lee.ourand.me: Posts

Just finished setting up a little sync device so my website’s toots get synced to Mastodon. 🎉

February 22, 2025

📝 Post February 16, 2025

Sprouting

Duolingo’s out. Hello Chinese is in. Duolingo is fine. But after trying out the free version of Hello Chinese for a bit, it’s very clearly a superior product. They have actual audio (and video) of native speakers as opposed to the standard robot Duolingo voices. They support Traditional Hanzi, Duolingo doesn’t. They have a lot more explanations (e.g., Chinese speakers don’t actually say 你好嗎 (Nǐ hǎo ma / roughly “how are you?”), which is a phrase Duolingo generically teaches). And Hello Chinese quickly gets you reading stories / testing your comprehension, which has been cool. I’m reading like preschool-level “Peter likes coffee. Susan doesn’t like coffee. Peter doesn’t like bread. Susan likes fruit juice.” stories, but at least it’s something!
The veggie seeds have sprouted! Well, most of ‘em. The bell peppers are pretty stubborn. Everything else is off to the races.
Cooked up this eggplant parm recipe for Valentines Day din din. The salt / dehydration step along with deep frying made it 7/10 on the pain-in-hindquarters scale, but I’d be lying if I said those ‘plants didn’t come out real tasty. Made tiramisu for dessert. Cynthia’s an honorary Italian—those are her fav foods. Which, for what it’s worth, ‘Italian’ is one of the approximately 14 Mandarin words I can speak with any confidence. 她是義大利人!
Week of crappy weather… I guess it got to me. Slow week. Not much else to report.

📝 Post February 09, 2025

Tones

Making me say dumb shit more frequently than usual!

Learning Mandarin is hard, man:

是一点（shì yī diǎn): it’s one o’clock
十一点（shí yī diǎn): eleven o’clock

Understanding these tones is not coming easily.
Started growing some veggies indoors in preparation for the Spring. We’ve got some onions, bell peppers, arugula, two types of tomatoes, and jalapenos going for now.
The boards on our front porch have been getting a bit gnarled and wobbly. Most of the nails have totally rusted out, so they’re held together by approximately nothing. My dad came and helped me disassemble it. In doing so, we discovered: 1. there’s another porch under our porch, made of concrete. It’s in extremely awful shape, and is crumbling apart. I assume it’s probably made of reinforced concrete, and all the steel inside is rusting and falling apart and 2. the “new” porch is some fairly shoddy worksmanship. Anyway—the next house project is to figure out how to securely fasten our “new” wood porch joists to the slab of concrete underneath. We did successfully remove all the rusty nails, and replace ‘em with a handful of screws until we figure out how to do phase 2 reasonably well.
Speaking of Rust, I’m resuming my Rust (we’re talking the programming language this time) education, a bit. I cruised through the rustlings exercises, which were an excellent intro to all the things that make Rust a bit unusual. I feel like I can move forward moderately confidently with all borrow checking, lifetiming, and Arc<Box<dyn Thing>>ing now.
Trying to pay less attention to political news. But holy moly, what a week. The “this is fine” meme feels woefully insufficient to describe our situation.

📝 Post February 02, 2025

Groundhog

Even he's not feelin' too optimistic about this year

Welcome back. And Happy Groundhog Day
We’ve officially expanded our gardening operation by a whopping 50% (went from 2 to 3 raised beds). I carved up our Christmas tree and tossed it in the bottom of the raised bed to make a Hügelkultur type thing. Emptied out one side of our compost tumbler to fill out most of the rest, and topped it off with some top soil we had layin’ around.
Went on a not-quite-a-hike around Maymont yesterday, and enjoyed the relatively lovely weather.
We attempted to begin a Star Wars movie extravaganza this weekend. But the Mandarin subtitles I was able to find from OpenSubtitles are all kinds of a mess. George Lucas’s fascination with adding random cut scenes to the various editions of his movies really goofs up one’s ability to find decent subtitles. After the 7th adjustment, where we had to offset the subtitles by over 2 minutes, we just gave up.
Speaking of Mandarin, I’ve resumed my Duolingo Mandarin practice. I just got to the first section where I practice writing Hanzi. It’s damn hard to remember the direction / order to draw each stroke of each character. I can’t figure out the “rule” beyond ~roughly: left → right / top → bottom. Hoping it eventually sinks in, but at this still early moment, it feels like a borderline hopeless exercise.
I made Taiwanese Sticky Rice(油飯) for dinner on Thursday as a belated Lunar New Year treat. It came out decently well for a first attempt. The recipe I followed had you make fried shallots, then add them to the rice, then steam the rice. So it completely destroyed the delicate delicious little crunchy onion bastards. That seems like a mistake. Will make some adjustments next time.
To deal with the whole Prius battery dilemma, I just bought a new AGM battery from Costco. Popped that thing in (again, what a pain in the butt, Toyota!), it just worked. Good as new. I had my dad pop the old battery on his trickle charger for a day to see if it would still hold a charge. It appears it does! So now I’ve got a spare 12V battery I need to find a use for. Solar powered rain barrel pump project? Powered fence gate opener mechanism? The possibilities are endless!

