i went to a harvard lecture today, "a shift in buddhist iconography between the 8th and 12th century: rock carvings and mandala murals in eastern and western tibet." a bit esoteric, but i'm interested in tibetan art so i figured it was worth taking a look. i had a arugula-prosciutto-egg sandwich in the morning, but this was one of those lunch lectures so there was free food so i ate a slice of turkey sandwich (with bacon) and had some fruit salad (i brought home a bag of cape cod potato chips and a pomegranate pear flavored nantucket nectars). the guest speaker sort of mumbled her way through her presentation, i couldn't really make much sense of it, but the slides of various tibetan buddhist rock carvings were interesting. the advising professor who sat nearby was more insightful whenever he spoke and i learned more from him. a lot of people in the audience seemed to be fluent in both chinese and tibetan.

it was a grey day that began to let up a bit around noontime that i was beginning to get hopeful that we might see some sun. but by the time i walked back home around 1:30pm, the sky had darkened and it was raining a bit. i brought an umbrella (miniso) but it wouldn't open. i know i have that new umbrella that i got yesterday, but that one is a little heavy to be a travel umbrella, so i'll need to buy a new compact umbrella this weekend. the production for today was a measly 6.85kWh. tomorrow looks to be an all sun day, i'm expecting to see another record to end the month of march. we will definitely surpass the 700kWh energy mark for this month.

my wifi smart color led bulb arrived today. it took a while to connect and set up - it didn't work with my android until i tried my iphone - but once connected it worked fine. at 7W it's supposed to be a 60W equivalent bulb but like a lot of reviewers said, it still seems dim. when it's on white light it can change from a neutral to a bluish light, but can't produce a warm white. it uses a wheel to adjust the colors, there are no options to save favorites. there are also preset scenes, that does allow you to select a group of colors to cycle at various rates, and also rainbow cycling options. when i use the smart life app to schedule a lighting event, the only options are on/off, i can't select which color i want. however, through IFTTT there is some color selection options, but it's from preset of about a dozen colors, no custom color options. i paid $16.99 for this sinzau brand light. at this point it seems like a novelty item, not sure how useful it can be when there's limited customizability.

it's been 3 weeks since the last time i cleaned the aquarium. the thread algae didn't seem as thick on the plants as last night, though there was plenty of algae now on the glass. i poured water directly from the bucket after adding a few drops of seachem prime. last saturday the anbias nana sprouted a flower.

the thai basil finally sprouted today, so those old seeds were still viable after all. i gave my plants 14 hours of fluorescent light a day.

i have one of my living room lights set up using apilio.io with a logicblock to turn on only if i'm at home and it's after sunset. the problem i discovered is i'm using the weather underground service in IFTTT so that a sunset event will trigger a web request using webhooks. however, sunset events don't get triggered until 15 minutes after sunset for some reason, instead of instantaneously like when i set up sunset events using the native smart life app.

i finished my leftover risotto for dinner. instead of warming it up in the microwave (which results in a gross clump of starch), i poured everything back into a pot and slowly warmed it up that way, which brought the risotto back to it former delicious self. there was a lot of it and i felt stuffed again afterwards.