2024

2024-04 April

2024-04-02 Tuesday

1. Today

   Woke up and walked the dog; work was somewhat eventful. We had some correspondence regarding our internal capabilities and compute availability. Also, how to manage workstation security posture. I suggested Tailscale which I can do that with alongside some sort of local daemon that uploads info about the state of software updates. I also did some side work for Connor regarding loan securitization. I re-ran my heuristic loan picker on real (rather than generated) loan data. We went to the Barrister's Ball, a BYU Law School event where all the students get together and have dinner and dancing. It was somewhat long. The food was minimal, but not bad. We danced the Penguin, a dance we made up where we lift up and then lower our arms. Nobody joined in… :)

   Entered on [2024-04-02 Tue 23:15]

2024-04-03 Wednesday

1. Again

   I wonder if I will keep this up. It seems like it will be nice to have in the future, but now it is just boring. I have not attempted to keep a journal in a little while… Anyway, today was about preparing for my meetings tomorrow. Had to put together an outline about the paper I am planning to write with my co-worker. Should be fun.

   I also read a reasonable amount of random substack articles about philosophy. Interesting.

   I need to fix the clock skew problem with the generation of this site. Really the problem is that each of my computers is a little out of sync… It might be easiest to introduce a mandatory ~30 second delay after a change before Make gets ran.

   I should come up with more fun after work activities to do with Solveig. Maybe I will ask her to wait until 5 to walk the dog? I was thinking about replacing the surface of my desk with a similarly dimensioned bamboo countertop slab. That could be fun. Maybe she would want to help me design pewter cups for her birthday. That would be pretty fun, but less surprising for her!

2024-04-04 Thursday

1. Today

   I had a variety of meetings at work regarding data science and our internal processes regarding it. My co-worker and I are going to write up our processes and try to get other institutions in Drone research to adopt them, because this will make interoperability better for all of us. We will be able to make use of each other's data more easily, is the hope… there is too much siloing, which prevents us all from effectively making the case to the FAA to integrate UASs into the national airspace. I also had to coordinate a temple cleaning service project with our ward. the EQP asked me to do that. Apparently the activity is from 10 PM to 12 AM, so I am not really expecting anyone to help out.

2024-04-05 Friday

1. Friday!

   I am supposed to make a storage location for data for work; did some of that. Solveig's friend has come down to visit us from Rexburg for the weekend. She got here late. I am pretty tired.

   This weekend is general conference! Soon to see what that entails.

2024-04-08 Monday

1. Hmm

   I skipped a few days. Most of those days were General Conference. I watched a lot of TV, basically. i also got to go and see my sister-in-law, Haley, perform as part of a musical number, which was cool… Saturday evening session, shee was right in the back on the line between the men and the women.

   Solveig's friend Carolyn came down to visit for conference as well. She stayed with us, and it was pretty fun. She is a good person.

   I still need to do my taxes.

   Today I worked on putting our massive 256-core, 1.5Tb ram server to actual work. We got it a bit ago. Now it serves as out primary Postgres server.

   After work, we went to a friend's family reunion. Solveig knows them more than I do, but it was fun. It is strange to crash somebody else's family reunion, but that is what we did.

   I should look into using Server-side Includes to include things like nav bars into HTML, because as it is every time a new page is included into the list of recent pages, all the site needs to be regenerated.

2024-04-12 Friday

1. Friday again

   I have been having to stay up really late recently. Went and cleaned the temple on Tuesday, which happened at 10PM-12AM. Today I mostly worked on further automation for our servers, as I have been doing much of this week, although I also worked on a somewhat complex git hook.

2025-01-14 Tuesday

1. Returning

   It has been a little while since I wrote anything in this, obviously. Why am I writing in it now? Because I would rather be a writer than a reader. Much of my life I have just spend reading nonsense from the internet I hate it. Writing in a diary and posting thoughts on line is meant to be an antidote to that. I got everything site-related into better shape today. Solveig and I have a house now, an ancient 110-year-old detached house in Provo. It is nice to have our own space which nobody can kick us out of. Anyway, getting a house means also getting bills, like electricity and water bills and Internet bills. I have constructed a lightweight, low-power server in our basement/crawl space. It now hosts this site, among other things, using that internet service. I have been able to correct a few bugs in my static site generator and got everything running well. I would like to no longer read nonsense on the internet. Perhaps writing nonsense on the internet can help to kick that bad habit.

