Life – A Geeky Gulati

Openjscad.xyz to build some shelves

I did a thing.

A thing (not quite finished, more vertical support needed)

It was an ask from my family. I did the initial planning in.. code!

https://github.com/sunnywiz/openjscad_xyz_stuff/blob/costco-box/costcoBoxes.js

Side effect of the code is it tells me how many 2x4x8’s to buy, and attempts to plan the cuts in them:

floor 0  of length  48.5  in piece  0 
floor 1  of length  48.5  in piece  1 
floor 2  of length  35  in piece  0 
floor 3  of length  35  in piece  1 
floor 4  of length  35  in piece  2 
vertical 0  of length  52  in piece  2 
vertical 1  of length  52  in piece  3 
vertical 2  of length  31  in piece  3 
vertical 3  of length  31  in piece  4 
vertical 4  of length  52  in piece  4 
vertical 5  of length  52  in piece  5 
vertical 6  of length  31  in piece  5 
vertical 7  of length  31  in piece  6 
vertical 8  of length  52  in piece  6 
vertical 9  of length  52  in piece  7 
vertical 10  of length  31  in piece  7 
vertical 11  of length  31  in piece  8 
ledge 0  of length  38  in piece  8 
ledge 1  of length  38  in piece  9 
ledge 2  of length  38  in piece  9 
ledge 3  of length  38  in piece  10 
ledge 4  of length  38  in piece  10 
ledge 5  of length  38  in piece  11 
ledge 6  of length  38  in piece  11 
ledge 7  of length  38  in piece  12 
ledge 8  of length  38  in piece  12 
ledge 9  of length  38  in piece  13 
ledge 10  of length  38  in piece  13 
ledge 11  of length  38  in piece  14 
top 0  of length  48.5  in piece  14 
top 1  of length  48.5  in piece  15

There’s a bug though. I should have specified the width of the boxes as 22.5″, not 22″. Also, i had to re-measure where the rails go – ended up with the box at less than 17″, and the first rail at 15″, it was 15″, 32″, and 49″. Also, i really had to reinforce the vertical stuff so it didn’t .. parallelogram to the side.

The code is parametric of course. I plan to use the same code for the slightly smaller boxes. But i might use a smaller size of wood – this was overkill and way too heavy.

House Temperatures

Recently, we had a scare with our furnace .. luckily, part was under warranty and we got it back up and running. However, having lived without heat for 2-3 weeks, I was super curious about .. how heat dissipated.. I am now aware of some sizing problems and return problems in the house. Specifically, i wanted to know if I should leave the Fan On or Auto, and how effective that was at equalizing temperatures between upstairs and downstairs. Answer: Its very effective. I answered these questions with the use of Govee temperature loggers, which can export CSV, tied into Excel.

The following is an overview minus the outside temperature, we’ll zoom into sections of this around certain things. It has two days, the first day was (mostly) fan ON, thermostat at 68; the second day (11pm 11/3) was fan on Auto.

The Gray line is the temperature at the vent – it shows when the heater kicks on and turns off. You’ll note that both days, outside sun warmed up the house to the point where heat was no longer being applied. About 10am-Midnight, amazingly. This is where multi-stage if we had it would be handy.

Upstairs is the green line, its where 3/4 grandkids sleep and play. What i didn’t know is that there’s a window AC unit in there, set to 70, that was turned on. First day, temperature trended upwards slowly, the AC barely kicked on (sharp downward spike). Second day – even during the night – AC kicked on several times, and a lot during the day. There’s a LOT of heat that just travels upstairs when the whole house fan is not running.

The Yellow and Orange are the two ends of downstairs. The Orange end does not have any returns, so whatever the A/C is doing, tends to accumulate there, especially when the fan is on. On the second day (I think) I tried to set up a house fan to help the air move out of that wing back into general circulation. It might have helped. Downstairs1, Yellow, btw, is directly below Upstairs, Green as far as these sensors go.

I also did a test of: What happens if I leave the door open, fully open, for 20 minutes, while its cold out. At the time it was about 35 degrees outside. Here’s a zoom in:

The door was fully open for 20 minutes, from 9:10 to 9:30 on this graph. During that time, the thermostat-area dropped from 68 down to 66, and I can tell you that the floor of the room with the thermostat (also where the door was open) got down to 54. and the heat kicked on, HARD. The rest of the house actually warmed up from all this furnace activity – Upstairs went up the fastest. Once i shut the door, it took a good 40 minutes of heat before the thermostat was happy. It took maybe another 2 hours before all the extra heat worked its way through the house and things returned to normal. During this time, the Sun was out and was warming everything up, and so data gets a bit.. too many signals.

Just to be complete, here’s the full graph including the outside temperature.

