Five and a Half Years
Things have been going, on the whole, pretty well.
After getting laid off from my job in Indianapolis, I bid the Midwest a fond farewell to take a position out in the Los Angeles area. It was an adjustment, but things are okay out here. The wife and I might be the only people in the area watching Indy Eleven games from our couch, and I'm never going to accept the awful no-cold-snap corn they have here, and I'm going to miss being able to grab cheap seats ten minutes before kickoff and walk to a Colts game on a whim. And all of that, of course, is nothing compared to being so far away from friends again. I miss those people. (And, in one case, their baby!)
On the work front, though, things are going fantastically. I like to joke that I'm the head of process chemistry. Realistically, I'm just the first scale-up chemist the startup hired, but it's great to be The Expert in something like that in a team of medicinal chemists. And while I was icked out by the "AI"-ness of it all on their homepage at first, during interviews it became apparent that this is not a company where they just ask an LLM how to do chemistry – instead, they generate a bazillion data points with cool robots and combinitorial chemistry, then train ML models, and use that info to design another round of experiments. I don't really interact with that workflow directly, but it's fun to see from the sidelines. It's been about five months since I started and I've never felt so valued as an individual contributor and also given as much responsibility to manage big projects while also recognizing that I'm a real person. And my coworkers are awesome. It's a mostly younger-leaning team, and even the dude-iest AI dudebros love to dunk on the hucksters who claim their plaigarism machines can think.
About a week and a half ago, it appears that I brought something home from work that I had successfully avoided for more than half a decade.
Covid is not fun. My brain was scrambled eggs there for a couple of days. I'm not sure when I'm going to clear this cough, and I'll be working from home until I have consistent good days. Worst of all, I only had one test at first, and it came back negative early on – and so instead of being completely paranoid about locking myself in a room and avoiding giving it to the asthmatic wife, I passed the baton. So as I recover, I get to take care of her like she took care of me. It will have been a very unpleasant couple of weeks. I'm just relieved that my job's policy is "stay away until you are no longer sick, because duh, and we do not keep track of sick days." Beats the heck out of the policy my job had in 2020: "we make pharmaceuticals, so you are an expendable essential worker, and also we won't enforce any mask mandate, and also you get to work outside in the smoke and 110° heat doing 60+ hour weeks." Not that I'm still upset at that situation.
But I had really held a lot of pride that I never got it. I know it was somewhat luck of the draw, but I put my thumb on the scale where I could. I was the last one at my job in like 2022 still masking up all day, but once we were a few years into the vaccination campaigns I figured I was being overly cautious. I still (and can't imagine a future where I won't) put on an N95 for public transit, espeically flights. I had my appointment set up for my 2025-6 shot, although that's going to probalby have to be delayed. It was just really surreal seeing that second line on the test show up for the first time ever.
It seems like as the years go on and evolution does its thing, Covid continues to get less leathal and more contagious. In the long run, I was bound to get it eventually. Doesn't make it suck any less, though. And at the rate the current brain-worm-addled government is doing damage, I think the already-slim chances that we'll ever be done with Covid have been reduced to zero.
Mac Pro Studio Case
It's been a bummer of a week.
But in between job applications, I've finally had time to publish a 3D printing project I've been working on for a while now: the Mac Studio Pro Case.
I'm really proud of this thing. There were a few major challenges between "huh, maybe I could do this" and a physical object. First, the holes in the front were kind of weird to model, but I eventually got it. Then, my first few attempts involved one very large piece that surrounded almost the whole Mac Studio, which turned out to be way too unwieldy to print. Eventually I broke it down into small enough parts to print individually. But then, these things wanted to warp really badly. Glue stick helped, but the biggest parts actually lifted my PEI build surface off of its magnetic mount! I had to use some binder clips to hold everything together.
I'm not sure it will get widely printed – especially since I used some bolts from McMaster for assembly, which most people won't have. But I really like it, and it prompts a little bit of joy every time I look at it on my desk.
Now, to get back to those job applications.
Leaning on the Scales
The Indy Eleven season came to a close this afternoon. They lost 2-3 against Rhode Island FC in the USL quarterfinals at home. I was there, and although it's a huge bummer to lose and have the season end, it was made way more frustrating by the referees leaning on the scales.
Earlier this season, we faced Tampa Bay at home with this same referee crew, and we lost. The same thing happened. A really lopsided threshold on what constituted a foul for each side. A yellow card in a situation where I have video of the "offending" Eleven player not even touching the Tampa player. Et cetera. This ref crew has a thing against Indy, for some reason.
If Indy was going to win today, there were going to have to win by a lot for the final score to actually reflect that.
But then, this afternoon, it was the same story. Blown calls that heavily favored RIFC. Nonsense yellow cards against Indy. A goal that was taken off the books due to supposed offsides that was immediately contradicted by the video replay. Tons of flops by the other team that killed time that didn't seem to be reflected in the extra time at the end. The final score was 2-3, but in any reasonably fair contest it would have gone to PK's.
Winning today would have required an overwhelming win in order to overcome an inherently unfair situation.
Anyway, the election is on Tuesday. It's hard not to see parallels.
Edit, 2024-11-06: well, crap.
My Work PC's CPU Cycle Budget
- Outlook 6%
- Teams 8%
- Chemdraw 2%
- Corporate IT background software 80%
- Excel 4%
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my work PC is dying
Crossroads
It's good to be back in Indiana. New job, old friends. Living in the city rocks.
Getting to Indiana was bad.
No direct flights from San Jose, so we flew through Denver. A two and a half long layover would be rough, but it would give the cats a chance to stretch their legs in an animal relief room. And Denver isn't so bad as airports go. Decent food options, and it wouldn't be busy on a random Wednesday.
But wow, is Denver windy.
It was when we were circling for longer than usual that I started realizing there might be an issue. We actually made one attempt at a runway but pulled up while still a few thousand feet up. As it turned out, wind shear at ground level was grounding all flights out and preventing any flights from landing.
The captain, with an apologetic tone, told us we were running out of fuel and would divert to a nowheresville airport in Nebraska to refuel and wait for the wind to calm down. It took about two hours. By the time we made it back to Denver, our connecting flight to Indy had just left.
So now we have two nauseated cats, and one nauseated Lucas, from the turbulance. No flights to Indy until the next morning. And a customer service line that wound through the whole airport, since everyone else had missed their connections too. But I managed to get ahold of an agent using the fancy iMessage customer service thingy, and proposed an option to him: we flew to Chicago.
The in-laws let us stay at their place in the Chicagoland area for the night. Taylor drove all the way up from Indy and picked us up the next morning. Hailey let us borrow pillows and blankets. Taylor helped me retrieve our luggage, some of which had made it as far as Montana, that had eventually been delivered to the Indy airport a day later. Then he let us borrow some plates and bowls and stuff as we wait for our household stuff to be delivered. We were tired, but we made it.
We had a very bad time getting here. But that experience reminded me of one of the biggest reasons I wanted to be in Indy: the people. There are good people here. I've missed them very badly.