If you're reading this, huzzah, it worked!

The Great Gatsby - Upgrade


If you're reading this, huzzah, it worked!

I made a few changes to this site, namely:

- It went from Gatsby 1.0 to Gatsby 2.0.
- It went from pulling content from markdown files saved in the git repo to pulling content from [Contentful](https://www.contentful.com/) and [Pocket](https://getpocket.com/a/queue/).

## Why is this better?

A few things:

1. Contentful can issue a webhook when I publish content, and [Netlify can listen to it](https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/05/09/building-portfolio-website-contentful-nextjs-netlify/), so I don't have to push code to Netlify to kick off a content build. That separates the code from the content nicely.
2. I find a lot of links I want to keep track of _and_ share, but I'm terrible at following through on it. Saving those links in markdown files didn't make it any easier, but I already use Pocket. Now the flow is: save a site to Pocket, read and archive it, tag it with `bwc`, and [Gatsby will add it to the site's graphql](https://github.com/conradj/gatsby-source-pocket)and I can merge it with the content I've created on the home page.
3. The content here isn't particularly complex schema-wise, but I am a UI developer so I'm very aware of how a few seconds here and there messing with formatting and structure can, over time, become super frustrating. Moving the markdown metadata into nicely formatted Contentful fields makes the process of creating a new post much more enjoyable.

## What's left?

1. I'd like to find a way to connect the Pocket archive task to a webhook so that _also_ does a Netlify deploy, but it's a low priority.
2. Getting the site working offline as a progressive web app. 😁


I’m Posting this from my iPad


This is my first attempt at updating this site from my iPad. "Wait, how hard is that," you might wonder. "Just log in to your CMS and write something and hit publish."

Sure, that _would_ be easy. So maybe I should clarify: this is my first update to this site from my iPad, and this site is completely serverless. The magic here is simply:

- [Working Copy](https://workingcopyapp.com).
- [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.org).
- and [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com).

Working Copy is a pretty amazing iOS app which lets you pull down, modify, and push git repos. It has a decent editor built in, so I wrote this post (in markdown) in the app. It's also possible to use Working Copy as a file source in iOS's Files app, so you can create a markdown file and then open it in your editor of choice. If you don't have one for iOS, I'm a big fan of [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer).

After that, you commit the new file and push it. Netlify is setup to look for any changes on the `master` branch, it runs a Gatsby build script that compiles all the markdown content into blog posts and violà, the site is updated.

## Downsides

There's still no way to preview this site on my iPad. Someday, maybe, we'll live in a world where iOS and MacOS overlap enough that you can do actual development on an iPad - what a crazy idea that you could build iOS application in iOS, right?

Until then, I'm just happy to have a very convenient way to update and publish my site from my iPad.


You never see a dog walk after a ball, even old dogs will run their slow wobbly-kneed run after a thrown ball.

Unbridled Enthusiasm


Every morning, on the way to the office, I walk by a dog park. It's in a nice part of the city, so it's a lot of _fancy_ dogs with hypoallergenic hair and such, although I doubt the dogs know that. What I always enjoy about the dog park is how excited the dogs are. Excited to chase a ball, excited to sniff other dogs, excited to roll in the grass. You never see a dog walk after a ball, even old dogs will run their slow wobbly-kneed run after a thrown ball.

It's not just dogs, I see my daughter do it as well. If she sees a friend on the way into daycare she runs all the way to the daycare door. If we say she can watch TV, she runs to the couch, tell her she can have a cookie she runs to the table and waits for it. She could walk and arrive concurrently with the cookie, but that thought never crosses her mind.

You rarely see adults run out of sheer joy. The dog owners usually stand around, many looking more interested in the prospect of being able to leave the park than being at the park. The parents at daycare don't run along with their kids, and I assume they, like I, do not run to work if we meet a co-worker on the way there. You see someone running in something other than obvious jogging attire and you wonder what they're late for, or if they're really moving, what they're running from.

I haven't started running out of excitement. I do some days stop and watch the dogs do it.


Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.


> She decided to dye her hair.
>
> A silly thing to do, if you’re a universal idea, like Death or Spring or Music or Peace. But Suzie had learned something interesting about people: They knew the wisdom of simply being busy sometimes.
>
> Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.
>
> Dye your hair.
>
> -- <cite>[“Reincarnation Blues” by Michael Poore](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33571217-reincarnation-blues)</cite>


Sunday Slothsday


![A sloth relaxing](/assets/images/2018/sloth.jpg)

This sloth’s relaxation game is my new life goal. Spotted at [Southwick’s Zoo](http://southwickszoo.com/).


The only thing where you need a big group of people to do something is when you’re building an Amish barn.

Amish Barn


> The only thing where you need a big group of people to do something is when you’re building an Amish barn.
>
> -- <cite>[George Lois](https://www.fastcodesign.com/90167996/ad-legend-george-lois-magazine-covers-are-trash-today)</cite>


At first glance, five minutes and fifty-five seconds seems like a pretty arbitraty unit of time to measure something by. Does it read better as 1 “Bohemain Rhapsody”?

Build and Deploy a Website in Under Five Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds


At first glance, five minutes and fifty-five seconds seems like a pretty arbitraty unit of time to measure something by. Does it read better as 1 “Bohemain Rhapsody”?

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fJ9rUzIMcZQ" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I had a goal to show off how to create and deploy a website as fast as possible -- and after a few tries, I couldn't do it under five minutes. But six minutes... plenty of time! Especially when you've got a sweet Brian May guitar solo to give you a little boost 4 minutes in.

I demoed these steps at a weekly work meeting, but everyone in the room had about the same background as me, so for you, random Internet stranger, some assumptions:

## Assumptions (If you really want to get this done in under six minutes):

- You have a github (or bitbucket account), git installed on your computer, and know basic git commands.
- You have node and npm installed and a general idea of how npm works.

If these assumptions don’t apply to you, you’ll need to budget some more time. If you’re just getting started with git or npm, you might need the entirety of _Live at Wembley '86_. If you’re brand new to development, consider loading up the entire Queen discography.

Now that you’ve got a reasonable time bound for this, let’s get to it.

## Create a Website

We’re going to use [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/) for this. Gatsby is a React based static site generator. There’s some comprehensive [getting started instructions](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/) here, but here’s the TL;DR version.

`npm install --global gatsby-cli`

from your favorite command line, pick a folder and then:

```shell
gatsby new gatsby-site
cd gatsby-site
gatsby develop
```

and once it’s done loading, like magic you’ve got a website at [localhost:8000](localhost:8000).

## Set up Git

Create a new repo at your git host of choice (bitbucket or github). Either of them will give you instructions for pushing up new code, basically:

```shell
git init
git remote add origin [your-origin-here]
git push origin master
```

- but follow their instructions if you’re unfamiliar with git. You can refresh the repository to verify the code is there.

## Deploy it Using Netlify

I cannot speak more highly of [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/), but if you’re doing this at “Bohemian Rhapsody” speed for now I’ll just say that Netlify makes Gatsby deploys crazy easy. Sign up for an account, ideally using the login for your git host (github, bitbucket, etc). Once you’re in you’ll see a dashboard with a big “New site from Git” button. Click that then:

- Pick your git host.
- Pick your repo.
- There’s a third step to set it up, but Netlify already knows it’s a Gatsby site so everything is set up for you.
- Hit deploy and... that’s it, you’re done. Within seconds Netlify should have a semi-randomly generated URL for your website.

## Why This is Awesome

The charade of creating a site and deploying it in under six minutes aside, this is awesome for a few reasons:

- We never actually _built_ the site. Running `gatsby develop` spins up a hot-reloading development environment, but Netlify actually did the build step for you. There are other services that will do this, but there’s usually a few more hoops involved to get it working.
- Netlify will let you change the randomly generated URL to a domain you own for free. They do one-click installs of HTTPS too.

Once you’ve done this once, you can spin up and deploy static sites to your heart’s content. And these sites are only quasi static, Gatsby is based on the idea of the (JAMstack)[https://jamstack.org/] - JavaScript, APIs, and markup. You can even feed Gatsby content from live sources hosted elsewhere, like a WordPress site or [Butter CMS](https://buttercms.com/) - basically anything with an API endpoint. Even Netlify is only quasi-static - they have features like [form handling](https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling/) to deal with most of the tasks you might have needed server side code for in the past.

That’s it. Hopefully you followed along and got a website up and running. If not, at least you got to enjoy some Queen.

<iframe src="https://giphy.com/embed/cAfaWIcWr7qus" width="480" height="264" frameBorder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/cAfaWIcWr7qus">via GIPHY</a></p>


About a year ago I was ready for a new computer. I had money set aside to buy one, and was just waiting for the release of the new Macbook Pros. And then they released it... and I didn't get one. I had a number of older Macbook Pros that I 💖, and when I had them you couldn’t convince me to ever use a Windows laptop instead.

Dude You Got a Dell


About a year ago I was ready for a new computer.

I had money set aside to buy one, and was just waiting for the release of the new Macbook Pros. And then they released it... and I didn't get one. I had a number of older Macbook Pros that I 💖, and when I had them you couldn’t convince me to ever use a Windows laptop instead. But in the years that passed since the last owning a MBP, a few things happened on the Windows side:

- Windows 10 released, and while I have issues with it, it’s the best release of Windows so far.
- I’m more OS agnostic than I used to be. I use a Windows PC for development at work, and there are no apps that I have a strong preference[^1] for that exist only on MacOS.

...and a few things happened on the Mac side. The last MBP I had was a 2012 model and it was great for the following reasons:

- It had an SD card reader! That was amazing at the time, and made importing photos off of my DSLR so much easier.
- It had an ethernet port.
- I had an Nvidia GPU in it, which made you believe Apple actually cared about gaming.
- You could upgrade it. It came with 4GB of RAM and a 250 GB spinny-disk and left my possession with 8GB and a sweet SSD.
- I bought it from Microcenter for under $1000. Actually, well under at $899, brand new.

So Apple decided to get rid of all of the things I liked, and focus on things I didn't care that much about, like making the computer incredibly light and adding a useless touchbar, while increasing the price.

So instead of a Macbook, I am now the “proud” owner of a refurbished Dell Inspiron 7577.

