They return my hand's grasp, smotheringly close. Was this how it was meant to feel, in a classroom cutting multi-colored construction paper? Not a pain to be gotten through, but comfort, closeness, togetherness. Their design now feels aggressively overdone, broad curve just so around the thumb, as if they might tighten and snap it off. Only too large index finger's knuckle, chafing, provides some relief, some reminder that I shouldn't run.

(Thanks, liw.)

I've gotten the bs branch to build everything again. Was not trivial, the diff is over 7000 lines.

Had hoped this was a mechanical enough conversion it would not introduce many bugs, but the test suite quickly found a lot of problems. So that branch is not ready for merging yet.

I'm considering making a library that's like filepath but for RawFilePath. That would probably speed git-annex up by another 5% or so, in places where it currently has to convert back to FilePath.

Regrets.  Woulda, coulda shoulda.  I’m not the man I  could have been.

Today I read the article below. “Being gentle with ourselves every day means giving ourselves credit for what we’ve already accomplished, not getting stuck in the “woulda, coulda, shouldas,” and giving ourselves a path of hope for everything that is yet to come.” from https://therapychanges.com/blog/2017/05/gentle/

Why am I not the man I could have been.  Do you feel like you are all that you can be?

Overall, I feel very lucky.  It seems the right people came into my lives at the right time to give me a boost of sorts.  There have been enough challenges to force me to deal with just enough unpleasantness to want to make a change.  In high school, when I was heavy, and finding a dance partner was a challenge, so I lost weight.  When only a B student in college the first go around, I got serious the second time.  I learned how to study and memorize things more quickly, and disciplined my self to do the work.  Almost straight A’s from then on.

In high school,  I shied away from some things, like group sports in high school or group anything, like chorus, band, parties, etc.  I spent more time alone than a lot of kids then, or with one friend at a time, someone I felt safer with than a group, who i feared would see my imperfections, my unimportance, and see through my charade.  The battle inside, the time consuming decision making process of should I or shouldn’t I was often there.  Even when something or someone looked attractive, I struggled with the what if’s inside my head.  I spent far more time considering the downside of those what ifs than the upsides, and consequently missed a lot of fun and opportunities. I coulda been an actor, an athlete, an artist, a writer.  If not for the fear of exposure.  Contemplating asking someone out on a date was excruciating most of the time.

A small caveat.  Some probably did not see me as emotionally constrained.  I fashioned a pretty good facade.  Good looks helped. I had older siblings whose stories and mannerisms I copied.  It worked for them after all. Sometimes I shined, when I let the creative juices flowed, and a few victories were won.

At 65, it is easy to look back.  Knowing what I know now, if I could go back, what would I do different.  You might see this as an exercise in futility.  I don’t think so.  It may help another if they read this.  The very same advice I would give to my 20 year old self, I give to my 65 year old self as well.

Never hesitate to be kind and generous.  I’ve missed out on a lot of relationships but there are lots more to have. But it isn’t just about how I could benefit.  It’s also how they could benefit from knowing me? My top most sorrow about my dad these days, who died when I was a junior in high school, and he was 47 is two fold.  I didn’t get to know or enjoy him. But the flip side is, he didn’t get to know me, and oh, how cool that could have been.

Don’t worry about what other people think of you.  As they say in Alanon, what other people think of me is none of my business.  And there is nothing so gratifying of pursuing my own dream and finding success.  Whether they are critical or encouraging, it is minor compared to my own evaluation. My brothers will attest to the fact, that I don’t take advice much.  But taking some of those risks worked out for me.  A job in Maine on a sailboat for 8 months, diversifying my studies in college, resulting is a B.A. and an M.A. in “jack of all trades, master of none.” Perfect for teaching middle school shop.

Pace yourself.  Doing too much of one thing isn’t good for the body or mind, as it leads to mental, emotional or physical exhaustion. Take time to do things that charge your batteries.  One day at a time, or as Johnny Cash said, “One piece at a time.”  Moderation is key.  Whether it comes to food, exercise, alcohol, and commitments.  I don’t think there is a workaholic that I’d trade places with.

