FRICKIN FINALLY

I CAN GET SOME WORK DONE

Okay okay looking okay so far oh god so nervous

Are we going to be able to take action on climate change? COVID? Stimulus checks? So hopeful

Went canvassing today which was 100% useless but at least I got some exercise vs. lying in bed checking twitter, I guess

ahhhh GA elections ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Okay I might go check out some zoom watch parties now? for a little bit? Then hopefully get some work done

22:16

Ugh 538 last 2 or 3 days trending upward for dems, widening lead from 0.5 to 1.5 pts or something like that. But hearing of split perdue/warnock voters was nervous. And after 2016 trust no polls. And not sure if trump recorded call would distract people from GOTV. And not sure if trump’s base would actually not vote despite all the speculation. But right now looking promising on nytimes needle??? and half an hour ago someone already called the race for warnock

I've seen enough. Raphael Warnock (D) defeats Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) in GA's special Senate runoff. #GASEN

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) January 6, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/05/us/elections/forecast-georgia-senate-runoff.html

22:30 Warnock +1.8, Ossoff +1.0

From twitter, Cohn: A lot of GOP vote trickling in slowly over the last half hour but it’s mostly been a hair better for Democrats than expected. Warnock win probability now over 90%, and do remember this is accounting for the possibility of some unlikely kinds of errors”

–> omg remember at the end of general (well like after we knew there would be runoffs) people were like eh it’s probably republican, and washpost had those shaded red for forever

Lol so much canvassing and I forgot to sign up for the virtual watch parties before hand and now signups are closed and i have no zoom link T__T cannot meet other volunteers oh well i had dreams

Also I was madly trying to figure out what was wrong with my computer (nojs?) turns out wsb-tv coverage is just offline until 11pm (https://www.wsbtv.com/) (https://www.c-span.org/video/?507707-1/wsb-tv-atlanta-georgia-senate-election-night-coverage)

“If the Dems exceed Biden’s margins in blue counties, that seems to support Stacey Abrams’s argument that the key is not persuading swing voters, it’s getting left-leaning voters to the polls.” Shaila Dewan 4m ago

“Dave Wasserman @Redistrict
Although a lot of TV chatter right now is focused on the big prizes (DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, etc.), lot of it is overlooking what tipped the Warnock/Loeffler race in favor of a call, in my view: Rockdale Co. #GASEN 10:06 PM · Jan 5, 2021 “

“Greg Bluestein @bluestein 28m
Rockdale is among the Democratic strongholds where the #gasen candidates are improving upon Biden’s November margins. #gapol”

Washpost: “9:35PMDemocrats make gains among Hispanic and Black voters, early exit polls find9:32PMIn Fulton County, more people voted in person Tuesday than on Election Day in November9:11PMWhat historic early voting totals tell us about Georgia runoffs’

https://www.ajc.com/politics/live-what-the-ajc-is-watching-during-todays-georgia-runoffs/TJFSEFBCDRCXJA4RWRIHRQKOBU/:

Republicans currently have the lead in the tabulated vote, but the outstanding votes are mainly from Democratic strongholds Results are pouring in much faster than they were in November because of the shorter ballot and a new requirement that county election officials process absentee ballots ahead of time. Counting will still stretch into Wednesday for some counties”

Nate Cohn@Nate_Cohn· Ossoff up to a 92% chance to win, according to our estimates. Warnock is on track for victory with a greater than 95 percent chance to win, according to our estimates. The fundamental GOP problem at this point: the Republican vote is basically exhausted. Ossoff favored to win what’s left by 36 points (he needs to win by 26 to win)

23:38: WSBTV back on at 11pm, watched for 10 mins. Was good to catch some actual live speeches from the candidates. I think RBG was more motivating to me than specific campaign promises to be honest.

omg > Decision Desk HQ Projects @ReverendWarnock (D) has won the Georgia Special Senate Runoff Election Race Called: 11:13PM EST 01.05.21 All Results: https://results.decisiondeskhq.com

23:44 WSBTV: gabriel sterling: knew it would be faster (smaller pages). Preparing for tomorrow. More than expected (over 1 million votes today!!!! wow I thought expectation was half a million)

23:46 be kind to those on both sides, there will be another election in 2 years. also something about fulton county, vehicles blocking absentee ballot delivery o__o wat

Now the question is margin… and I actally have no idea vs general I had some idea for some reason. Don’t remember. I expected 6k margin, back when GA was still under, and ended up 12k.

“Burton said DeKalb had more people voting in person today than the number of people who voted in person in November. Even so, he stressed “this is working seamlessly and it’s working the way it’s intended to work.”” word! https://www.ajc.com/politics/live-what-the-ajc-is-watching-during-todays-georgia-runoffs/TJFSEFBCDRCXJA4RWRIHRQKOBU/

00:01 AWW YEA at 11:53PM:

I've seen enough. Jon Ossoff (D) defeats Sen. David Perdue (R) in GA's other Senate runoff. #GASEN

Democrats win control of the Senate.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) January 6, 2021

Dave Wasserman@Redistrict·17m

Fact: Whitfield Co., where Trump held his pre-election rally, turned out at just 86.1% of November levels. The state as a whole is on track to exceed 89% of November levels.

