My inverter has unfortunately died, and I wanted to replace it with the same model. Ideally before I lose the contents of the fridge. It's a 24v inverter, which is not at all as easy to find a replacement for as a 12v inverter would be.

Somehow Walmart was the only retailer that had it available with a delivery estimate: Just 2 days.

It's the second day now, with no indication they've shipped it. I noticed the "sold and shipped by Zoro", so went and found it on that website.

So, the reality is it ships direct from China via container ship. As does every product from Zoro, which all show as 2 day delivery on Walmart's website.

I don't think this is a pandemic thing. I think it's a trying to compete with Amazon and failing thing.

My other comically bad shipping estimate this pandemic was from Amazon though. There was a run this summer on Kayaks, because social distancing is great on the water. I found a high quality inflatable kayak.

Amazon said "only 2 left in stock" and promised delivery in 1 week. One week later, it had not shipped, and they updated the delivery estimate forward 1 week. A week after that, ditto.

Eventually I bought a new model from the same manufacturer, Advanced Elements. Unfortunately, that kayak exploded the second time I inflated it, due to a manufacturing defect.

So I got in touch with Advanced Elements and they offered a replacement. I asked if, instead, they maybe still had any of the older model of kayak I had tried to order. They checked their warehouse, and found "the last one" in a corner somewhere.

No shipping estimate was provided. It arrived in 3 days.

Teaching sucks sometimes, but it shouldn’t suck all the time.

 A friend of mine has got herself in a bit of a pickle. What seemed like a wonderful opportunity to teach overseas turned into some kind of a nightmare. The behavior coming from the students is outrageous and the administration appears unwilling to do anything about it. What would I do?

 There’s a couple of pieces of philosophy or at least the way I think about the world  and how I  analyze what I want to do or what I’m doing and if it’s satisfying the five basic elements of well-being. Those elements are positive feelings. Engagement therwise Known is Flow. Positive relationships. A sense of achievement. And finally a sense of purpose. So in a situation like that I ask myself: am I having fun; am I making any progress and will I have any sense of achievement. Am I making the world a better place by my tolerating this situation. Only the person in that situation can make the final judgement.

 There’s another aspect of decision making for me when to stay when to leave whether it’s a relationship or a job. And it has to do with intuition. It’s much deeper than just surface feeling. There were years where I taught where I was miserable but I intuitively knew I needed to stay and figure out how to make it right, What I needed to change to become a better teacher. In the end I ended up teaching 27 years.  The first few years we’re pretty rough. I and the situation got better and better over time. I had some tough students but for the most part I had excellent support from the administration which made life tolerable if not downright enjoyable. Students were taken out of my class if they proved to be repetitive behavior problems.

 Back to the intuition thing because of my belief system I believe we can access a deeper knowing if we truly listen so what’s going on inside our head or you might say, inside our hearts. Does this activity truly make me happy. Is this good for my well-being and health. I’ve tolerated some miserable jobs because I knew they were temporary. But I can only take so much misery. So much damage to my mental and physical well-being. I’ve had jobs where I lasted three days. Or a month.

 It’s a big world and there are plenty of opportunities. I don’t believe any of us need to stay in a painful unproductive emotionally abusive situation for any length of time. unless of course there’s absolutely no way out. 

So I wouldn’t tell another person what to do but I know what I would do. I would jump ship. Count my blessings. Chalk it up as a learning experience. And find something better.

A stressful thing about maintaining git-annex is that sometimes changes to git break it in some way. Since git has a high development velocity, it can be hard to keep up with all changes and catch such problems. The git devs are good about backwards compatibility, but can still make mistakes. Worse is when there's an assumption about how people will use git, when git-annex lets people use it in a rather different way. I've been dealing with one of those today.

CONFLICT (file location): x/foo added in refs/remotes/origin/master
inside a directory that was renamed in HEAD, suggesting it should
perhaps be moved to y/foo.

This was a interesting new git feature when it was added back in 2.18, especially since git doesn't really track directories, so is here somewhat guessing if a directory was renamed.

An example of a way git-annex is used that this does not play well with is managing media files for consumption, where you might have an incoming directory, and then rename files to somewhere else once they're processed. If you renamed the last file in your incoming directory, and then a new file was later added to it in some other clone of the repository, this git feature could result in that new file being moved to an unexpected location when you git-annex sync.

Normally it wouldn't matter much if git guessed wrong like that about a rename, since the merge conflict forces the user to look at it. But, git-annex sync and the assistant automatically resolve merge conflicts, so the user can easily not notice this happening.

If you're worried that might have happened to you, look for files in your repository with ".variant" in the name. If there are two with the same base name, that's a normal merge conflict, but if there's only a single variant file by itself, it could have been created by this rename conflict scenario.

git-annex will now avoid this problem, by setting merge.directoryRenames=false when running a merge (unless you've manually configured it yourself).

Today's work was sponsored by Martin D on Patreon