Silicon Valley Redneck

Time for a new chair.

High-rated replacement ordered from Amazon, for a bit over $100 with discount.

The old one - just over three years old, really - is increasingly broken, and the back is now entirely detached from its supports.  My attempts to repair the first broken support attachment point were not successful, so time for a replacement.  Maybe I'll have another go at patching this one for some light-duty role.

Critter craziness

So Top Hat had a long-scheduled vet appointment first thing this morning....

It's basically a grooming appointment, for a summer shave, but for that she has to be sedated, and while she's there she might as well get caught up on her shots.

And, as long as we were taking her in, we'd also scheduled Huckleberry and Southmoon to get current on their shots.

Well, whether from hearing the word "vet" mentioned or for some other reason, Southmoon was very stressed around bedtime.

Sometime past midnight, Huckleberry woke Joy up with his "Open this door!  I want to be on the other side of it!" cry, except that instead of being on one side or the other of the bedroom door he was running from one window to another.  And Joy thought she heard some critter outside trying to get in.

Southmoon was nowhere to be found.  Wut?  Oh: one of the screens had come detached from its frame - it looked like there was a screen there, but it wasn't secure, and apparently she'd leaned on it too hard and fallen out, sometime after I'd fallen asleep and before Joy closed the windows.  And now she was frantically trying to get back in.

So, what with all that extra stress, we figured we'd reschedule her trip to the vet and just take Top Hat and Huckleberry - both of whom turned out to be exceptionally hard to round up.

Then, when we got to the vet's office, the waiting room was full of dogs.  Barking dogs, sniffing dogs, slobbering dogs... and when Huckleberry was done, someone had showed up with five, count 'em, five enthusiastic young Labradors - apparently one was a service dog and the other four were just beginning their training and were finding the environment highly overstimulating.  Sniffsniffsniff!  Will you be my friend?  I want to be everybody's friend!  Huckleberry did not appreciate this.

I should probably do a little bit of gardening today but mostly spend the day on ToasterCo stuff that I didn't get around to earlier in the month because of that dang fool logic issue.

Additional:  Back at home, I was somehow still hearing the barking.  But wait!  Across the road, multiple dogs are in fact barking.  Additional barkage is to be heard from various other directions.

And... yesterday's mail never came.  Not just us; the neighbors have had their flag up since yesterday morning, and it's still up.  The post office must not have had a driver for this route.  Or did the dogs catch the postal driver, and they're still celebrating?

Update:  New short-hair cat is here, with a bent tail just like Top Hat.  I'm sure she'll grow into the role, and by next Spring she'll look just like Top Hat.

Also, yesterday's mail showed up along with today's.

Another draggy and minimally productive day.

Been getting some small fiddly stuff done.

Got a couple of on-line orders organized, and stuff on the way or at least pending shipment.

Planted lettuce & mini-carrot seeds in little window-box planters on the front porch.

And, I finally got around to dealing with the backpack sprayer, which had been sitting on the driveway since its last use - at which time it had extruded the O-ring just upstream of the valve.  My boots still have blue dye in them....

Turns out I hadn't gotten around to cleaning it out in preparation for repair, so it still contained a significant amount of the blue dye, plus surfactant, presumably-defunct glyphosate, and possibly some old selective grass killer.  Now my fingers are blue.

Replacing the O-ring was no big deal; one of my assortments had one that was close enough to the original size.  (The original, though, was brown.  I wonder if it was something other than bog-standard nitrile.)

But... it didn't wanna spray.  Turns out the "spray optimizer" (25 PSI pressure regulator) had gotten clogged up.  Looks like a replacement can be had for $10 plus shipping, or maybe I can fix it, or maybe I don't need it.

Anyway, the sprayer, sans pressure regulator, is back in service - or will be once I flush out the leftover stuff from last fall.  Then I'll be all set to take on various large areas of weeds.

Update, THEM! edition:  I went to dig out some charcoal, as is proper for the day.  Was it not proclaimed back in 1868 that the last Monday in May should henceforth be the opening day of grilling season, to be solemnly observed with bacon cheeseburgers?  So, charcoal!  Turned out the charcoal bin had been taken over by a colony of quite large ants, complete with superjumbo ant eggs.  If we had some koi, I might have fed the eggs to them.  As it was, well, a goodly dose of bug spray got the ants under control, without too much of it getting onto the actual charcoal (which is in bags).

