Pandemic Journal, Day 687

Our HVAC got repaired today – the tech replaced the gas valve and adjusted the air flow to direct a little more air towards our bedroom. The air coming out of the register in the bedroom was only 98F before he started working on the system; now it’s 112F, which should help keep the temperature in the room closer to the rest of the house.

And it was Jeff’s birthday – it would have been nice to see him in person, but we had a nice conversation.

And I kept working on recovering from the character set problem induced by installing WordPress 5.9. I spent a long time trying to get MySQLdb (an old Python to MySQL connector) installed on my M1 Mac mini to no avail; I eventually decided to give up on it and installed a pure Python connector, pymysql. I had to change the way I make the initial connection to specify keyword arguments, but that was the only change I had to make. People say that the pure Python version is slower than MySQLdb, which is partially written in C, but I doubt I’ll ever notice.

After that, I was able to actually work on the real problem, and I think I have code to safely convert the Latin-1 columns to UTF8. I’m not crazy enough to run it tonight, though!