Quarantine Day 42. For the umpteenth time, I woke up today thinking “Wow! Yet another day where I’m going to stay inside, work all day, join more Zoom meetings, read, write, then sleep.”
And if you don’t have time to read the rest of this entry, here’s a spoiler: yes. That’s what happened today.
If you’re still reading, though, here’re some things that made this day a little different:
- Today’s “Leading Through Change” guest was Lars Ulrich of Metallica. For the past 4-5 weeks (I don’t even remember now), there’ve been daily (and some twice-daily!) half-hour “B-Well” workshops. Guests have included Ariana Huffington (who seems to be a recurring speaker), Jane Goodall (which I missed and have to go back to watch), and other apparently notable people who I haven’t heard of before.
For the most part, while I tuned in out of curiosity during the first week, I’ve gradually only tuned in when it’s a person that I’ve heard of. For some reason, even though I should have more time now that I’m saving some two hours a day on commute, I feel like I have less time than ever! (Really, where are the freakin’ days going???) That said:
(1) even if some of the talks seem kinda gimmicky (e.g. there’re lots of “guided meditation,” which I’m sure is helpful for a lot of people, but seems a little unnecessary to me), I absolutely appreciate the gesture (Salesforce is obviously spending a lot of time and effort putting these on), and
(2) it does provide a little extra flavor to each day (e.g. who’s the speaker this time?)
So even though I didn’t really take away much from the chat Marc had with Lars today, it still provided pep to start off my day. - I spent most of the day trying to figure out why Tensorflow just would not initialize CUDA in my project’s docker container — despite CUDA working on my host machine and in my container (just not within the TF context). Turns out in this case, there were two environment variables that were missing in my Dockerfile. Why did GPU-enabled training work before? Well, those two environment variables were there before; I had put them there myself. Then after thinking that they didn’t do anything, I removed them, not thinking it would lead to a day of headache! So stupid.
- I also spent a lot of time automating Splunk queries, data pulls, and analysis. I had kind of pushed it off for some time, thinking that I would get that data from a more accessible source. But the time sink of doing the analyses manually have just grown too much. So I spent a lot of time working on that, with help from Yixin, who I’ve been quickly onboarding (and now delegating a lot of this “busy work” to).
- I also didn’t have to wait in line at Berkeley Bowl today. Since the self-quarantine started, waiting for up to 40 minutes to get has become the norm. So I was surprised when I just walked right in today (using a buff as a mask).
On a related note, I was also surprised that 3 3-pound bags of frozen fruit were available today. Interestingly, while I haven’t seen any other shortage at Berkeley Bowl (yes, including toilet paper, and meat), frozen fruit has become hard to find. Because of that, I bought two bags of berry+kale, and one bag of blueberries. Now I can make berry smoothies again! - On the subject of Zoom, I decided to join the SF Runs Zoom at 6:30pm today. It’s been a while since I’ve joined SF Runs, including before COVID-19, so I was curious what the meetup today would be like.
In short, it was all about the same, with most of the regulars, and two new members. Not too much more info though, and not many of the “old regulars.” I’m not sure when I’ll be tuning in again. - Finally, after wrapping up work, I played Azul for the first time with Christie and Pat. I feel like I’ve played Azul before, but if I did, it was a long time ago. That said, I still managed to win. Beginner’s luck? 🙂
No run today. My motivation’s been somewhat flagging. I’m also more sore than expected from the Diablo run on Sunday. I’ve basically gained back all the weight I lost from that run, too. Oh well… I wonder what differences tomorrow will bring…
