It was another quiet day today – the most productive thing I did was to create a draft service order for next Saturday’s Shir Shabbat service and share it with my lay cantor.

We did take our usual walks, though, and flowers are continuing to brighten them, like this ice plant a few blocks away.

 

As I was getting ready to write this post, the news broke about Fry’s Electronics closing permanently. I guess I can stop waiting for Randy Fry to respond to my Open Letter from 2005.

I can’t really say that I’ll miss Fry’s because they’ve been basically useless for a couple of years – the last time I went into their Campbell store was probably in 2019, and there was almost nothing there (I guess I could have found printer paper, but I didn’t need any that day). They closed the Campbell store a few months ago and I haven’t noticed its absence.

Still, it’s sad to see them go – I did have some good shopping experiences at Fry’s. Fry’s customers often gave great advice, and seeing many “previously loved” return tags on a particular item was a good way of choosing something else.

I never did take advantage of their biggest sale, though – their 25-cent hot dogs did not appeal to me at all!

It’s beginning to look more and more like spring – one of my ex-colleagues from IBM Almaden lives nearby, and he and his wife were outside working on their yard when Diane and I walked past.

We had a nice, properly-distanced chat – he got his first COVID-19 vaccination recently at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds; his wife isn’t quite eligible yet, but she’s looking forward to it.

They had a couple of California poppies growing by their driveway, the first ones I’ve seen this year. I always like the poppies – we went to the Antelope Valley State Poppy Reserve to see them in 2019 during the superbloom, and they were a high point of early Spring walks at Almaden every year. So I was happy to see this one today.

 

Every spring, Toastmasters has a cycle of speech contests – there are two different contests. One is always the International Speech Contest, which culminates in the World Championship of Public Speaking at the Toastmasters International Convention; the other is different each year – this year, my District chose Table Topics (impromptu speeches) as the second contest.

Tonight was the club contest for the Silicon Valley Storytellers and I competed in both contests – I won the International contest, so I’ll be representing the Storytellers at the Area Contest in two weeks. I finished third in Table Topics, but I have another chance to advance at the Silver Tongued Cats contest on Thursday.

One of our neighbors has a number of raised beds in their front yard. During the summer, they are mostly devoted to fruit and veggies, but during the winter, they grow flowers, like these – it’s worth making sure our walk goes past their house!

 

What else did I do today? I started writing code to generate an easier-to-read weather update to send to Pushover each morning, which is forcing me to learn about Pillow. I could go into more detail, but it’s not terribly interesting – perhaps it’ll be worth writing about when I’m finished.

The biggest excitement today was cleaning up some of the code I’m passing along for Toastmasters. I have to wonder what, if anything, I was thinking in one place – the original code looked like this:

foo = ”˜  this  that the   other thing’.split() 

The string was actually about 18 words long, with lots of extra spaces. It extended way past the right side of the screen, so the .split() was invisible. And I couldn’t figure out how foo became an array instead of a string for a couple of minutes until I realized what I’d done: written code that was not only inefficient but also hard to understand (I’m sure I cut-and-pasted the string in from somewhere – at least I hope I did).

I got the value of foo and put it into the statement, like so:

foo = [”˜this’, ”˜that’, ”˜the’, ”˜other’, ”˜thing’] 

I had to break it into three lines to make sure each piece was visible, but that was easy enough – and now the code is obvious and faster.

Sometimes I wonder….

We took a photo walk today so I could try playing with my camera in preparation for Africa; naturally, all I photographed was flowers. But I liked the results, so here you are.

Beyond that, it was a busy day, mostly taken up with two meetings about Toastmasters (one to help with District alignment, one to prepare for a club contest on Monday). I have a bit of programming to do in the near future as part of my turnover process.

And I did my part to help Santa Clara County’s statistics – I took a COVID-19 test yesterday and it came back negative. The test was painless and easy; figuring out the traffic pattern in the parking garage was the biggest hassle!