![Dude you're getting a Dell](/assets/images/2018/dell-dude.jpg)

Pros:

- It has a GTX1060 (MaxQ) GPU in it. It can play Overwatch at 60 FPS on high settings without breaking a sweat. Attempting to do that on a Macbook Pro would have required setting large piles of money on fire on something like an external Thunderbolt GPU box and dual booting Windows.
- It has an SD card reader! And an ethernet port! And an HDMI port! And a Thunderbolt port so I can attach a dock and get an entire second set of all of those ports!
- It has one screw that keeps the bottom on, and if you take it off, you can upgrade / replace whatever you want in there.
- I picked up a refurbished[^2] model and it cost about 50% less than a similar refurbished Macbook Pro would have cost.

Cons:

- The screen isn't great. I’ll conceed that Apple’s retina screens are pretty amazing.
- It weighs about 3 times what a MBP would weigh, but again, I didn't need it to be super portable.
- I’ve never used a Windows laptop trackpad that was half as nice to use as a Mac’s, although I will say that this one is better, and has multitouch support.

It’s worth noting here that I have an iPad Pro that I’m pretty enamoured with, and it was a driver for not needing a laptop running MacOS. 95% of what I used MacOS for exists on iOS, and the iPad is lighter, cheaper, and (in some cases) faster than a MacOS running laptop. If the two OSs ever merged, I’d consider getting a Mac laptop again, but until then I’m happy with Mac apps running on an Arm processor and everything running on a much cheaper Intel box.

<hr />

<span id="fn-1"><a href="#fnref-1">1</a></span> I will admit that there's no good Windows replacement for Tweetbot, and not being able to use Sketch is _annoying_, but I am equally annoyed that they won't support Windows. And my favorite writing app, iA Writer, has [a kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reichenstein/a-focused-writing-app-for-windows) for a Windows version!

<span id="fn-2"><a href="#fnref-2">2</a></span> I try to buy refurbished computers and electronics whenever possible. Best case, they're just a computer someone returned, worst case they failed in some way and then got fixed, but that just means someone else took the early part of the [bathtub curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve) for you. Also, some times you get unexpected free upgrades.


Our cat Maggie passed away yesterday. She was a good cat.

RIP Maggie

Our cat Maggie passed away yesterday. She was a good cat. We adopted her in 2012, somewhat unintentionally. We knew we wanted a cat, and there was a room in the shelter for “Salty and Pepper”, which is a terrible set of names for two black _and_ white cats. The one we would name Jake came over like a dog would, introducing himself with a head butt and looking for scritches, but Salty (or Pepper, we never were quite sure) was nowhere to be found. Searching around the room revealed Maggie hiding away in a little cat tent, reluctant to come out, relying on her brother to do the work of finding new pet parents, a pattern she would continue once we brought her home, making Jake do the work of asking for treats and dinner.

A funny thing about furry friends is you spend a lot of time with them, as much as immediate family, and they’re tied up in memories of everything. In our first house Maggie would find all the odd spots a cat could find to hide in a turn of the twentieth century home. Lorelei was born and once Maggie stopped being afraid of her stumbling and crying, she became her everyday companion and occasional play table.

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images%2F2023%2Fmaggie-2.jpeg)

Throughout Covid she was the screen time cat, joining me for meetings while Jake napped on the couch. 
![Maggie laying on my desk](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/images%2F2023%2Fmaggie-1.jpeg)

And would still hang out for play time.

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/images%2F2023%2Fmaggie-3.jpeg)

I’ll end with this photo, a happenstance of lighting that revealed her inner kitty, the one that would knock over scratching posts at 2 a.m., or attack the doorknob on our bedroom door while we slept just to run away when I opened it.

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/images%2F2023%2Fmaggie-4.jpeg)

2x-ing the amount of cute cat pictures I can download.

Modem Upgrades


Xfinity sent me an email a while back saying service in our area had been upgraded to 600 Mbps, and that my modem couldn’t handle this extreme new bandwidth. But any network test was showing 550-580 Mbps so… seemingly it could handle _most_ of it. I filed a mental note, went on with my life.

![fast.com test for our old modem showing 540 Mbps down](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2023/modem-old.png)

But more recently they sent another email saying speed had been increased even more, and my modem was objectively trash at this point, so maybe consider a new one. This seemed more interesting, so I did some research about which modems are actually ok and not unreliable disasters, and picked up the [ARRIS SURFboard S33](https://www.surfboard.com/products/cable-modems/s33/) which is a name that is both cool and lame at the same time, somehow. I guess we still “surf” the web? Feels like like we’ve got our foot trapped in a rock and the waves just slap us on our head over and over and over.

Anyway, I installed it tonight, and Xfinity was not lying, the old modem was slow and sad and the new one gets us 1 gig down [^1]. Also using their app to register the new modem took about 10 minutes and was entirely painless. It was, I dare even say, Comcastic.

![fast.com test for our new modem showing 1gig down](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2023/modem-new.png)

This modem is _in theory_ capable of 2.5 Gbps down, although I do not believe Xfinity will be promising that any time soon, and it would require replacing a lot of other hardware, and honestly, I just don’t think I can click on links that fast.

[^1]: The upload speed remains sad and slow, only slightly better than a man in 1880 repeating a Morse code message down a telegraph line.

Welcome to the Worst Month of Winter


If you’ve ever been around me in real-life in the month of February you’ve likely heard me argue that humans in cold climates should not have to February, at all. Take the month off, hibernate, catch up on streaming TV shows, slowly drink a cup of tea in the afternoons, start a new hobby, clear out a backlog of books or learn something new. It’s cold, the Sun barely exists, it’s peak cold/flu/whatever else season, if you have kids _they_ get a near third of the month off anyway, so why shouldn’t you? 

The only good part? It’s the shortest month.

Built with Comments


Every once in a while I get a message from someone about something I wrote here. Most of those messages would be valuable to anyone reading the site, but they get dropped into my inbox instead. On top of that, I often leave comments on _other_ people’s websites, so I figured why not add them here.

This project was part “let’s add comments” and part “let’s play with a new service”, in this case [Supabase](https://supabase.com) a PAAS (platform as a service), being used here pretty minimally to glue a few APIs to a database for the comments.

Anyway, leave a comment, see if it works.

Annual Maintenance Again


![VW Bus in the lobby](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2023/vw.jpg)

Last year I wrote [Annual Maintenance](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2022/01/annual-maintenance?searchterm=GTI) about the differences in the one day in January of 2020, 2021, and 2022 I sat in a VW dealership. I made a guess about 2023:

> What’s my best guess for January, 2023? No masks. Finally hit 10,000 miles but still well under 20,000 and impossibly far from 30,000. I’ll still go to Trader Joe’s after. I’ll be smart enough to do this on a weekday so I don’t get stuck in the weekend crowd. Things change, but things stay the same.

Was I right? I pulled in the service bay with 9992 miles. No one is wearing a mask. It’s a Friday. 50/50 I go to Trader Joe’s after — we’re good on groceries but I do have a mild trail mix addiction. Is everything normal now? Normal as any normal is, I guess.


Aptitude vs. Tenure

> Aptitude is the ability to perform a type of work. Tenure is the length of time in job. Their correlation degrades rapidly.

[From Professional Aptitude vs. Tenure
](https://ilya.grigorik.com/professional-aptitude-vs-tenure/)

Ilya includes a nice graphic here of the idea of aptitude versus tenure. In a past career life I worked with a manager who would frequently toss out the phrase “I have over twenty years experience!” when justifying decisions. We’d joke he’d been showing up for twenty years, whether he’d actually learned anything was up for debate.

> Most organizations have a “career resting level” for each job: a level everyone is expected to reach eventually that, once reached, carries no further level growth expectations except for sustained execution and honing of their craft. Unfortunately, it's rare to find well-developed tools and language that gives enough credit, praise, and recognition to this happy steady state. Resting levels are not "easy" levels, they are the personal goldilocks zone: challenging but not impossible, rewarding but not at the cost of all else.

The idea of a resting level is a nice thought experiment now that I’m some-many years into my career as a software developer and I am not yet (and do not appear to be on track to reach) Google Fellow level.

RIP to the only person who has managed to figure out how to use a Fender trem and keep the guitar in tune.

Jeff Beck


Jeff Beck passed away yesterday. I don’t recall how I first found out about him, it was either some _Guitar World_ magazine list of “greatest guitar albums” or my dad recounting the history of rock n’ roll to me while driving me to school. He wasn’t popular or well known when I was a teenager, but I got a copy of _Blow by Blow_ and listened to it a trillion times in a row. The solo in “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” remains one of my favorite guitar solos. 

Weirdly of all the songs of his that pops into my head on a regular basis it’s this song “Blackbird” from his 2001 album _You Had It Coming_, where he does call and response with a bird and, in Jeff Beck fashion, lets the bird get the last word.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mJhUAeqJjPQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

How not to organize content for a Next JS based blog.

Mistakes of the Past


At some point when building out this blog I made the clever (but not smart) decision to match Next‘s page folder structure with my content. So when generating all the routes for this site, I’d get all the content from the blog folder, the parse out the year and month from the path of the item, and that’s the url of the post.

For example, if I saved a file at:
`content/blog-posts/2023/01/mistakes-of-the-past`

It would show up at `blog-posts/2023/01/mistakes-of-the-past`. Which is ok, but over time I found these issues with it:

- Automating generating new content is unnecessarily cumbersome (e.g. as a Shortcuts shortcut), as you can’t just throw it into `/blog-posts` and call it a day, you have to put it in `year/month/post`. Also every post already has the full date in the YAML frontmatter so it’s duplicating dates. More to the point, if you move the content it might disappear / break everything.
- Content couldn’t be stored in a folder that was easily readable to me, the author of the content. I wanted a “drafts” folder for draft content I can view locally, but it was instead scattered around the year/month folders.
- Generating the slug from the file name is also annoying, because it means the filenames had to be slug friendly. I’ve switched to slugify-ing the post titles now, although I’ll likely add a `slug` property to the YAML frontmatter to decouple it entirely.

Other things left to fix:
- The codebase is about half TypeScript files, half JavaScript files.
- Other types of content are generated by folder path as well. So book notes have their own book-notes folder when they should just have a `post-type` property. 

Am I starting to wish I kept some of this in a database? No… nope. Not yet. Nope.

Keeping all my notes in Obsidian in 2023.

