Maybe there are things going on?
It's been another one of those months, where just enough is going on that it's hard to keep track of what, actually, is going on, but not so much that it's impossible to put together and write about. Yet, weirdly it's ideal for lots of shower thoughts that, individually, don't add up to a whole lot. It's the exact opposite of a sweet spot for somebody with ADD. So I'm more or less forcing myself to sit down and write this to keep values in those registers. It's undoubtedly going to suck but I figure I have enough editing time ahead of me to fix that somewhat.
A few weeks back Lyssa and I flew to Cleveland to attend the 25th anniversary party of some old friends, whom we haven't seen in quite a while. This wound up being a more difficult journey than we've been having in recent years... it started off about a month before actually flying out when looking for a hotel. For some reason, Google Maps was silently stuck on "directions to walk to your destination" mode, which lead to Lyssa and I panicking over what appeared to be a nearly-two-hour drive to and from the Cleveland airport. When your flights are red-eyes, this bodes not well at all. However, it turns out that, after some web browser jiggery-pokery we got the map into "driving mode" and were actually staying in a hotel only about ten minutes away. But things didn't actually get interesting 1 until the day of our flight.
We knew that we had to catch a connecting flight at LAX that morning, and that we only had twenty minutes to get to that gate. The gate was only ten down from where we'd be flying into, so we weren't that concerned about it. Until we got on board the plane and time continued to pass. And pass. And pass. By twenty-five minutes past the time we should have been in the air we were informed by the flight crew that there was a hydraulic leak that required a nontrivial amount of work to fix. 2 We were further informed that those of us catching a connecting flight at LAX were certain to not get there in time, and to get off of the plane and go to the desk to re-book that flight. Sensibly, Lyssa and I did this. While waiting in line I happened to watch the cargo crew pulling all of the luggage out of the storage compartment of the plane while an engineering crew stood by waiting to climb in there, presumably because that was the only feasible way of doing what they had to do.
Our new flight was a direct flight from SFO to Cleveland a couple of hours later. So Lyssa and I got some breakfast and cooled our heels until it was time to board. And then the replacement tickets they'd issued us were no good. They'd been issued but not added to the flight roster.
Cue half an hour arguing with the desk while our flight prepared to take off. We finally got things sorted out but they'd stuck us in the middle seats of an already packed flight. I don't think I need to tell you just how not fun this was. By the time we landed in Cleveland, we made another unpleasant discovery: Our luggage (perhaps not surprisingly) had not arrived. This made a certain amount of sense: Our flight had changed from a two-part with a layover (technically) into a direct flight, but our luggage was still on the old schedule. Kind of. The baggage office told us that our luggage was going from LA to Houston to Cleveland and would arrive around 0030 hours local time that night. So Lyssa and I only had what we'd carried on our backs and no real assurance that we'd have a change of clothes soon. We headed for our airport after filing the necessary paperwork to get our stuff delivered to the hotel. Perhaps fate smiled somewhat kindly upon us, because our luggage was in fact delivered as promised that night around 0045 hours.
The long weekend and anniversary celebration themselves were quite fun. There was revelry, amazing cake, and two old friends celebrating having been married for a quarter century. We got to meet some new people, explore parts of Cleveland, sample some of the restaurants that we've heard so much about, and meet their new dog. There was building stuff in the back yard (so I got to feel like I actually did something useful) and shooting the shit, almost like we were adults or something. I wish I could remember more of our flight back but it was another redeye and we arrived right at the beginning of a heat wave in the Bay Area. My body's ability to thermoregulate hasn't worked right for years so not only was I tired but I was thinking like I was dead tired (which is to say, not clearly).
I have to write up how I interfaced my weather station with the software WeeWX. I keep forgetting; every time I remember something else comes up and it winds up on the back burner again.
I'm still working on that analysis of DC Metro SmarTrip cards in my spare time. Thus far none of the gear or softwarwe I have seems to be able to get them to respond in any way. I'm not entirely sure what's going on but I've had a couple of agents hunting down documentation, and some phone calls to same may or may not have been made recently.
I need to do some more debugging of my XMPP bridge. The XMPP library I'd been using has been out of support for several years and it's no longer compatible with any versions of Python available on any machines I run. I rewrote some of the code to use a different library, SliXMPP, but there's a subtle bug that I keep running into. Let's say there's an XMPP bridge running on a laptop; the laptop goes to sleep for a while to conserve power. When it wakes back up, the XMPP bridge doesn't reconnect to the server, so you can keep throwing commands at it but they don't go to any of the bots. After some figuring and a few failed attempts I decided to open a ticket about it and eventually got some responses, but haven't had a chance to read them over and think about what to do. Time management being what it is (especially at this time of year) I'm spending more compute cycles on work and family than fixing a bug that I only run into on Windbringer. Pull requests, as always are welcome.
Lately I've had some thoughts about LLM assisted programming with applications like Microsoft Copilot. Not necessarily about the problems it can cause, though, though that's certainly part of it. The thing about tools is that it's easy to become to reliant upon them and when you don't have access to them for some reason you're kind of screwed. All the advantage you had before is gone and there's a very good chance that, assuming you didn't pick up one or two things in the process you won't have time to learn how to do things manually. What do you do without connectivity, which is something that is less and less a corner case these days. I don't want to come off as the old guy yelling at a cloud but there is something to be said for knowing how to do stuff when you only have the basics at hand. If things continue to progress the way they have been these last few years I can't help but wonder how hosed things might get if some folks don't have access to that technology.
I don't actually have a particular place I'm going with that. I've just been thinking about it lately. I don't have any solutions (there aren't any, really) and I don't know if anybody would care if I floated a caution in any particular direction. I just hope it's not catastropohic.
I just remembered that I have a bunch of photo albums that I have to put online. I should probably get around to building those galleries.