Weeknotes 25
- We rewatched Season 1 of Severance in preparation of binging Season 2. I’d forgotten a bunch over that 3 year span.
- Finished reading Shop Class as Soulcraft. It started out promising, and a lot of the talk about physical work being more satisfying than “thought work” resonated with me. Crawford’s description of office politics and white collar office work processes and bureaucracy was as hilarious as it was apt. But the book just went on way too long, and he gave himself a bit too much rope to hang himself with, really devolving into that gross grey tribe politics. Lots of misogyny, “both sides bad”, and self-indulgent rationalizations for why his life choices were good, actually. If you’re going to read it, just do yourself a favor, and drop it at the halfway point.
- I’ve been spending far too much time emailing some cog-in-the-machine of Virginia’s property tax department, trying to understand how they’re valuing my car $5,000 more than what I paid for it. They claim to use J.D. Power estimates, and I’ve shown the J.D. Power estimate for the car is almost exactly what I paid for the car. Still they insist, without evidence, it’s actually worth $5,000 more. The fight will go on, but I suspect I will somehow lose. This is double annoying because in Virginia, you’re also taxed extra for having a fuel-efficient or EV vehicle. You try to do the right thing, and…
- Played a bunch more pickleball this week. Tried out the courts at Forest Hill park, which are a heck of a lot closer, but also significatly more crowded (and maybe less friendly?).
- I walk by this park all the time, but somehow had missed the gigantic Michael Jordan portrait on the basketball court until this week. Check out this bad-boy from space
- Went to Stone Brewing for a little afternoon warm day boozin’. They have a PB&J Berliner Weisse that tastes like you’re drinking a PB&J. It’s as weird as it sounds, and ‘round about delicious as it is weird. Will get again.
- The U.S. MotoGP race is next week (in Austin), so folks will start tricklin’ into the states over the next couple days. Wonder if they’ll even hold a U.S. race next year, given the risky travel it now requires.
Famed Pincher
- Finished reading The Courage To Be Disliked per a Justin Searls recommendation. It’s a very odd format, where the whole book is basically the dialogue between a student and a adlerian philosopher. This was my first exposure to Adler. Much of it feels dismissive of people’s problems—unempathetic, maybe?! But it’s an interesting angle, nonetheless. It caused me to do a little reflection on my own thought-patterns. Too early to tell if any lasting good will come from it.
- Once again obliterated my feet attempting to not get killed—and failing–in pickleball. I’ve acquired new shoes, so hopefully we can put this painful saga behind us.
- Made a new bud at the pickle ball courts. He’s from China originally, so I utilized a few of my recently learned Chinese words to tell him: 我會説中文一點點 (“I can speak a little Chinese!”). He (very generously) said I pronounced it perfectly. I left the Chinese speaking there, so as to not embarrass myself any further.
- Neat week for the stock market, eh? It looks like I’ve pretty much nailed the worst possible timing for quitting work. This retirement thing may be rather short lived.
- Hosted a little pizza party for Pi Day. Cooked up 6 pizzas on the Ooni. Used my 50/50 bread flour/00 flour @ 70% hydration recipe, and it came out just perfectly. Won’t change a thing next time.
- Celebrated St. Patrick—famed pincher and drinker of green beer—at Jess’s. He cooked up a meddley of Irish-themed fare, plus a couple Irish Coffees (or, as they call them in Ireland: coffees).
- MotoGP round 2 is in the books. Another Marquez brothers demolition job. I know it’s probably going to get old quick if it’s anything like many of Marc’s pre-2020 seasons. But for now, I’m happily cheering it on.
Pickly Feet
- Marc Marquez is undisputedly back! Unfortunately, that probably means a boring 2025 MotoGP season awaits us. But what an incredible comeback story this could be.
- Foolishly played a couple hours of Pickle Ball on Thursday in my old beat up Vans Authentic shoes, resulting in some gnarly foot blisters. Oops. Lesson learned there! Proper footwear: important.
- While we’re on the topic of pickle ball, I acquired my very own set of pickle
ball
racquetspaddles. Sad to report, I still absolutely suck. But I did win two games (of probably 30) this week. So you could say things are improving. - National Pancake Day: the second round.
- Some days, it feels like learning Mandarin to a useful degree is just unrealistic. Other days, it really feels like things are clicking. Yesterday—after finally understanding how to use 了—felt like the latter. 真在我學中文很好.