Burgers were tasty.  Winding down now.

A chill and drizzlesome Sunday

Currently 57°F out there, and I think that's as warm as it's getting.

Not very much rain, but enough to moisten things.

I'd expected to catch up on some indoors stuff today, but that doesn't seem to be happening; my metabolism didn't start up properly this morning.  'Tis a day for Internets and nappage.

I did get some yard stuff done the last few days.  Onions, and the last of the tomatoes and peppers, are in the ground.  Squashes and melons, and the early sweet corn and green beans, are sprouting.  I'm determined to keep the weeds under control this year, which means putting in some time every couple of days with hoe and/or rototiller.  Builds muscles!

I'm not really keeping up on mowing, partly because the blades currently in the mower give very lopsided results (they're home-resharpened, and I suspect one of them is rather bent).  Supposed to have some new gator-type blades of exactly correct dimensions coming Wednesday, and I think I'll wait until then to change blades.  I guess I can give the second expansion field a lopsided haircut in the meantime.

Ah, Memorial Day weekend.  In the before-time, I'd be at Baycon.  Now... I look at the web site, and, hm.  Firstly, it appears much reduced (there was fragmentation happening the last couple of years that I attended, and it looks like it's only gotten worse).  Secondly, it looks remarkably Woke, i.e., No Fun Anymore (that too was underway many years ago).  And thirdly, hidden away under "health policy": vaxx passports strictly enforced (at this point, a glaring sign of tribal insanity).  Seems that the things I miss about living in Silicon Valley are mostly dead now anyway.

Such a day... and it's not even lunchtime yet.

Wake up late.  Deal with flurry of household chores.  Eventually have a quick breakfast.

Get call from HVAC guy.  Oh, right: there's a spring maintenance visit scheduled for this morning.  Window was 0830~0930, but he'll be here around 0800 as he clears the deck for a long weekend.

All goes well, until he's finishing up and Joy notices a drip from above in the master bathroom.  Oops?  Turns out that - probably last year, when we had some insulation upgrades done in the attic - the condensate drain pipe had gotten disconnected from the pan.  So, when he flushed the drain pipe this morning, a bunch of water ended up in the attic.  He climbed up there, reconnected the pipe, and cleaned up as much water as he could, but it's still kinda drippy.

And!  The weird chicken, who hadn't been laying eggs much lately, decided to have another go.  The result was... well... I'd ask the reader to imagine Agrajag as an egg, but that would't be quite wrong enough.  Imagine instead a jumbo egg that's been through the Galaxy Quest digital conveyor.  Yeah.  Like that.

(I think she'd tried a day or two ago and produced something more along the lines of a turtle egg; I found the remains of a thick membrane, sans shell, on the doorstep of the coop.)

There was another thing, but that's not bloggable.

And the cats are being cats, only more so because of the scary intruder and all the commotion.  (They didn't have "HVAC guy" on their calendar.)

Meanwhile, my Chipzilla shares are having a very bad day, for reasons that may (given the opacity of modern financial markets) never be clear.

On the positive side, the comm test for the toaster project is still running happily.  I still need to do at least one further build, to undo a couple of changes I made for debugging (repurposing two signals as debug outputs, since the current board design is notably short of test points connected to FPGA pins).

And, a shipment of kitty litter just arrived.

Got to spend some time in the garden; there are things to put in the ground (probably one each additional tomato and pepper plant, and a bunch of onion sets, today; more seeds tomorrow), and there are always lawns and walkways to mow.

And I need to resume work on the two other toaster projects that have been preëmpted by that one fiddly problem.  One, I mainly need to build and ship a special-purpose interface dingus and update the firmware in an already-tested way.  The other calls for a bunch of setup and study, followed by a bunch of coding and testing.

Additional: Typepad, or maybe Cloudflare, has apparently developed a suspicion that I'm not human, and now insists on a human test when I post... despite my being logged in on the same computer, using the same ISP, as always.  Been getting that occasionally from Amazon and Walmart, too.

