paloma's journal

it's been two days since i last wrote! yesterday at work was very chill because the people i work for were on a day trip to nyc. then afterwards i went to the gym even though i hadn't even planned to. and i ran a mile in 12:15.

this morning i went to the doctor because i just got my connecticut health insurance and i haven't gotten a checkup since... 2018? i forgot to set an alarm and andrei woke me up literally when the appointment was supposed to start. luckily no one at the doctor's office cared that i was late and there was basically no one else there.

we biked to kit's to pick up some cucumbers because he had a surplus of them in the garden. i also worked on some random little things and generally enjoyed my day off. i wanted to try and fix something with the home assistant setup but it's still a work in progress due to VM configuration things i need to figure out. also, i am planning to change up my computer setup in my office/studio soon, so i did some research on external monitors and ordered one. my laptop, which is actually newer and more powerful, will become my main computer setup with an external monitor/docking station, and i will move my desktop off to a side station since it's now kind of becoming mostly a server.

anyway, we are currently watching jaws. i didn't realize this movie was set so close to where we live.

i guess i'm just writing a bit more inconsistently since my week of house-sitting. which honestly is fine. sometimes it feels good to just... accept and embrace mental scatteredness.

what's going on?

• on sunday we went to meet up with andrei's family for indian food and then we went to the thrift store.
• our upstairs neighbors moved out and sold us their washer dryer in the basement, so we can do laundry in our own home now. luxurious!
• i got into "home assistant" (the open source automation app) through doing the kobo python wall display project. i started running it on a VM on my desktop computer instead of a docker container for networking reasons. it seems to be working well and i was able to bridge a bunch of lighting controls to apple homekit, so that enjoyably scratched some "random tech project that improves my life slightly" itches.
• i also did some more automation stuff for the rhino/adobe file workflows at work. i can now do a bunch of things that would have taken an hour or so in just a few minutes.
• it was hot and humid and there were also hornets, so we haven't done much outside work.
• andrei and i watched a very incoherent detective dee movie last night and now we are watching once upon a time in china.
• i wanted to go to the gym yesterday but i was too drained from the heat so i went today instead. among other things, i ran a mile in 12.5 minutes. (previously i did it in like... 14?)
• i gave my plants a bath.

i continued working obsessively on the hacked kobo, and though i couldn't get ahold of all of the data i wanted to display, i eventually landed on a satisfying result for now. it shows the time, date, current weather conditions, and the next event on my calendar, as well as an illustration at the bottom, all of which should change to a theme with a black background after sundown. the sun is still up currently, so i guess we'll see if that worked!

i also mixed a new batch of the cocoa and spice blend that i've been mixing into my cold morning tea, and made some progress on sorting through my piles of cables and other debris around my office/studio. there is still one final pile of stuff to organize and put back, but at least it's contained. i set up just enough equipment to test out some new, expensive video converters i ordered from ebay. i had to return the two $40-$140 sdi<->component converters i bought, which is fine because i factored some trial and error into the process. ironically and unsurprisingly, the two $5 converters i bought as backup and backup-backup are working fine.

one more thing i did today was figure out a quicker and easier way to grab photos off of my nice camera. i am starting to feel the limits of my iphone camera lately, even with the "halide" app which lets me turn of the horrible default image processing, the sensor is still tiny compared to a real camera and things often look grainy. so hopefully with this new method, i'll be encouraged to pick up my sony a6000 more knowing i can almost-as-easily grab and edit the photos i take with it.

these days off in between house sitting and returning to work have been filled with rabbit holes. but that's not too surprising. since i know i won't have time to dive down them after tomorrow, my brain is seizing the opportunity.

anyway, i have to go do the dishes so we can watch the rest of this dumb bollywood movie.

it's been a few days since i last wrote. dog sitting was kind of fun but i was pretty tired and disoriented by the end of it, so it was a welcome relief to return to my own home and sleep for a full 9+ hours.

today was pretty hot, so i mostly stayed indoors. at the top of my to-do list was to sort through all of my stuff that was in disarray from the show last weekend and my hasty packing job from the house sitting, but instead of doing that i mostly actually played around with installing python on a disused e-reader to convert it to a little home dashboard. i wasn't able to finish the project today, but i made surprisingly decent progress considering i had to fix a bunch of things because i was using a different model of e-reader, and also i ended up spinning up home assistant to handle some back end stuff for the information i want to display. hopefully tomorrow i can get more things working and then convince my brain to move on to more practical matters at hand.

