That Was Interesting

18:25 Friday, 14 November 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 38.93°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 4.94mph
Words: 636

Yesterday and today, I undertook a fairly comprehensive review of the marmot. For reasons that remain unclear, much of the content in the Tinderbox file has had the date and time stamps associated with the notes altered. There are two main discrepancies.

The most common is a 12-hour advance, where my morning posts have had their times changed from a.m. to p.m. When this occurs in the occasional post I that wrote in the afternoon, it pushes the date and time to the following day, which makes "On This Day in the marmot..." a bit, well, off. This affects probably the majority of the posts before early 2024.

The second most common discrepancy is a 12d 20h regression. There are hundreds of posts with this discrepancy. This makes "On This Day in the marmot..." meaningless.

There are a few discrepancies that are in neither category, but they are very limited in number. There were a few weird cases, where posts in the Tinderbox file are out of order, even considering the time discrepancies. There are whole months with one discrepancy or the other, and some months with some of each. Most of the 2024 posts I examined in an old copy of the marmot exhibited no discrepancies.

For what it's worth, the html files on the server, with one exception, all seem to exhibit no discrepancies. There was one month, I think in January or February 2024 or 2023 when I was posting without noticing that the $PublicationDates were all in the past. (I could check, but I closed the file because it's so easy to get confused with two open Tinderbox files that look identical. I discovered an error in the Archive page with links to all the posted months, and ended up correcting it in the copy of the file that I was inspecting and marking up, which ended in November of 2024. So the archive page now ends at November 2024, and I need to fix it with this copy. Sigh.)

I've forwarded the reviewed copy to Mark Bernstein hoping that he might be able to identify what mechanism could have altered these timestamps. $Created is a System Attribute, and shouldn't be able to be altered, yet they were. $Created would have been the backstop to fix all the $PublicationDate attributes exhibiting a time discrepancy, but whatever the mechanism was, it affected $Created as well.

It's very strange, and there was no clear pattern visible to me.

Anyway, I'm thinking of just changing "On This Day in the marmot..." into a "Random Blasts From the Past..."

It was exhausting looking at all of these posts, and I wonder just who the heck I think I am that I wrote all this stuff? Most of it has been written in the past few years. I should get a different hobby.

In other news, an electrician came by and installed the interlock and generator breaker into the power panel. We tested the EcoFlow Delta Pro 3 and it easily handled the mini-split and the well pump. We should be ok in an outage. If I can get the little generator working, I can recharge the batteries when they get low. It'll take a few hours to charge both the DP3 and its expansion battery, but that'll be manageable. I gather I could even run down to Watkins Glen, assuming they have power, and use the EV chargers to charge it back up.

Anyway, had the panel inspected today and it passed. Should get a letter saying it's all up to spec soon.

Hopefully back to normal tomorrow. I have a knot between my shoulders from sitting hunched over this computer for the past two days. I need to take a nice long walk. Hopefully we get a bit of sun tomorrow.

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