lee.ourand.me

• I got a notification that the coffee for The Decaf Project was delivered successfully to a P.O. box. I don’t have a P.O. box, so that was odd. After reaching out to the fine folks at Reserva, they confirmed they’d shipped it to my actual address, so it was a USPS mistake, but they decided to ship out a second set super-quickly. Just got the coffee this weekend, and it’s fantastic. Also really cool to try side-by-side coffees that have been decaffeinated using different processes. Cynthia and I both enjoyed the one decaffeinated via CO2 Subcritical Decaffeination. Our least favorite, sadly, was the Swiss Water process, which I was kind of hoping to like, since it seemed the simplest. But the taste buds felt differently.
• Walkabout Mini Golf is just a treasure. I’ve been playing a decent bit, and my first pass through any course, I just have a dumb smile plastered on my face. I just wrapped up playing the Upside Town course vs Jess, and it was nonstop laughs. Some really clever design, fully taking advantage of the VR medium.
• Spent some time battling a super-slow MySQL query at work. Turns out (at least in this case?), MySQL sucks at ORing things, and can handle UNIONing things just fine. So… there you go. Hot tip du jour.
• Made some big decisions that I’m not quite ready to share yet, but I’m nonetheless excited about.
• Baked my first sourdough in a while. My scoring could use some work, but otherwise, it came out pretty great.

• Remembered I had a handful of smart plugs I wasn’t using, so plugged the new Christmas tree lights into one of those bad-boys, and we’re now scheduled.
• As predicted, I fell off the Advent of Code exercises pretty quick. But I got through ~5 of ‘em, including this masterpiece of ugliness! Don’t judge me, I’m just embracing that whole worse is better idea.
• My comfort in the Metaverse has increased substantially this week! Upgraded the Quest with some shiny new Zenni lenses so I can see spectacle-free and a new head strap that’s miles better than the cheap dingus Meta sells the thing with.
• Met up with some friends for brunch and boozin’ on Saturday. The brewery we wound up at happens to also stock Uncool non-alcoholic beers. It was my first exposure to them, and I gotta say: I like the branding. And the beer was actually pretty decent too, as far as N/A beers go, anyway.
• Ordered up my tasting kit for the The Decaf Project and ready to compare the results from these decaffeination methods.

• I read on Reddit that Target had printed some incorrect discount codes on the Meta Quest3. I asked Cynthia to go check it out. Our local Target had apparently already corrected the error. But somehow, Cynthia still walked out of there with a 30% discounted Quest3. So, say hello to a new citizen of the metaverse or whatever.
• This KTM fiasco just keeps looking more grim by the day. Hard to take anything they officially say seriously, either, given their long history of being extremely dishonest.
• Advent of Code has begun. Sticking to my Go theme, I’m attempting at least some of ‘em in Go. Working in other languages always makes me realize how spoiled us Rubyists really are. Example I found today: in Go, the absolute value function only works on Floats. So if you want to get the absolute value of an integer, you either have to write your own function (no biggie, but.. y’know) or convert your int to a float, call the function, then convert it back to an int again. Little things like this can sometimes make Go feel borderline anemic.
• Black Friday shoppers spent a record $10.8 Billion. Isn’t that crazy? Because less than a month ago, we were all unable to feed our families because inflation was out of control, groceries were too expensive, etc. Wild how quickly that whole conundrum got resolved. Must be some of that good old fashioned American exceptionalism. USA! USA!
• My digestive tract handled the Thanksgiving Day hot pot fiesta just fine! Thanks for askin’.
• Jess had a birthday. We had some beers at the always-lovely Penny Lane Pub.
• We grabbed a Christmas Holiday Tree! It’s my first time buying a tree, I think, ever in my adult life. We’ve got it decked out in some decorative mushrooms (thanks mom).

