Personal

Still winter 🌨️

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I really should find out how long it is to the Ground Hog doesn’t see his shadow and there is early spring. Busing it in again, those days of riding my mountain bike to work seem not to happen this week. But I’m up early and planning an hour of walking and stairs in the Plaza and the Capitol complex.

Friday is tomorrow and then the weekend. 🌬️ Going to be cool and windy this weekend though not truly frigid but I don’t have any plans besides maybe write 📝 some code, do some work with the soldering iron and go out and see the folks 👨‍👨‍👦 on Sunday. Next weekend I might do Rennselaerville State Forest but that depends on the weather.

I got my second to last pay stub of the year, 🎫 and was thinking this would be the last retirement payment of the year but I still owe a $1.72. But then I will have maxed out for year so it’s a nice bump in my final check of the year as my bank 🏦 account will be pretty much depleted after I pay my credit card 💳 next week. Plus I need to call about the state inspection 🔎 today. But I also am hoping to get an end of the year bonus. It’s been a good year, though inflation is tough and I’m glad I bought bonds even if rates are falling, as I’m too much in the stock market and who knows what the Trumpster will do with crazy tarrifs. 💹 The one thing about Trump is he too much like me judges his self worth based on the status of the stock market.

It’s cold and too icy to ride in and snow is coming later 🌨️

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I’m good at making excuses and making the bus company rich riding it to work. Catching the somewhat earlier bus downtown to walk laps in the Plaza before catching the shuttle over to the Starship.

Don’t fear 😱 the cold, it’s going to rain ☔ and be I’m fifties come next week but a mini freeze in the meantime with a nuisance snow storm tonight just like we had by surprise yesterday 😲 when some lake effect band blew through. Never got any snow up at office in Menands but there was a enough snow to wet roads so I didn’t bother washing Big Red 🛻 🚿 yesterday when I went to the laundromat and got groceries. Maybe next week when it warms up.

Traffic is heavy heading downtown 🚗 🚚 🚌 but maybe it’s just the particular bus I decided catch downtown. It’s still early enough I’ll probably get a half hour or so in walking 🚶 so it’s not bad. Yesterday I didn’t do very good at getting many steps in – I was busy and it was hard to get going after five days out of the routine – riding to work 🚴 is such a big part of my exercise routine these days.

Cooked up a big pan of beans 🫘 this morning, I’m sure I’ll find lots of good healthy meals to use with them. I will walk a few miles in the Plaza and do the stairs 🧗‍♀️ but honestly I know the real thing is to avoid those calorie dense processed goods. Exercise is great and important but calories that are easily digested are processed. You can eat a lot of spinach and apples 🍏 and not get fat.

Duck DB

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DuckDB is an amazing tool. Even with tens millions of records you can create advanced analysis in seconds or less of without setting up a database server using fairly straightforward SQL commands.

It’s a self contained application (no libraries required!), though you can write apps that use it in a wide variety of languages like C, Rust, Java, Python and R that either use it statically or dynamically linked.

I’ve been mostly using the C interface with it, but for most data manipulation you can just create lists of SQL commands to run an pipe it into the duckdb app – in my testing it’s slightly faster with then the C though granted I played with relatively simple apps and I didn’t optimize my build or exclude debugger symbols and used dynamic linking.

In the timbers of Fernando… 🐺

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I guess that’s the way that old Grateful Dead song goes. Certainly it’s warmer on the bus heading in then at camp. Electric bus today, driver misjudged the stop light, she stopped three quarters the way through it. Electric buses are heavy.

After my trip up north I was moving slowly this morning. 🐢 I think it was being five days removed from the routine it’s just hard to get moving. I struggled to get out of bed, and everything just seemed to be in slow motion today. 😴