Dave Wasserman@Redistrict·17m

Oh god I wasted hours on this probably

I have a huge 3 GB git repository that the class I am grading for, uses to track all the student submissions and our grading. My hard drive is constantly teetering below 1 GB of free space so I started having git pull’s fail due to lack of hard drive space (and it’s a PAIN to recover from that issue when half the files are around and half aren’t).

I naturally tried removing the files locally. This does work if I am religious about only using git add -u . in the specific folder (HW0/my_name) that I was working in.

However I rely in constantly looking at git status and it was totally unusable since it would just have 100s of lines of “deleted: “.

After trying out various combinations of .gitignore, git update-index --skip-worktree, git update-index --assume-unchanged -- graders/HW5/ etc., sparse-checkout, .git/info/exclude, etc. The solution is just a single line (but one that may have to be run repeatedly):

rm -rf HW1 HW2 HW3
git ls-files --deleted -z | git update-index --assume-unchanged -z --stdin

This ignores ALL files listed as “deleted” under “git status” prior to running the above line.

Hurray!

Thanks to: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4589333/git-ignore-locally-deleted-folder

Side note: I bought myself a 2 TB SSD and hopefully that should alleviate some of this, eventually, when I get around to all of the time consuming exporting files from the existing hard drive etc. Hopefully it goes smoothly, wish me luck!

Scattered thoughts –

A few days got the first flier for voting absentee, and the texts are starting to ramp up as well.

Also got first text about getting tested for Thanksgiving – first piece of advertising I’ve gotten about the pandemic, EVER. And saw finally a communications toolkit. https://www.covidtestingtoolkit.org/about/why-this-toolkit/

Just the amount of advertising and money for the politics was sickening compared to amount of time spent on this deadly disease.

This was also something we dreamed about at the beginning of the pandemic. Cool to see we’ve figured out so much more about the virus that we can make more precise estimates about danger of enclosed space vs touching things. microcovid.org

Went and saw the fall leaves the last two weekends. Once to bell gardens, once on a 10 hr drive around the natalanha scenic highway area.

Understanding campaign jobs:

• https://fairfight.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/TheAbramsPlaybook.pdf
  “In 2017 and 2018, Abrams ran for governor and diverted from the normal Southern Democrat strategy of centering a campaign on winning as many white swing voters as possible. Abrams did try to win white swing voters, but also invested heavily in boosting turnout among voters of all races in the Atlanta area and among Black people in particular in the state’s more rural areas”
• https://www.bluebonnetdata.org/post/persuasion-vs-gotv-a-key-to-campaign-strategy
• https://www.bluebonnetdata.org/post/so-you-want-to-work-in-political-data

I wanted to hold high school registration drive. But losing energy to do so. Also wanted to make a QR app for canvassing so people can literally sign up on the spot. I think people know they should vote but may not have plan yet. What if there was a voter drive at high school? A democracy club? Voting was definitely a huge learning curve, not just show up and circle something. But somehow we have so many elections a year, and you have to fill out this form, and there’s actually like 20 positions up for voting, where to find information about this stuff, the websites for checking status, etc.

Spent last two weekends seeing the fall colors, last weekend fixed upstairs shower. This weekend did yard chores, pine straw.

CDrama – recently just finished third drama of the pandemic. I guess I am becoming something of a cdrama person. Have I actually watched a complete drama before this year? I don’t think so actually. Watching: Joy of Life (impressed at tight plot, excited for 2nd season, ended on cliff hanger), Oh My General (gender bender, general is the lady and a lot of strong female leads), the Untamed (basically no strong female leads, story is pretty uneven and a little nonsensical TBH, but the lead characters are memorable). Then I got sucked in since there’s a giant fandom, so there’s behind the scenes, and then you get to see just HOW MUCH WORK goes into filming a drama that I kind of knew but had no idea the scale (kind of passed over it since there’s just SO MANY palace dramas). It just has an unending amount of extra content lol. Pretty shocking at first / totally unrecognizable out of costume. But yea, cool to see the cable system used for all the flying stunts etc. Even if the story made little sense. EDIT: right what I wanted to write down is, it feels like the writer had a few cool scenes in mind, and cool character interactions in like a fanfic sort of characters, and kind filled in the rest rather haphazardly to get to specific moments in time. So characters seem suddenly all powerful and can’t be taken down, until suddenly they are, why wouldn’t they just be destroyed in the first episode, why are the elders so easy to kill, etc. Yea… Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but this kind of thing where the suspense and tension is caused by clans fighting, the power/magic structure is actually important. Joy of Life plot was way tighter… And in general, cdrama esp. these historical dramas have pretty disappointing female leads sigh.

The “excuse” for these dramas is to learn Chinese. I think my Chinese is improving a bit, some days I’ll use more Chinese terms for things I’d use English for before. But definitely not nearly as much if I had spent 150 hours hard core studying / spaced repetition etc. learning Chinese, I think. IDK.

IRL I have a TON of work on my plate. I don’t know how I spend so much time grading, it really sucks. Read two terry pratchett books. Putzgiving is happening over zoom? Need to finish ISER revision, contract work site redesign, ACTUALLY DO RESEARCH on both the scraping and labeling fronts, figure out where I will be in February? I’m so upset that the pandemic just keeps getting worse and people care less and less. I want to make a website just showing daily life returning to normal for countries that locked down early and hard.

Still slowly working on Russian, but poorly. Still can’t have a 2 sentence conversation…

Still want to set up lasercutter and do some actual hardware projects. Maybe next weekend…