The Other Don Kelly

Another dusting last night, an easy shovel job but the neighborhood looks really pretty, especially on my walk this morning. Anne went early to deal with her office’s walkways, then met Debbie for breakfast at the new breakfast place on Main Street (the Flying Egg, go there it’s pretty nice). Anyway — after I got up, and shoveled here — I texted to see if she needed help; she replied that the job was done and I should  come over and join them. Great start to the day, nice to see Debbie, and the point of my story was that it was beautiful out, with early-morning-rosy winter clouds, before it all morphed into a generic “sunny winter day,” which was nice in its own way but that early sky really was cool.

On the home front, we got our new oven yesterday. It looks pretty nice and stainless-steel modern, the range is a bit more aggressive than our old one and, most important, the oven keeps the correct temperature. Too bad the delivery came while I was trying to sleep in — not too early really, but before 9:00, and I was trying to catch up on my sleep after a rough few days…

I’ve had a bit of an eczema problem lately, and it really got crazy this week. We super-cleaned the house, I switched to baths instead of showers… and I broke down yesterday, went to my GP and got some prescription strength cortisone cream, as well as a Prednisone prescription. I’ve been warned about euphoria, mania etc as side effects, but nothing: I’ve basically been just putzing around the house today, though my skin is running through a fast-motion miracle cure so there’s that. I have an allergist appointment in the New Year, and I got a referral for a dermatologist from the GP. I’m going up in the attic soon to find the humidifier. Life goes on.

Meantime, the mapping — rather, the fixing of the mapping scale-up problems — continues. I had problems with getting the elevation changes, and had to eventually abandon a QGIS solution, and build my own PostGIS function to get the “chainages.” The term is apparently a holdover from ancient surveyor days, where they used chains to measure distances; what I needed was a shapefile of points, set every 10 meters along each road in the database, but the new file had to refer back to the road database in a certain way, and the QGIS plugin just wasn’t flexible enough for what I needed. (My solution worked like a charm.) The next step was to use SAGA and my elevation data to give each point an elevation, which since the new chainages were themselves now in the database rather than a standalone file, the process was its own struggle learning experience, but it’s done now. Next up is generating the ascent/descent data, which I might decide to do in PostGIS as well — my current, PyQGIS-based method is run-all-night-check-results-in-the-morning slow. Tomorrow, or this weekend…

The warm weather finally broke (again) with this recent rainy spell, let’s hope it lasts but for now it’s nice and cool…

While we were in Pittsburgh I kind of got fed up with my phone sending me messages about memory use — it wasn’t really all that close to full, but it was getting closer every day, for no reason I could see, and the messages were getting more ominous. I had already moved as many apps as I could to the external drive, my photos, music etc, there should have been very little on the internal drive at all, much less enough to cause problems.  What gives?

I started looking through the folders on the drive, Googling their names and trying to find what was going wrong. Turns out (among other things) that my photos were being stored several times on my phone, over a thousand photos, each a few megabytes, and while my regular photo storage is on the external drive, the backups were filling the problematic internal one. Several minor changes to the settings, turning off “cloudagent” or whatever, and I recovered a huge chunk of storage space. I was so happy I deleted a bunch of apps I don’t use, freeing up another chunk. The best part? They’re staying freed up.

Meanwhile, back home on the laptop… my hard drive has two partitions: one large partition where my old system was, and another one that holds the root of my current system, which is smaller than the first partition but by no means small. Unfortunately, it was also constantly growing, and I was down to like 25 gigabytes — which sounds like a lot, but the disk is old and on the small side, and still it’s 350 gigs. I’m down to less than 10 percent usable space?

Once again, it was the cloud. I’ve been putting it off for a while, but I knew that the problem was my Dropbox folder, which was huge and growing (photo backups from my phone), and things would be a lot better if that folder was on the bigger, emptier partition. This required some work — the Dropbox preferences program wasn’t working correctly, so I had to fix that first, then the move itself took a while — but in the end, the move was a success, and I freed about 25G on my main partition.

That got me excited enough to look at what was on my auxiliary partition, maybe there was even more I could free up… I have my old system backed up on a network drive, but the old home folder (about 65G) was still there, and all the useful stuff had been moved over to the main partition already. I couldn’t bear to just erase it, so I moved it all over to the network drive (where there are now two full backups, but with two terabytes it’s a drop in the bucket) and now I have tons of free space — 190G of 350G total — on my drive.

