t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


SEP

26

2016

it happened this morning: i woke up with the tip of my nose feeling cold. autumn is finally upon us. there's no use in fighting the forces of planetary alignment and the change of season. less daylight, more darkness, the average temperature falls, everything gets cold. i'm not worried about myself, i have a high cold threshold; i'm more worried about cristina, can she handle the temperature drop?

i woke up at 7:40am but cristina had already left for work. her bedroom door was open and a dirty knife sat on the kitchen countertop. for lunch i heated up two slices of leftover pizza and made myself a kale-banana-almond milk smoothie. it suddenly dawned on me that now the weather has turned cold, i can once more begin drinking my assortment of hot teas.

today i went about acquiring the parts i need for an updatable LCD menu display my father was asking me about. it's pretty easy to do with a raspberry pi, but seems like a waste of a good equipment to do something so basic (better than what he was thinking before, which was to hook it up to one of our used PC's). but at the very least i needed an HDMI-to-VGA adapter, which i ordered off of ebay for $3.99. the one that i got is the traditional version, a small cable tethered to a dongle, but nowadays they come in micro versions (which cost more and i didn't really need a fancy one).

then while reading up on setting up a raspberry pi (rather outdated material for the pi 2 which doesn't come with wifi/bluetooth, unlike the pi 3 which is what i have), i got the idea of getting a USB wifi adapter so i could run my cheaper (99¢) raspberry pi zero in headless mode. so i ordered an adapter from amazon.com (edimax EW-7811Un $8.99). then i remembered the zero only has microUSB ports, so i needed an OTG cable to connect microUSB-to-USB. i had one but i remember my father was using it, so i bought another one off of ebay ($1.99, later i discovered i had another OTG cable in my cable box and i'd actually examined it earlier, not realizing what i had).

although i couldn't set everything up until all the parts arrive (hopefully the end of the week), i could at least prepare the microSDHC card. i had a spare 32GB card from my old panasonic lumix, already formatted to fat32, and downloaded them copied (using dd) the disk image onto the card. i can begin working as soon as the wifi adapter arrives, which will be on wednesday (via amazon's 2-day delivery).

cristina came home relatively early around 5:40pm. she left soon afterwards though, to go climbing at brooklyn boulders.

i didn't leave the house at all today, except in the evening after sunset to put the cover on the motorcycle in anticipation of the rain that will be here for the next few days. i was expecting it to be colder outside, but it was actually kind of balmy, despite what the temperature said.

for dinner i heated up the leftover piece of chicken parmigiana to make a sandwich.

cristina came home around 10pm. she brought her friend fabian, along with chinese food, and cases of beer and hard cider. they came home to watch the debate. i wonder who's idea was it though? i'm a little leery of fabian, he seems very touchy-feely with cristina, from the first time i saw him at the cambridge carnival, and now tonight. although he says he has a girlfriend (a chinese-swiss girl), my feeling is he has ulterior motives. fortunately he's leaving boston by the end of this week. anyway, i spent the night with one eye on the debate and one eye on my houseguests, afraid that they might spill their food (cristina with pho, fabian with fried rice). the downeast hard cider was okay, but it had a sour aftertaste and made my left upper molar hurt for some reason (for me woodchuck is still the best).

the debate itself was kind of boring, as most presidential debates are. i was tempted to skip the debate and just wait for the analysis afterwards with highlights, turning instead to the monday night football game on ESPN. it's hard to say who won. trump supporters will say he did, clinton supporters will say she did. i thought she was the more intelligent and prepared debater, had all her facts down, gave details, seemed more presidential. trump was just trump, perhaps more civilized than usual, which muzzled his normally disruptive powers.

the debate was over and we were heading into midnight, with no inkling that fabian was ready to leave. in fact, he invited cristina out for drinks. i actually went outside to put away the bicycle (because of the rain tomorrow). that sort of pushed it a little bit so by the time i got back inside the house, fabian was packing up his things and left soon afterwards.