• I picked up Thorsten Ball’s Writing an Interpreter in Go book, and have been slowly working my way through it. You can follow along on my journey to implement Monkeylang.
• Speaking of Go, I’m planning on attempting this year’s Advent of Code in Go this year. Before I get overwhelmed and or tired of it, like I do every year, anyway.
• I finally stopped procrastinating the installation of my new POE cameras, and spelunked into the crawlspace to do some drilling. It didn’t go great, so project has once again been suspended. Just ordered a flexible drillbit, some fishing tape, and an oscillating multitool to help this go a bit more smoothly. We’ll try again next week!
• Jess acquired a Quest3, which he let us all tinker around with. I hadn’t tried VR anything in probably 10 years. It’s seriously impressive how far that technology has progressed. Playing iRacing in VR made me feel uneasy within literal seconds of pushing the gas pedal. I was full-on motion sick within 2 laps. Pretty brutal. Less motiony stuff—like the paddle golf game—was really cool, though. I’m contemplating picking one up for myself just to try my hand at the whole “spatial computing” idea without forking over the cash for an Apple Vision Pro.
• Time to start mentally preparing my digestive tract for the annual Ourand Thanksgiving Day Hot Pot Feast of Feasts.

• Went to watch Jess run the Richmond (half) Marathon on Saturday. We were able to walk over to Bellevue, which was a rather happenin’ segment of the race. That neighborhood goes all out for the race, with all manner of booze, candy, and pickles for the runners.
• Had my first “range anxiety” experience with the Bolt. Drove up to have lunch with for family friend’s surprise birthday celebration, and didn’t take into account the range estimation being based on our usual city driving and not so much for highway driving. We still made it there and back with a whopping 15 miles left on the battery, so no big deal!
• Well, the 2024 MotoGP season has ended, and we’ve got a new champ! Congrats to Jorge. And also congrats to Cynthia for whippin’ everyone’s ass in the fantasy GP again this year.

• After some schmucks stole our car’s catalytic converter I took the car to a local mechanic to see what it’d cost to fix. They quoted me over $4k. I’m much too cheap for that nonsense. So I bought the parts myself, and just completed the work tonight. All in, it cost me about $400 and a couple hours wrenchin’ with my dad. Not a bad deal!
• Relatedly, I’ll be installing a couple security cameras outside the house. Just acquired a spool of cat 6 cable, some reolink cameras, and will be trying a proper PoE setup after my current wifi cameras failed spectacularly.
• Oh yea. An election happened. And… what an indictment that is of us Americans. We are a stupid, angry, hateful bunch of people. We need help.
• We binge watched Disclaimer this week. It was really good. My only gripe is that it was maybe a bit too graphic at times. It took me a bit to recognize Kevin Kline, who’s less hilarious than in his usual roles.
• I went to a bar that had live music. The artist started singing a song with the lyrics “who put PCP in the lobster chowder?”. It was a catchy little tune, so I had to look it up, and was shocked to discover that this was a real story that happened while filming The Titanic in 1999.

• Ah, yes. Continuing my trend of very infrequent updates, I see.
• Some life updates: we bought a house in the suburbs. We (well, I) hated it. We sold that house. We bought a new house in Richmond and are much happier. I got a new job, back workin’ as a lowly individual contributor, and that also makes me much happier. Management ain’t for me, it turns out. New gig’s at Ride with GPS. We visited Taiwan. I met my in-laws, two nieces and one nephew for the first time.
• Been watching a bunch of Halloweeny movies. Standouts: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Oddity, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe.
• Speaking of frightening… this damn election is in 4 days. Hold onto your butts…
• Some schmucks stole our Prius’s catalytic converter. We had been just sharing that one car, and I’m committed to fixing it myself, so we needed a functional set of wheels. I’d been wanting to acquire a Chevy Bolt for a while, so this gave me an excuse. So.. we now own a sweet-ass Chevy Bolt, and I could’nt be happier with the thing. It’s a massive upgrade over the Prius, plus there’s no risk of catalytic converter theft!
• Jess and I ran in a goofy Halloween 10 Mile race on the Capital Trail last week. I’m still recovering from a rough go of bronchitis, so it was a slow one. But one of those “in hindsight it was fun” things.

Watch as Jorge Manrubia Díez uses Turbo 8 to make a responsive UI in a Rails app.

Good grief. The way Turbo 8 is shaping up is really impressive. It really does feel like another giant step forward for Rails productivity. Also really wild just how simple the DOM diffing technique is—how have none of us thought about doing this since pjax’s inception in, what? 2011?

50 Years of Hip-Hop Samples 1973-2023. This thing is really well done.