📝 Post January 26, 2025

Double Zero

I declared victory too early for the battery dingus. That 12V battery seems to be toast now. I can get the car running, but the main display panel–which includes the speedometer–doesn’t turn on.
The pizza dorks on the /r/pizza subreddit seem to mostly use 00 flour for their pizza dough. I’d avoided buying that mess beacuse I’m cheap and it’s way more expensive than regular bread flour or all-purpose flour. I expected (hoped) there to be no noticeable difference. But I finally got around to giving it a try, and made “proper” 00 flour pizzas last night. It made a big difference. Best pizza I’ve ever made. Sonofa…
Not even one full week into whatever the hell this is, and I’m tired, boss.
I learned about the
Details & Summary HTML Tags
No idea how long these've been a thing. But pretty cool.
Lunar New Year this week. 新年快樂, y’all.

📝 Post January 19, 2025

Detour

Week 1 of unemployment is in the books! I (kind of?) stuck to my exercise regimen and signed up for my first Habitat for Humanity gig this week (there’s shockingly little need for volunteers right now).
In a surprise to no one, Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities Director has “resigned” after that whole water debacle.
My YMCAing idea didn’t quite go to plan. Between the random dude hanging out in the locker room singing about Jesus, the lone squat rack, and how crowded it still was at 10:30am, I just couldn’t be bothered to return after the first day. Instead, I picked up a set of adjustable dumbbells, and will just work with those until I’m in shape enough to need to lift something more substantial.
All this cold weather has apparently gotten to our mostly neglected Prius. The 12V battery has crapped out. Even if we had jumper cables (we don’t), apparently you’re not supposed to jump cars from the Bolt. So I picked up a portable battery jumper dingus. No thanks to Toyota’s extremely annoying design decisions*, it did ultimately do the trick, and the Prius runs once again.

* 1. You cannot open the trunk from outside the car if the battery is dead. So you have to climb into the trunk, remove the carpet, spare tire compartment, etc., stick your finger into a little hole to access a tiny lever to manually pop the trunk. 2. The battery is then inside a little compartment that also requires entirely too much fiddling to expose. And 3., the positive terminal is covered by this extremely fiddly red plastic shield that took like 10 minutes to figure out how to remove without breaking it. Most things on most Toyotas are usually very easy to work on. They must’ve outsourced the 12V battery system to a BMW engineer or something. Not a pleasant experience!
Hold onto your butts. Gonna be a hell of a week ahead.

📝 Post January 12, 2025

Well that about does 'er

Wraps 'er all up

After last week’s snow, Richmond’s water system was knocked completely out. Water utilities are one of those things that receive zero fanfare, and are just kind of taken for granted. Looks like, Richmond’s had been neglected for a long time, including being headed by a wholly unqualitified University of Phoenix grad with zero engineering background. Wild. Hoping this kickstarts some much needed infrastructure investment in this city (and removing lots of past nepotism hires).
Friday was my last day of work. We made it. Wrapping up this 13 year early retirement project feels less significant than I’d expected.
Signed up for the YMCA in preparation for gym session #1 tomorrow
Cynthia and I were pushing the limits of our 200GB Family iCloud storage plan. I took that as a challenge to figure out an alternative to paying Apple a relatively absurd $11per month for the next storage tier. I wound up installing Immich on our NAS. It’s an aboslute delight so far! Really, it’s a nice piece of software. The web app is much more feature-rich and faster than Apple’s own iCloud Photos web app. The mobile app is roughly equivalent to Apple’s.

Hot tip for anyone attempting something similar: the Immich iOS app allows you to set an internal server address when your phone is on the same network as the server. Do this. It makes photo uploads much faster than having to go out over the internet.
We went to watch the VCU women’s basketball game. Close game and VCU came out the victors.

📝 Post January 05, 2025

Callin' It Quits

As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve got a big life change taking place this week. Tomorrow I’ll quit my (hopefully) last job ever. I’m dippin’ my toes into this early retirement thing I’ve been working towards over the past ~13 years or so. Right now, it feels a bit anticlimactic, if I’m being honest. Hopefully the significance sinks in in a good way in the coming weeks.

As of now, my plans are to take 3 months, and do 3 things:
1. Sign up for the YMCA, and make going to the gym my new job.
2. Volunteer a bunch at Habitat for Humanity.
3. Otherwise, Peter Gibbons it up (in the “do nothing” sense, not the back-dooring my previous employer sense). Massively-reduced screen time is the goal here.
After that, I’ve got a million things I want to do, and I trust my curiosity will take me somewhere fun. We’ll figure all that out when the time comes. For now: a little bit of a reset is in order.
IT’S SNOWING, IT’S SNOWING…
Squid Games season 2 is straight traaaaaash. The whole premise borders on idiotic. And the rapper character is insufferably corny. Then on the final episode, it… kind of just ends in the middle of things. Not like a cliffhanger ending, really. Just a “wait. What?” type of ending. Bizarre.
What’s the “Happy New Year” statute of limitations? I think we’re still safe. Happy New Year
I forget how I even stumbled upon it, but this LiveViewNative platform seems super-neat. Instead of the typical web view style (a la Turbo Native), this is actually rendering SwiftUI components from a Phoenix server. There are obviously tradeoffs in doing things this way (e.g., you still have to write separate views for each client: web, iOS, android, watch, etc.) But it’s a totally valid option for “easy” native mobile apps that I didn’t know existed.

📝 Post December 15, 2024

Goofy Gravity Golfing

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.

📝 Post December 08, 2024

Preparing to Chug a Bunch of Decaf

For Science!

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.

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