Cathy

it was honestly so much fun. it felt like I spent the weekend hanging out and being fannish with 30 folks I'd known all my life, even though it was the first time I'd met any of them in person.

lots of cool things done and talked about and blorbos squeed over. new things to read and watch acquired. took side trips to observe Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and also to do a bit of yarn shopping (and the shop we found turned out to also sell fabric - so I got a nice skein of sock yarn, and also there was a 1.75 yard cut of beautiful fabric in the remnant bin so it was half off? whatttt???)

if there is a ConFabulation 2024, and there is no reason to believe there won't be, I will be there with bells on.

and meanwhile it is nice to be home and to sleep in my own bed, and I'm super glad I'm working from home tomorrow so that if I need to, I can finish processing my con drop by wrangling my spreadsheets while wrapped in a blanket and cuddling the emotional support plushie.

A few months ago Duolingo added pinyin training to their Chinese course. It's... a quick source of XP; it mostly challenges you to distinguish two syllables that are not actually that hard to distinguish. (Really, Duo, if you want to challenge me, give me the same syllable with different tones...)

And then a few days ago... they upped their game. Every unit now has associated hanzi lessons - every character introduced in the unit now has a 'trace this hanzi with your finger' lesson (*), which it will walk you through repeatedly, and which addresses one of my biggest challenges with the Chinese course: 'wtf is this hanzi?'

(well, they did not make me trace 一,二, or 三. they're giving me some credit. :) )

I am basically stopping all forward progress in the main course to go catch up with the hanzi (both 'trace this on the screen' and 'write this with a pen on paper', thank goodness I am not being graded on penmanship.) This will take me a while but I think it will pay off.

(*) they are not directly introducing the concept of radicals but they have at least brought up the idea that some characters are made out of other characters? 零 is 雨 on top of 令, 好 is 女 + 子.

Lab data at my workplace is kept in a bog-standard SQL database with a custom web interface. Part of this interface lets me run a query and then, in theory, export the results to a lovely Excel spreadsheet, or PDF, or a couple other formats. I do this to transfer the lab data to other spreadsheets and do lovely charts of data trends and the other things one might want to do with lab data.

Back in early March, the "export" function stopped working - but only when I was working from home. I clicked the "export" button, and it indicated that it had been clicked, but it did not export my data. Sitting at my work desk, plugged into the docking station, I can export data until my data cup runneth over.

IT's assumption is that it's a "me" problem. We did some troubleshooting.
- Did Husband change a setting on the PiHole? He did not, but also he turned it off and it didn't help, and also he didn't see records of anything from my work network being blocked.
- Is it something weird with our home wifi? It is not; the problem occurred when I worked at the library or in the waiting room of the hospital.
- Is it something weird with the VPN connection? It is not; the problem occurred while sitting at my desk if I unplugged from the docking station and went on the workplace wifi network, no VPN required.
- Is it some kind of hardware problem? It is not; they had me test it on a random laptop that they had on hand, and also gave me an entirely new laptop, and the problem still occurred on both those computers.
- Is it some kind of problem with my account on the database server? It is not; "unplug from the docking station" made the problem happen - mostly - for two other people. ("mostly" being that one of the other two could export one of my two daily-use reports but not the other. wtf?)
- likewise when I was working at Husband's desk and plugged into his docking station I could export the same one report the other person could - but he says his docking station is on the house wifi.

At this point, I think it's a really bizarre networking problem - perhaps they did something to the firewall that had unexpected results? but a) they say they have made no changes, and b) while the IT person I'm working with has observed me having the problem he has never been able to duplicate it for himself, so he still thinks it's a "me" problem somehow even though he can't think of anything else "me"-related that we haven't ruled out. (also that implies he did not believe me when I said I had successfully duplicated the problem with two other people, ugh...)

IT person wants to refer the problem to the vendor, but they will not help us because we are not upgraded to the latest version, which was not going to happen any time soon.

Fast forward to yesterday. IT person calls, along with the person managing the software upgrade (who has not previously been involved with troubleshooting). They watch to see exactly what I'm doing and exactly what happens when I click the "export" button. IT person follows along on his own machine and does not experience the problem, but the software manager does! (SO now IT person believes me that it's not a "me" problem. Yay, I guess?) We poke all the buttons. We find that in order for the data to export, I need to enter the date in a particular date field, even if that date field was previously pre-filled with the right date.

"?????," we all said. But at least now we have a solution even if it sheds no light on the problem?

"Except," IT guy says, "I think it has to do with the display settings." I did acknowledge that when I got it to *slightly* work on Husband's docking station, I had it on one of his external monitors.

Today, at my desk, I put this to the test. Instead of running the query in a browser tab on my nice big external monitor, I moved the tab over to the laptop screen without changing anything else from "known good".... and whaddayaknow, instead of behaving itself, it would not export the data unless I touched that one particular date field.

I do not understand. I do not understand why the display settings matter to whether the "export" button works or not. I do not understand why entering the date makes the "export" button work. This is the equivalent of going to the mechanic, telling him "the car won't shift from 3rd to 4th between 8 and 11 PM," and the solution being to turn the windshield wipers on and set the radio to a specific station. I do not understand why the problem began suddenly during a time period when they said they did not change anything about the software.