Obsidian for 2023


[I wrote last year that I’d love one app that sticks the best features of iA Writer, Bear and Obsidian together](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2022/11/can-we-smoosh-ia-writer-bear-and-obsidian-together). It’s 2023 and it still hasn’t happened, but I want to more consistently use one tool for notes and writing this year, so I’m deciding to stick with [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) and not think about it for the next year. The main reasons for this:
- I use Obsidian for notes at work, because I can’t / won’t use the Apple App Store there, so consistency between home and work is nice.
- iA Writer and Obsidian both have a quick open feature (⌘ + SHIFT + O and ⌘ + O respectively). Bear... has search, which doesn’t work half as well. I’ve worked around that by using an Alfred plugin to quick open in Bear but it’s not as nice as having this work as a native function of the app.
- Most of the UI quirks I’ve been annoyed by in Obsidian were smoothed out in the 1.0 release, or at least made tolerable. 
- I realized that I can keep all of my blog posts/content in the same working folder as my personal notes by simply symlinking the `content` folder in the git repo for this blog in my notes folder, which means I can now keep stuff like my notes on [monorepos](/evergreen/monorepos) in sync on this site and locally.

The one mark against Obsidian compared to Bear is the mobile app support. Obsidian has a mobile app and sync service that is paid, but I rarely edit on mobile, so I’m going to use my [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/) inbox for capture instead, and [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer) if I need to really modify some text.

20-odd years later, I finally have a shreddy guitar.

A New Guitar for a New Year


[I wrote in 2020 about fixing up my first guitar](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/08/the-20-year-history-of-a-partscaster?searchterm=partscaster), a black Squire Stratocaster. It is (I think) from 1995. My other guitar is a nicer Stratocaster from 1999. When I got that guitar I was torn between it and something more “shreddy”. If I remember correctly I was comparing it to an Ibanez JS1000, but in the end I wanted the bridge and middle single coils, so I went with the Strat.

Well, 20-odd years later, I finally have a “shreddy” guitar, a the amazingly named [Charvel Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 1 HH FR M](https://charvel.com/gear/series/pro-mod/pro-mod-san-dimas-style-1-hh-fr-m/2975031500). I picked it up from [Matt’s Music Center](https://mattsmusic.com) in Weymouth, worth a trip if you’re in the Boston area looking for guitars. The color is Chameleon and I wanted to get it from a physical store, not online, because the color… photographs as a lot of different colors!

Like, it’s black, right?

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/san-dimas-1.jpeg)

Or purple?

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/san-dimas-2.jpeg)

Or kind of gold?

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/san-dimas-3.jpeg)

It’s fun and I’ve aggressively abused the whammy bar many times already. Now for next year finally following up on something I meant to _this year_, recording myself while playing.

Smarter Than You Think

I finished [Smarter Than You Think](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143125822) by [Clive Thompson](http://www.collisiondetection.net)[^1] today. I started it many months ago, it was a book I read in fits and starts. I thought it approached the subject of “what is technology doing to how we think” well enough, with lots of references to historical precedence (people thinking writing would ruin the mind hundreds of years ago) and non-technical studies of similar topics like shared knowledge and the overhead of organizing large and wide knowledge networks.

One of the more interesting parts, at least to me, was about solving puzzles collectively. He talks at length about video games, and wiki pages for games contributed to by large sets of people, which means every facet of a game can be documented   in depth and at speed. He references _Skyrim_ a lot but I found this playing through _Elden Ring_ recently. The game does not present a deep story unless you know what to look for, and many of the puzzles are fair if you know what you’re looking for, but… you might honestly have no idea what you’re looking for. You can search online for the smallest part of the game and find everything you could ever want to know about it. There’s deep backstory on Reddit that you’d think was fan-fiction except it comes with references!

And it’s true of almost everything. I’ve been playing guitar more this Winter, and I like to search for “how did player X get their tone”. The information is out there, and you begin to realize that a lot of good electric guitar players from the 60s and 70s were ok guitar players who had access to the equipment and information that allowed them to get great tone. Today you can Google it and get the same tone in a digital modeler (more technology!) in five minutes. The ease is obvious when you start to search for instrumental electric guitarists in your favorite streaming music platform: there’s _thousands_ of them, and the music skews heavily towards the last ten years or so, when not only did digital recording get easier, sharing information on how to play and inspiration for playing did too. Heck, some of the best known guitarists now don’t even record often, they post on Instagram and play live. Hard to say that’s a bad thing for humanity.

There was one salient bit later in the book about Twitter:

> One study homed in on Twitter users who displayed “clear political preference,” as with right-wing Twitter users following Fox News, or left-wing Twitter users following _The New York Times_. It turns out these users inadvertently got a more diverse set of news delivered via other people they followed, because their friends would tweet tidbits from the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, 17.8 percent of the left-wing Twitter users were seeing right-wing media via retweets from people they followed, and the right-wing Twitter users saw even more—57.2 percent of them were seeing left-wing media.

So someone right leaning goes and buys Twitter and now how do you think that skews? And what impact does that skewing (and the algorithm behind the skewing) have on us as a society? That’s a question the book can’t answer, we’re learning that one in real time.

[^1]: His blog is sadly and oddly dead. Oddly because it’s mentioned in the book more than once.


A list of ten Christmas songs with particular vibes I enjoy.

The Ten (Insert Superlative Here) Christmas Songs


A list of ten Christmas songs with particular vibes I enjoy.

## 1. Christmas At Ground Zero - “Weird Al” Yankovic
The best of the “joke” Christmas songs you would hear on classic rock stations, well above “Grandma Got Run Over by A Reindeer” or Porky Pig singing “Blue Christmas”, but it stopped getting radio airplay because after 9/11 the phrase “ground zero” went from the generalized dystopian idea of where a nuclear bomb lands to specifically the World Trade Center (that’s very America of us). It’s on this list so you _never forget_ what we lost.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/christmas-at-ground-zero/250494835?i=250494908)

## 2. Santa Tell Me - Ariana Grande
I like this song well enough, but there’s something else to it because it’s the only Christmas song that, when it comes on, anywhere and at any volume, Lorelei starts singing along like she’s an awakened sleeper agent.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/santa-tell-me/1444319981?i=1444319982)

## 3. Feliz Navidad - José Feliciano
I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS.\
I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS.\
I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS.\
FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/feliz-navidad/255615877?i=255615879)

## 4. Mary Did You Know - every Catholic musician in history
Many years of attending Catholic school as an atheist means I could do with out anything espousing the true meaning of Christmas, but I personally enjoy this one because it strongly implies that Jesus takes over the world with an army of zombies.

[I dunno, church?](https://www.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html)

## 5. Christmas Time Is Here - Vince Guaraldi Trio
It’s Christmas Eve. You’re sweaty, wrapped up in fleece footy pajamas and under a blanket, laying on a high pile carpet floor, using a Christmas present as a pillow (is it a Nintendo?). You can hear adults around you talking but their words are muffled and the syllables distorted. The edges of your vision are blurred, strange Caldor-color rainbows, but in the center the warm yellow glow of a CRT TV. On it, a dog points his nose at the sky and wiggles his arms and feet erratically. You fall asleep, knowing someone will pick you up and put you in your bed, and in the morning it will be Christmas.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/christmas-time-is-here-vocal-version/1440948781?i=1440949308)

## 6. What’s This? - Danny Elfman from The Nightmare Before Christmas
Every time my brain has the thought “what’s this?” it’s immediately repeated (what’s this!) and then this song begins.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/whats-this/1440662430?i=1440662601)

## 7. Carol of The Bells
With a nod to “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” as heard on “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24”. The Christmas songs you can headbang to.

[Listen on Apple Music (turn to 11)](https://music.apple.com/us/album/christmas-sarajevo-12-24-instrumental/206345419?i=206345482)

## 8. Please Come Home For Christmas - Charles Brown
If you were drinking spiced egg nog while reading this, here is where you skip the egg nog part of the mix. Take a pretty standard blues arrangement, throw church bells in the background and a piano that sounds like sleigh bells, it’s a Christmas song! A really, really sad Christmas song about being alone at Christmas.

The sad, sad part is the Eagles version gets played the most. I fuckin’ hate the Eagles, man.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/please-come-home-for-christmas/214325415?i=214325498)

## 9. River - Joni Mitchell
Oh you thought that last one was sad, did you? While “Please Come Home For Christmas” covers Christmas day through New Years, this one starts with “putting up Christmas”, so now we’ve got the day after Thanksgiving through to New Years covered with sadness.

I will acknowledge that “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” probably doesn’t hit as hard for people who grew up in warm climates, but on the other hand every musician who has seen ice once has covered this song so there’s something to those words.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/river/1492263092?i=1492263130)

## 10. Someday at Christmas - Stevie Wonder
There’s a lot of songs that fit a theme of “it’s the end of the year, and having some time to reflect on the state of things, I’ve decided the world could generally be a lot better than it is”, but this one is the best one. Also a good one to end this list on because as Stevie says, someday at Christmas everything will be right, but it’ll be long after you’re dead.

[Listen on Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/someday-at-christmas/1443206142?i=1443206146)

Saga, Volume 10

Took Lorelei to the comic book store yesterday. She got some Pokemon cards, I got Saga, volume 10. I’ve been waiting for it for a while, volume 9 released in 2018! And ended on a total gut punch too. Fortunately this one has a happier ending.

![Lying cat from the Saga comic book series.](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/lying.png)

Yeah, it’s another rough one. Still a great series. I want to believe there’s a happy (happy enough) ending for Hazel but that looks to be many volumes away still.

Did you try turning it off and turning it on again?

Ignore the last post, I fixed it

All the smart stuff in the house is back. I did two things:

- The older Apple TV in the basement was showing up as a home hub in Homekit. That might be fine but it’s the oldest device of the available home hubs so I turned off the option for it to be a hub.
- Restarted the router. Which with an eero means… pushing one button in the app.

 So now my home automation can run, and at sunset today the Christmas tree will turn on and the nearby Homepod will start playing Christmas music. 🎄

I’d flip this table but it’s a smart one and it’s not responding

I [wrote about this when iOS15 released](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/09/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-september-26-2021?searchterm=smart), but by far the most frustrating thing about any new technology is that when it doesn’t work there’s absolutely fuck-all you can do to try to debug the issue.

I picked up a Eve smart plug for the Christmas tree. Added it to Home, flipped it off… couldn’t flip it back on. Unplugged it, plugged it back it, flipped it on, off… and that was it. Says it’s “not responding” in home. Then I notice one of the lights in that room (which has worked consistently until now), also “not responding”.

