It's Sunday, June 9th. I've been feeling actually sick this weekend, and I've developed a mysterious rash on my chest and neck. I spent the day in bed, as well as much of Saturday. I'm planning to go to the hospital tonight to see if I can get an appointment, waiting in line for when they open to take appointments at 5 AM. Violeta came over last night; I made us an omelet, salad, and polenta, and she made us orange pancakes this morning and made me chamomile-anise tea with lemon juice this afternoon. That helped my throat feel better.
I went over to Santiago's house yesterday to pick up the mylar balloon, which Violeta and I floated over my patio last night to see if I could get improved Wi-Fi reception from the Hacking Club. I see no significant improvement. Near Santiago's house, the Iglesia Universal del Reino de Dios was having some kind of big convention. There were maybe a dozen buses, mostly school buses, parked on Corrientes, the main avenue. One of the drivers was sitting in the bus drinking mate with a couple of his friends. I asked them where they came from; it was a small town I hadn't heard of in the partido of Presidente Perón, which is one of the outer suburbs of the capital. Dozens of other buses were parked around the neighborhood. I successfully cured most of the moldy clothes by washing them with a bit of bleach, but one light-colored cotton pillowcase still had pretty substantial mildew spots. Soaking it in bleach water (6mℓ/ℓ of 60g Cl/ℓ bleach, so about 400ppm Cl) from Friday to Saturday didn't help, so I tried an additional soak in stronger bleach water: 60 mℓ of bleach in about liter of water, so about 4000 ppm chlorine. About an hour of that treatment removed the visible mildew stains completely or almost completely, and didn't damage the dye. (There's still a sort of reddish spot that might be the remains of a mildew spot.) I had spent some time looking online at pages about removing mold and mildew stains, and also cleaning products marketed for removing them, which all turned out to be made of sodium hypochlorite with, perhaps, some surfactants. Some of the how-to pages recommended hydrogen peroxide instead; by and large, though, they seemed pretty clueless: "If your clothing's fabric cannot tolerate using bleach, substitute 1/4 cup of oxygen bleach instead of the hydrogen peroxide," bleated one, while another senselessly gibbered, "Another option, instead of mixing your own bleach and water solution, is to wash your clothes with a bleaching detergent such as Clorox or Oxiclean." Many of them recommended about 30 mℓ of bleach per liter of water, without specifying the strength of the bleach. I was able to dry the previously-moldy laundry, even the thick towel, by hanging it on the laundry rack on the patio and pointing the space heater at it, from inside the kitchen, on its 1000-watt setting, for about 12 hours. It didn't pump nearly as much air as the fan, but it did the job. I probably should have set the space heater on an upturned pot in case a surprise rainstorm flooded the kitchen again. Dismayingly, the mold smell has returned to the bedroom since the flood. I still haven't called Telefónica to get the internet connection fixed. I stopped by a bakery nearby to buy some alfajores. The bakery alfajores cost a bit more than the kiosco alfajores (I bought 13, weighing 250g, for AR$20) but have more variety and taste better. I haven't washed any more laundry Saturday or Sunday. I need to get back to washing laundry soon, tomorrow or the next day, but at least I have a fair bit of clean laundry stored up. I hope the moth larvae I see occasionally are living off something else than my clothes. Yesterday I finally checked on the status of the work project I mentioned before. Disappointingly, the disk ran out of inodes more than a month ago, and so it stopped recording new data. I haven't run out of inodes since freaking 1996. I fixed it so it would be able to record further data, but I don't know if I can get back the data it would have recorded during that time. On the other hand, having gotten the server working again is a positive step. On the third hand, this is yet another example of how I really, really need to work with other people --- not only would the other people have, I hope, persuaded me to show up and do stuff even when I was depressed, they could also have looked at the server to see if it was okay. In fact, if they were actually working on the project, they could hardly have avoided doing so. Interestingly, this experience, while disappointing, was devoid of the crushing guilt I've so often subjected myself to in the past, and which is generally responsible for my procrastination. Perhaps this is a step in the right direction, and I can achieve some more things tomorrow, if I'm not in the hospital, and if I haven't already sunk this project by neglect. If I have, I won't sink the next one with neglect. I haven't quite finished the _Guide to Digital Signal Processing for Scientists and Engineers_, but I've read most of it. I'm pretty sure I now know how to run a vocoder on an Arduino, which is perhaps my next non-work non-self-maintenance task to undertake; I might also have the seeds of some fundamental new inventions in DSP, although of course by far the most likely outcome is that somebody's already tried them, and they don't work; but exploring that will be highly educational, too. Understanding DSP should turn out to be really useful for the work task, too. The news broke about a week ago that Landsat 8 data was open access. I signed up on the USGS's Earth Explorer site and downloaded a shot of Buenos Aires, which is lovely but still needs work to be useful. I'd like to be able to get Level 0 unresampled Landsat data products to try out some resolution enhancement algorithms, but I didn't see that as a download option. The improving conditions in my house are leaving me feeling much more optimistic, for all that the conditions inside my actual body are substantially less pleasant now than a few weeks ago. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-journal
