Monday, April 22

Woke up at 7:05, got up by 7:15. B was running early to her camp in Brooklyn. I had coffee, a toast with an egg and cheese. Staying home till 8:50am: I setup slack on mobile and looked into the services from my personal laptop. My slack name was changed back to the misspelled one. I have to find the system where it’s all propagated from – not an easy task, turns out.

Train at 9am – not crowded at all. Perhaps commuting 9-10 would be the best option. 

On the train I read a paper about the origins of human rights activism in the 1970s. That’s when Amnesty International gained popularity. To the left side of human rights activism, there were “solidarity” movements. Pinochet was the catalyst: Cambodia’s Pol Pot killing 2M+ was not enough; Uganda’s Idi Amin killing 300K+ was not enough; Pinochet killing 4K in Chile catalyzed the movements across the political spectrum so they became impactful transnational power. 

At work still fighting my email access. Called one number: and they said PeopleSoft now looks good. Called another number they said some other dude would need to fix ActiveDirectory. My name is in staging, not in prod. That’s all I’ve heard from them for the day.

Abhi told me about the website [nycsubway.org] run by volunteers. Lots of good stuff there: historic maps, pictures, plans of the train stations, and railroad connections. We used to talk about a waste of resources developing apps that are never finished – turns out there are entire tunnels built underground but never used.

Regarding history, there were three competing subway companies until 1940: IRT, BMT, and IND. The traces of division remain visible today: the numbered lines 1-7 are the original IRT with lighter and shorter cars, and the letter-designated lines like R, W, Q are unified BMT and IND which have larger trains.

We went for lunch with Abhi to Dill&Parsley.

After lunch, I got access to the git repo. It’s in Kotlin – looks readable. My first project is to feed the displays on the stations with data from our tracking system. I already see my nightmares: I walk into the station, look at the timetable, and see “Arriving in -2 minutes” on the displays. I hope “Arriving in null minutes” is not a possibility for the nightmares since we use Kotlin.

Leaving by about 5. Talked to Hanif a bit before going. Turns out he is an intern; he’s thinking of finding a real job soon but is scared of the market. Yeah, the market sucks, I can tell, but it’s better outside of NYC.

We hung out with B in K-town in the evening. An old man in Vision Pro was showing us a Ferrari in augmented reality. I’m already sold on Vision Pro. I just can’t pay so much money for it for now. Let’s wait till it’s closer to $2K, perhaps.