Logbook 2024.F: first birthday, plumbing problems, truck repair, Niri Window Manager, black tea, Black Swan, A Pattern Language, chili oil

What is this?

See my recent post about my six-week checkpoint plan. These are notes from July 29 to September 8, 2024. I'm just getting a feel for what's worth writing about and what isn't.

Baby News

The first, first birthday party! Our little girl turned one year old and we had family and friends at our place to celebrate. There were toddler second cousins running around, and our baby got to eat her first ever piece of cake.

One of her favorite toys is a little rideable bee with a handle and four caster wheels which she pushes around as a walker. Recently she has been stopping, and then she pushes the bee away and stands by herself for a while, presumably contemplating taking some unassisted steps, but ultimately ending in a controlled squat.

The most notable new words are "uh oh". Every animal goes "bah", according to her. The sheep goes "bah", as does the cow, the dog and the frog.

At Home

A stuck truck

My truck was out of commission for a multiple weeks. The '04 F-150 was stranded in my church parking lot, where it wouldn't even crank, much less turn over. I tried a jump start, then cleaning corrosion around the battery terminals, then replacing the ancient battery completely, but nothing changed. My dad helped me make sure using a multimeter that power was in fact getting to the starter. He got under the truck and used a screwdriver hotwire trick in an attempt to start it, but even then it wouldn't turn over.

We realized that the security light on the dashboard was blinking quickly in an abnormal way when the key was inserted and the truck was turned on. It seemed like the secuity system or the key was malfunctioning in some way. I decided to get the truck towed to the local Ford dealership, and someone there determined that the security system was not being activated because the console was not getting power at all, being busted in some obscure manner.

It's a twenty year old truck, and Ford doesn't make replacement consoles that old. So the guy at the dealership told me that they took the console out of the truck sent it somewhere(?) to be repaired. After a week it came back from wherever it was, they replaced the part and the truck started up!

Plumbing Fixes

One night when we came home I noticed that the kitchen counter was wet. I looked around confusedly, trying to find where the water had come from, and then I heard a drop. Looking up with some horror I saw that water was very slowly dripping out of one of the recessed lights in the kitchen ceiling.

That light was positioned directly below the toilet in our upstairs bathroom. I went upstairs and turned the water off to that toilet. I could see some water around the bottom edge of the toilet, and I assumed the the seal was loose. I tightened the bolts holding the toilet to the floor, but left the water off for the night.

The next day a truck from the city department of water parked in front my yard, and two men hopped out to dig for something. When I went outside the older man told me that they wanted to check my water meter because I was using an average of twelve gallons of water an hour, and asked if we knew of any leaks. I told him that I was in the process of fixing a leaking toilet and he said that it was probably the cause.

Soon after, we determined that the leak from the toilet was coming from the joint where the tank and the rest of the toilet came together. It didn't appear that there was an way to get it tighter without cracking something, so I went to Lowes and bought a one-piece toilet, eliminating that problem altogether.

Several days later, the truck from the city returned. Our water leak was not fixed and our usage had actually increased slightly from a few days ago. The toilet was a red herring. I turned off all the water to the house, which did stop the water meter in my front yard from turning, so there was a leak somewhere.

Donning a headlamp, I and my father in law ventured into my unpleasant crawlspace, tracing PVC tubes to try and find the leak or at least shutoff valves to experiment with. There was no water anywhere in the crawlspace and no valves yielded the leak source.

We eventually found the hose that took water from my house, down into the ground, where it traveled under the back porch and driveway, ultimately coming up in my detached garage. There was no shutoff valve, so we had to install one, and having done that, we turned off water to the garage, which finally caused the water meter to stop spinning.

We found out from the city employees that we can install an app on our phone that pulls our water usage data by the hour. Looking at our water usage history it seems like the leak started earlier this year, corresponding closely to the time when we had new concrete poured for our back patio. It will be difficult and probably expensice to find where in the line the leak is happening, but for now we plan to simply leave the water turned off to the garage.

Personal Computer

In the past six weeks I read about the "Paper-*" family of window managers for Linux. PaperWM is an extension for Gnome Shell which opens OS windows in a continuous horizontal row. You can imagine your windows stretching past both sides of your screen, and you can move yourself along this row to the left or to the right with keyboard commands. Opening a new window pops it open to the right of where you currently are, which shoves any existing windows to your right one more space farther away.

PaperWM inspired Papersway and Niri, both bringing similar functionality to windows in Wayland. I was impressed by Niri's demo video so I installed Niri to give it a test drive.