The answers online seem to always be “reset everything”, “power cycle everything”, “toggle every feature on your router”, or some other combination that would be easy if I had a trained monkey to push buttons in sequence.

Anyway, I haven’t figured it out yet, so tonight I’ll be unplugging the tree… from the smart plug.

Did some holiday decorating and baking after going out to see Strange World.

You can’t catch me

I’m the gingerbread man.

![A decorated gingerbread cookie.](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/gingerbread.jpeg)

Did some holiday decorating and baking after going out to see _Strange World_, which I rate a solid “ok”. The central plot (which I won’t spoil) I enjoyed, and some of the visuals were well done, especially the comic book style introduction, but the meat of the story was pretty forgettable. Lorelei’s favorite part: “when the dog licked the thing”. I agree, the dog is funny.

Also I’ve seen the “movie theaters are dying” stories and, sure, COVID, but I didn’t think much of it until today when… we had the entire theatre to ourselves. Early afternoon, and the theater is in the middle of a mall (that also might be dying), but geez, that doesn’t seem sustainable.

I wish that turkey only cost a nickel

![Thanksgiving food](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/thanksgiving.jpeg)

We did “early” Thanksgiving with my parents this weekend. We do it the weekend before because then it’s easier for my parents to visit us, and on the actual weekend of Thanksgiving we usually have four straight days to do “not much”.

Every year I struggle to find the recipes/timings/temperatures I used the year before, even though every year I write it down somewhere. So this year, it’s here. Maybe next year I’ll find it.

- Turkey. 9lb breast only, spatchcocked, 450° for 80 minutes. Should have covered the skin a little earlier (or dropped the rack down a level) but still good. I coat the skin in mayonnaise and [bird herbs](https://www.generalstorepr.com/product/bird-herbs/317595).
- Roasted red potatoes, coated with oil and said bird herbs.
- Buttermilk biscuits with poultry herbs. About 10 years ago now I made these and they rose perfectly and I’ve been trying to chase that magic combination since then.
- Green beans with almonds, sautéed with butter and honey with herbs from the biscuits.
- Homemade cranberry sauce, which is personally my favorite part of the meal.
- A salad (greens, grapes, blue cheese, walnuts, balsamic fig dressing).
- [Pumpkin pie](https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/the-great-pumpkin-pie-recipe/), although not nearly as nicely decorated as the one in that link. Still tasted good.

I miss the old metaphor for the web

That was an actual web, with webmasters, and crawlers, and spiders. It feels like the current web is a lot more spiders dangling from a very high ceiling on a single thread, just waiting for a strong wind to blow them off.

The best parts of my favorite note and writing apps.

Can we smoosh iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian together

I use iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian these days. I use iA Writer for writing (like writing this post), Bear for notes, and Obsidian at work for work notes. I wish all three could be smooshed together.

- iA Writer is the best for writing in. The fonts and layout are amazing, not to mention focus and typewriter mode.
- Bear is the best for notes with attachments. Adding a picture in a file based notes app is painful and sad.
- Obsidian queries working on individual blocks of text are _so cool_, and the wikilink previews (and backlinks) are much more powerful than Bear. It makes generating something like a [brag document](https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/) very easy. As you record something, tag it with #brag and then query for each of them. 

A quick example of Obsidian queries. Two separate daily notes with a #workouts tag on them.

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/obsidian-example.png)

I’d drop Bear for Obsidian on features, but Bear is miles ahead on UI, especially on mobile. Bear 2.0 seems like it will be released “soon”, but I might start taking advantage of Bear’s export to markdown features to then import in Obsidian for querying.

Wherein I consider throwing my iPad into the river.

Setting up an iPad as a multi-user device

Andrea had a good idea the other day to set up a digital display in our kitchen area to be able to see shared calendars, reminders, other digital debris we individually see on our devices but don’t have a great way of seeing as a family.

We do everything in the Apple-ecosystem, Homekit, iCloud, all that, so it _would seem_ that setting up an iPad to be a simple controller/view screen for this information would be easy, but Apple has made iPadOS the most frustrating OS in existence. Some things I ran into:

-  By default a device being reset to factory assumes you’d want to restore it as is. It even encourages you to use your phone to start set-up (I was too lazy to enter the wifi password), but this then sends you down some miserable “restore all your settings” path.
-  I don’t want this to run my iCloud account, in theory it’s a device that sits downstairs for some shared functionality. Someone could grab it to use, say, Paprika, control the Sonos, but not send e-mails from my e-mail account. Seems easy enough, but it’s also very unclear why I should or shouldn’t make this a family account. And the ability to just run as a “guest” (a feature of MacOS, last I checked) is limited to running a single app. Of course I eventually realized that if I wanted to use this to play Apple Music, I’d have to add it to the family anyway, because I can’t simply have a device with one account that logs in to another account for a single service.
-  To finish a new Apple account, you need a phone number to verify it (why?). To download apps from the app store (even free ones), you need to enter a billing address and phone number. Why!
-  I signed in to this account, completely detached from my family account, opened the Sonos app, and… my recently played music was in there when I selected Apple Music. This might be a thing Sonos exposes but it seems weird.
-  When iPadOS finally boots up, Apple News is dead center. This is only one of what seemed like a dozen upsells during the install process.
-  Enabling location services and then having the default weather widget be Cupertino is some “made in California” bullshit.

Anyway, it’s up and running now, I’ll see how it works out for us. It remains baffling to me that the iPad exists as this “super simple” device for kids and grandparents but also a pocketable super computer. And also why isn’t there an Apple TV with a display. Also why can’t you hide the dock. Also… I think that’s it for tonight.

The wheels on the vehicles go round and round.

Tired

It’s a bad pun, I spent a fair share of time today mucking about with tires, swapping a bike one for a trainer tire for the still-not-yet-here Cold season, and putting on the Winter wheels for our Subaru (for the still-not-yet-here Snow season).

They are deceptively simple, especially a bike one. Bit of rubber with some air in it, but quite amazing (or terrifying) when you realize that’s the bit of rubber keeping the wheels turning at 80 miles per hour. Uh, in the car, that is.

Veteran’s Day


![My Grandfather in his fabulously cluttered shed.](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/grandpa.jpeg)

I wrote about my [Grandfather’s experience in World War II a few years ago](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2018/11/veterans-day?searchterm=veteran). We talked for hours about a few significant days in his life, but at the time it was hard to find any information about it online. Well I searched again this year and found this, [a substantial write-up about the Battle of Metz and Fort Driant](https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/battle-of-metz-pattons-bloody-fortress-battle/).

This paragraph describes the main conflict my grandfather saw in the war and described to me in detail:

> Irwin broke off the attack the following day and replaced elements of his battered 11th Infantry with fresh troops from his 2nd and 10th Regiments; the two units renewed the assault on October 7. This time, the Americans attempted to fight their way into the underground entrances to the fort but made no better progress; they soon were bogged down.

Also interesting:

> The 26th Division alone reported 3,000 cases of trench foot during the November offensive, Patton said.

Which was what eventually sent my Grandfather back to America.

We don’t need more bad ideas getting popular.

At this point I have to hope Twitter fails

At this point I have to hope Twitter fails because if it’s successful a lot of other CEOs are going to wonder if they can cut half their staff and force people back to offices.

If I had to guess, in a year from now it’ll still be around, but some incredibly pared down version of it’s former self that still lives at twitter.com but isn’t recognizable as anything you’d think of as Twitter. I mean Myspace isn’t even completely dead yet.

My favorite programmers are the ones that are smart and lazy.

0.1x engineer

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/cat.jpeg)

[Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer](https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2016/01/25/why-i-strive-to-be-a-0-1x-engineer/), bit of a joke title but good ideas in here, especially this one:

> Let’s not keep maintaining this feature. 

I’ve gone so far as to slip some features into the red-lined diff during a refactor to see if anyone noticed [^1].

[Some good quotes from the original Hacker News on this blog post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841), definitely a little more pointed after recent stories about a particular new social media owner hiring or firing engineers based on lines of code:

> Jeff Atwood: “the best code is no code at all. Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options.”

> Robert Galanakis: “The fastest code is the code which does not run. The code easiest to maintain is the code that was never written.”

> Dijkstra: it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month". This is a very costly measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code, but today I am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point of view. My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

> Bill Gates: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."


[^1]: They did, they always do. They couldn’t explain why it was there but oh boy did they miss it!

So sad I could sing a little country song.

Sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year

[A great list on Reddit of sad songs](https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/yp0l4a/saddest_songs_youve_ever_heard/) if that’s a thing you might be in the mood for tonight.

Always not-sad (glad?) to see John Prine at the top. Weirdly missing, this American sadness classic:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4WXYjm74WFI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

JavaScript Generators

With Tim Tams, at [Why Would Anyone Need JavaScript Generator Functions](https://jrsinclair.com/articles/2022/why-would-anyone-need-javascript-generator-functions/), an enjoyable write-up of a confusing part of JavaScript, although I’m not entirely sure I’d ever use them short of a library that hides all of the implementation details. 

As [noted in the Hacker News comments Redux-Saga uses generators](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506626), that’s where most of my knowledge of them comes from. After implementing it once (look at me, very smart!) I took over another project that used it and immediately ripped it out which, based on the replies, I’m not the only one:

> I had to rescue a saga based project that went badly off the rails and it was some of the hardest code I’ve ever had to debug in any language. Code flow was very difficult to reason about and forget about trying to use stack traces. [source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33514897)

Happy first 5 PM after Daylight Savings ends.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Happy first 5 PM after Daylight Savings ends. I know Winter doesn’t officially start for more than a month but something changes today. Maybe we need a micro-season for it, like Dark Fall.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xUZgM96XY7s" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

…and now too many Mastodons

[@threetonesun@front-end.social](https://front-end.social/web/@threetonesun) and [@jjmartucci@micro.blog](https://micro.blog/jjmartucci). The first I guess I’ll try as a Twitter replacement, the second just a happy little side-effect of cross-posting to [micro.blog](https://micro.blog).

Trying to find a new Mastodon instance, just like everybody else.