Update:  Did some close-in tilling in the garden.  The mini-tiller isn't nearly so heavy nor unwieldy as the mid-size one... but it's quite a handful when there are rocks in the soil.  I really need to get a rock bucket for the tractor, for use during fall & spring tilling.  I got exercise.

Afternoon: time for some nice easy mowing!  Fire up the mower.  Proceed to an area that needs attention.  Engage blade.  Get rather alarming noise... come to think of it, I was getting that yesterday too.  Seems to be getting worse.  Blade coming loose again?

Back to the barn.  Wrestle deck off mower.  Yup: I guess it's the other blade this time.  Flip its washer to be concave-toward-blade, tighten the heck out of the bolt, and wrestle the deck back onto the mower.  Take a blog break.

Update 2:  More mowing.  Lawns & walkways out front, fine.  Take on some of the areas in the far back yard.  Go after the tall stuff around the Strategic Topsoil Reserve.  And... yup.  Starboard blade came loose again, uff da, uff da.  At least this time it had an excuse: I hit a big rock.  And it seems to have come very loose indeed, as in hardly cutting anything at all.

Back to the barn.  I'll deal with it later.  I'm thinking that (a) gator-type blades are indeed a good idea, but (b) using "universal" blades not actually designed for riding-mower use is not such a good idea.  Maybe when "later" happens I'll put a fresh pair of OEM blades on until such time as I can scare up a couple of pairs of correct gator blades.

Bug fixed, I think

The thing I'd been chasing for the past couple of weeks?

A missing edge case.  Strange thing is, statistically speaking it should have happened in 1/64 of all messages... but somehow it only happened under circumstances that don't even begin to make sense (like, when  a particular value was read from a variable as opposed to being supplied as a constant).

I figure that out late yesterday evening.  Fixed it - quick & easy, once spotted.  Started a test running overnight....

And, this morning, I found that the error had occurred very soon after I started the test run.  I spent the morning trying variations on the fix.  I kept getting impossible results... as if two mutually exclusive cases were happening simultaneously.

Oh, look: a missing else in a partially-pasted end else if () line.

Comment out the latest hacks.  Put the missing else where it belongs.  Build, load, commence testing.

Been running happily for an hour and a quarter now.  It's probably fixed.

(That edge case?  The result of modular thinking.  A bit of logic that's needed in two states of the state machine is definitively not needed in a third... except that a transition from the second state to the third, with the specific data pattern having happened at a specific time, does need part of the special handling.)

Gardening break

So I spent a while down in the garden, maneuvering the medium-sized tiller around some of the weedier parts.

Oooh.  That's a big, heavy, unwieldy piece of machinery!

Prolly building up some arm muscles.  Groan.

Maybe later I'll take the mini-tiller down there and do the areas closer to the plants & rows of seeds.  Or maybe I'll do some mowing.

Data corruption happens on Thursday nights...

... when the janitor polishes the datacenter floor with the big electric floor buffer.

OK, I'm not seeing backup tape erasures.  It's still that packet error thing I've been chasing for the past couple of weeks.

I'd been running tests with traffic sped up to 10× the nominal packet rate, to reduce the time-to-error.

When I return to the nominal rate?  I get about 1/10 as many packets through, on average, before the error.

So it's not a question of bit error rate, nor packet error rate, but something related to time outside of the message formatting / encoding / transmission.

Kind of like the classic "the circuit glitches when someone uses the nuker in the break room" scenario.  Except that this has to be internal to the system, given that it (or something very similar) is happening both there and at the client site.

Grrrr.  Currently testing with a polling routine slowed down, despite the fact that nothing the routine is currently doing should have any effect on communication.

Not much yard work today.

Busy indoors with one thing and another in the morning.

Came the afternoon... Joy figured it was time for another go at re-integrating the two indoors chickens with the flock.  Results: mixed.  One did fine; the one that's spent the most time indoors (because of the bad frostbite) ended up spending most of the afternoon in the coop.  They're back indoors now, but at least they did make it through the afternoon without major conflict.

I ended up sitting on the deck for a few hours, reading a book and looking up every so often to see how things were going.