I suppose ultimately it doesn't matter if I understand? I can get my data from home again. But this will nag at me for days.

everything feels horrible in general today. work. body. family relationships. friendships. homeownership. I'm doing all of those things wrong in some unspecified way, either too much or not enough...

maybe I just need a nap?

this is only my first multi-day power outage of the year, where many of my neighbors are on their third or fourth.

am currently sitting in an extremely uncomfortable chair at the public library pretending to do day-job related work; there was no spot with both 'comfy seats' and 'adequate outlets' available. (They exist, but the library was not designed with 'everyone come here and work during your power outage' in mind, and I assume they were snapped up within minutes of the door opening this morning). The rest of my family handed me their devices on the way out the door and said 'charge me please...'

DTE has learned its lesson from the last major outage and instead of estimating restoration times for each little zone individually they are simply stating that 'we expect 80% of customers to be restored by the end of day on Saturday'. They also, they brag, have plans to solve the reliability problems in my area within 15 years!!!

(the powers that be in The People's Republic of Ann Arbor are getting sick of excuses and my guess is that in 15 years, they will have had a publicly-owned utility up and running on completely renewable energy for 5, which I guess would solve their problem, yup, and the city of Ypsilanti will sign on, and I will be in the same boat as I am with bus service: sitting right in the middle of the two but without the benefits thereof, because my Very White Middle Class Suburb isn't down with that pinko stuff.)

in the meantime I got a shitty night's sleep last night, I am looking forward to another shitty night's sleep but at least I don't even have to pretend to be functional tomorrow, and I will be neither sewing nor watching Street Dance of China this evening.

reading by candlelight might be in the cards, though?

ETA: I am informed by a family member that the power came on roughly the moment I hit "post" on this post. :) perhaps I should whine about my first-world problems more often.

"I want to go to the thing, but I don't want to go alone and nobody is available to go with me" is the bane of my existence.

ETA: I usually have a wonderful time anyways when I do go alone. but I have to have this fight with myself every time.

ETAx2: I went to the thing. I had a wonderful time! except that it started raining on an outdoor concert, whoops.

...I can hear my therapist suggesting that I keep a list of Things I Went To Alone And Had A Fun Time.

Problem: spreadsheet on network share is suddenly announcing that it is not in a Trusted Location and therefore it will Absolutely Not entertain the idea of running its macros.

Befuddlement: it did this last fall and we fixed it? why is it unfixed?

Solution: when we fixed it last fall, we spelled out the full path to the network share folder. apparently last Friday they did something to the network that made \\server.path.my.work\Folder different from Z:\Folder, where Z: is where the server gets mounted.

Further befuddlement: why on earth is OUR OWN NETWORK SHARE not a trusted location? but. ugh.

currently torn between "you do not get a cookie for doing the stuff you're supposed to be doing" and (in lunarriviera's words) "only positive reinforcement teaches new behavior".

must consider the sources: "no cookie" = brain weasels; "positive reinforcement" = the best dog in the known universe.

I will have the cookie.

I've talked about how the Republicans aren't good faith partners in democracy... but that's not the problem, the problem is that the political classes among Deep Southern whites were never good faith partners in democracy, and even the Tidewater gentry wanted to limit it to their idealized-to-the-point-of-myth "yeoman farmer".

We can't shame Mississippi into improving their health and education systems (or their representatives into improving the nation's) by pointing out "you're dead last" because the political class among Deep Southern whites is somewhere between "doesn't care" (those who deserve education and medical care will still get it) and "actively hostile" (why are we wasting tax money on education and medical care for the rabble???)

I've also talked about how the "heritage" of the Appalachians has nothing to do with the Confederate battle flag, that the forebears of the Appalachian people who wave that flag fought for the Union - but it does accurately represent their "heritage" of screaming "you're not the boss of me!!!" at anyone who seems to be telling them what to do. Fly that flag, boys, I won't argue with you anymore. (My heritage is still "shooting at people flying that flag" though...)

And then (and ask me how many times I heard this from my half-Appalachian mom) there's the resentment politics of "they are getting something for free that I had to work my ass off for." ("If we had a bigger budget for freebies, you could have gotten it for free too..." "No, I'm proud of how hard I work! Everything I have, I got on my own...") (and I guess that's still better than 'The Company gave me everything I have and I'm grateful for it')

and meanwhile my Yankee ass is up here like "what do you mean deserve education and medical care???" "what do you mean, 'on my own'? you went to public schools, you drive on public roads, the government insures your bank deposits and makes sure the people who sell your food aren't poisoning you...")

We used to find common ground to agree on even if we had to straight up make some up. The Supreme Court used to occasionally make us put on a get-along shirt. (Mileage varied as to whether the Yankees or the Deep South got to decide which way we were collectively going...) But there doesn't seem to be the willingness to do that anymore, and the Supreme Court is definitely letting the Deep South steer right now...

How can we have a functional society when a third of the people don't even agree that we live in one?

Husband literally yelled at me when I took it out to the compost. Said he'd use it for something if I didn't want to keep it up. So it's back in the fridge.

a month from now when it has gone off from not being fed it will be compost time anyways, so.