- Remade the same eggplant dish I made a couple weeks back, but cut out all the funny business: no pre-salting, no deep frying. About a bajillion times easier, and it came out every bit as good.
- Migrated our onion sets out to the raised bed garden. Fingers cross’t for no more frost. 🤞
Pickle Points
- Feels like approximately the 3rd most cliché activity to pick up, but I started playing pickleball this week. Out of the roughly 72 games I’ve played, I’ve won one (playing doubles where I may or may not have been carried). Fun little goofy game, though. I’m enjoyin’ it.
- In our last installment, I incorrectly stated the date of National Pancake Day. It’s actually this Tuesday. Oops!
- This week I learned the Chinese word for “movie” is 電影(diànyǐng), which literally means “electric shadow”. I don’t know about you, but I think that is one badass way to describe a movie.
- I put my long-neglected bicycle to use this week, and went on a nice (slow) ride up to Bryan Park and around the Bellevue neighborhood.
- I have no idea what I’ve done wrong, but the huge majority of my plant babies are struuuuuuuuggling. I think only maybe like 5% of them are going to make it. Arugula: rough. Jalapenos: rough. Tomatoes: rough. Bell peppers… lookin’ good!
- First MotoGP race of the season! Haven’t seen the race as of writing this, but thus far, Marquez looks like he’s back to his old completely-destroy-everyone-else ways. Usually I’m an underdog fan, but after all the shit this dude’s been through the past 6 years, I couldn’t be happier to see him back to his winning ways.
- Trying to avoid too much political commentary here, but I can’t believe how embarrassed I feel after seeing how those clowns spoke to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
Extremely Clean
- I’ve gotten a bit spoiled already, and pretty much can’t stand going anywhere during peak hours when John Q. Public is off work. I forgot Monday was a federal holiday, and went to a local cafe to get a little afternoon coffee with Cynthia until we saw the crowd. We noped out of there, and I made some fancy coffees at home instead. <insert some pithy line about voters’ economic anxiety>
- I migrated the bell pepper seeds to sit on top of the refrigerator, thinking some heat may help ‘em sprout. It worked! Looks like we’ll be swimming in bell peppers by the summer as planned.
- Went to a freshly constructed library near us just to get out of the house. I tinkered around with Loco for a bit while there.
- More snow! I’m really just over it, man.
- I’ve been using *nix systems of some type or another since the aughts. And I
just learned that you can do string substitution in parameter expansion. I
used this the other day to rename a bunch of files. It looks like this:
for file in some*.files do mv $file ${file//replace_me/with_this} doneVery handy!
- My relationship with the HelloChinese app has reached the state where it’s comfortable straight lying to me:
- Important reminder: 🗓️Pancake Day is Tuesday. Don’t forget to… well, you know the drill 🥞
- Finally paid my dues for Jess’s 2024 MotoGP Video Game championship dinner + drinks deal. He doesn’t read this blog, so I can be honest: he whipped my ass this year. If you are reading this, Jess: fuck you.
- Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there have been an upsetting number of sieg heils flying about lately…
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Sign up for the YMCA, and make going to the gym my new job.
- Volunteer a bunch at Habitat for Humanity.
- 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.
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.
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.
Giving Thanks
- 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).
Monkeying Around
...with Go
- 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.
Cruising
Three in a row, here we go
- 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.
Weekly Notes?
Check out this streak
- 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.
Biannual Notes?
This is the best I can do, I guess
- 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.
Lifenotes 6
Changes
- It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
- We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond.
Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we
wanted.
- We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and
longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the
love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
- I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots
of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
- We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.
Lifenotes 5
Adios Valencia
- Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite
lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs,
enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent
some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.
Lifenotes 4
Roam
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical,
frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is
bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That
laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not
sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the
two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen
had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble
water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink
that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and
horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a
camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let
us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed
up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be
Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under
control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic
Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact
laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my
laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all
familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
Lifenotes 3
Big Business
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and
techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so
refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the
flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple,
fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame
about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought
an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP
Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I
have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
-
Learning Mandarin is hard, man:
是一点 （shì yī diǎn): it’s one o’clock
十一点 （shí yī diǎn): eleven o’clockUnderstanding 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.
- 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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Sign up for the YMCA, and make going to the gym my new job.
- Volunteer a bunch at Habitat for Humanity.
- 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.
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.
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.
Giving Thanks
- 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).
Monkeying Around
...with Go
- 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.
Cruising
Three in a row, here we go
- 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.