I did find time to fuel up the small and medium tillers and confirm that they still start, and to do some watering and some selective weeding with the hoe.  Someday real soon now I need to get the tillers down there and chew up the emerging Johnson grass.  I also did some weed trimming, but nowhere near all that I had planned.

Indoors afternoon.

Yesterday was mostly indoors too, except for a little watering.  Still struggling with that presumed timing issue, presumably inside a dagnab FPGA.

I need to go through that code, determine exactly where a timing issue is even possible, and see if there's anything to be done about it.  With various tweaks, I'v gotten the problem to happen almost immediately or only after thousands of messages... except that I'm developing a suspicion that it's actually random enough that none of the tests has had a big enough sample size to be statistically valid.  So it could be that none of the tweaks had any effect at all on the problem.

Anyway.

This morning I needed to make a post-office run; there was a package held there in need of picking up, and Joy had a return to drop off.  The held package was... confusing.  The note said it was oversized, and had "Team lift" written in.  What Joy was expecting was a small side table: too big for the mailbox, yes, but well within the range of parcels routinely delivered.  Had Amazon mistakenly shipped a conference table?  The right size of side table, but solid gold?

As long as I was going to Sevierville, I figured I might as well do some shopping: farm co-op, Tractor Supply, and maybe the Walmart Neighborhood Market.  As long as the farm co-op (plus Tractor Supply right across the road) was at the beginning of the itinerary, I took the scenic route - and, hey looky here!  A tractor show!  Free!  Which... had I not had other errands, I would surely have stopped for a look; I presume it was vintage equipment.  (One of these days I want to go to a tractor pull, but I don't think this was that, at least not one of the modern-spectacle kind.)

Errands went pretty much as expected.  That side table?  Was a side table.  The clerk (no Amazon she) had no difficulty handing it across the counter.  But!  The box did indeed say "team lift" on it, and maybe postal regs have something to say about that?

This afternoon is moderately rainy.  How much we'll get is wildly uncertain; it's a slow-moving storm with ill-defined boundaries.  So, indoors.  And I did need a nap.

Got a little more planting done.

Two types of sweet corn and three types of bush-format green beans.

Still a few more things to put in the ground soon.  Meanwhile, weeds are emerging - from both seeds and rhizomes.  Gotta put in some tiller time, with the smaller tiller(s), what with use of the tractor in the field being somewhat impractical at this point.

Most of the day, though... still trying to track down that doggone timing issue.  I've eliminated a lot of possibilities.  Now trying to come up with some way of capturing the failed message as received so I can compare it to the message as sent.  I actually tried to do that with internal loopback, but for some reason that resulted in the comm subsystem becoming totally messed up before any messages were even attempted.

And, I had a little supplemental caffeine in the afternoon, trying to get rid of a headache.  Oops!  Even a little was way too much.  So, being extra-unproductive.

A somewhat productive day.

One side of the ongoing ToasterCo problem is now properly fixed.  The other side... well, I think I need to start bring signals out to where I can put scope probes on them.

I took a midday-ish break to finish putting tomato & pepper plants in the ground.  Still need to put seeds in the ground for corn, beans, and one or more varieties of edible-pod peas - and maybe some grains a bit later.

Oh, yes: those crimp contacts for the AMPMODU connectors?  Those arrived today.  The expensive definitely-the-right-ones... aren't.  Not only are they nigh-impossible to crimp using a common(-ish) hand tool, but they're not at all the right contacts for the connector shells I have.  The right contacts turn out to be the cheaper, maybe-they'll-work-but-that's-not-clear ones.  Yeah, I'm increasingly reminded of why I'd been avoiding AMP.  This was a pain a couple of decades back when I was working in Corporateland; it's more so now.

A very Monday Tuesday

The morning started out sort of OK-ish, but within the hour the situation had degenerated into multiple cat-fights.

Yes, there are now at least three angry and/or frightened cats looking for a confrontation.  And things had been mostly peaceful the last few days.

That, and I'm feeling a mite feverish.  The thermometer says I don't have a fever.  This other thermometer says it's not terribly hot in here (77°F, with 63% humidity).  I think my metabolism is messed up.

