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!

I’m still trying to clean up the character encoding issues I created (or maybe I just uncovered them) last night. My brain hurts.

But today wasn’t totally without success – I achieved a goal that I thought was completely out of reach.

I use my Apple Watch to keep track of my activity. The watch tracks three dimensions of activity – standing, exercising, and burning calories, and there’s a goal for each dimension. Reaching the goal in all three dimensions gives you a perfect day; reaching the goal for every day from Monday through Sunday gives you a perfect week.

I’ve owned an Apple Watch since July, 2015 – six and a half years, 341 weeks, or 2391 days (not that I’m counting). In that time, I’ve only had 51 perfect weeks, even though I hit each of my daily goals at least two-thirds of the time – consistency is hard!

So I was happy to open up the Fitness app today and see the “Perfect Month” award on the screen. I wonder if there’s a “Perfect Year” award?