Weekly Notes?
Check out this streak
- 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.
Biannual Notes?
This is the best I can do, I guess
- 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.
Lifenotes 6
Changes
- It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
- We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond.
Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we
wanted.
- We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and
longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the
love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
- I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots
of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
- We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.
Lifenotes 5
Adios Valencia
- Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite
lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs,
enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent
some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.
Lifenotes 4
Roam
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical,
frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is
bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That
laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not
sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the
two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen
had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble
water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink
that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and
horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a
camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let
us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed
up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be
Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under
control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic
Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact
laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my
laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all
familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
Lifenotes 3
Big Business
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and
techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so
refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the
flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple,
fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame
about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought
an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP
Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I
have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
- 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.
-
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:
- Sign up for the YMCA, and make going to the gym my new job.
- Volunteer a bunch at Habitat for Humanity.
- 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.
- 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 handleUNIONing 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.
Giving Thanks
- 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
ChristmasHoliday 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).
Monkeying Around
...with Go
- 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.
Cruising
Three in a row, here we go
- 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.
Weekly Notes?
Check out this streak
- 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.
Biannual Notes?
This is the best I can do, I guess
- 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.
Lifenotes 6
Changes
- It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
- We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond.
Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we
wanted.
- We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and
longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the
love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
- I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots
of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
- We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.
Lifenotes 5
Adios Valencia
- Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite
lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs,
enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent
some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.
Lifenotes 4
Roam
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical,
frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is
bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That
laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not
sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the
two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen
had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble
water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink
that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and
horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a
camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let
us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed
up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be
Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under
control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic
Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact
laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my
laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all
familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
Lifenotes 3
Big Business
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and
techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so
refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the
flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple,
fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame
about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought
an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP
Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I
have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
- 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.
Weekly Notes?
Check out this streak
- 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.
Biannual Notes?
This is the best I can do, I guess
- 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.
Lifenotes 6
Changes
- It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
- We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond.
Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we
wanted.
- We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and
longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the
love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
- I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots
of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
- We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.
Lifenotes 5
Adios Valencia
- Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite
lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs,
enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent
some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.
Lifenotes 4
Roam
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical,
frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is
bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That
laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not
sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the
two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen
had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble
water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink
that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and
horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a
camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let
us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed
up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be
Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under
control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic
Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact
laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my
laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all
familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
Lifenotes 3
Big Business
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and
techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so
refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the
flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple,
fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame
about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought
an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP
Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I
have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
- 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.
Lifenotes 6
Changes
- It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
- We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond.
Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we
wanted.
- We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and
longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the
love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
- I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots
of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
- We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.
Lifenotes 5
Adios Valencia
- Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite
lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs,
enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent
some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.
Lifenotes 4
Roam
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical,
frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is
bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That
laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not
sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the
two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen
had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble
water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink
that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and
horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a
camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let
us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed
up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be
Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under
control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic
Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact
laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my
laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all
familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
Lifenotes 3
Big Business
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and
techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so
refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the
flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple,
fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame
about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought
an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP
Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I
have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
- It’s been over a year. Holy shit. Lots has changed. Let’s see…
- We got married! Had a nice little ceremony at a restaurant here in Richmond. Jess officiated the thing, and did a damn fine job. It was exactly what we wanted.
- We’re back in the states, living in Richmond, VA. We’ve got some family and longtime friends in the area. And we’re practicing making new buds through via the love of whiffleball. Team We Got The Runs went 4-3 this season.
- I’ve officially transitioned to a management role at work. Still doing lots of in-the-weeds programming, so it’s been a soft transition so far.
- We got a cat. Her name is Biru (you know, like Ruby, but staggered). She is a bit of a devil. But she is cute.
- Welp, that 90 days went pretty quick. Our time in Spain has been quite lovely. We’ve both learned some Spanish, eaten some paella, ran some runs, enjoyed some siestas, seen a MotoGP race, met up with some buds, and spent some time with family. Next stop is Split, Croatia.
Lifenotes 4
Roam
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical,
frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is
bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That
laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not
sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the
two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen
had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble
water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink
that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and
horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a
camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let
us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed
up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be
Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under
control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic
Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact
laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my
laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all
familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
Lifenotes 3
Big Business
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and
techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so
refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the
flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple,
fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame
about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought
an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP
Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I
have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
-
August was my last month as a New York resident. It’s been a magical, frustrating, amazing place to spend the past decade, and leaving is bitter-sweet. We’ll be shoving off for Valencia, Spain later this month. That laid back Spanish living will be a nice change of pace for a while. I’m not sure what comes after that—we’re taking it one step at a time.