i also finished my book (the vorrh by brian catling). despite its strange start, i ended up enjoying it a lot and i now want to read the other two in the trilogy. but i'm holding back on starting any more books for the next couple days until i have more of my affairs in order.

we watched half of a really long, kind of idiotic bollywood action movie. sometimes i am very confused by andrei's taste in movies, but they are usually entertaining anyway, even if i'm just laughing at how stupid they are.

last night, i finally managed to get a good night's rest, despite the hyper puppy sitting situation. in between walks and playing with the small creature, i've been working on website and newsletter updates. i posted the full video of our performance on youtube and peertube, as well as a shorter highlights reel. hopefully today i can make a post for my blog and update my CV! lots of things to update.

also, later today andrei is coming over and we are going to visit a waterfall with the dog and then do some grilling over the fire pit.

i'm here at the house where i am puppy sitting for the week. the show on saturday went well, but we didn't get back until 2am that night, so i barely got an hour of sleep before i had to get up and head here to meet anoka and david as they left for the airport. i was able to take a few naps though, so i actually felt OK, if a bit dazed. the puppy seems to have adjusted well to the transition and i've been working on training him to walk on the leash without pulling.

i realized that i sort of forgot to promote the show at all from my end; normally i post the link somewhere at least, and invite people directly, but the location in upstate NY was a bit remote so i didn't really know who to invite or who would make the drive if they weren't already going for the rest of the show or upstate arts week; there were plenty of people around though since there was also an open studio and a sculpture exhibition on the same site (chashama north). i guess we did enough by just performing and supporting the other artists. also our friends were there, so we got to hang out, and it was a fun evening.

yesterday, during my first day of puppy sitting, i brought thor (the puppy) to a park in new haven and met up with andrei, his sister, her two kids, and andrei's mom and aunt. the park was full of activity and children, so thor was a little nervous, but he behaved well and patiently tolerated the clumsy physical affection of ozzy the four-year-old human.

i've had a string of video converter deaths over the past few months. the first two that died were expensive blackmagic branded devices, which are supposed to be "industry grade." my fallback was a $5 cheapo hdmi to RCA converter, which i could get away with using because i was only using a black and white version of the input, so color depth wasn't a big concern. but then, yesterday, after using it for a few hours in practice and then power cycling it, that one died too! it was awkward timing because this time, i didn't have a backup converter, so i had to rethink my setup with the show coming up the next day. i decided to simplify my setup and remove the laptop from it completely (since that was the HDMI source i needed to convert), and instead do live camera feedback and use artificial life (andrei's video oscillator device), both going into my modular. despite the hiccup, i'm quite ok with the resulting output; i haven't done live camera feedback in a while, and i actually feel a bit safer to not be using my laptop for an outdoor show. it's also a similar setup to ones i used to use before i started incorporating the laptop, so i still have muscle memory for performing with it.

anyway, it's time to get ready to pack up. we are taking the van since we need to bring the PA and projector screen. hope it's a fun show and that we can get back at a reasonable hour because i have to be up ridiculously early tomorrow to start puppy sitting.

the day started out overcast and a little cooler, so we got to do some work on the shed before lunch. now it has a floor, and we ordered some lumber racks so it will be ready for material storage soon! i also did more computer work, this time it was a bit more rote since i already set up all the automations i could figure out how to do. any further adjustments to the process will likely be on the rhino/grasshopper side, which i'm not fully ready to delve into yet (but maybe soon!)

we are playing a show on saturday and i need to do some prep, but i'm leaving it for tomorrow. i've had an active week and could use a little down time (and an opportunity to read a bit finally).

i keep thinking about how i want to read my book, but the day is too full to let me sit still for long. that's the sign i'm "into" the book now though (i'm usually "into" one thing at a time — a book, a series, a game, or a project, etc. — something i think about a lot and look forward to getting back to whenever i'm not doing it).

