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Ran my last office hours for the course I've been assisting with for the past seven years. It was a pretty standard hour, only one person showed up. Wild to think that chapter has ended. It's not a bad thing, but it was time for me to move on. I enjoyed office hours, answering questions and occasionally giving impromptu lectures on different bits of statistics or programming. But grading was basically a rote chore I tried to finish as quickly as possible. I haven't had the energy to give real feedback to the students for a while now.
My periodic desire to start playing the cello again is kicking up, along with my interest in classical music. The difference this time is that we actually have enough room for me to have a cello, and we could afford to get my cello back into playable condition and get it out here. The question is how long my interest will last and if my old thumb problems will come back to haunt me. As far as that goes, I think that my bow-hold was fundamentally wrong, and it really held me back. The wonders of the internet meant that a few minutes of searching brought me an answer that I didn't even know how to ask my instructors for back when I was playing as a student. I am pretty tempted to rent or buy a cheaper instrument to try it out again and see if it is worth dealing with the instrument my parents still have. You can buy a cello off Amazon these days! And at least one of those is available on Craigslist right now. Probably more than I should pay for it, but still tempting. Rentals are not cheap but would be less expensive for a few months of use. And probably a nicer instrument to use in the meantime.
Been a while since I wrote anything here and a lot has changed. Still working from home, but we've moved twice in the last two months. Made a hard break with some family that were not treating us well. I found a new job and will be starting this week. Somewhat different work than I've been doing the past few years, but interesting and I'm excited to dive into a bunch of new stuff. Need to stay vigilant so that it remains interesting beyond the new stuff.
Found Lo-fi ATC today, a weird combo of lo-fi music, which is not something I've ever spent much time listening to, and air traffic control streams from airports. ATC audio is kind of lo-fi to begin with, so it's a good fit. And then you get a channel in each ear and it's not too distracting. It was fun to connect to an airport I used to live and work near and hear some of the traffic while I was working today. ATC audio is pulled from LiveATC.net, so you could choose an airport where the ATC languange is not your primary language if you wanted the audio to be less distracting.
Full day at the office today. Feeling a bit better about everything, but still struggling to finish this update report. Haven't gotten nearly as much done over the past three years as I wanted to. No surprise there I guess, but listing out what I expected vs. what I actually got done is pretty depressing. On the upside, I get a nice 30 minute walk home at the end of the day when I work from the office. Yesterday I finally saw an osprey catch a fish. I was on the road behind the baseball stadium, right at the corner. The osprey floated there, then folded its wings and dove to the water. It was slower than I expected. I wasn't sure if it had caught a fish at first. But then it came up, straining to get back out of the water. And there was a nice fish in its talons. It flew up the creek from there, to eat or maybe to feed some hatchlings. Today I saw heron, its neck fully extended, just standing in the water. When I saw it next it was beside me, flying a foot above the water. Barely flapping, it just floated to its next hunting spot.
Great weather today, felt like the first nice day in a long time. Probably the start of summer-type weather even though it didn't get much into the 60s(F). Heard from an old friend today with an invite to a party in late summer for their 10 year wedding anniversary. Too bad they're across the country and we can't afford to travel to see them. Looked at real estate in the area they're living. Not as batshit insane as around here, but I'd need a fully-remote job to make it work.
Listened to a great two-part series on the Civil Civil War War (the Civil War withing the Civil War), on Cool People Who Did Cool Things. Black laborers instituted probably the largest general strike ever against anything that would help the Confederate cause, helping to speed the end of the war.
Just realized that I originally dated all of these entries as being from 2020.
Back to the office today. Nice to work from a larger monitor, feel like a got a bit more done. Found the pomodoro settings in Toggl. Used them for a few rounds in the afternoon. I'll try to do a whole day of pomodoros tomorrow and see how it goes. Might as well try something new until it quits working.
Back to semi-normal today. Went for (what felt like) a hard run. My legs were really dragging about 10 minutes from the end. Probably the fact that I've barely run in the last 3 (?) months, though it's also possible I didn't eat enough today. Nice weather; ready to get back to running regularly.
Tried to get back into my WFH schedule today. Felt good this morning, then spent a bunch of time looking into what it would take to self-host (or use a VPS) a few things like a Mastodon instance and maybe a few other thngs. It seems like it should be easy enough, but I'm sure that it would end up a time-suck to get everything working just right. I also worry about getting things like backups set up correctly, especially if I was going to offer access to anyone else.
Daughter's sixth birday party today. Had family over. Took the cousins to a local park to run around in the rain and work out some energy before coming back to our little apartment. It was pretty fun to run around in the rain. There weren't too many people there (though more than I expected given the weather) and the dog did great off leash. He did less well at home, where he managed to snag a chocolate cupcake and a bunch of salami. Lots of clean up before and after, but worth it because everyone had fun.
Spent most of the morning cleaning out the carpet cleaner we found out by the dumpster. Pretty disgusting but also satisfying getting all the dirt and hair out of all the little pieces. Listened to a couple of episodes of the 'Live Like the World is Dying'[a] podcast while I worked. The episode on open source medical chemistry was particularly interesting. Apparently Four Thieves Vinegar[b] has a Raspberry Pi-based device that can run a small-molecule synthesis kit, taking care of a lot of the stirring, heating and timing tasks. The Open Insulin project[c] was also mentioned as very promising.
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