Now, more than ever, I think less and feel more.  How will I feel if I do this or that? I know I have the luxury of being retired so maybe it won’t work for everyone, especially if you are struggling to make ends meet, and take care of others.  I work part time, making my own hours for the most part, doing things that re fairly enjoyable.  With my relaxed schedule, and relative lack of concern of what others want from me or think of my, I get to ponder.  What would be fun?  What would give me a sense of achievement today.  What gives me joy. Who shall I call and talk to.  Where should I go, or invite myself, and look for opportunities for fun and friendship? It’s working for me.

As for the original point of regrets, and woulda coulda shoulda.  Sure it could have been different, maybe better.  I’ll have to accept that my journey was a little hit and miss, a little jerky perhaps.  I will hold the sentiment that I hold for everyone.  I did about the best I could under the circumstances.  However, knowing what I know now, I expect the next chapter of my life to be pretty interesting, fun and rewarding.

Two entire days spent making a branch where git-annex uses ByteString instead of String, especially for filepaths. I commented out all the commands except for find, but it still took thousands of lines of patches to get it to compile.

The result: git-annex find is between 28% and 66% faster when using ByteString. The files just fly by!

It's going to be a long, long road to finish this, but it's good to have a start, and know it will be worth it. optimize by converting String to ByteString is the tracking page for this going forward.

Today, sped up many git-annex commands by around 5%. Often git-annex traverses the work tree and deserializes keys to its Key data type, only to turn around and do something with a Key that needs it to be serialized again. So caching the original serialization of a key avoids that work. I had started on this in January but had to throw my first attempt away.

The big bytestring conversion in January only yielded a 5-15% speedup, so an extra 5% is a nice bonus for so relativly little work today. It also feels like this optimisation approach is nearly paid out though; only converting all filepath operations to bytestrings seems likely to yield a similar widespread improvement.

• Have you had enough? Me too. I’ve had enough of so called representatives of the people who protect a president, well known before he was elected to be a womanizer, an accused alleged predator, a lousy businessman, a liar, and an adulterer.
• I’ve had enough! I’ve had enough of 8 years of nothing but opposition/obstruction  to anything Obama tried to do, no matter how worthwhile. You obstructed, because you couldn’t stand the thought of him succeeding.
•  I’ve had enough whining and moaning while our brave public servants testify UNDER OATH of the truth of the events, while the GOP obstructs, whines and refuses to comply with legitimate subpoenas. In prior years, refusing to comply meant arrest and jail time.
•  I’ve had enough of your bragging about all the jobs and growth of the stock market, when in fact income inequality is greater than ever since the census has been in effect. And the party of fiscal responsibility is mum about the record high deficit.
•  I’ve had enough of bragging about low taxes in this state of TN while poverty levels and lack of affordable health care and education achievement is some of the worst in the country and affordable housing is so difficult to find.  
•  I’ve had enough our our schools barely getting by, and teachers subjecting themselves to pay much lower than their professional peers for the benefit of children, and your governor takes even more money away from public schools for charter schools.
• I’ve had enough of money in politics, where representatives have to worry about pleasing their corporate donors more than doing what is right for the people. 
• I’ve had enough of a pay to play system where people are unqualified for the position they are given after giving a million dollar donation to the presidents inaugural fund.  
• I’ve had enough of politicians that sit on their hands and look the other way in silent complicity while thousands of children are separated from their parents in violation of international law. 
• I’ve had enough of politicians putting their heads in the sand refusing to look at the facts about the climate crisis and do nothing except whine that it is not 100% conclusive. 
• I’ve had enough of the obstruction in the Senate where McConnell refuses to bring a vote to over 200 measures that were passed in the house.  
• I’ve had enough of tax breaks for the rich and little or nothing for the people that need it. 

I could go on and on. 

In summary, I’VE HAD ENOUGH of whining GOP representatives that refuse to be transparent, that prefer to twist the facts, ignore those in need, pass legislation that benefits the rich while the poor and the middle class try to make do on less. I’ve had enough of elected officials treating us like mushrooms, keeping us in the dark, and feeding us BS. 

