the official boston high for today was 66°F, breaking the record for this day. but according to my wireless temperature sensor, it was 71°F here in cambridge. when the outdoor temperature is warmer than my indoor temperature during the winter, it's an opportunity to open windows and air out the house.

the first thing i did was to drag the large xmas tree from the backyard to the curb. the tree belongs to my upstairs neighbors, and they were supposed to toss it a long time ago. this late in the season, i don't think the city picks up trees anymore. at the very least they should've left it outside, instead of just lying on the backyard on top of some thawing perennials.

after making myself an all-grain english muffin sandwich of egg, honey ham, muenster cheese, and jalapeño sauce, i went back outside again, this time to shovel snow from the large snow pile in front of my house out onto the street, for faster melting. i've been working on this snow pile all week whenever i have a chance.

i didn't know how long i'd have to be home to wait for my UPS packages, but thankfully the delivery van arrived a bit after 2pm. two packages were from frances, but one package was for me, the samsung memory card, the only thing i had to sign for.

i switched to my faster fuji bike to get to belmont. it was so warm i rode in just a t-shirt, even though i brought a pullover and a light jacket in case it got colder later in the evening. my sister had just dropped off hailey. i let her outside to go to the bathroom and had a chance to inspect some perennials. all the larkpurs/delphiniums planted in the ground are doing well, there will be a good showing this coming season. i will try to save some more seedlings from my defunct community garden plot before they tear everything up next month.

when my parents came home we went to the watertown home depot so my father and i could return $50+ of unused supplies, while my mother shopped at marshalls. i also took the opportunity to look for some good seeds, but they didn't have any of the plants i wanted to grow this year so i'll have to buy them online. we met my mother at marshalls where she got an inflatable travel neck pillow.

when i returned home i started on installing an OS for the new raspberry pi3. i have an image of raspbian jessie that i downloaded a few months ago, but i kind of like the option of have multiple different OS's running (raspbian, OSMC, etc.) so i decided on installing NOOBS instead (v2.1 2016-11-29 release).

NOOBS comes in two versions, full and lite. the full comes with raspbian jessie but it's a 4GB behemoth. the lite version is only around 30MB but it needs to download the OS as an initial step (so either way i'm downloading GB's of data). i downloaded the NOOBS lite zip, uncompressed it, and copied all the files onto the 32GB samsung microSDHC card. i also earlier reformatted with the SDFormatter app but i didn't think that was necessary as the card came preformatted.

i plugged in the memory card, a USB keyboard, a wireless mouse, HDMI cable, and finally the power (via microUSB). NOOBS fired up without any problems. it asked me to log into the nearest available wifi. after that it gave me a choice of different OS's to install. i picked raspbian and OSMC, the same 2 OS's i have installed on my first pi3.

midway through the installation, i lost the wifi in my house for some reason. i didn't know it at first, until i tried to turn up the heat and the nest app told me i didn't have wifi. i had to reset the router, but the NOOBS install seemed to be stuck for good, so i pulled the plug on the raspberry pi3 to force a reboot. it went directly into raspbian jessie, which meant that OSMC wasn't installed. otherwise everything worked as expected. it took a few minutes for it to compile a list of available networks before i was able to get wifi. i also disabled bluetooth (it was on as default) and turned on SSH and VNC (off as defaults). finally i changed the localization so at least the time and date would be correct. i rebooted again and held down the shift key to enter NOOBS. just as i suspected, OSMC wasn't installed. however, in order to install OSMC, it seems that i have to reinstall raspbian jessie as well.

i held off on OSMC for the time being. i closed the monitor (AKA my HDTV) so the pi3 could run headless. then from my macbook pro i logged into it via SSH. at first i wasn't able to, because of the security setting on my mac, that it recognized the local IP 192.168.1.108 as already used for another MAC address. i fixed it by editing .ssh/known_hosts and erasing the line containing 192.168.1.108. from there i was able to log in via SSH without any problems. i went ahead and updated the system's package list (sudo apt-get update) before upgrading all packages to the latest versions (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade). update took but a few seconds, but the upgrade took forever (135 upgraded, 62 newly installed). after 3 hours, it seemed to be stuck, and i ended up having to do a manual reboot. when i logged back into raspbian, it couldn't get wifi anymore. this forced me to start all over again, reinstall raspbian, and also OSMC in the process as well.

steve and paul had their music blaring around 7:30pm. my upstairs neighbors don't have an ounce of consideration. it's no wonder not a day goes by where i don't wish them a quick death. maybe it'll happen next week, because apparently they're going on vacation, according to the e-mail steve sent me earlier. they didn't tell me where, not that i cared, just said they'd be back next friday. when they go on vacation, it's like i'm going on vacation as well, from their loud music. i wrote him back, letting them know i brought out the xmas tree for them, but not sure if the city will pick it up (it was still outside when i came home). he didn't write back. the fact that they won't be here tomorrow made me a little bit more tolerant of their loud music. after a while it died down.

karen came home sometime after 8pm, clutching a bag of market basket groceries. she made a tuna salad for dinner, asked if i wanted any. karen told me before she went to bed that she wasn't going to work tomorrow. instead, there was a conference she was attending at harvard at 11am. hopefully this conference takes up the rest of her day and i can still have the house to myself.

sometime after midnight, i went outside to drag the xmas tree back to the backyard. i read that cambridge will only recycle trees the first 2 weeks of january. however, i think they will still take it, but just as trash. anyway, my neighbors forgot to bring it out this morning so it's already too late. up to me to bring it out next week.