Thanksgiving Break in Trichotomy

Reminder of abnormalcy

We just came back from upstate visiting La Professeure’s parents for Thanksgiving. It is nice to spend holidays with family again. And we went there a day early - stayed Tuesday to Saturday - so we avoided traffic and (just as important) Saturday church service.

I had gotten the booster on the Friday before, and my armpit (not arm) was still sore when we drove up. La Professeure said that’s a sore lymph node and that she had soreness all over her body when she got her booster. But that only lasted 12 hours. I did have a day of tiredness - felt like I had pulled an all-nighter - and then the lingering sore lymph node. Not sure if I would take being locally sore for 3 days, or being sore all over for half a day.

It’s nice that vaccines are available in my area, but quite disappointing how unequitably it is being released globally.

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Abundance of caution

The recital scheduler tool I made for the amateur musician group provides a facebook login option - people can login using their facebook credential. That way I don’t have to create a credentials database and people don’t have to create a new account just for that tool. But I got an e-mail from Facebook that says our app violates their privacy policy. There’s a policy on facebook where apps that uses Facebook services must provide an explanation of what personal data from facebook it uses, why it needs the data, and how to delete it. Even if the app is, like ours, not using personal data.

It amuses me that privacy protection extends to apps that do not keep personal data.

Our site also keeps a searchable database of all performance recordings at our recitals since 2012. Usually people use this to look up their own performances, but just before the break I got a request from someone who wants to listen to recordings from many years ago, before she joined our group, of someone she doesn’t know. Apparently the Google drive sharing link had broken due to them changing their security policy and now she couldn’t listen to those recordings.

Taking care of that took a chunk of my time but it’s nice to know that the tools are being used.

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Tiering our friends

We had a long discussion about whether to host our annual New Years Eve party at our house this year, because of Covid. We were looking to Marius for lead, since he hosts an annual Christmas party every year. What he did this year is to limit the guest list, so he is inviting I think a quarter to a fifth of the people he normally would invite.

So over the break, La Professeure and I took a look at our list and decide which of our friends to drop, taking into account how close we are, whether they are likely to have alternative plans, whether they are likely to RSVP yes, and a bunch of other considerations. And we don’t always agree on our assessments. So we had a multi-dimensional optimization problem between the two of us. But Google Sheet is so useful in this aspect; both La Professeure and I use it at work often so quite fluent in it. So I created a shared spreadsheet with formulae to calculate how many people would be invited, filled out our assessment of all the criteria, and it automatically updates. It’s like a work project’s “planning poker” optimizing between work priority, time estimates, and dependencies.

I never thought it’d apply to friends.

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