ash_blackwell

Sometimes you get an idea for a song and it just doesn't work out the way you planned.

In this case, I was contemplating the fellow who was trying to use modern AI technology to create an on-line replica of his parents simply because he wanted to talk to them so badly. I had a verse. I didn't like it. At all, the longer I considered it.

Yesterday morning while lying in bed at oh-dark-thirty or thereabouts, I got the chorus. And a couple of verses. And random bits to build the rest of the song out of.

Today, I have the whole song. It is not *anything* like the song that I set out to write.

Overall, I think that's a good thing.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

It is amazing how deleting roughly 150,000 lines of obsolete code will improve the quality of your code base.

Both cars are finally parked in the garage again. It has been a bit more than nine years since a pallet of books for ISFiC Press needed to be stored in the garage, which meant that one of the cars had to stay in the driveway. It is remarkably hard to get a pallet of books to go away once it arrives.

Gretchen parked in the driveway during a variety of miserable weather for most of that time. Winter, of course, is the worst with snow and ice. It was very good of her. We replaced her van in December 2023 and the new van, being a PHEV, took the space in the garage so it could be charged.

I did not like parking in the driveway. I think I liked frost less than I liked snow.

At various times in the intervening nine years, we attempted to clear out the garage. We finally got the books moved out to the storage locker, which made it possible. But at one point, I decided that I needed to clear the mass of boxes that had been stored in the library as we had the kitchen remodeled out to the garage so I could get the library back. Then *more* boxes got stored in the library. Oops. Now I had set back the garage cleaning *and* still didn't get the library back.

Eventually, the boxes in the library were dispatched once and for all, along with the boxes that had gone to the garage. There was hope! Except that we had tossed a variety of things into the garage in the interim, because it got them out of the way. This was true. Inconvenient when trying to clean the garage, but true.

When it looked like we were going to fix the fence ourselves, I bought the lumber in preparation for this and stored it in (chorus) *the garage*. Then we hired someone to fix the fence, but I now had all of this perfectly good lumber occupying too much of the garage. Gretchen noted several times that we could not clean out the garage successfully with all of that lumber out there. Gretchen was (as usual) correct.

About a month ago, I found myself with some time to kill and Gretchen's van was not in the garage. I *found* places to tuck all the lumber where it was out of the way. I now have a partially cedar-lined garage with all the pickets that are tucked away in between the studs. But the lumber was out of the way, so Gretchen's precondition was satisfied.

Over the last three weekends, we have (with varying numbers of kids) spent some time out in the garage. Two huge boxes full of unread Chicago Tribunes went into the recycling bin over successive weekends. I saved enough to use as charcoal starter for some indefinite period of time. Shelves were rearranged and boxes shoehorned onto them. Broken things were disposed of. Useful things were either kept or boxed up for Goodwill. The back of Gretchen's van is *very* full with three outgrown bicycles that will be leaving tomorrow.

Thursday, I put out the pallet that had once held up Mount McGuire and the old Oriental rug that the mice had gotten to for the garbage collection. Happily, they took both. The garbage bin and recycling bin were *very* full.

Today, I decided to finish it up. I went out and collected the donations for the girls' softball league that will be picked up tomorrow: two helmets, two sets of cleats, my lineup board from the season when I was a head coach, and a batting tee. The last of the stuff for Goodwill went into the car. Things were tucked into corners.

Then I went in and got the remaining magnetic hooks, attached them to the big metal shelves that hold up my tool bag and the small sound system, and draped the cord for the charging plug for Gretchen's van over them so that she wouldn't drive across it trying to get in. I swept things into a pile, then recruited K to help me bag the mess for the trash.

And the floor was empty.

I rolled the trash cans and the dolly off onto the grass for the moment and pulled my car out of the driveway, parking it on the street. I had already gotten the key to Gretchen's van, so I backed it out of the garage, got a running start, and pulled it into the freshly cleared space where it fit nicely. There was even space to plug it into the charger.