Mastodon’t, or can’t

I had a Mastodon account on [mastodon.technology](https://mastodon.technology/about) from a while back (April 2017 my account says — looking for an alternative to Twitter in late 2016 sounds right). Unfortunately the instance is shutting down. I looked about for a new one tonight and a _lot_ of them are already full, waitlist only. Which lead me into self-hosting, but the managed instance service I found, [masto.host is also temporarily unavailable](https://masto.host/pricing/).

Seems like a lot of people looking for a Twitter replacement real quick. Might do some more reading this weekend on the [Digital Ocean 1-click install option](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/04/mastodon-now-available-on-digitalocean/).

The joys of software that keeps getting better.

It’s free software

I’ve currently got my Helix LT updating to version [3.5](https://line6.com/support/page/kb/effects-controllers/helix/helix-350-release-notes-r1003/). Updates for the Helix are interesting because every update gives you more value for your initial investment. It’s essentially free amps, pedals, better tones. This release fixes a lot of the issues with the stock cabs, including allowing you to easily do dual cabs with a simple delay and pan between them, which is something I used to do with every preset in Bias FX.
	
It’s nice to get new and exciting features in an update. Software updates are mixed bag these days. Some apps I prefer they never update (like Things, Bear), because I don’t want to learn new features all the time, I want consistency. Others update to the point where I feel like every time I use them I’m getting a new tutorial on how to use them and overwhelmed by the changes (looking at you Confluence). Others push new features at a higher cost that aren’t necessarily wanted.

Which is to say, shout out to the Helix team at Line 6 for continuously making the software more better and not charging for so many awesome new features.

A quick review of Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train

Game Review: Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train

![Cover art for Dicey Dungeons and Monster Train](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/games.jpg)

Over the last month I’ve picked up [Dicey Dungeons](https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/dicey-dungeons-switch/) and [Monster Train First Class](https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/monster-train-first-class-switch/) for the Switch (on sale!). They’re both inspired by [Slay the Spire](https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/slay-the-spire-switch/), which, to me, was inspired by deck building games like Magic the Gathering. The idea in all of them is that you have a limited amount of resources per turn and a set of abilities or cards to play per turn. 

Dicey Dungeons goes for more of an RPG style game with different classes with different abilities and a load-out for your particular skills. The limited resource is determined by (surprise) dice rolls. It’s by far the more frustrating of the two because the dice rolls are dice rolls and even though you can control them to an extent, depending on which class and variation of the game you’re playing, you are often stuck hoping for a lucky six. And once you get above the intro levels the runs can end extremely quickly — one enemy that is strong against your current load out and it’s game over.

Monster Train encourages you to build up an army of monsters to fight invaders on your train. Don’t think too hard about the plot, the main differentiator is there are multiple levels and multiple monsters per level, which gives it a bit of a “tower defense” game feel. It’s deck building is deeper than Slay the Spire because you mix two factions at the game start and build from both, and it gives you a lot of options to remove or modify the cards you have, rather than hoping for lucky draws in the events where you add cards to your pool.

If you’ve never played any of these games, start with Slay the Spire. It’s the most straightforward, and quickly shows you how the gameplay loop works, where you balance building a resilient character as new cards come in, or going all-in on one strategy to exploit it’s ability to do tons of damage, and hope that later draws (or enemies) don’t completely destroy that plan. After that Monster Train, which is more complex, and if you want a fun diversion that’s easier to understand, Dicey Dungeons.

And be warned: while these are all fun games with strategy involved, you might get a _long_ way into a run and then get absolutely destroyed. And also be warned: once you get your first win, you’ll want your second, and third, and fourth, and….

Nanoblogmore

The key to posting a lot on your blog is making it easy to post on your blog.

Twitter stopped being fun when it had to be twitter.com

Leaving Twitter

> The unique tragedy with Twitter’s changing attitude toward developers is that so many of Twitter’s early innovations did come from third-party developers. The word tweet, the first use of a bird icon, and even the character counter started in Twitterrific. Twitter’s new leadership displayed an incredible disrespect for the value developers added to both the ecosystem and core platform.

From the Leaving Twitter chapter of Manton Reece's [Indie Microblogging](https://book.micro.blog/leaving-twitter/). Just a reminder that political and leadership changes aside, most of the joy of early Twitter died years ago.

This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point.

Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig

> This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point. The possibility of a new type of ecstatic vision and a life filled with meaningful tasks, I imagine, is what drew me and so many other readers to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” We believed Pirsig could see the Buddha in a well-maintained carburetor. We wanted to see it, too, and we wanted to work as he did, perhaps in large part because we saw very little future for ourselves in the striving world.

From [Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/returning-again-to-robert-m-pirsig). I keep meaning to reread _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_,  mainly because even if I don’t love the book, it has lots of great little lessons and themes that resonate. I reference [Pirsig’s Brick](https://www.thestrategyexchange.co.uk/2014/05/pirsigs-brick/) quite often.

You aren’t going to need it, or will you probably need it?

PAGNIs and YAGNIs


YAGNI = [You aren't going to need it](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Yagni.html). 

PAGNI = [Probably are gonna need it](https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/1/pagnis/).

Many senior software developers I’ve worked with have had their own PAGNI lists in their heads. YAGNIs, on the other hand, are more of an “argue about it every time” kind of list, not to mention as developers we often end up with “can we try to need this?” lists of things to try and learn that are more likely aren't gonna needs than probably gonna needs.

Some I have from past experiences:

- Real User Monitoring (RUM). At some point someone from the business is going to want to see a breakdown of user flows, errors, actions, everything. A one line set it and forget it RUM setup can save weeks of setting up specific logging and reporting.
- Preview environments. I push a branch, I get a place to see it. Takes time to set up but pays massively for testing and getting product sign off.
- Feature flags, because eventually you're going to have to release something to production and you don't want to have to let everyone at it.
- A no-code way to modify production. This one has pros and cons but eventually you'll have simple strings that need updating or images or a configuration that doesn't map to an API anywhere and someone will wanted it updated ASAP. Why break out a code editor when you can edit a value in a CMS and push publish.
- Regression test checklists. Not everything will be caught by automated tests. Make a checklist on the first day of prod releases, modify it so it’s up to date over time.
- Hard limits on build times, API request times, and asset load times. Because if it’s fuzzy it’ll one day seem slow, and then next time you look it’ll be unbearably slow and no one will totally understand why or how to fix it.

Breakdown of where tone come from in a guitar amp.

I’m just a performer, I don’t know anything about circuits

[Jim Lill](https://www.youtube.com/user/JimLill45) has a lot of great videos breaking down what makes a difference in guitar sound. This one might be the best because the guitar market for amplifiers (along with guitar pedals) has had this mix of classic collectors claiming only one amp can get one tone, and deep-state conspiracy theorists arguing one wire makes all the difference (but don’t _look_ at the wire, opening the amp will change everything).

Turns out... nothing matters much except in what order the EQ and gain is added. So yes, a Fender _does_ sound different than a Marshall. Unless you want them to sound the same. And no, your Soviet-era tubes don’t radiate magic sound waves into your signal.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wcBEOcPtlYk" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I wish my web server were in the corner of my room

> I could hear the hard drive spin up if somebody accessed the machine, and a little chug-chug-chug while Festival (the open source text-to-speech engine I’d installed) generated the voice. Like footsteps approaching before the door opens.

From [I wish my web server were in the corner of my room](https://interconnected.org/home/2022/10/10/servers). I enjoyed the [Hacker News discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165836) on this, lots of early 2000 throwbacks about hosting some stupid script on a laptop plugged into a university network, but also some good options if you wanted to serve something from home in the year 2022.

Do you? Probably not, but I do miss thinking of a server as a thing that I can physically know and not some amorphous cloud entity.

The garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.

TIL: Mojibake

> the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake) by way of [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053918), where I learned:

> In Russian this phenomenon is called "бНОПНЯ" (read "b-nop-nya") and was caused by taking the word "Вопрос" (meaning: "question") in win-1251 encoding and reading it as if it was in KOI-8 encoding.
>
> Also this is called "крокозябры" (read: kro-ko-zya-bry, nonsense word, no translation) especially when reading a binary file in a text viewer.

RIP The Middle East

![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/a-wilhelm-scream.jpeg)

[A Wilhelm Scream](https://www.awilhelmscream.com), likely the last show I’ll ever see at [The Middle East](https://www.mideastoffers.com) in Cambridge now that they’ve got the notice on the window to [start demolition for a luxury hotel](https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/middle-east-cambridge-closing-hotel-retail/).

Three loosely related thoughts on “getting things done”. Entirely not something on my mind after a week of work, for any reason.

Teach Them to Yearn for the Vast and Endless Sea

Three loosely related thoughts on “getting things done”. Entirely not something on my mind after a week of work, for any reason.

[Fast · Patrick Collison](https://patrickcollison.com/fast): Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Metrics are crucial and it’s good to be data-driven, esp to be clear what you’re shooting for. <br><br>However, it&#39;s easy to lose sight of the purpose and game the metrics. Chasing things like hitting 100% of goals or 6 nines uptime can mean you’re not innovating and taking risks.</p>&mdash; Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) <a href="https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/status/1575501694611337216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 29, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Andrea used to have [this quote](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/25/sea/) by her desk:

> If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.

How to Beat Worry

I like blogs where people add little cartoons and drawings to the text, which makes me think I should do it more. This one does it, and is a good read: [How to Beat Worry](https://moretothat.com/how-to-beat-worry/).

> The last thing a worrier should do is wait around for something to happen. Anticipation doesn’t bode well for someone caught in a worry feedback loop, so the key is to proactively invest thought into a worthwhile challenge instead.

Franklin Park Zoo

We had plans to visit friends in Dorchester today, and earlier in the week I thought “well what else can we do if we have to drive to Dorchester”, then realized the [Franklin Park Zoo](https://www.zoonewengland.org/franklin-park-zoo) was nearby, and the weather looked nice, and it was “Princess & Pirates” day so why not.

We went to the [zoo in 2020](/blog-posts/2021/03/one-year?searchterm=zoo) but not to see the animals, to see the [Zoo Lights](https://www.zoonewengland.org/engage/boston-lights). I’d never actually been there to see the animals. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give the zoo a solid 7. Going during Zoo Lights but not at night means the park is more decorated, and given that its past Labor day there wasn’t much of a crowd, although a few animals were away. I assume in Florida.