Weather forecast has shifted from thunderstorms all day to thunderstorms arriving midafternoon, so I could get out and do some more gardening, but... overheating easily, and still got sore muscles from yesterday, besides which I need to be focusing on this weird logic timing issue, assuming I can get my brain working.

That rain that wasn't supposed to happen yesterday?

It mostly didn't happen today instead.

The forecast called for rain most of the day, and what we actually got was a few sprinkles in the afternoon.  (There was lightning within a mile, though, and apparently significant rain within a few miles.)

I got a little planting done in the morning - sweet potato and tomato plants are in the ground, as are some of the pepper plants.  There are several more plants yet to be dealt with, but I was getting hot & sore.  Tomorrow isn't looking terribly promising (besides, which there's Work to be done), but I might finish with the pre-sprouted plants Wednesday morning.  Then there are corn, beans, and such to be planted in seed form - probably not using the little seed drill this year, but I haven't decided yet.

Tomato & pepper cages are spread around on a roughly fathom-square grid.  I'm thinking rows of corn, beans, and whatnot should be spaced 2 feet or so, so there'll be room to get in between with a rototiller (at least the little one).  Corn maybe needs to be spaced a little more than that, but close enough for pollination... always the conflicting requirements!

Feels like Summer out there.

Been doing incremental bits of manual labor out in the morning heat.

Soil prep for squashes & melons is done.  Actually planting the seeds... I think I can manage that this afternoon.

The bags of cow-manure compost that'd been sitting around since last Spring had gotten well and truly infested with ants.  Aggressive little buggers.  Nondescript tiny black ants, but bitey when disturbed.  I assume they're also infesting the other soil-related products in that area.  I may need to Take Measures.

Tomato cages are ready for deployment (the new square folding ones needed some wire-bending done, as they'd arrived configured for folding in quarters; when fully assembled they only fold in half, which I figure is fine for storage).

There are more big-grass sprouts coming up, but it does seem to be corn rather than Johnson grass, based on pulling up a few.

Gotta clean the chicken coop, too.

Maybe I'll take a nap this afternoon, or do something constructive in the barn.

Update:  Coop cleaned, or at least the straw changed.  Squash & melon seeds put in the ground, this time with snow markers bearing nylon shipping tags to identify which type was planted where.  Planted spots heavily watered, as there's no rain expected until maybe-tomorrow.

A bit later: that rain we're not having?  Came out of the Northwest.  Quite a bit of it (going on a quarter-inch, and escalating).  Lightning within a mile.  I'm supposed to be grilling dinner this evening; we shall see how the weather develops.

Update 2:  Total rainfall was 1.29" before the storm dissipated.  Looks like a sunny (and humid) evening.

Can't make it easy, can they?

I needed a couple of connectors... double-row, 0.1" grid (to match a protoboard), male connector right-angle-through-hole, female connector crimp contacts that'll work with 30 AWG wires (to match prewired connectors).

Settled on the AMPMODU series, because why not.  Ordered the right-angle headers, the mating shells, and a bunch of contacts.

Comes time to assemble the thing: the contacts I ordered look awfully tiny.  Oh: they're 2mm AMPMODU, not regular AMPMODU.  Foo.  Regular AMPMODU contacts are only trivially pricier... except for the ones for 30 AWG, which are way pricier.

There's also a contact that's considerably cheaper and might be compatible, but it's not at all clear.  It, and the presumably-correct contact, are provided with incomplete drawings (each incomplete in its own way), and there's nothing about what connectors they're meant to be compatible with.

I'm reminded of why I've long hated AMP.  Trouble is... there was a Great Consolidation around the time of the Dot-Com 1.0 bubble, and choices have been scarce ever since.  Doesn't help that basic boring rectangular connectors are out of fashion nowadays, especially in 0.1" spacing and crimp-type contacts.

Oh, well: a sufficiency of the correct contacts, and a few of the maybe-usable ones, ordered, along with a few specimens of chip I've been wanting to play with for a couple of possible future projects.

Some time out in the hottenhumid

Wasn't really all that hot today, but I haven't adjusted yet.  I need to start getting outdoors earlier, and doing desk stuff during the heat of the afternoon.