   So,

   • we got a house.
   • My brother and his wife had a baby
   • We did Christmas our selves and made ebelskeevers and other traditional breakfast foods. It was pretty fun.
   • Our water heater exploded and we replaced it with a new tankless one, which took perhaps 30 hours of continuous work. We had to cut some holes in our wall.
   • In fact, cutting holes in the wall of our new house seems to have become one of our main hobbies; we did a lot of that installing Ethernet to each of our rooms too.

   We like to invite other couples from around our ward to come and eat dinner with us. We are able to do that about once a week. Last week we had a couple who Solveig ministers¹ to, this week we will have my ministering companion and his wife and two little children over. We will eat some food and frost cookies to take around to the families that we minister to.

   Sometimes I wonder about whether I should start a business of some sort. Connor did; it went fine. He had a good idea though. I feel more-or-less happy with my current work, but it would be good to own something and make something real.

   I am happy. We have a good life.

2025-01-20 Monday

1. The once and future president.

   A few days have elapsed since I wrote here. I probably could have on Wednesday, but Thursday and Friday were impossible; as were Saturday and Sunday. Thursday and Friday were the days of the Silicon Slopes expo. Connor's business was invited to attend, so I got a free VIP pass and a mandate to create a visualization for the display that we set up. I made a world map, colored by overall loan performance, which displayed a table of sample loans from the relevant country as the user moused over the map. It was reasonably successful. Other attendees where intrigued enough to voluntarily enter into our booth to be play with it while Connor talked to them about the miracle of synthetic securitization. I got to wanter around the expo, as well, and have some important takeaways. Perhaps the most important of all is also rather tongue-in-cheek: Do not overthink your company. Some of the ideas for companies were truely bad.

   • Churro Stand that is also a tech business somehow
   • Magic message stool that cures your addictions
   • Rent-a-beehive marketing tool for businesses. Your barber shop or whatever can rent a beehive and get honey in return. Apparently this gives you marketing exposure.
   • something or other with clocks and steampunk people
   • two separate levelled books company (a thoroughly debunked method of teaching how to read).

   Many others, too.

   Many of those will fail, but somehow all of them have received funding. So even my worst idea has a relatively high chance of becoming a functional business. Probably just has to beat the indeterminate steampunk thing.

   That was two days. I took the train into Salt Lake for the event, mostly so that Solveig had access to the car if she wanted it, but also because I had no time to work on the visualization. I made most of it on the train, and frankly the code quality reflects that. I should probably clean it up a lot. After the sessions, which ended at noon on both days, I made my way home and did actual work for my main employer. That amounted to three or four hours. That was not really the end of the day, thought; on Thursday we had my ministering companion and his family over for dinner. Solveig made chili and hot dogs, which was calibrated to be palatable even to their very young son. We decorated some sugar cookies after to deliver to our ministering people. It was pretty successful, but decorating sugar cookies creates a lot of cleaning to do afterward and I needed to go to bed early to catch the train the next day, so no time to really write anything. Friday, Solveig came down to the expo with me and got general admission. Some of our investors came by and enjoyed the visualization. Solveig remained in Salt Lake after to sing at a fireside, and I went home, worked, and had some dinner. We were both pretty exausted and went to bed early.

   On Saturday, my ministering companion and I delivered the cookies. My wife and I did various chores and cleaned and stuff. Her friend came down that evening from Rexburg to stay with us over the long weekend. We watched a show with her. Went to bed.

   I would like to make some custom decorative pewter drawer pulls. I can probably do that in much the same way as my previosus pewter projects, by making a mold and casting pulls. I will need to buy longish steel nuts and embed them into the stem of the pull to have a threaded hole on the bottom, but I think that can be managed.