The Artist: Ren

Last week or two? I’ve ingested lots of stuff by, and reactions to, an artist named Ren. I’ve been reluctant to share about it because.. more in paragraph 5. All the videos linked here are cute and safe-for-all:

Here’s a happy song he wrote about growing up in the 1990’s. I recognize many of these things through the eyes of my son. Video Date: 3/12/2015. This would be before stem cell transplant, probably before Lyme disease diagnosis that saved his life and named his medical condition:

He has a super wide range. There’s stuff he did with a band “The Big Push” – THE CUTEST video:

And here is a Bob Marley Cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJaJyUivzVg and War Pigs cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azAD9KE9HKE

The artist himself has gone through a .. low point in his life, and right now he’s on a .. rebound, re-stabilize, focus, growth, directed, explode.. these are all words that could apply. During that down time, though, he has developed (improved?) some crazy musical (and editing and production) skills. Fountain of creativity, has the will to work it now that he has a life that is actionable again.

I think I’m reluctant to share about his more powerful stuff because it is a freaking punch in the heart. Not everybody wants this level of punch. There are .. several of his more popular songs, much darker, much deeper. Here’s a list with my interpretations. The ones that are starred, I still cry when I see them, still affected / raw / emotion.

* Hi Ren – about dialog with the negative inner voice that ___s you (insert your word here).
Chalk Outlines (with Chinchilla)- about being dependent on medication(?) yet how its like digging a grave(?) and how it affects how you approach the good parts of the world and the resolve of being okay even though.
** How to be Me (with Chinchilla) – loss of a friend to suicide, written for the friend.
Money Game part two – Cynical about the state of power / wealth / etc corruption
Money Game part one – don’t watch this video unless you are okay with dealing with potential violence being inflicted on a person. He is a very good actor.
Jenny / Screech / Violet – This is a trilogy, straight up tragedy story. The last song loops the first two in, and then after all three you can see .. patterns hidden within.
- This is one of those where watching the reactions = wow I missed all that from the original watching.
- There’s a “Live” 360 version of this where he performs it from a stage. You can tell from it he has a following and he is well loved.
There are several rap-type songs. The hook from “Genesis” sticks with me.
There are several homage songs where he pays respect to other artists.
I keep discovering more songs by him that I missed initially.

A note on my interpretations: these are just what I project into the music. He takes some joy seeing how people react to his music.

I have found that his songs are deep and complex enough that … I cannot absorb more than one or two in a session.

I’ve also found that .. whoever he collaborates with – he lifts them up. He spotlights them.

I’m enjoying watching reaction videos to some of his stuff – seeing people go from doubt to “holy sh*t” and then seeing what they take from it. I’m also humbled by – I’ll listen to something of his directly, and think, “not that big a deal”, and then I listen to a reaction of it, and people point out all these things that I missed, and then I realize: whoa, that was very well layered. Stuff about how he’s playing, audio engineering, directing, lighting.

Actually, i found a set of blog posts (paywall-ish) that goes into this in way more detail than i will here: https://bryanwinchell-japan.medium.com/hi-ren-examined-pt-1-the-overview-f0e247e4bd60

I wish him a very .. I don’t know if “bright” is the right word. I think “effective” is the word I want to broadcast for him. I want to see more of his stuff.

Keep getting better, Ren. In all the ways.

Phoenix: Sunday (intro)

I’m supposed to give a talk on Gratitude sometime in November.

I’ve fallen out of the habit of doing a gratitude list daily (well, twice daily).

I found myself on vacation, yet grumping about. True, there were some emotions to process.. but for my sense of positive-ness (some people seem to think I’m never sad, always upbeat .. this is not true) .. I decided to backtrack and make a list of good things for each day of vacation.

As a single post, that would be overwhelming, so I’m breaking it up by day. No promise on when I’ll post them, this is from current me to honor past me and represent for future me. Here is Good things from Sunday, in no particular order.

Easy Flight. We forgot to check in early, we got C-something in line, so we were lucky to get aisle seats across from each other. 4 hours in the air. Cute family with little ones nearby, little ones slept almost the entire time with no crying.

Train Ride. Rather than get an Uber, 9 of us went on an adventure to ride the light metro rail. (Later, 2 of them got chewed out by local relatives who are in law enforcement). I looked around and there were at least 4 or 5 conversations between us as a group and some locals going on. I love taking public transit, if its safe.

Our Room was awesome. Corner view, 3 windows, downtown.

In-N-Out. We took a Lyft to the nearest one (and back). Macki & Matt joined us .. I think it was their first time. Macki liked it. I re-discovered their french fries. I found out much to my surprise that Waymo is a thing in Phoenix (I had forgotten / not associated), but I found out that it was nowhere near where we were going to be, and you have to be a local resident to participate in the downtown testing.