Notes:
- The “open air” exhibits were the big hits, like the rooms where the birds could fly around or the butterfly house.
- Lorelei: “ocelots in real life are cuter than in Minecraft”.
- I’ve always kind of thought of tapirs as being about the size of a dog about apparently some are 600 pounds.
- We spent a little over 3 hours there, which included eventually getting food because we had planned on being there more like 2 - 2.5 hours.
- ![](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/chad.jpeg) look at this absolute Chad. 
- Driving to a point in Boston has gotten so much more annoying in the last 10 years that it might have been easier to drive to the zoo in Providence had we not already had a reason to be in Dorchester.

🔗 Link: THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER

THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER.

> Why do people climb the ladder? “Because it’s there.” And when they don’t have any other goals, the ladder fills a vacuum.

> If you never make the leap from externally-motivated to intrinsically-motivated, this will eventually becomes a serious risk factor for your career. Without an inner compass (and a renewable source of joy), you will struggle to locate and connect with the work that gives your life meaning. You will risk burnout, apathy and a serious lack of fucks given..

> The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have not been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least. Or when I felt the least needed.📈📉💔

From [THE HIERARCHY IS BULLSHIT, WE CAN DO BETTER.](https://charity.wtf/2022/09/23/the-hierarchy-is-bullshit-we-can-do-better/). Happy Friday everyone.

DOOMCAT


We were out at lunch the other day and after burning through all the games on the front of the kids menu, Lorelei turned the menu over and started Tic-Tac-Toe on the back. Andrea suggested Hangman instead, and started explaining how you play it. It occurred to me that Hangman is… well kind of awful, so I suggested instead of Hangman we play DOOMCAT. Which is drawing a cat: two ears, two eyes, two pairs of whiskers, two teeth and then the DOOMCAT eats you. Which is also a little morbid but at least avoids antiquated forms of capital punishment.

We ran out of paper and then we ran out of food and left. Lorelei mentioned she liked and I thought, well, what if I just made it for you to play whenever. 

So… I made [DOOMCAT](https://doomcat.builtwith.coffee).

![DOOMCAT the game in action](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/doomcat.gif)

Some fun things:
- The cat emojis came from [OpenMoji](https://openmoji.org). They’re well set up for slicing for simple animations like this.
- Rather than set up a new project I made the entire thing in [Code Sandbox](https://codesandbox.io/) then exported it to Github. From there I added it as a project in Netlify and made the custom domain a subdomain of this site which, as far as I can tell, worked and didn’t break anything.
- The GIF above was made with [Gifski](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gifski/id1351639930?mt=12).



dun nuh na nuh nuh nuh, dun nuh na nuh nuh nuh, wah woo we woo we woooooo

I Want To Believe

![A ballon over George Washington in the Boston Public Garden](https://coffee-cake.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/2022/i-want-to-believe.jpeg)

Nice evening in Boston. Met up with the parents for dinner at [Citrus & Salt](https://www.citrusandsaltboston.com)

Treating links on the blog as real content.

A Little More Love for Links


I’m going to start treating links as content and not as a separate thing living under [links](/links). I started thinking about this by way of [Stat’s Page](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/stats-page/) on Jim Nielsen’s blog, which led me to [Indexing My Blog’s Links](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2020/indexing-my-blogs-links/), which got me thinking that all the inline links I post get lost in posts over time, and the posts I created as "link" type posts were... not numerous. There’s a lot of things I read which are interesting, and it’s a disservice to the Internet (alright… it’s a disservice to me when I go to look these things up again) to not treat them as the rest of the content.

So, I updated [the links page](/links) to show all the external links ever posted here, and I’ll try to get better about re-sharing the good stuff I find. And I’ll remember to share links with the whole link title instead of some clever words because that might be clever but it is _not_ helpful.

Wherein we visit the fair and Lorelei is married off to a Vermont boy.

The Comedy and Tragedy of County Fairs


We went to the [Caledonia County Fair](https://caledoniacountyfair.com) yesterday. I used to go with my parents every Summer when I was a kid, because it was honestly about the only thing to do in the Summer in the Northeast Kingdom back then, short of the day they switched the movie at the theatre in St. Johnsbury.

I don’t remember the fair as much: there were the cows, goats, other small animals being judged (with every single one seemingly winning first place), a demolition derby, a tractor/horse/ox pull, rides that had not seen a maintenance check since the day they left the facility that built them, the usual lineup of crappy carnival games and fair food mixed in with local grub. 

This year was a lot of the same. The big hit was the magic show — Lorelei got picked to be the last “assistant”, and was part of an elaborate “pick a card, any card” trick during which she was part of a sham wedding to a Vermont boy and was threatened to have her armed removed.

![The card Lorelei pulled at the magic show](/assets/images/2022/card.jpeg)

_The card Lorelei picked and how she made it clear it was hers._

But the big difference from when I was a kid was the “guns and Trump” stalls all about the fair. Need a hat with a pistol on it and the words “we don’t call 911 here” above it? Need a Trump 2024 flag? Need a “let’s go Brandon”, uh, anything?

Thirty years ago you’d see some knock off No Fear shirts, or Calvin pissing on whatever stickers, but it tended towards Beavis and Butthead levels of stupid and silly, not blatantly offensive. And it’s not like I think Vermont is the hyper-liberal wonderland some people picture it as (the “no steppy on snek” flags don’t stop at the Connecticut River) but it’s disappointing to see so much of the fair become political Hot Topics for shitfucks.

Even the bears don't want to hike up this.

Above Black Bear


![The gazebo in East Haven at the top of the Haul Road trail](/assets/images/2022/my-east-haven.jpeg)

I wish I could post the sound for this photo. Well I can, I guess? There was no sound. You get out early enough here and there’s no other bikers, no road noise, heck even the birds seemed like they’d had their worms and were chilling. 

This didn’t help the voice in my head that kept wondering why the trail was named Black Bear. It’s just a fun name… right?


A pleasant change from the brown yards of home.

Green Mountains


![](/assets/images/2022/green-mountains.jpeg)

A pleasant change from the brown yards of home. 

You just gotta ignite the light


I [mentioned in July](/blog-posts/2022/07/fourth-fireworks) I had some less than stellar ideas for watching Fourth of July fireworks without crowds. I made up for it tonight by getting a great spot for the Beverly Homecoming ones.

![Fireworks at Beverly Homecoming 2022](/assets/images/2022/fireworks.jpeg).

It’s amazing how well the iPhone Pros can take pictures at night. In the past I’ve tried getting photos of fireworks with a decent DSLR and ended up with blurry lights, now I can balance the phone that I carry in my pocket on my ankle and get something good-enough in 3 seconds.


Elden Ring


![Platinum trophy from Elden Ring.](/assets/images/2022/elden-ring-done.jpeg)

![Frodo saying “it’s done” after he throws the ring into Mount Doom.](/assets/gifs/its-done.gif)

Some notes:
- Took about 90 hours, not including time spent Googling “wtf is going on”.
- Ended up doing two runs, one as a DEX/INT build with Ranni’s ending, and a second NG+ run as STR/FTH that was a speed run to the end so I could do the other two endings via some save scumming. DEX/INT I ran with Moonveil katana and Wing of Astel, and then got enough INT to throw the moon at people. STR/FTH I dual wielded Blasphemous Blade and the Gargoyle's Blackblade. Both were fun. Never used a shield.
- If you’ve never played a Dark Souls game, this is the easiest one to get into, for sure, and there are a lot of ways to have fun exploring and not constantly seeing YOU DIED screens.
- Definitely a top ten favorite game. Maybe a top five. The open world map is _just_ the right size: huge, and so much to explore, but almost every inch of it has enough to make it unique and memorable.

Now, time to wait for some more _God of War_.

Leaving the Island


![](/assets/images/2022/bileaving.jpeg)

Back on the Cecilia Ann. 

Island Night


![](/assets/images/2022/binightsky.jpeg)

Clear skies. 

Morning View


![](/assets/images/2022/bimorningview.jpeg)

From the Block Island Beach House. 

Cecelia Ann


![](/assets/images/2022/ceceliaann.jpeg)

On the way to Block Island. 

What I’ve been up to for the last month instead of posting here.

An illustrated guide to why I haven’t been posting as much

A few reasons:

1. It’s been a beautiful Summer

Like, super nice. Lots of times I’ve just gone out and sat on the back porch and done this for a bit:

![Scene from Con Air where Nic Cage feels the breeze of freedom.](/assets/gifs/freedom.gif)

Granted, it’s nice because it’s been _dry_, no rainy days, not a lot of humidity, so we’re slowly heading towards a future that looks like this:

![Scene from Mad Max where they release the water to the people waiting below](/assets/gifs/mad-max-water.gif)

2. I’ve been playing a lot of Elden Ring

Probably not a lot by some standards but a lot by my standards. I’m working on Platinum-ing it. It’s good. That might be an understatement. It might be my favorite game ever, just need to make it through the last few bosses to make a final judgement.

![Screenshot from Elden Ring](/assets/images/2022/elden-ring.jpeg)

3. I’ve been playing guitar more

I went all in on [Helix](https://line6.com/helix/) and picked up a Helix LT[^1] to replace my Pod Go. It’s cool and makes loud noises at reasonable volumes.

![Angus Young playing guitar.](/assets/gifs/thunderstruck.gif)

4. We’ve been doing house projects

Sometimes it feels silly to be redoing parts of a house that’s not even 10 years old, but it turns out that when builders do a new construction you get a decent house built to the latest standards and literally the cheapest versions of every single thing to finish the house. For example, I was at the store today looking for a replacement for our back lights[^2] and I found our current lights. They cost $7. In 2022! The light bulb in them cost more than that.

Andrea has done most of the planning and work, but she subcontracts to me for plumbing and electrical and moving heavy stuff and some amount of demolition although that’s mostly because I want to use the sawzall.

![](/assets/images/2022/bathroom.jpeg)
_our redone guest bathroom_

[^1]: More on this later.
[^2]: More on this later too.

Convincing your kid that walking into the woods at night is worth it.

Not all ideas are good ideas


The back of our house points towards Salem, and Salem had their 4th of July fireworks tonight. In past years the booms have been loud enough to wake up Lorelei, and we could see the flashes through the trees on our back deck, but it wasn’t “watching fireworks”.

This year, I thought… oh, there’s a trail behind our house, in the woods. Let’s walk back there to where there’s a clear view over the water and watch them. Lorelei is old enough to stay up late, it’ll be fun.

