Pandemic Journal, Day 688

On Monday night, I’d learned that one of the members of the Silicon Valley Improvmasters was the owner of Glazier Rolled Ice Cream on Santa Cruz Avenue in downtown Los Gatos. I’d been curious about the place but we’d never gone there; this gave me another reason to consider visiting.

This afternoon, we took a 5K walk through downtown Los Gatos with the South Bay Striders – I was a little hungry afterwards, but it wasn’t time for dinner, so I suggested visiting Glazier. Diane was agreeable, so off we went (we’ll do anything for more steps!).

Making rolled ice cream is an elaborate process – I don’t know how they’d cope on a busy day, since each order took more than five minutes. The result was interesting, but I think I prefer the texture of a traditional ice cream. But I’m willing to give it another try.

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!