Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

While running errands, the radio was doing that thing where it's mostly playing one station, but then it briefly cuts over to a different station for just a single word like, "confusion" or "radar". I think whatever the other program may have been something like a very slow paced word based game show.

Cat time

Was not fast enough to photograph the cat sticking her tongue out at the neighbors setting off firecrackers.

The cat was hiding behind the front door when I got home today so I opened the door, failed to see the cat, looked on the couch, still no cat, and then I asked, "where's the cat?" which let me see her. Then she meowed.

That might be long term motivation to port the whole codebase over to something that can run on my laptop.

Part of the performance surprise is that I'm prototyping the algorithms on my laptop which granted is a few years old, but was pretty high end when I got it and the math library in use sees what I'm doing and says, okay, I'll just offload all that to the GPU and I get my result instantly, then I try it on the hardware it needs to run on and all of that gets pushed back to a much slower CPU.

First test batch on the new algorithm ran into performance issues that makes it kind of painful to use, but it slashed the error in half compared to the original code. With a sample size of 1 it's not as if that's meaningful, but I've made some adjustments aimed at improving performance and I'll see how that does after staff lunches are finished.

It looks like my home Internet bill got a few dollars cheaper. I wonder how that happened.

Spent some time working on another new approach for generating measurements from the roaster cam. Results on some previously gathered test data look a lot better (25% error reduction, but I suspect I can push that farther by cranking up a parameter that I just didn't have enough data to push farther). I'll take my best guess at an implementation based on last night's exploration and work on getting a larger set of testing data for work on future refinements.

Their mascot is a reasonably cool looking fish.

The credit union just sent me an email about what I think is a sports team branded debit card that I could get, but it has no mention of which sport that team plays and I don't have prior knowledge of the team, so I guess I'm not in the target demographic for that product.

Also, has anybody ever made a histogram of which decks get hull breaches? On which decks are you most and least likely to get blown out into space?

Why do Starfleet people not break out the swords when they're engaging the borg? They know the phasers are going to stop working.

In normal times, the fire extinguisher maintenance people just come on a schedule, do their thing, and let me know if something more expensive than usual is coming up or required. If they don't show up and we don't have a fire requiring an extinguisher, the only people double checking that are the fire inspectors.

According to the fire inspectors, everybody has fire extinguishers that haven't been checked because the companies that do that have stopped and they're not marking it as violations for anybody. While our many fire extinguishers probably do still work just fine, please no arson.

Ordered Christmas mugs. One of the less overtly Christmas ones on the order is a sloth wearing a festive scarf.

The cat is expressing concern because I'm cooking dinner instead of hugging the cat.

I have an initial set of test images to work with now. Sadly, the information I wanted in the file names is not what got put there (the original code was placed after the relevant variable had been re-used for something less useful and I failed to notice that when adapting it). It's not a big deal because I can just replicate the code and have it load data from a file instead of from a camera, but it's more work to get started on the analysis than I hoped.

morning cat

If you can hear thunder, you are close enough to have already been struck by lightning.