I really don’t have much of a desire to visit any cities. I’m much more comfortable in the wilderness, on the dirt road out in the sticks. While I enjoy urban life – especially the ease of mass transit and cycling to get around, cities aren’t really a place I would want to visit recreationally. Instead, cities are place to get together with others, to meet, collaborate, work and share time together.
Busing it in again as it will be rain by evening. After work I have to go shopping as my pantry is pretty depleted at this point. But first, I need to shower and get it on.
Wednesday is my truck inspection 🛻🔍. I checked the lights and they’re good. Seems to drive well for a thirteen year old truck and I’ve not noticed any issues so I expect thf inspection to be quite trivial and I’m getting the tires rotated too. Taking Wednesday off as I have time to use before the end of the year.
Watching the weekend 🏕️ but now it’s looking more like rain especially Sunday. Work Christmas 🎄 Party 🎉 on Friday so I can’t take that day off to extend my weekend but I was hoping maybe Monday. Maybe instead I’ll do a day trip on a nice day next week. Still need to see if I can get off December 30 and 31st do I have off from Christmas Eve to New Years Day.
I didn’t get shopping over the weekend but I figured I’ll run to Walmart on this dreary Monday evening. Beats retiring to bed at 6:30 PM or whenever I get done with dinner. Maybe Hannaford is a bit closer but Walmart has better prices, and like the internet advertisers have figured out, I need toilet paper. Plus, the slightly longer drive is better for the engine, as it gives it a chance to fully get up to to temperature before being shut off.
Good morning! Happy Sunday. Showering and then off to Walmart in a bit to stock up on groceries, hopefully before the crowds. I don’t need a lot of things, as I went to store after doing my wash on Tuesday night but I still to get a number of things. Milder today and the sun is coming out, though we got a few inches of snow last night and there is a breeze this morning.
The upcoming work week looks surprisingly wet it would seem. The heaviest day for rain is Wednesday, the day I drop my truck off at the shop to be state inspected and tires rotated. Going to get wet doing that, but I’ll take the day off to read and work on some code. It’s the end of the year and I still have some time to use up. I am still thinking of taking December 30th and 31st off from the office — New Years Eve this year ain’t a holiday due to being mid-week — but I just have to make sure we have office coverage.
Rode for about 15 or so miles yesterday, which helped break up the day, and then I went down to the library, came home and worked on the geocoding program I am working on writing in C++. Of course it got my inspired to think about also implementing it as a shell script so I can run it on the server at work, using jq as a JSON parser. It’s not that complicated, and while I didn’t neccessarily need the C++ program, it’s a great way to write code and boost my experience as a programmer. Every line of C++ I write, and process using a professional build environment, the better I get at it. Just using regular make, as let’s be honest, this is too simple of a program for CMake or GNU Automake, though maybe because I’m old and grew up building software using GNU Automake, I still am quite partial to the later. And it works excellent on Linux.
Part of my problem I realized is I am not dressing warm enough and get chilled through on the weekends at home. If I am going to keep my heat at 50 degrees most of the winter, except when it’s exceptionally cold, I really should make sure I’m dressing warm enough. I got the space heater out the other day, but I rarely use it. It’s not that couldn’t make my apartment nice and toasty — the electric baseboard heat upstairs can really make things toasty — but it’s been years since I’ve had it on and it usually stinks when you first turn it on from all the dust burning off, or for that matter turn the gas heat downstairs up, but I just don’t like spending money on something as trivial as comfort.
Nice thing about keeping my apartment so cold, is my laptop runs so much cooler, especially since I fixed the fan. Most of the time, unless I’m doing some complicated code compilation, it runs at a very comfortable for it’s components 75 degrees F. When the fan was broken on it, at times it was pushing over 150 degrees F, which I admit was cooking all the solder joints and generally breaking everything internally. All I had to do was unjam the fan, which was probably plugged with dust and crap..
Often in the winter months it’s cold and I keep my heat low, so I don’t find myelf getting out doing the exercise I should be doing over the weekend. So today I made sure to go for a nice long ride, out to Five Rivers, then Swift Road to School Road in Voorheesville then on the rail trail, which was very rough from the ice, then snuck over Font Grove to Stockbridge/Surrey Mall then over McCormick Road to Cherry Ave – Slingerlands Bypass.
It looks like this winter might be colder and snowier then last, so if I want to ride, I really got to think about the quieter suburban residential streets I can ride on that are plowed. I missed not riding in all week. While Thursday I walked up to the 17th floor of the Alfred E Smith Building, along with the 4th floor of the Capitol and the 9th floor of the LOB, along with doing the down stairs, plus 3 times down in AESOB, Friday I was running late and skipped my steps. It was cold and I was tired.
Besides riding, it’s just been a lot of intensive studying and coding. I have been pouring over the new OpenXLSX C++ library but also playing a around a lot with DuckDB. I just want to live up to my title as Director of Data Services at work, and be an expert at moving around big data as fast as possible and doing interesting things both for work, and coming up with ideas. Plus I want to be a real programmer — not just somebody who is handy around R and can write C/C++ and Python and PHP but not well. The thing about studying C++ and the build process more generally it is really is helping me understand all parts relating to computing.
Beats retiring to bed at 6:30 PM or whenever I get done with dinner. Maybe Hannaford is a bit closer but Walmart has better prices, and like the internet advertisers have figured out, I need toilet paper. 
Plus, the slightly longer drive is better for the engine, as it gives it a chance to fully get up to to temperature before being shut off.
so if I want to ride, I really got to think about the quieter suburban residential streets I can ride on that are plowed. I missed not riding in all week. While Thursday I walked up to the 17th floor of the Alfred E Smith Building, along with the 4th floor of the Capitol and the 9th floor of the LOB, along with doing the down stairs, plus 3 times down in AESOB, Friday I was running late and skipped my steps. 
It was cold and I was tired.
I have been pouring over the new OpenXLSX C++ library but also playing a around a lot with DuckDB. I just want to live up to my title as Director of Data Services at work, and be an expert at moving around big data as fast as possible and doing interesting things both for work, and coming up with ideas. Plus I want to be a real programmer — not just somebody who is handy around R and can write C/C++ and Python and PHP but not well. The thing about studying C++ and the build process more generally it is really is helping me understand all parts relating to computing.