Main accomplishment was making another pass over the field with the tiller.  Also, I got the hoses untangled and, roughly speaking, deployed.

Afternoon development: Southmoon is home.  Back from the vet with some special kibble (high fiber) and a bit of some transdermal appetite-boosting drug.  She likes the kibble... unfortunately so does Huckleberry, so assuming it works out we'll have to buy lots of it.  We'll see how she does over the weekend.

Not much work-type work the past couple of days.  Have to catch up on that soon.

Some outdoors time today

The afternoon thunderstorm was cancelled, so I spent some time out in the heat/humidity/sunshine.

Mostly repotting some little plants into window-box planters or tree buckets.  Sunchokes went in tree buckets.  Put buckets in loader bucket, drive out to the strategic topsoil reserve, shovel in several scoops of silt and a couple of scoops of compost per bucket, stir, transport now-heavy buckets to the side-yard, put on saucers for root-containment purposes, add young sunchoke plants, and water heavily.

Over the next few days, I'll be needing to put plants, and seeds, in the actual outdoors garden.  In the actual ground, like.  And making sure everything's properly tagged this time.  New thing: instead of sticking plant labels in the ground to get hidden among emerging weeds, I'll be using nylon shipping tags that zip-tie onto tomato cages, stakes, and the like - up high where I'll be able to see them.  (Writing on them with a paint pen, of course; even the supposedly-for-outdoors magic markers fade rapidly in sunlight.)

And, sometime soon, I should pick up some sweet onion slips to put in the new, improved root-vegetable area.  Sweet potato plants also go there.

Hm.  Should also lug a post with hose holders down there and stick it in the ground.  And run the long hose down there.  Always details.

Exercise is good, but I got overheated.  Brain not working well.

Update:  Main field has some rather robust grassy sprouts coming up.  Maybe I'd better give it one more pass with the tiller before planting (and before putting the hose-storage pole in its place).

Oddly quiet around here.

Southmoon is still having diarrhea - for maybe a month now - and medicating her at home is Not Happening, so we took her to the vet, again, yesterday afternoon.  (It was a long wait; we had a non-emergency appointment shoehorned into what turned out to be an afternoon filled with emergencies.)

She'll be staying there for a while for adventures in medication, diet, and maybe diagnosis.

For such a quiet critter, her absence makes a big difference.  The other four cats are all subdued, and even the various birds aren't making as much commotion as usual.

And I managed to eat breakfast this morning without anyone climbing into my lap and saying "I can haz blueberry muffin?"

Update:  Late-afternoon report from the vet's office says she hasn't been having the diarrhea there.  Should be coming home tomorrow, probably.

Hypersensitive AFCI?

A short, but somewhat intense, thunderstorm blew through this morning.

The breaker for my office tripped off.  Again.

I presume it's something to do with the AFCI, which is there because for some reason the outlets for each bedroom are on the same circuit as the overhead lights.

I need to work up a list of electrician projects - there are several, to be done in stages, and I should get them organized.  Checking and maybe replacing that breaker - I'm disinclined to work on panels myself - should be on the list.

In other weirdness: this morning, Joy's Windows 10 laptop reported the presence of a removable drive, E:, which was her phone.  Which wasn't plugged into the laptop, nor paired via Bluetooth, which that laptop doesn't have anyway.  But wait!  It was some of the files from an older phone!  Which, apparently, were stored on an invisible thumb drive or something.  Then it claimed that there were two DVD drives, both F:, and rebooting repeatedly didn't improve the situation.

So, she's having a "save everything, reformat the drive, reinstall Windows" sort of day.

And I'm trying to figure out how a CRC error is creeping into a communication link, sometimes.  Been chasing possibilities, and ruling them out.  The errors are being detected on the end of the link that isn't under my control (someone else's comm hardware, plus drivers & application software running on Windows), which does make sleuthing that much less convenient.

Update:  Extra funsies on that comm issue!  I set about looking up the specs on the yonder end... which uses a chip for which I can find only a preliminary datasheet from 1997, and it seems the chip is now obsolete (though apparently some board-level vendors stocked up and are still shipping products based on it).