Wednesday, June 5 Train to Boston

[soid]

 Woke up at 7:10 with the alarm, feeling the sleep debt; took another 20 minutes of a nap before getting up. The standup is a 9:30 and the plan is to be in the office by then. The train was somewhat crowded. There were all hot people on the train: pretty and intelligent office women, not fully awakened guys in suits; all looking confident into the day. All were brought into the train car space of the 9 am Wednesday morning while it was hot outside, but air-conditioned and staying in their pants and suits, and business dresses and heels hardly walked in on the New York streets.

I was two minutes late for the standup. After the standup, Abhi introduced me to PageDuty. My shift starts on Thursday morning. I had never done this; I’ll see how it goes. The last outage was just last Friday when he restarted one of the servers cause it became unresponsive for an unknown reason.

Kenny says he likes paper books cause of the annotations. He says he likes writing notes while evaluating code. Interesting use.

I was working on the Google Pay button on Android, and my trivial changes were not working, then I realized it was not properly reloading my changes. Sometimes it would not reload at all, and sometimes it would just make the button stop responding to my clicks. No, all other changes were reloading just fine, but the changes around this damn Google Pay button were wonky. Painfully, I figured out the steps to make it reload my changes. Here’s an excerpt from my notes

1) stop npx expo on Mac 2) kill the app on device 3) start npx expo start --dev-client on mac 4) start the app on device 5) Shake the device for dev menu 6) "Change Bundle Location" menu item (clicking "Reload" won't work) 7) type the mac IP address:port 8) the app may crash and ask you to clear cache, do so 9) start the app again and type mac IP address:port

That took the day. I also ran some data analysis on the ticket purchases and figured my change would save us about 90% on the SMS costs. Not bad; we will see.

We took the train with B to Boston at 7:45pm. She had a business trip, and I was tagging along. We couldn’t figure out how to meetup at Penn Station: she says she’s by Dunking Donuts; I am standing by Dunking Donuts. We don’t see each other. She says she’s in a nice hall, I say I’m in a nice hall. She sees the track escalators, I see the track escalator. Et cetera. Then we realized her hall was round and my hall was squared. That was how we figured it out. The new Moynihan Hall at Penn Station is nice: modern as a Chinese airport, but it has its character too, and it’s not filled with cops and all security checks like the airports. The food sold is just great, Manhattan quality restaurants that make it right in front of you, and not the sad cold sandwiches typically sold at train stations.

On the train, I tried to work on my Android app, but no, I was not in the mood. We ended up gossiping about work almost all trip. So I tell her all the gossip, then I don’t have the energy to write my diary. That’s how it happens.

We got to Boston by midnight. At first, the people looked quite different, but the same people. Take a New Yorker, wash them, clean their clothes, iron the pants, put an edgy ring in the ear – you get a Bostonian. We took a Lyft to our Airbnb, and driving in Cambridge I saw no single pedestrian on the street, and cars passing with loud music from their car window – late-night people heading home, driving alone and listening to music. That all looked familiar – American suburbs as I remembered them. We slept by 2.

New Moynihan train hall at Penn Station.