We watched three tiny explosions before I was informed this was “the worst idea ever” and we marched back home. Standing in the (surprisingly dark considering we live in a city) woods was not her idea of a good time. Honestly it wasn’t _my_ idea of a good time either (how long has it been since I was in the woods at night?), but the booms of the grand finale are taunting me a bit right now.

Arts Fest Beverly 2022: Bridge to Nowhere

Took a walk down to [Arts Fest Beverly](https://www.bevmain.org/arts-fest-beverly/) early this morning. Nice weather for a walk, and it seemed like a lot of other people agreed, it was quite crowded. We picked up some prints for the house, and Lorelei went a bit cat crazy:

![Various cats art, books, and clothing.](/assets/images/2022/cats-cats-cats.jpeg)

The walk was great not only because of the weather, but because there wasn’t many cars out because the bridge we take into town is [closed forever](https://baystatelocal.com/2022/06/16/hall-whitaker-bridge-to-permanently-close-friday-replacement-bridge-could-take-over-2-years-news/).

![Picture of the closed bridge.](/assets/images/2022/bridge-1.jpeg)

This bridge has always had an appearance of “should we be driving over this?” so the news of its closure was not surprising, but the one day of notice was. 

![Picture of the bridge deck with holes in it.](/assets/images/2022/bridge-2.jpeg)

Some prints not pictured were from:
- [Eric Pow](https://www.ericpow.com)
- [Ashbeadle](https://www.ashbeadle.com/links)

### Past Years
- [2021](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/08/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-august-22-2021#arts-fest-beverly)
- [2019](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2019/06/arts-fest-beverly)

Forty


I turned forty today. It was a nice day at home, and there was ice cream cake. One upside to having a birthday on a holiday: you almost always have it off. One downside: a lot of other people do too. But late May also coincides with peak allergy season for me, so I’m happy with at home cake instead of sneezing the top scoop of ice cream off my cone.

## My thirties, by the numbers:
- 1 child.
- 3 houses and 1 apartment across two states.
- 4 cars. Two Subarus, a Honda and a Volkswagen. Real exotics.
- Visited 5 new countries: Mexico, Spain, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and two new US states, Colorado and Nevada.
- 6 jobs (across 2 careers).
- 1 global pandemic.

The most complete record for those numbers (besides my head) was my Photos library. While I had online accounts that pre-dated my thirties, I deleted two of them (Facebook entirely, everything on Twitter over a few years old), and lost track of a few others (two blogs, including one that was a webcomic that _I swear_ was pretty funny but I have absolutely no record of). I choose to believe that, God willing and the creek don’t rise[^1], I’ll be able to point to this blog post on this blog when I turn fifty.

## Notes for my Forties
Last night Andrea said she wanted to document me giving advice for my fifty-year-old self because, “you can’t go back and give advice to your thirty-year-old self”. Fair. Although I wish I could, because I feel like the main difference between my twenties and thirties was that I had to actually learn something. While I could brute-force my way through a lot of things in my twenties (with mixed results) that fell apart early in my thirties. So, here’s some advice for myself for the next ten years from what I’ve learned from the last ten years.

### Know what to say “no” to
I spent a lot of my early and mid-thirties saying “no” to things out of avoidance. My anxiety about being anxious when doing something got the best of me, and I wouldn’t do it. I know relationships ended because of this. I missed out on things that were objectively fun because of it. I missed out on career paths because of it. Eventually I went to therapy and now I have the metacognition to know better _why_ I’m saying no, and a historical record to look back and that proves that the alternative to avoiding anxiety isn’t being not anxious, it’s being miserable about the choices you made to avoid it.

Austin Kleon wrote about a similar idea recently, [“Would I do it tomorrow?”](https://austinkleon.com/2022/04/27/would-i-do-it-tomorrow/). I haven’t found the right mental model for me to decide yes or no to things, but I at least know it’s not defaulting to “no”, or choosing “no” because you’re worrying about what the bad parts of saying “yes” are.

### Know what choices have been made and no longer require further thought
This is the crux of why becoming an adult is difficult, to me. Looking again at my twenties, I wasn’t entangled with anything. I could quit a job on a whim, move, spend money on whatever. Once I got married, owned a house, had a kid, that all becomes more difficult. Which then breeds a different mindset where you think things _can’t_ or _shouldn’t_ change. 

But a) everything changes eventually and b) being adaptable to change of your own volition is important for being able to deal with when change happens outside of your control.

So think of the future like an artist trying a bunch of different mediums, then saying “I’m going to draw with pen on paper from now on”. They can draw anything, but they don’t have to think about what they’re going to draw it with.

### Listen to the birds
Sometimes Andrea asks me what I’m thinking about, and I reply “nothing”. I don’t think she always believes me, but I’ve been trying to get better about being bored. It’s like a return to my pre-Internet youth, where when you sat down outside, that was it, there was the outside and nothing else. You could listen to the birds, or look at the clouds. Do we need more than that?

This isn’t me going full [“blow up your TV”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BofvfVPFbiM). I recently bought a really large, very fancy one. It’s more an acknowledgement that I can only think about so many things, and often I’ll think about things in unhelpful ways. So, sometimes don’t think, just listen and watch, or doodle on a piece of paper, or close your eyes and feel the breeze. Brains need rest too.

### Take more vacations
…and travel to more places. We made an intentional decision after getting married to spend most of our savings on a house, and then made a lot of other life choices around having a house. We now have a nice house and will never move again (see above about knowing what won’t change. Again, God willing and the creek don’t rise), but it meant there was never a lot of money left over for vacations or travel[^2], or we felt that travel was an extravagance. While I do enjoy spending time in our lovely home, some of the best memories I have and the biggest source of novel ideas came from traveling. 

### You can respond to everything with this now
![](/assets/images/2022/too-old-for-this-shit.jpg)

[^1]: Even though I don’t believe in God, this is by far my favorite American saying.
[^2]: But Joe, you say, you went to 5 new countries. Well, they were all for work. If you want to travel, I highly recommend working for a travel company.

Seven


Lorelei turned seven this week. We had a party today, with a princess / fairy theme. We did a pile of yard work on Friday to finish off projects in the back yard, then woke up to clouds. Luckily it burned off by the time the kids got here, and they got to play outside for a bit. None of them mentioned the work we did, although I suppose they would have noticed if it was all a big dirt pile still (and, maybe enjoyed it more).

I look forward to a time in the future when I can tell Lorelei how she spent most of first grade pretending to be a cat. All of her friends seem to accept her catness — they all came with cat-themed gifts, and there was a game they played called “pet the cat” where Lorelei got to pretend to be a cat. The parents lamented that none of their kids ever tell them what goes on at school except in bits and pieces, but we pieced together that this is a game that gets played often at recess.

We also picked up an [instax Link wide](https://instax.com/link_wide/en/) so we could send real pictures of the party home with the kids. This is Lorelei testing it out the day before:

![](/assets/images/2022/seven.jpeg)

I’ve [wrote before about how much I enjoy the instax formats](/blog-posts/2020/12/instax). The wide format is even better, and the printer, which allows you to use your much better camera phone as the source, makes it better x2.

Since yet another Easter has passed and Covid still isn’t over, it was, of course, a topic of discussion. The kids at the party are all in the same class, so the risk of one party is the same as the risk every single other day. Among the parents it was more a sense of resignation: we’re going out, we’re going to work, what else would we do. We want to start talking about “the pandemic” in past tense. Can we? I’m not sure it’s up to us. May of 2022 isn’t the same as [May of 2020](/blog-posts/2020/05), but it’s not the same as [May of 2019](/blog-posts/2019/05), either, but I guess that’s how life goes.

The end of last week we were in Connecticut and Andrea wanted to go to a used book store, so I suggested we go to the Niantic Book Barn.

Books and cats and books and cats and….


Our trips in the past few years have been there-and-back affairs, due to the complications of figuring out COVID hours/openings, the fickle nature of New England nature, and wanting some amount of post-travel pre-work time to relax. But the end of last week we were in Connecticut, Andrea wanted to go to a used book store, and none of the aforementioned issues were issues, so I suggested we go to the [Niantic Book Barn](https://www.bookbarnniantic.com), which met everyone’s requests:

- Andrea: a large, semi-curated but mildly out of control collection of books.
- Lorelei: cats

Andrea found a pile of romance novels:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I just bought a crap ton of paperback romances and romantica dating from the 1930s to early 2000s. Check out my Instagram stories where I’m sharing pics (and commentary of course)!<a href="https://t.co/S578iWQU7P">https://t.co/S578iWQU7P</a> <a href="https://t.co/TzqdudeynW">pic.twitter.com/TzqdudeynW</a></p>&mdash; Shelf Love: Romantic Love Stories in Pop Culture (@ShelfLovePod) <a href="https://twitter.com/ShelfLovePod/status/1517970192852299776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Lorelei and I found the cats. Credit to her sixth sense for finding the two under couch.

<div class="four-up">
	<img src="/assets/images/2022/bb-1.jpeg" />
	<img src="/assets/images/2022/bb-2.jpeg" />
	<img src="/assets/images/2022/bb-3.jpeg" />
	<img src="/assets/images/2022/bb-4.jpeg" />
</div>

I wouldn’t recommend going far out of the way to stop there, but if you’re by the Connecticut shoreline already it’s a fun stop. You won’t find a lot of _good_ books unless you snipe one that just got sorted or you pull it straight from the newly arrived section. The stuff that accumulates… well, let’s say they had three entire shelves of L. Ron Hubbard.

![The thermostat, in the politics section](/assets/images/2022/bb-5.jpeg)

As for me, I walked out with one, one dollar book. I think it was a steal.

![A 1968 copy of Conan the Warrior](/assets/images/2022/bb-6.jpeg)



Spending a school-break day underwhelmed at the Boston Museum of Science.

Museum of Science


We went to the Boston Museum of Science today. I have fond memories of it from when I was a kid, although growing up in Connecticut it was a rare treat, so far away in the big city of Boston.