So there we go, that’s Sunday .. first day of vacation. Molly was going to Gen Blue, and I tagged along for the fun. I’m glad Molly’s is a family owned company and spouses are included in things like this.

Using Meater Wireless Thermometer

It turned out semi-okay. I didn’t let the steak get to room temperature before i started, I kinda hurried things along. I also misjudged the size of the pan to sear it in, so I didn’t get a good sear, and some juices escaped.
Note that Sear In Pan raised meat temp faster than Oven, even with lower ambient heat. That’s because the temp sensor is not on the bottom of the pan which is probably 400 degrees or more.
Note that the Oven said “400” when in fact it was maybe 180. “Enough hotter” that the temperature gradient is there in the food. Hence the “Preheat for a long time” when doing very sensitive recipes
Note the “Hotter while resting” inertia thing. Meater did warn me to take it off the heat 5 minutes before it reached temperature, and I still overshot it.

Looking forward to my next cook.

Removing Sod with a Half Moon Sod Remover

Hey I Learned Something! … had to remove 200 sq ft of Sod to make a spot for a pool. It was hard work. Over time and research, I found a way that works for me. Video.

Shot with iPhone 13 (with wide lens for some). Edited with Luma Fusion. Luma Fusion = I don’t need to pay for Adobe Premiere for simple videos.

While I’m writing a post .. My world is family, grandchildren, and some work. At work I’m no longer a contractor software engineer, but rather a member of a 3 person IT team, where the primary purpose of the company IS NOT writing software. So, there’s a lot of monitoring systems, and fixing old code to be more configurable, and finding people who have hard work to do and making their lives easier.

I’ll most my most recent wins as short separate posts.

on BLM and protests and stuff

Stuff I learned / re-learned. If you’re not familiar with any of these, ask me privately and we can chat. I am by no means an expert, just a student.

1970’s stuff to discredit Black Panthers. I’ve only heard it mentioned, haven’t delved deeply.
Today’s social media – much more raw message, much harder to contain. This also means a lot less “marketing buzzword blitz” and you have to work to tune in to the message, or follow somebody you trust to parse it for you. Also means lots of information warfare can jack with the signal.
Analogy of “There’s a house burning on the street”. All houses matter. Right now one is burning.
Analogy of “All folks are hungry”. And one person has no food.

Some personal historical notes:

As a child in Liberia, there was a different kind of racism. Is it racism? Or does some other word apply? Cultural non-melting-pot? There were native locals, there were the descendants of freed slaves, the African Americans we had heard of but never met, all the white Americans whom we had met, the folks from other African countries neighboring us, the Indians, the Lebanese, etc. All these had different .. relationships? expectations? with each other.

I remember the first time I realized that my race-thoughts were wrong. I was hanging out with Charles “Flip” M. in Washington D.C. I said something about “those Americans” .. and Charles stopped me in my tracks: “We’re American”, and he might have also said Dog. He is Black.

I had never considered it before. The way I was raised, all Americans were White, and everybody else was just lucky if they got allowed in to eat a slice of pie. Possibly very delicious pie. Even now, as a naturalized citizen, that programming is strong inside me – at any point, “Spanish Inquisition” and I’ll be stripped of everything and thrown out on the street. So DON’T BUCK THE SYSTEM BOY or YOU WILL PAY something like that.

But what do I do about it now?

My spiritual path pays special attention to “What do I choose to create” and “Who do I choose to be Now.” So, take a sheet of paper, and make a grid. (Sorry, WordPress styling not so good)

Topic	Initial programming	Intermediate	Current Thoughts/Action	Want to Claim

This is a private exercise to share with someone you trust. But basically, i can put in, for a given topic – say, “who can be American”. What was my initial programming? And in the 2nd to last is .. based on my current actions and thoughts, what do I currently believe in / what “world” am I choosing to create around me. And the last one, that’s between you and God. But its what you would aspire to be.

For example, my second to last column was something like this: “Yes, its all fucked up, and its going to stay that way, because the folks who want to keep it that way have the power to do that and can rewrite narrative.” I kid you not, that’s the negative ass story I was telling myself.

And then people started protesting. And whether those protesting did the boat rocking or not, or others joined in and started throwing rocks at the boat, nevertheless, the boat did rock, and some acts started to get cleaned up. Maybe not all of them, but some did.

Which means .. I was wrong. My 2nd to last column was wrong. Dare I accept a new truth? Dare I write a different next column?

And then if you’re like me and you’re doing this electronically, change the font for all the old ideas and make them ~~strikeout~~.

This way, when the old ideas come up — and they do, all the time — at least for me, I’ve put the old ideas and the new ideas next to each other, and I’ve revisited my decision of what do i want to create now, and I can gently forgive myself for the old ideas and surrender to God to water the new ones.

Hope that helps.

America is … for the people, by the people?

America is principles before personalities?

