on slow days at work

It's a slow day at work and it's going to be a slow week next week because our employees in China are dealing with quarantines and stuff. Nice as it is to have the pressure off, a good steady flow of work helps me keep my mind off worse things. And it's hard to stay motivated for side research projects that nobody's counting on.

Yesterday I stayed home to sign for a package, and that was the day there was some crazy new critical error I had to diagnose. From home and with the VPN down, I wrote a shell script to decode protobuf files inside zip files and tweak them and put them back to prevent the error. I felt like a miracle worker, until about five minutes after it was over, then I was back to worrying about things I can't control both large and small.