I know, the excitement is palpable…

I woke up — late — this morning, with a full day of tasks and errands I wanted to get to: I had a noontime ride planned with Ted B, a friend from back in Manalapan days, and I wanted to get to some computer stuff (mapping, among other things). I was thinking of mowing the lawn, I had some laundry to get done, and, since we’re heading to Pittsburgh for a wedding this weekend, I wanted to get my packing and other preparations for the trip done ahead of time. I have a simple to-do list I keep, a list of the day’s chores and errands, which I update whenever there’s enough to do that I might forget something, and it was all there.

But life comes at you fast… When I came downstairs Anne said “I want to show you something,” and brought me around the back of the house, where the concrete wall near the basement was all moist — keep in mind, it hasn’t rained here in more than a week. Uh-oh, we’ve had an intermittent problem with the downstairs toilet running, leaky flapper or whatever, a DIY fix-up that would be addressed soon enough, but this now looked like we had a serious leak working its way though the floor and out. Anne called the plumber, and I canceled my ride — she had to take her Mom to the doctor, so I was now on “wait for the plumber” duty.

I also looked over my to-do list. The planned yardwork was basically weed-whacking and mowing, but the grass hadn’t been doing much growing, and meantime something had been digging in the new mulch (covering the crocus bulbs) so I swapped mowing out for sprinkling cinnamon and cloves around the garden — the Internet says that keeps critters away, we’ll see. I did the same for other things on my list, paring down and swapping out a few things, and managed to get all the things done for today’s modified plan.

(The plumber came, declared it was most likely condensation from the constantly-flowing toilet pipes, and replaced the flapper for us. We’ll have to keep an eye on it to see if the problem goes away, but I’m hoping.)

One thing I had on that list was to look at some productivity software I downloaded, something called Task Coach. This is a task and time management tool, almost to the  point of being a lightweight project management tool, where tasks and subtasks can be added, organized, prioritized, assigned prerequisites, tracked, etc. It has a lot of really neat features, including a few I was looking for — for a friend — about a year ago: Lori M, another grade-school buddy, put out a request for recommendations for some to-do list software, which had to include (among other things) the ability to add notes at the project as well as the task level. The moment has long since come and gone to make any recommendations, but Task Coach has this and more. It’s really good, except…

When I was a kid, allergies precluded me from doing the lawn work at home; my brothers got that job instead, and I was the one who took care of the swimming pool. This meant chlorinating the water daily, maintaining the pump and filter, cleaning out the skimmers and skimming leaves manually, and, most important but also most time consuming, vacuuming the pool. It was kind of a pain but really did not require that much effort.

Then one year, my parents got a Polaris automatic pool vacuum, sort of like a Roomba for the pool. It would run constantly — it was almost hypnotic to watch, like a slow-moving aquatic creature foraging — and my vacuuming days were over. Sort of: I basically traded the vacuuming job for the one called “maintain the automatic vacuum,” cleaning it out, disentangling it when it got caught in things, and even vacuuming occasionally when the machine didn’t work well enough. In other words, my effort level did not actually get reduced with the coming of this “labor-saving device.”

It’s something I always remembered, and often used as a good, and surprisingly apt, joke/parable over the years, especially at work. And now here I am, looking at the same situation: beneath a certain level of scale or effort, brute-force methods often work better than the more elegant solutions, and I find myself wondering if I’ll spend more time curating my task lists with Task Coach than I actually save by being organized — Task Coach looks like it would only really shine when it’s managing more complicated projects than my daily chores. We shall see.

In the meantime, I still have my simple, ever-growing text file. Whenever I feel the need, I start my morning (or end my evening) by writing up, at the top of the file, a list of the tasks that need doing that day. Then I can run through the checklist, marking them done as I go. I can add or remove tasks as it occurs to me to, and if I don’t get everything done — no big deal, I can reschedule it, or not, as I see fit. The file sits there on my desktop where I can see it whenever I go to browse — my usual worst time waster. Just knowing that I have a list of things that I need to do and check off seems to drive me a bit; it gives the day a little bit of an unpleasant sense of urgency, and days that I don’t use it feel deliciously unstructured (even if I do manage to get things done), but “to-do list days” leave me with a real a feeling of accomplishment. It’s the little things…