I knew right away that the Niri window experience is what I have always truly wanted from a window manager, and everything else I've ever used has been a compromise. I can quickly open new browser windows for one-off searches and terminals for running commands, killing them as quickly as they were opened with a keyboard shortcut.

The Niri configuration file comes with a myriad of commented out lines showing you how to turn on various configuration options. Saving the file after an edit applies your changes live, for a short feedback loop.

For the last five years I've been using AwesomeWM. My AwesomeWM configuration had nine virtual desktops, and during a day of work I would often have windows open on at least seven of them. I don't like having windows visible when I am not actively using them, meaning Slack should be completely hidden when I'm coding, but reachable in one keyboard shortcut. I've always felt like I only needed one desktop-sized monitor to work on, and no more.

Notable Blog Posts Read

Notable Books Read

Black Swan

This was my first time reading anything by Nassim Taleb. I've read mentions of him many times in Hacker News comments, I knew the titles of the books, I felt like I got the gist, and thought it would be up my alley. However, this book was... tough to enjoy. The premise at a high level seems both important and defensible, but he's an annoying writer, and the jokes he feels the need to pepper in everywhere cause more wincing than smiling. Dude needs an editor.

A Pattern Language

I also finished reading A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. I had not heard of this book until I read a book from the 90s by Richard P. Gabriel, in which he talks in depth about Software Design Patterns which were in vogue at the time. It was news to me that the "Gang of Four" book about Object-Oriented software design patterns drew its structural inspiration from a book written in the 70s about building design.

From the vantage point of 2024, many of the patterns in the Gang of Four book do not seem timeless. Some seem more like workarounds for getting things done in a programming language that gave you objects, members, methods and not much else. By contrast, A Pattern Language is an amazing book that opened up my mind to ideas that I've never thought about every room in my house, my yard, my neighborhood, the roads I drive on, the town I live in, and the very nature of urban and rural organization. It made me think about building materials and social gatherings, childhood, teenagers becoming adults, elderly people and their needs.

Some of the patterns are things I've never seen spelled out before, but having read them they seem to be indisputable and wise. Some of the patterns are completely wackadoo dreamstuff that no one normal ever has or will adopt. It has to be one of the most important books I've ever read. And yet, I'm not sure what a house which followed many of the patterns in the book would even look like. I'm certain that I've never been in one.

I need someone to discuss it with. I may show it to the homebuilders in my life, with some caveats to ignore some of the crazier ideas.

Notable Edibles

I developed a pretty serious tea habit in the past six weeks. A gift card received for my birthday let me by three sixteen ounce bags of loose leaf black tea blends from Davidson's Tea. My favorite of the three is called Earl Grey Cream. My weekday hot beverge regimen is now 10 ounces of coffee in the morning, followed by 18 ounces of tea before lunch and 10 to 18 more ounces of tea before I finish work. I tell myself that it keeps me from eating snacks all day.

I made Thai Garlic Chili Oil from a bush of thai hot peppers in my garden. The peppers were tiny, each an inch or less, and bright red. I put them all in my food dehydrater, and when they were dried out I chopped them up into small pieces. Then I heat up vegetable oil in our wok and fried garlic slices and shallot until they were brown. At that point I threw in the hot peppers with their seeds. Then I let it cool and put it in a glass jar which I'm keeping it in our pantry. I dip out drops of it on all kinds of food. A teaspoon of the oil by itself will light up my mouth, but putting into other food you get the flavor and not pain.

My most recent batch of dill pickles was largely a disaster, following up an nearly perfect batch that I made in 24-E. This was the first time that I tried slicing the cucumbers before putting them in the brine, usually I just throw them in whole. I also left them pickling for at least one day too long. The pickles pretty much fell apart when I took them out to put them in new containers. There is lactic acid pickle flavor in spades, but it's a mushy mess, and I think I'll throw them out rather than finish them.

In the Garden

I harvested tomatoes, eggplant and peppers from my summer garden, but I let time slip by without planting anything for the fall. A few days ago I did spread some clover seeds as a late season cover crop to cover the beds for the winter.

Perennials Planted

Health

Weight trend: 157.0 lbs. The trend was ticking up ever so slowly toward the back part of the cycle, but now it is coming back down.

I stopped my weightlifing training plan early in order to make it fit nicely into my new six week cycles. I hope to have a more detailed report in my next logbook.

September 9, 2024