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Sometimes it's right in front of you.
And yet you can step right by it without noticing.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with proton gradients.*
And if you can see me doing that, then...
You can see in the future of a thousand years.**
* A non-sequitur for the sake of it.
** And another, a meaningless Hendrix reference.
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A day spent mostly unable to find things.
Not unlike most other days.
Although other days the thing needing to be found might be 'the answer', 'what's wrong', or in those hippyish moments 'myself'.
Today it is mundane.
What's missing is an Infra Red camera for use with the Raspberry Pi. I've obviously put it 'somewhere safe'.
What I can find is the normal camera, which leads me to another thing that I can't find, which is how to get it to work. The electrical path is all good, tested end to end with a multimeter, the camera works on an old Pi, but the Pi Zero refuses to accept that there is a camera attached.
Debugging mode tells me that it can detect the camera but refuses to power it on.
assert( camera_subsystem_state.power_enable_ref_count[port] > 0 ) failed; ../../../../../vcfw/drivers/device/camera_subsystem/camera_subsystem.c::camera_disable_ctrl line 1116
Some further fiddling around and I get the LED on the camera to flash at my command. But I can't find the solution.
I then find something else to do, possibly involving squashing aphids - if I can find any.
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Loads of chillies on this Numex Twilight, and loads more to come judging by the number of flowers and new flower heads.
The aphid genocide will be well worth it, I'm sure the aphids agree.
Sweet flavoured and medium hot, these chillies will ripen through purple then yellow then orange to red.
Eat them uncooked with a bit of cheese on a cracker.
For added entertainment poke yourself in the eye with the cheese, the cracker, and the chilli. In that order.
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I'm a human dynamo.
Oh yes.*
I'm a human dynamo.
Apart from when I'm not.
Possibly due to having had one too many.**
So today this human dynamo needs spinning back up to speed, recharging.
Unlike these batteries.
No amount of chocolate, tea, or sitting down watching Celebrity Masterchef will revitalise them.
These batteries are fucked.
Even the rechargeable ones.
Whereas in a few hours time this human will be back at it and tap dancing on the ceiling.***
And for that there will be No Charge.****
* As John Major might have said.
** As ? and the Mysterians might have said.
*** As Lionel Richie might have said.
**** As Tammy Wynette might have said.
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The Mighty Wurlitzer
The command console.
It's a standing desk
That keyboard needs a clean.
Look at the size of that bolt.
A bottle opener?*
* Available for hire.
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Those words should be spoken by Don LaFontaine as the summing up after "In a world where chilli plants are under attack..."
Getting bored with squish, squish, squish, I decided to take a more methodical, less green fingered approach. Using a scalpel, some cheap reading glasses and a piece of kitchen towel, I went into battle.
The tiny aphid offspring were suddenly visible, and using the scalpel it was possible to flick them onto the paper towel where they could be squashed with the flat of the blade. Key areas to locate the buggers are generally around the flower stalks, although sometimes they venture onto the undersides of leaves if they're feeling particularly cosmopolitan. Looking for shed skin cases is a useful way of tracking them, they are white and look very like a small aphid, these will be seen on the soil or on leaves, and there may often be a recently enlarged beast specimen directly above. Tidy away any skin cases as new ones will give an indication of further pest activity.
Ten minutes of checking chilli plants three times a day has reduced the population to the point where I need much greater magnification reading glasses. Either that or the aphid population has been vanquished.*
I'm pretty sure there are still aphids there, tiny, not yet old enough to reproduce, waiting for me to go out. And as long as I spot them before they get to a week old and pop out more clones then this out of control game of life may become void.
Rules for minimum viable population are probably not the same for aphids reproducing via parthenogenesis. Infestation from soil borne eggs and winged aphid invaders is also a risk, especially with non-sterilised soil and an environment which it isn't possible to isolate or hermetically seal.** The only real answer is scorched earth, and that won't produce me any chillies.
With the above in mind, and Don's voice reverberating between my ears, I will steel myself to continue the deadly battle.
Green death gets serious, if only the Doctor and an assistant were available.
* Fat chance.
** In one of their incarnations they give birth to live young, in another they can lay eggs, in another they can fly - sneaky buggers.
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It's been a long time since there was a mainframe in our machine room, but up until recently there were still a few relics of the original installation.
The room that was slightly larger than the size of a basketball court has since been partitioned into a much smaller space. Even in the much smaller space there is a lot of available room, partly due to more powerful computing having a much smaller footprint than previously, and also because we make great use of virtualisation.
Now in rack space no larger than a couple of washing machines we run over 1200 servers.
When the partitioning work took place, in the early 2000's, I liberated this piece of monitoring kit to use as a desk ornament. It's a Honeywell circular chart used to plot temperature over the time period of a week. There were probably similar charts to record humidity. On the panel I removed the chart from there were large indicator lamps to display alert states, and there were outsized and clunky switches to set different modes, all very 1960's in appearance, a classic period.
This chart doesn't appear to have ever been used, although it does have a spreading ink mark where the pen was left in stationary contact with the paper, like a failed chromatography experiment.
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