In November, hopefully, you will see we have had enough of you as well.

The git-lfs support I added to git-annex had one small problem: People expect to be able to clone a git repo and get right to using it, but after cloning a git-annex repo that's on a server that uses git-lfs, there was an extra git annex enableremote step to be able to use it as a git-lfs special remote. And, you ended up with a "origin" git remote and a git-lfs special remote with some other name.

Now, it's this simple to set up a git-lfs repo on eg, github:

git annex initremote github type=git-lfs encryption=none url=https://github.com/joeyh/lfstest
git annex sync github
git annex copy --to github ...

And then for others to clone and use it is even simpler:

git clone https://github.com/joeyh/lfstest
cd lfstest
git annex get

The only gotcha is that git-annex has to know the url that's used for the remote. Cloning any other url any other way (eg http instead of https) will result in git-annex not using it. This is a consequence of git-lfs not having any equivilant of a git-annex repository UUID, so git-annex can't probe for the UUID and has to compare urls. This can be worked around using initremote --sameas to tell git-annex about other urls.

During the last month, we had a very late first frost (November 1), rapidly followed by a freeze down into the teens. I went on a caving adventure, Mark learned to make movies on a hand-cranked, black-and-white, film camera, and I published a new werewolf novel.

But none of that is the topic of this post.

Instead, I want to talk more about --- fungi!

Fantastic Fungi
Mark and I just got back from a showing of the documentary Fantastic Fungi at the nearest art-house theater. We both highly recommend you check this movie out!

The stunningly beautiful time-lapses alone were worth the price of admission. But it was equally fascinating to hear Paul Stamets speak about his life and work. (Michael Pollan, although listed in the description, plays a much smaller role. There is also a cameo appearance by Tradd Cotter!)

I was a little uneasy about certain New Age/overly-poetic language. But Mark felt like the subject matter merited the flourishes. The second half also goes deep into psilocybin/consciousness/mental-health experiments and theory, which was thought-provoking but may turn certain members of the audience off. (I can't decide whether or not I'm among that number.)

New Mushroom Field Guides
Of course, my feet remain firmly planted in the dirt, so I got just as much out of the two new field guides I splurged on a couple of months ago. When I experienced my first round of mycophilia two decades ago, there were so few book choices out there that I was soon disappointed by the fact many of the species I found weren't ID'able. Nowadays, there are lots of local field guides that contain most of the species in certain areas.

For our region, I settled on two new editions. First, Appalachian Mushrooms by Walter E. Sturgeon feels like a (big but) traditional field guide. Species are divided up by category with great images and descriptions.

In contrast, Mushrooms of the Midwest, by Michael Kuo and Andrew S. Methven is a little denser and more scientific (arranged alphabetically by scientific name), although still with excellent photos and good descriptions.

The rule of thumb when identifying mushrooms you intend to eat is to use at least two field guides for ID, preferably also begging backup from a real, live person. Together, Appalachian Mushrooms and Mushrooms of the Midwest make me feel good about at least some of my IDs. Obviously, I don't eat the ones I don't feel good about.

Mushroom ID Websites
Of course, you don't have to pay for books unless you want to. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, iNaturalist is a great social-media-style gathering place to share information about species you find in the wild. Don't eat something just because someone on iNaturalist tells you it's okay! But, beyond that caveat, you can learn a lot by posting your tentative ID and waiting to see what others think.

A more field-guide-style website is MushroomExpert.com. This labor of love is put together by one of the authors of Mushrooms of the Midwest, and it has even more photos and species than Kuo included in his book. Definitely worth a visit if you have an unknown fungus in your hands!

And that's probably about as much mushroom enthusiasm as you can handle for one day. I hope you enjoyed the photos, which came from various hikes over the last few months.

I was sent a link to an article that talks about the five things needed to do to be happy.  Yeah, right.  Haven’t I read them all by now?  Out of respect and appreciation to the person that sent it, I opened it and read it.  One of the five ideas to me is  huge…a paradigm shift.