Does this relate to the sanctity of the law, putting law above individual people?

American Government is to serve the people, not to strike fear in the people?

American Government is a sham placeholder to police the world’s oil supply for the wealthy and silly things like people’s right don’t matter other than to placate the population?

American people is all the people, not just the wealthy?

American people includes the homeless? Or is it only those who agree to certain norms like street addresses and social security numbers and those who pay taxes?

What is your picture of America?

Covid-19 – why are we so vigilant when seems like nobody has it?

So, there’s this other thing going on – the protests. And restaurants are open. And it feels like there is social pressure .. don’t wear a mask, you look stupid. Maybe just me. Feels like, “If this were a real problem, more people would have it.”

Human feelings are nice, but.. they don’t scale well.

What’s the right percentage of people who should be sick in order for it to “feel” right? Lets say.. 10%.

At 4.4 Million people in KY.. wait, no, that’s assuming even spread. Lets just go with, “In the metropolitan area that I live in, 10%”.

At 600,000 people, that means 60,000 people would be exhibiting symptoms.

According to the most recent numbers (link), 6700 active cases, 500 hospitalizations, 70 in the ICU. So about 7% hospitalized, and 1% ICU. So if 60000 folks where “active”, then 5000 hospitalizations, and 700 in the ICU. We have (link) in the magnitude of 2500 hospital beds across the state of KY and 1500-ish ICU rooms.. but that’s for 4.6 MILLION people. I can’t find the exact numbers for Louisville, but basically:

If “enough” people around us seem sick, then the hospital system would be overwhelmed and we’d be seeing the 10%+ death rates that were seen in other places that got overwhelmed.

So, if we win, it looks like: Nobody around us, nobody we know, gets the virus. And still a ton of people die.

I guess i’ll continue to wear my mask and try not to be a vector, even if 99.9% of the time, i’m not near anybody with the virus, and I’m probably not carrying it either.

Life as it is: Geekyness under-reported

I made a conscious decision to replace “look good” with “be”. As such.. many things .. i could share about.. but then i question my motive. How urgent is it that I share about it? Hence, not a lot of updates here. Additionally, Saturday went from “Misc” time to “Grandchild” time, which pushed a bunch of things to Sunday, which squeezes out large blocks of time available to thoroughly document geekyness.

However, now, i have this sense of .. i don’t know what I’ve been geeking around with over the last few months (since October). Let me see if I can remember:

Lots of learning about driving my used Nissan LEAF in winter.
Lots of work things:
- At work, got another PHP migration to AWS project -> but this time, the client uses Macs and does development, so I ended up with a Mac Mini on my desk, and I’ve learned about homebrew and all kinds of Mac things. I like the Mac. Also hit some limitations of elastic beanstalk and learned more about git submodules. Ongoing.
- Inherited an Ops Role from a coworker leaving. Still learning the details of it, one emergency at a time.
- Another project at work: LouisvilleMetro/WazeCCPProcessor – typescript, postgres, terraform, AWS. This one is open source!!! I’ve had to learn a lot of things for this one – my first time in the world of webpack and launch.json. Ongoing.
- Let go of the maintenance role that I’d been doing for 2 years. Very grateful to have professional kick ass coworkers who can take things over from me.
I spent a lot of time prepping a 1-hour long EV presentation for an event that, sadly, got cancelled. But! the presentation is ready, for the next thing that needs something like that.
Started running (a little bit) again. Using the Spring Moves app, I like it. Its very nice having the right Tempo, and its not the same playlist over and over.
Used my FLiR camera to figure out the extent of a water leak in the family room. Dried it up, its raining again, not wet yet, will check again tonight. Very useful device, but not used very often.
Pretty regular about getting up at 6:10am most weekdays, and having 40 minutes to myself to “wake up”. I like it.

Out of time! Gotta go… get this cat off my lap, get dressed, get to work, work on my two projects. We also have an interesting quandry of how, in an inherited codebase, there’s a DST thing that kicks in on a shift and might be causing an extra billable hour, maybe.

New Host for this Blog

If you’re seeing this post, this is being hosted on an AWS Lightsail instance running wordpress. I got tired of forgetting that WordPress was going to charge me $100 a year in November, so I went ahead and got a bit more technical.

Its a bit annoying – I have to google everything. I’m currently working my way through this guide: https://metablogue.com/enable-lets-encrypt-ssl-aws-lightsail/ (thank you, Mr. Mohindra), but I haven’t gotten to the “Change All Internal Links to https” part, and it looks like image links are broken. (DONE! i had to delete, permanently delete, then reimport the posts; and it reconfigured the images to match)

This is a test image to see if this image survives. I think I need to search-replace or something to get previous images to work, or just delete and re-import them now that I have the server name set up correctly.

I also need to change the default user to … me. 🙂 (DONE!)