire route I road on Saturday, out past Five Rivers, over to Voorheesville, down through Font Grove and Surrey Mall to McCormick Drive. With no luck. It’s a $65 lock, so I was really hoping to find it. I’ll go out searching on Saturday morning, after the snow and ice is melted away by tomorrow’s heavy rain. First half of the weekend doesn’t look bad — Saturday fairly nice — but rain by Saturday evening.

I noticed the wheel kind of went into hard traction control when I turned hard getting onto the Slingerlands bypass, and it reinforced my fears that something on suspension like a worn out ball joint will need to be replaced to get it passed. Not that a bad thing for the shop to catch such a thing, I’d rather just get it fixed then break down in some hick town a long ways from home. But it’s more money, not that I should be getting that upset about money, as for the most part I’ve put nothing into the truck over the past year besides a light bulb, some windshield wiper blades, an oil filter and motor oil and fuel. And because of the rain, and that I needed to use the time up any rate, I’ll be sitting at home, just waiting on the news. The shop is always busy, so I don’t expect a call until 2 PM or later, even if I drop it off in the morning.

Got into the office around 10:30 AM this morning, but my nerves have been bent out of shape over my truck’s state inspection that will be happening tomorrow morning. It was so busy, but then again some of it is my frantic pace I like to work, carefully scripting and running database updates, with staff coming and going with lots of different issues that need to be addressed and calculated. Of course, alot of it it was not just the cups of coffee I drunk in the morning, but popping some of those extra strength caffine pills, which not only made me poop a lot but also super jittery. Commute home wasn’t bad, but I intentionally stayed off the freeway in favor of local streets through the South End, but I sure prefer to bike it home, or if not bus it home to driving.

So that was another day in the life …

Another year is coming to a close with few answers in my own mind 💭

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I so wish that I could have found all the answers after smoking a little bit of pot. Wouldn’t life be great if you could have all the answers after smoking some grass?

In many ways, it’s hard to believe another year is coming to a close so quickly. It’s been a year since I’ve been the Director of Data Services, a year since I moved out to the suburban office in Menands. Almost a year since I learned my landlord had sold my building, and I seriously started looking at buying land, and maybe a house or building something. In many ways, a very ordinary but very strange year at the same time, culminating with the election of Donald Trump, which because a gun control ad I saw the morning I got my absentee ballot, I decided to vote for probably out of pure spite and because I knew a protest vote didn’t make a difference in New York. He’s going to be such a buffoon over the next four years — I hope he doesn’t trash my investments and my future too much. But I really don’t have a plan, despite all the research and hope I’ve had.

This past year, I looked a lot of houses and land, at least online. I took some drives out into the country, explored some back roads, looked at what real estate agents were selling, what was available, and even toured a house next to my parents house that was for sale. It was a neat property, but it wasn’t right for me. I am actually quite off-put by the whole idea of owning a big house, with the costly energy bills and all the furniture and appliances you need to buy. Plus those big gas bills driving back and forth to work in the city, even if I got a more practical vehicle for driving to and form work, giving up the buses and my mountain bike as primary commuting vehicles. I might be a country boy at heart, but I sure like not having to drive to and from work every day, and deal with traffic. Even snaking through the back streets of Albany’s south end — staying late at work — commuting by my big jacked up ain’t fun.

I’ve in many ways wasted a perfectly good year, smoking pot, drinking beer and hanging out in the woods, doing the remote work thing whenever I could get away with it, like during the autumn months from camp. A year watching my parents grow older, a year watching the days disappear much too quickly, knowing the years aren’t that much more for them, enjoying the final minutes that seem to last forever, until they’re gone. I really should settle down, have a house, but the options are all bad. So many of the things that pass as housing are big, energy sucking vacuums and what is supposed to be nice, is just complete tackiness. Plus, 3/4 of the houses I see in the listings are located in ghetto. Or the suburbs.

Renting forever is a bad idea, it’s not sustainable. I was able to come to an agreement with my current landlord, for some extra money, to stay where I am, but the options are all so bad. I really don’t want to buy in New York, but every check sent to landlord, is money forever lost. Though I still need housing. Yet, the traditional 30-year mortgage would mean I would be paying $2,000 a month for housing through age 72 at this point. So I don’t know, but I still like the idea of building my own, in a place that reflects my values. I have assets I could do it if I want — I could leave any day — but I really like my job and I do good work. The title is amazing and I think I’m doing good work. It feels good to have a year under my belt as the Director of Data Services. You know, it’s now my operation, the buck stops at my desk. I have implemented some changes to improve agency efficiency, and expanded the number of products we are offering to clients, and plan to offer even more in the coming year. It’s exciting to see some of your ideas actually implemented and how they improve process flow. At the same time, I do miss working downtown, though I get up there more and more these days for meetings.

And after a year of solid gains in the stock market and high interest rates, my net worth looks good, as I’m working for a better tomorrow. Yet, it’s so cold in my apartment much of the winter, as I keep the drafty old unit in disrepair at 50 degrees as long as it’s not so cold I have to worry about burst pipes. And it is such a run down dump, in part due to my years of neglect, though my previous landlord wasn’t that interested in repairs either. I still take the bus and shuttle to work on days I don’t ride my bike to work. And I still don’t own a television or have home internet. Yet, I know it can’t go on forever, just like Big Red, my big jacked up truck, is getting old and worn out. But it’s been good for what it has been.

Really I can’t know what tomorrow brings. Things are tough, but they are getting better. Maybe I should have made progress this year, but there weren’t a lot of good options out there, so I’m making do with what I have currently. But I do wish I could have better, but I really have nothing but disdain for those big houses, filled with fancy furniture and technology. I like my small dumpy apartment, and taking the bus or my bike to work every day.