After moving out of my apartment, we headed to an Airbnb we rented for the two weeks before our flight. It was the grossest damn thing I’ve ever seen. We encountered a cockroach within 2 minutes. The hand towel in the kitchen had roach eggs all in it. The dish soap was watered down so as to resemble water with a bit of blue food coloring. There was a leak under the sink that’d clearly been running for years—all the wood was rotten and moldy and horrible. I called Airbnb, and left almost immediately.
We got super-lucky, and some good friends happened to be leaving for a camping trip for the exact two weeks we needed a place. They generously let us stay in their lovely Brooklyn apartment while they’re out. So, we’re holed up in an infinitely better spot while we await our flight out of here.
- Valencia happens to be the last stop in the MotoGP season, which will also be Valentino Rossi’s final GP race ever. Hopefully covid remains enough under control in Spain, so that we can go cheer him on.
- My friend Andrew came up with this clever laptop stand called the Basic Stand. I picked one up as a lightweight/compact laptop stand to take while I’m traveling. It’s very neat, and raises my laptop up much higher than the kind of standard aluminum stands we’re all familiar with. My posture is thankful. Brilliant stuff.
- HappyGastropod, LLC is officially a thing. I’ve
been using the name HappyGastropod since 2008. Thirteen years later, we’re
officially in business! I’ve been working on a little bulletin-board software
called Cafayo that prompted the move to start a company.
I’ve always loved the name HappyGastropod, and loved the goofy logo I made
all those years ago:
This thing remains a nights-and-weekends type of project. It’s been a fun
learning experience thus far, and I’m excited by the possibilities.
- I’m building Cafayo using some Hotwire libraries and techniques. It’s an absolute delight to build apps this way. It’s so refreshing, having spent the past several years writing in the flavor-of-the-month single-page-app framework for work. Hotwire is simple, fast, and (once you wrap your brain around it) surprisingly flexible. A shame about its whole relation to Basecamp…
- After years of prodding by some family and friends, I broke down and bought an Xbox Series-S. I got it primarily to whip my brother’s ass in the MotoGP Game. It’s not going as planned, thus far. I have much practice to do.
- Governor’s Island is open to the public yet again. Cynthia and I went this
weekend and enjoyed the scenery.
Lifenotes 2
Type-O
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a
hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit
replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the
end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking
forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY
was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
Lifenotes 1
Let’s Begin
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weekly occasional set of notes. So, let’s
embrace the opportunity to start anew.
- I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is
More. It’s is an excellent read
about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental
sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow
while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty
thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book.
Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with
a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by
Daylight with some buds for
a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical
survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played
with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as
they’re found by the killer.
- New joke who dis? Ready?
A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a hospital. A doctor asks the rabbit: “do you know your blood type?” The rabbit replies: “I don’t. But I think I’m a type-o”
- Lots of people around me are getting vaccinated—including my parents. It finally feels like the end of this pandemic is in sight. With summer approaching, I’m really looking forward to the possibility of some semblance of non-pandemic normalcy.
- Spring is upon us, and it feels so good. Last year, we heard nonstop how NY was dead. This weekend proved otherwise.
- The first race of the MotoGP season is next week. It’s a little sad to see
Valentino Rossi move down to the satellite team. But good grief does his
setup look excellent.
- I recently stumbled upon Tom Stuart’s Weekly Notes, and
was inspired by the simplicity of keeping a
weeklyoccasional set of notes. So, let’s embrace the opportunity to start anew. - I wrapped up Jason Hickel’s Less is More. It’s is an excellent read about the incompatibility of growth-based capitalism with environmental sustainability. I used to have the naive idea that GDP could continue to grow while we transitioned to sustainable energy production. Hickel pretty thouroughly debunks that idea. Eye opening and mostly hopeful book. Definitely recommend it.
- Gall’s
Law came up at work this week. It states:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
- I’ve been playing Dead by Daylight with some buds for a few weeks now. It’s grown on me. It’s a hilarious-to-play asymmetrical survival game where four survivors try to escape from a killer. Best played with friends on voice chat so you can hear teammates scream bloody murder as they’re found by the killer.