I’ve been sorting and sifting through my Catholic upbringing, a short stint in Jesus Freakism and then in my 20’s started to explore parapsychology and mysticism.  The crowd I run with for now resonate with native American motifs, seven generations, and spirituality and the other talks about archetypes, corners, and Robert Bly, inner child, and healing.

The paradigm I’m comfortable with these days, and imperfect to be sure is one that says we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.  Call it God, love, source, “all that is”is part of us, and we are part of it.  Same track maybe, or parallel tracks that sometimes split and we get a little lost along the way, only to find our way back to a place that honors all things and the spirit that resides in them.

I have looked to others for wisdom in the words they speak and still there is sifting and sorting and trying to make sense out of their words.   It is never quite complete or perfect.

The concept in the article resonates inside me. Speak to, or at least listen to your older self.  For me that means me, in my mid 80’s, who sees me, knows me, and despite the good, bad and ugly, mistakes and all, loves me.  That old man has wisdom for me, custom made, and perfectly suited to my situation.

He is also a reminder  of my mortality.  He says, make the years count.  There is no destination but the process is what counts.  Therefore, make each day count.  Never miss a moment to show kindness and appreciation.  If you feel the urge, call someone, and by doing so, you may cheer up both you and the other. If there is an opportunity to learn and have fun at the same time, go for it.  It may be theatre again, as it was last year. Or it might be a new job. A new club.  Hanging out and making new friends at the senior center. Volunteering for a worthy cause. It may be with family scattered around the east coast. It may be dancing, or singing, or a festival or a holiday celebration.  Show up. Make it count.

My older wiser self also tells me not to get complacent.  There are enough good years left and you don’t want to squander those years with bad health.  If you are going to dance, travel and play, to fully appreciate those things, you need a certain level of health?

Older self says “Check in with me next time you have the temptation for that donut, cookie, sugar sweet drink.  I won’t tell you what to do, but let’s have a conversation about it.  We’ll talk ever so briefly about your goals, what you hope to accomplish, and how to best share your many gifts with the world. Because if you are not healthy enough to participate fully, it won’t be as rich and good as it could be. It’s your choice.  You can settle for some temporary pleasure, but look around you.  Who lives life to the fullest?  Who has given up and just taking up space?  The choice is yours.”

Spent the past two weeks on the sqlite database improvements which will be git-annex v8.

That cleaned up a significant amount of technical debt. I had made some bad choices about encoding sqlite data early on, and the persistent library turns out to make a dubious choice about how String is stored, that prevents some unicode surrigate code points from roundtripping sometimes. On top of those problems, there were some missing indexes. And then to resolve the git add mess, I had to write a raw SQL query that used LIKE, which was super ugly, slow, and not indexed.

Really good to get all that resolved. And I have microbenchmarks that are good too; 10-25% speedup across the board for database operations.

The tricky thing was that, due to the encoding problem, both filenames and keys stored in the old sqlite databases can't be trusted to be valid. This ruled out a database migration because it could leave a repo with bad old data in it. Instead, the old databases have to be thrown away, and the upgrade has to somehow build new databases that contain all the necessary data. Seems a tall order, but luckily git-annex is a distributed system and so the databases are used as a local fast cache for information that can be looked up more slowly from git. Well, mostly. Sometimes the databases are used for data that has not yet been committed to git, or that is local to a single repo.

So I had to find solutions to a lot of hairly problems. In a couple cases, the solutions involve git-annex doing more work after the upgrade for a while, until it is able to fully regenerate the data that was stored in the old databases.

One nice thing about this approach is that, if I ever need to change the sqlite databases again, I can reuse the same code to delete the old and regnerate the new, rather than writing migration code specific to a given database change.

Anyway, v8 is all ready to merge, but I'm inclined to sit on it for a month or two, to avoid upgrade fatigue. Also I find more ways to improve the database schema. Perhaps it would be worth it to do some normalization, and/or move everything into a single large database rather than the current smattering of unnormalized databases?