at work, i figured out how to automate something in adobe illustrator which was rather tricky. in fact, i'm not even totally sure how i got it to work, but i'm not going to question it. i was able to speed up making the mockup graphics for the paintings by at least 20x (i should have benchmarked it for exact numbers).

i worked the front desk at the yoga studio and took the class. it was a particularly nice class, with a strong but achievable level of challenge. the only down side was i was very hungry and i did not pack enough food for the day. (this was offset somewhat by anoka giving me ice cream at work!)

i had a much needed dinner when i got home and then, ironically, worked on more workflow automation stuff for andrei's business. basically, i made it so that when someone buys their software, it generates and emails the customer a registration key. this involved wrangling shopify's API limitations, translating andrei's bespoke hashing algorithm from C++ to TypeScript (i was told that it is Very Important to capitalize TypeScript properly), and bridging some quirky serverless runtime environments. but, looks like it is all done now!

but yeah, that took up a bunch of time, and now it's bedtime. good night!

i forgot to write earlier and it's now pretty much bedtime, so here are some updates from the day in quick list format:

• at work i figured out how to do python scripting in rhino to generate and modify geometry, pretty neat
• agreed to puppy-sit for my employers while they are out of town for a few days next week
• went to the gym, did a light day because i'm still sore from other exercise and have yoga tomorrow
• back at home, i helped andrei with a coding/web/automation thing for their business; didn't get it solved all the way but i think i know what i need to do to get it to work
• andrei installed a game on the emulator pi that i used to play on pc when i was 10, quite a throwback

oops, i forgot to write in here yesterday. even though it was sunday, i had to go into work briefly to meet with a freelancer who has another job they work during the week. i got passed down the torch of knowledge about the procedural design files for making the specialized painting equipment and mockup files for the artists i work for. they use the "grasshopper" plugin in rhino, which is actually a pretty awesome tool that i would like to delve into more at some point. but the premade patches that already exist are pretty user friendly so i can get started using them right away even with just my current knowledge. this was also what i mostly worked on today at work.

i wasn't sure at first about the book i am reading right now, the vorrh by brian catling, but i am officially hooked at this point. it's quite a bizarre book which is written in a very poetic, metaphorical style, so it can be hard to follow at times, but it turned out to have enough of a plot to keep me going with it thus far (about a quarter in).

this evening i am feeling a bit drained and headachey. i will just try to rest up and chill.

in the morning, i had to go to the dentist for a somewhat unpleasant procedure to treat my gums. but then, i made almond flour pancakes and then we went to the beach! it was a bit crowded, which was expected for a public beach on the weekend, but we did some swimming and went for a long walk. it was a nice day for it, not too hot but definitely warm enough to motivate one to jump into the chilly water.

now we are back home and andrei is playing retro video games on a raspberry pi.

this morning i biked over to kit's house to water the vegetable garden. while i was there a black vulture came to investigate me. it was a beautiful animal and quite unafraid of humans. i also harvested some vegetables and made a huge salad for lunch, and a batch of pesto.

i finally got the speaker stands installed. they look and work great and we are listening to music in proper stereo at this very moment. it will also be a huge improvement when watching movies!

speaking of which, it's time to watch the rest of new kung fu cult master 2...

my last day of work for the week. cataloguing paint colors, taking care of the puppy, doing maintenance around the property where i work. after that, i went to the gym and ran some errands. i am doing a lot more at the gym than i have maybe ever done before at any gym. the most exercise i have gotten before this was from a yoga teacher training program at a rather intense yoga studio. i think i'm maybe exercising the same amount that i would have at one of those classes, but in a way it's harder because i'm the only person doing it and there is no one telling me what to do. still, i've been doing a pretty good job of it. i hope i can keep up this routine. it helps that i drive by the place every day after work.

andrei made deep fried eggplant and squash for dinner, which was delicious. then we watched more of the kung fu movie. it turned out that the really long video file was due to it containing both installments of the series, so we finished the first movie and started the second. perhaps we will finish it tomorrow.

after work today, i headed to the yoga studio and did my weekly session there. then i went home. the bookshelf that i repaired and painted with green gloss seemed to be fully dry/cured so it has been returned to its station.

now we are watching a kung fu movie. we just realized it is actually four hours long so we are only going to watch half of it.