For the record, I have to note that response time is usually terrible. But luckily, I still get to bitch.
During the roughly half of the year that the weather is beautiful, I label various things as official Winter Projects. The professional stuff (there are always new things to learn) take priority, and always get done. Particularly if I'm going to do something that keeps CPU cores/threads pegged for the better part of a week, I'd rather do it in the winter. Because who wants to run the furnace in August? This happens. A couple of days ago a batch job that was spread over two systems pegged a total of 7 cores (14 threads) finished. Wall time 119 hours, with no restarts from checkpoints. And no, public cloud lovers, it was not something that I could run on Amazon AWS. Sensitive data.
Right now, it looks like we might have another early spring. Flowers are blooming, trees and shrubs are budding, bird behavior is changing. So I need to do some math, and run another couple (at least) long batch jobs. Also do a pile of reading, and write more than a little software. It's going to be hard to get through the tail end of that list of winter projects, and some non-professional things aren't going to happen.
One thing that will happen is a bit of work related to a local map, on the scale of a few hectares. Specifically, I need a series of GPS readings from locations that will be impossible to get once trees leaf out. The notion is to gather as much data as possible, then beat the noise level down via least squares. I wonder if it is possible to achieve precision approaching single meters, with on-hand tech. That's more precision than I really need -- I'm just curious.
So, what's with the map? I do a bit of birding. Not well, in terms of what seems to be the standard of who has the longest 'life list' of birds seen. Or county list, or whatever. Types of lists are important to many birders. I totally get that, but am not that into it. I don't even know what my life list would be, save that it would completely fail to impress those who are impressed by such things. If I had to guess, it would be around 275. That's less than the number recorded in just my county (287), according to eBird, but I took seven states to arrive at that number. So it goes, and yes, I suck as a birder. I could write a whole post about that. But I'd rather post a crop of a poor photo of a Merlin. Because I only see this small falcon in winter, when the light is usually bad (complain to $DEITY, not me) at ranges beyond what my gear can really handle.
In the checklists I submit to eBird, I refer to specific locations, such as the Greenway, or the Willow Corridor. That is meaningless to others -- I do it for my own obscure purposes. Now I want a fairly precise map to support those obscure and meaningless purposes. Simple as that. I may suck as a birder, but I prefer to suck precisely.
Spend a couple of decades in system and information security, where attention to detail and nuance is critical, and you too might end up somewhere between strange and deranged. Not knocking the field, mind you. Huge challenge, huge satisfaction.
