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Generation X Has Ideas for Game of Thrones
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New ending: Ned Stark wakes up and turns to his wife and says, “Honey, wake up, you won’t believe the dream I just had.”
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Maybe you don’t like that new ending? Snow is falling outside King’s Landing, and Bran goes to the window. In the next shot, we see Bran sitting in his room in Winterfell, holding a snow globe.
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Or what about this? Jon Snow flies away on a dragon and looks down seeing that Tyrion had spelled out GOODBYE with rocks.
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How about a spinoff? Bran wargs into The Oasis (avatar: F15her K1ng) and meets Parzival. They head off in search of Brandon Sanderson.
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In the remastered edition, King’s Landing shot first.
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The Simpsons
Subtitle: Who wore it best?
Everyone I know from upstate NY is very, very, very excited that we have been mocked on The Simpsons.
Even the Greater Schenectady Metropolitan Area got its own bit of ribbing.
One of the few landmarks in Niskayuna, NY is the water tower visible over the Mohawk Club. Normally you see this water tower from Balltown Rd., but the view on Google Maps is obscured by trees, so I looked around back for a view of the water tower for you.
Approximately every government official from Albany to Buffalo has weighed in on this episode. It is a little bit disappointing that Kirsten Gillibrand has nothing to say.
The very best part of this, though, is that comment sections all over the internet are now filled with people arguing about what counts as upstate NY. Apparently there are some trolls who put forward the ridiculous idea that Westchester County is part of upstate NY.
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Legwarmer and Sophie
Approximately done with the first
legwarmervery unusual upside-down sock.Sophie says, “hi.”
We’ll see how the top works out on these. When I am not wearing them, the top is very stretched out because the yarn is mostly-cotton, and I did not trust the ribbing to hold up the
legwarmervery unusual upside-down sock, so I made a channel for elastic, but the unstretched elastic is longer than the unstretched top of thelegwarmervery unusual upside-down sock.
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More Shapes to Knit
A few notes:
- We’re getting the topical medication for the elderly cat because her response to taking two pills a day for forever was a strong “no.” While I have always thought that this cat was stupid (for a cat), she might just be devoting every brain cell to not taking pills.
- Small database update: Most likely reason that everything is running stupid-slow on my office computer is because the disk drive sucks. As my office computer is seven years old, I am hoping that newer computers have better disk drives. No, work does not love me enough to get me a very large SSD. (But my extra laptop has a very large SSD because my dad gave it to me.)
Also I took today off work and emailed with people from work and also revised my surface-knitting stuff to do spheres now, too.
Pick a surface:
Radius (inches):
Number of stitches in 4 inches:
Number of rows in 4 inches:
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More Database Geekery
Nothing new and interesting to report for the past few days. I’ve been continuing to work on the same knitting project. The old cat is getting older and is starting to have the types of issues that you would not be surprised to hear about in a 15-year-old cat.
But, never mind the boring stuff. Yesterday I made some materialized views in the database, and they were awesome!
I’ve mentioned this before, but the production database for running the site was primarily designed to run the site and do all the things that need to be done in order to keep things running. Most of the interactions with the database are like, “This user did that thing,” or “Find the things for this user.” On the other hand, the analysis queries are more along the lines of, “Find all the users in these categories who did those things during that timeframe and calculate the average number of points that they scored under certain circumstances.” The latter tend to be slower. They can be really slow. Far too slow to be allowed to run on the production server.
Most of my queries do follow certain patterns, though. I join together the same tables on a regular basis, and these joins are pretty time-consuming. A materialized view lets me do all my expensive joins and other slow operations once in the middle of the night and then save the output in a table-like structure (it is so table-like that I can even define indices on it!), and then at run-time, my dashboards can query the materialized view. Queries that used to take minutes to run will now execute in under a second!
It also makes my queries easier to read because I am not joining together a rat’s nest of tables in order to get the information that I am looking for.
More updates to come. The first legwarmer is almost done! The cat is going to try to take pills, so maybe I’ll have some interesting scratches and bite marks to show off.
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What's So Special About Schenectady?
Yesterday afternoon and last night I spent more time than is strictly necessary on figuring out how to use the Census’s GIS API to return GeoJSON so that I could draw maps on web pages.
Long story short, my map of Schenectady County was perfect. The code for automatically scaling the bounding box was flawless, and my map would fill the entire SVG element. On the other hand, the map of San Diego County was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Sure, it was centered in the box, but the map was tiny. This happened for every non-Schenectady County that I tried. Albany County? Fail. Broome County? Fail. Oneida County? Fail.
Why, why, why is the only county that works the county that I grew up in?
I figured maybe something was being cached somewhere, since most of the original just-get-it-to-work-in-the-first-place-darnit code was written with Schenectady County hard-coded into the script. Search for the letter combination “sc” everywhere in the file; it only shows up in script tags. Search for the magic numbers 36 and 93. Nothing.
Hard reload. Clear cookies, cache, and local storage. Try a different browser. Download a new browser and use igcognito mode. Still broken.
I opened the other laptop and opened the pages over my local network. Still broken.
Was my router caching the responses from the API? I put the files In The Cloud (maybe they are still here in /maps/foo.html and /maps/bar.html) turned off the wifi on my phone and viewed them over my phone’s data connection. Still broken.
There’s got to be something about Schenectady.
Outside of New York City, Schenectady County is the smallest county in New York (geographically). And not a lot of people live there, so there are not a lot of census tracts or census block groups or other people-containing geographic features. Schenectady County is small enough and sparsely populated enough that the API is able to return the GeoJSON without timing out or throwing an error. The other counties were all larger and/or more populous, and the error from the server was being read in by the map-scaling code.
Next up, I picked a county in Rhode Island. Works perfectly.
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Knitting Update
Knitting update! Current project is now at the stage of “more than a third of a
legwarmervery unusual upside-down sock.”
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