I put the dolly and the cans back into their space on my side of the garage. Then I went across the circle, got my car, and pulled it in.

There was much rejoicing.

There are still a great many cleaning projects to finish up around the house, but this one, at least, is finally finished.

Before going into a marathon debugging session to try to find yesterday's problem, I figured that I would do some more code inspection first. I took a look at serialization for the involved classes just to make sure that there wasn't anything weird there. There wasn't.

Ok, let's try this. This branch works. That branch doesn't. Our source code is in Git. Let's get the complete list of all of the files that have differences between the two branches. It's a longish list, but it just requires a lot of clicking, swearing, and the use of some of my favorite not-available-on-Linux software, Tortoise Git.

And eventually, the problem was found in the most likely spot, which was the routine that was failing. In order to get the unit tests to run correctly, I had commented out what appeared to be an unnecessary line of code. Unfortunately, the unit tests ran much better without that line of code, but the actual software would object strenuously to its absence when a model conversion was needed. This is sort of the classic case of winning the battle and losing the war.

I have restored the commented-out line of code and life is now much better.

I will figure out how to fix the unit tests in a better way at a later date. :)

I have a ludicrous number of musical influences. Of course, I have been listening to music for a very long time. :) And I learned by listening to the Beatles (especially McCartney), and Paul Simon (with and without Garfunkel), and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and America, and Jimmy Buffett, and many, many others. And for someone who is almost completely unable to sing a harmony, I find my melodies weaving all sorts of harmonies inside of the chords that I play. That makes me happy.

One of the lesser-known bands that was an influence in my music was Mason Proffit. I would never have heard of them, but one of my college roommates owned one of their albums. Through the miracle of cassette tape, I shortly had my own bootleg. Many years later (and much like Jimmy Buffett paying the mini-mart back), I bought their CD, so I am now an honest man.

And one of my favorite songs of theirs was "Two Hangmen", which might have gotten more airplay if not for the extraordinary length of repetition of the last lines of the song, over and over for more than two minutes. Maybe there was a radio version. I hope so, because really, that was excessive.

But somewhere down at the core of it, "Two Hangmen" is a song about disinformation, about spreading messages that the government doesn't approve of, and consequences. And that makes it a song that still feels true to me today.

Maybe I will sing it at a filk some time.

But without the two minutes of repetition. :)

And here's the song.

My quest to reclaim the garage continues. I started moving a few things around while Gretchen and Julie went out for a drive. This included consigning a large box of unread Chicago Tribunes to the recycling bin.
When COVID hit, I pretty much stopped reading the newspaper. Eventually, I cancelled the subscription, but the unread papers lingered. For years.

When Gretchen and Julie got back, the whole family convened in the garage, the weather being good. Three bags of garbage later, we are *awesomely* close to having the garage in a condition where both cars can park in it. (Yes, at the same time. Wise guys...)

The old cheap Oriental rug turned out to be a complete loss, as mice had gotten to it, so it will go out in next week's trash, along with the pallet that once held up Mount McGuire. But most of the remaining stuff that needed to be dealt with found its way onto shelves, or into one of the three bags of trash that are now in the garbage, or into the house for sorting, or into the boxes for Goodwill.

Once the trash goes out next week -- which, annoyingly, has to wait for Thursday night, because our trash pickup is on Friday, which is (in my opinion) the worst day of the week for trash pickup -- then I can finish up the final bits.

And then Gretchen can put her van back on the left side of the garage.

And I can park my car on the right side.

Fingers crossed!

Great. I got a letter from the IRS saying that I have failed to file the Dodeka return. I *mailed* the Dodeka return on a timely basis, but apparently it is lost. Now they want nearly $500.

This can probably be sorted out and I will have to pay to mail them return again (which is a noticeably large amount, because you have to use a large, flat envelope), but I can't call them to discuss this until Monday, because the letter arrived late today. I will get to chew on this over the weekend, which is just perfect.

(Note that I have heard nothing from Illinois, who got a copy of my Federal return appended to the State return, because that's how Illinois rolls...)

*sigh*