Day 56 of the 47th year of my chronology

In the morning, at Sonya’s request, I made rice porridge with regular milk. The girls happily ate it with appetite. I cannot make myself eat porridge in the morning. It is tasty, I love it, but I cannot — I am drawn to savory foods. I took Leia to kindergarten and was a little delayed.

I ordered SUP boards for the weekend — decided not to rent but to buy our own. I also ordered life jackets for the girls, a document pouch, and cases for the walkie-talkies. I hope everything gets delivered before the weekend.

At work I handled my projects and conducted several interviews. I have some opinions about the modern younger generation based on interacting with young employees, but that is material for an article-level reflection, not a diary entry. I will describe it sometime. I built a scanner and encoder in Data Matrix format for SFI. At first I played with my own format, but then realized that industrial scanners would be harder to adapt, and the byte savings were not worth it. So I implemented a standard Base256 codec instead. Building the scanner turned out to be much harder than expected; more than that, I did not find a single free solution that read the code reliably. My scanner was able to recognize the code, but very inconsistently, which is obviously unusable. I need to keep refining and figuring it out.

In the evening I received my hunting license at the public services center. They did a fantastic job with the government service. It took only two days from submitting the application to receiving the notification, and three days later the printed ID was waiting for me free of charge at my local center. I never stop being impressed by how well our public-services platform has been set up. It is nice to know that I also contributed a little to several of those services. Of course, I got the hunting license not so much for hunting as for obtaining permission to own and carry a weapon, which I would like to use for clay shooting at a country club. I have even already been invited to come shoot with company.

I cooked dinner (...again) while Masha was busy with her lectures, and the girls were driving me crazy and constantly trying to break their mother’s academic silence by bursting into our room, for which I received shouted complaints about how unacceptable that was. I do not have enough time to recover after work. I do not know what to do or where to get more energy. Before bed my wife and I watched a little of the show Stars-2, laughed, and went to sleep.