![Floor shot from the Boston Museum of Science](/assets/images/2022/mos.jpeg )

This time I was not terribly impressed. Neither was Lorelei. I was thinking about why, on the way home, and I think it’s:

1. No one would pick the Boston Museum of Science as a museum to really wow someone. They make lightning indoors and it’s got a nice view of the river but it’s not even close to one of those “oh man this is so much museum it might be too much museum” kind of museums.
2. The interest and interaction you can get out of a museum exhibit for a six year old today is _so_ much less than what it was for me as a six year old. You want to learn about nature? Great, here’s birds in 8k video, let’s look up what sounds they make, here’s an AR app to see what kinds of birds live in our backyard. What did I have as a kid? Look up “bird” in the encyclopedia, get a few pictures, maybe go to the library and get a bird book. Bug my Grandfather about bird names until he’d tell me something like “if it’s black it’s a Blackbird” until I went away. Going to a museum and seeing all of that knowledge in one place was mind blowing.

But today a hall of dead (or are they fake? Probably dead) animals isn’t really a draw. A dinosaur skeleton is (if it’s real). A cool physical or interactive exhibit is. The 4D movie theatre was a hit.

But still, we had fun, even though Lorelei pretended she did not when we chose to not eat at the food court there.

![Lorelei trying to max out the sadness meter](/assets/images/2022/sadness-meter.jpeg)

I will say if you’re not from Boston and thinking of going, going on a holiday is _great_. For reasons I cannot explain after living in the area for twenty years, Boston on a holiday is always empty. I have no idea where people go. On the drive in there was not only no traffic, there were parts of the highway where there were _no other cars_. That maxes out the happiness meter for me.



In this era of “more of everything” it’s nice to enjoy something that ends.

The Three-Body Problem or the Three-Book problem?


I finished [The Three-Body Problem](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780765382030) this morning. I’ve been reading it in stops and starts, I found many parts too tell-not-show for my tastes. It’s an interesting sci-fi plot with a graduate-level physics class thrown in the middle. Or it’s not sci-fi at all and it’s an allegory for Communist China’s interactions with the West. 

Either way it’s book number one of a three book series and I don’t think I’ll continue. I tend to stay away from books that are part of a series that can’t stand on their own. I’m two books into [The Stormlight Archive](https://www.goodreads.com/series/49075-the-stormlight-archive) but I’m not interested enough to keep going. Similarly I finished [Horizon Forbidden West](https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/horizon-forbidden-west/) recently, a sequel itself that sets the story up for a trilogy and — I dunno, I’m not that interested in hearing more, especially if it’s tens or hundreds of hours more.

On sort of the other side of this, we watched _[Coda](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/coda/umc.cmc.3eh9r5iz32ggdm4ccvw5igiir)_ last night. It’s as good as everyone said it was and I don’t think anyone is going to pitch an incredibly ironically titled _Coda 2_ about Ruby in college. In this era of “more of everything” it’s nice to enjoy something that ends.


Sometimes a cigar is just a useless thing to learn about.

Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me This Sooner?

I finished _[Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780063227934)_ yesterday. It’s a good high level intro into almost everything a person might go see a therapist for.  It’s better organized than 6000 Tik Tok videos, which seems to be the _de rigueur_ way to learn about these things.

I took a Psychology class in college, it was pretty useless. I’d much rather someone had just given me this book. Honestly a week reading this instead of an extra week of Freud and bearskin rugs or whatever might have been the most helpful thing for me in college. Oh! This is how anxious thoughts work? And strategies for stopping them? No, useless information. More on Pavlov’s dogs, please.

There’s a lot of overlap here with _[Atomic Habits][1]_ by James Clear, it’s even referenced a few times. There’s an idea they share: say you’re out of shape. A bad goal is to say, “I want to run a marathon”. You’ll probably fail (too ambitious), but you could also succeed then never run again. The idea is to not have a goal but to form a habit. Tomorrow say “I’m a person who runs”, then start running, even if just down the block. While “becoming more physically fit” is one easy to understand example, the crux of it is you reframe your thoughts and change how you think about yourself rather than being reactive (I’m depressed, I need to be happy) or problem solving (I’m burned out, I need a plan for relaxing). 

If you want the super short version of both books, it’s the song “The Next Right Thing” from _Frozen 2_[^1].

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kFkClV2gM-s" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I recommend the book. It’s a quick read. It unfortunately doesn’t cover finding or affording a therapist because your insurance won’t cover it, but I suppose that’s out of scope.

[1]:	https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
[^1]: I love this song and reference it often. While the lyrics are like the textbook example of helping someone overcome grief slid into a children’s musical, it’s also just _really good advice_. 99.9% of the time you can get through life… just doing the next (right) thing. Don’t overthink it! Our brains are dumb!

A minimal reproduction of a bug that took too long to find.

An obvious bug

Debugging is one of the things I enjoy about programming. It’s like a little puzzle to solve. But as code gets more complicated, the little bugs can hide themselves in ways that make them very, very, annoyingly hard to find. This one, minimally reproduced in this Codepen, got me this week:

<p class="codepen" data-height="300" data-default-tab="html,result" data-slug-hash="ZEvxdZg" data-user="jjmartucci" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;">
  <span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci/pen/ZEvxdZg">
  A small bug 🐞</a> by Joseph Martucci (<a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci">@jjmartucci</a>)
  on <a href="https://codepen.io">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

It seems obvious —  an empty input calculates an invalid date. But then imagine the calculated date was never visible, an empty input is considered valid data, and the system that reported this being an issue was 3 microservice hops away.

And the real issue, it turns out, was ever using `parseInt`. [Day.js](https://day.js.org) can do the calculation just fine with strings.

There’s more writing going on now than ever before in human history.

The most writing in human history

I’ve been reading [Smarter Than You Think](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143125822). Chapter 2 is about online writing and blogging, and Clive Thompson mentions how there’s more writing going on now than ever before in human history:

> As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age, the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year. “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.”

What’s wild to me is that I got an English degree between the years of 2000 and 2004, and… no one saw this coming. A few weeks before graduating someone suggested I should sign up on some “Facebook thing, it just opened up outside of Harvard, you can see other people from other schools”, and no one I knew had ever blogged anything. So it wasn’t a miss of what was happening, but it was a miss on what _would_ be happening. 

Also, any English program could have ditched Hemingway for some basic communication writing and maybe we could have replaced the E in STEM.

React 18 [is now available on npm](https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/03/29/react-v18.html).

React 18

React 18 [is now available on npm](https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/03/29/react-v18.html).

I started using React back in the `0.14.X` days. I still prefer it over other front-end frameworks because it’s _not_ a framework, it’s just a library. That said — these days I prefer to use it _with_ a framework. When I first started using React it was as part of an MVC app (usually) or a truly single-page application. Once we moved to handling routing client-side, and handling all data fetching and state management client side, and handling authentication client side… it’s a lot. There’s a lot of cases where you would have been better of using AngularJS or Vue or an MVC whatever backend and some web components than trying to glue together React + React Router (no wait, Reach?) + Redux (no everyone uses MobX now, wait, now it’s just React Hooks WAIT, no, now we’re using state machines) + the CSS-in-JS library of the day.

You see the problem. Still, I think the React combination of JSX and parent/child rendering updates, and prioritizing functional JavaScript without a lot of magic is great. Do I care about most of the updates in React 18? Not really. I’m glad Next, or Remix, or some other great framework is going to do magic with them.

Web links worth reading on Canvas2D and the File System Access API.

Two articles on web APIs

The first one: [It’s always been you, Canvas2D - Chrome Developers](https://developer.chrome.com/blog/canvas2d/). Lots of nice updates to performance and quality of life for the Canvas API. I have a soft spot for the `<canvas>` tag — when I was (re)learning web development I spent a lot of time at my non-development related job spinning up little web projects that required no libraries or compilation steps to run in the browser pre-installed on my laptop. The canvas element was the most readily available but also _complex_  web API that runs locally, so I built all kinds of interfaces and animations in it while learning.

Second: [Using files with browsers, in reality - macwright.com](https://macwright.com/2022/03/04/browsers-and-files.html)

> The meaning and importance of the *file* has shifted a lot in the last decade. The Verge wrote about how  [students today don’t have a grasp](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z)  on how files and folders work - or they have a very good understanding of the norms of storing information in the cloud, but not on their local computers. The web contains all sorts of things that we never think of or use as files: is your email an  [Mbox file](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox) ? Do you ever directly use the  [HEIC files](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format)  that are the native format of Apple Photos? Or consider any rich text on the internet, like a Notion page - does it have a defined file type and an option to download? And think of the mobile web. You can download a file from mobile Safari, but do you?

Worth noting, I suppose, that I’m writing this in an application which does not use files. But I generally prefer the workflow of “don’t make me think about this as a file, but give me the file if I ask for it”, so it’s nice to see this API coming together.

And I enjoyed this bit from that article:

> Working with the web platform is dealing with history, with the accumulated matter of  [quirksmode](https://www.quirksmode.org/)  and good-enough standards. In exchange for the ability to deliver instantly-updating software directly to customers with no middlemen and no installation, you have to absorb a great deal of nearly-useless information that’s entirely about dodging meaningless traps.

Edifier R1280T compared to the JBL 104, Apple Mini and Sonos Symfonisk.

Another set of speakers for the $100 speaker shootout

![Edifier R1280Ts next to JBL104s](/assets/images/2022/edifier.jpeg)

I have a thing for cheap, powered speakers, it seems. In November I picked up an Apple Mini and a Sonos Symfonisk. I noted then that [both are fine](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/11/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-november-21-2021#speaker-of-the-house) but neither blew me away. The Sonos was being used in the basement with an old Apple TV for workouts, but because it required selecting it as the output _every single time_ the TV turned on I wanted to find a better solution.

I’ve read many good things about Edifier speakers so I picked up a pair of [Edifier R1280Ts](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088685QVJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1). I put them in the office to compare them to the speakers I was using, the [JBL 104s](https://jblpro.com/en/products/104). Here’s a high level ranking:

1. JBL104. Still my favorites. Not as loud as the Edifiers but a better shape for a desktop and much clearer.
2. Edifier 1280T. Ended up going in the basement workout space, hardwired to the TV out. Gets decently loud, not exactly clear but if I’m listening to speed metal while lifting clear isn’t the highest priority.
3. Sonos Symfonisk. Sounds good at moderate volume, and the shape (and ability to be a shelf) is neat. Distorted at high volumes, the Sonos app is miserable to use, and very directional sound. Might be better as a stereo pair but I’m suspicious of the overhead of two wireless speakers working together.
4. Apple Mini. Cute. Fun color. Unless you really need something in this specific size and need it to be “smart” and work with Siri it’s overpriced and anything would be better.




built with coffee ☕

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018