Stephen Castro-Starkey

I guess freedom of speech is only for citizens now. Shameful. Used to be it’s anybody in our borders. The kind of freedom that matters is eroding every day. https://apnews.com/article/f1-visa-international-college-student-trump-9d4d900d328a0c205503c1178e70f1d5

Continuing https://www.calmabiding.me/post/2025-04-03-gzhh1rrf46ao9q2pow3j2 .. building the desktop app in the same language (ClojureDart is basically the same as Clojure) as the server app was a HUGE lift. It was basically a copy/paste with a few tweaks. I am super happy with how quickly it went.

Get people productive, squeeze everything you can out of them, and let them die as quickly as possible. That’s capitalism.

Not a fan.

Today I learned while reading https://blog.janetacarr.com/software-design-patterns-in-clojure/ that you can name your lambdas in Clojure! 🤯

I will be doing this from now on!

Finally got the new client to be able to connect and get a list of streams from the server! That was a LOT. Especially with a custom transport protocol.

Forgot to log yesterday’s exercise! Grr. Bitten by not implementing back-dating.

This interview with Senator Booker after his historic speech brought me to tears. I am moved even more to keep doing the work I’ve been doing. It’s not just about building a social network. It’s about building safe spaces for people to help each other out however they are able.

Big insights from today’s chat about Streamful

Today I learned, with a bunch of digging, how to make clojure-lsp work on my computer. Since I have clojure installed in a "weird" place for linux, zed couldn't find it. And the editor's documentation doesn't talk about how to fix that anywhere. Figured I'd document my findings here for posterity.

Weighed in a day early. Slight gain in overall weight, loss in body fat, and gain in muscle mass. I accept. ☺️

Haven’t posted about family life since last year — good news tho! We have solar and battery backup. It has been marvelous. We haven’t been without power since then, even if there have been a few grid outages. Feeling so much better!

Found a bug in my old webmention code (this post wasn't working!) for this blog and fixed because I don't know why -- it's not like this blog is gonna live much longer. As I was about to deploy the app I noticed it's been running nonstop for 5 months. Not bad!

I feel like I've pretty much gotten to a place where I can rebuild this blog using streamful. It will be an interesting challenge! The only issue I have right now is that my only mac computer is super slow. Also, ios development is hard for me right now. But I shall do my best!

re Many Servers one identity

Today's main commit mostly simplifies the tests and documentation

I just love AOC! Here’s a speech about how universal health care and fair wages are common sense, not “radical.” bluesky link

A long ramble about why I’m likely going to drop the idea of federation from Streamful altogether.

Today’s commits get us almost all the way to being able to have a fairly full featured social networking system if it all runs on one server. Feels like all that’s left is notification of when aggregates change. They are all fairly large with a ton of refactoring but still only took a few hours. Pretty good!

Today I had no energy to add new functionality but I did to do some cleanup! Proud of myself as I uncovered some shortcuts I took that I'm not proud of. Had to back in test coverage! If I were really taking small steps and only writing enough code to make a test pass this would not have been necessary methinks. Yuck.

A bunch of commits and files showing how you can make threading happen in streamful. Likely these aggregators will end up being default for all servers. Tho they may evolve a bit, like, for example, only keeping the last X messages in a thread. The rest of them might end up being a search or something?

I continue to think more about how we make sense of data in various ways with this model.

Still working on aggregates — slowly but surely! I have successfully compiled text with only a whitelisted set of allowed symbols, which is quite handy. Figuring out how to do the hot swap from pending to active and retroactively applying them is next. It’s almost like I’m building a database engine. Which I am not at all qualified for. What could possibly go wrong?

This commit is quite thorough. It breaks down all the data structures and how one would produce a message that the streamful server could understand.

Very hopeful article about how fascism always fails but I hope it doesn’t take so long this time!

Today's coding session I decided I needed to write more tests. Which naturally led to adding a configurable maximum upload size. Which is good!

I'd call this.. exploratory unit testing. :-)

re this earlier post, I was wrong. Soon as I published it I found the energy to build a new thing (API for listing available streams). It took a surprisingly short amount of time (~36 minutes from start to push)!

Did some cleanup work today but didn't build anything new into streamful. But I think that's ok. The energy will return!

Added encryption but not in the usual way. More like SSH than TLS. The eventual intention is to use a combination of DNSSEC and TXT records to prove that a server belongs to somebody. The server's public key is in the TXT record! There is prior art of a similar approach.

So when you establish a session, we use the libsodium key exchange protocol to set up a secure session. Then all future messages are encrypted between client and server safely!

Well.. I hope. I am not a security person. But they say if you use libsodium you probably can't go wrong?

Ha!

This commit was a huge leap forward in my understanding of how Netty works under the covers. Namely, we were decoding arbitrary messages in a long running connection where sometimes you get a complete message and sometimes you don't. This was the moment when, for the first time, the "sometimes you don't" actually happened.

Today all I accomplished was protecting the privacy of a stream at a very basic level. Server admins can still see everything though. Wasn’t too terribly difficult!

Today I started in on storing and retrieving messages in a stream. Makes me wonder: how do I protect against malicious server admins hijacking my stream? Was thinking of having every message posted to a stream also including a hash of the stream’s “root message.” Trying to figure out how this can be hijacked if all messages are signed and can be verified by other clients.

Took a bit of a break but this morning I sketched out the basic storage mechanism for stream configuration.

The beginnings of public/private key authentication are in the code!

Long-ish post about the next steps on streamful — the bottom two layers are explained in more detail. Lowest layer is fairly stabilized!

I’ve done a lot more thinking about the thing I am itching to build. I’m tentatively calling it streamful. Finally figured out the elevator pitch when talking to my husband about it this morning…

It appears that the brain churn continues. I want this app to be ultra customizable. So you don’t have to pick a different app depending on what kind of social media you want. Events and microblogging? No problem. Threaded conversations? Absolutely.

Something nobody has ever considered yet? Why not?

So getting the primitives right will be critical!

My brain is currently churning on something that will replace the two apps I’ve built for blogging and event hosting. Hopeful that it will cause action soon!

My only home is peace
From there all else arises —
Rage, ignorance, and lust, as well as
Clarity, creativity, and compassion.

The path to peace is rest —
When activity ceases,
As it always does,
The peace that was always there is apparent.

Even the most frantic of activity
Lives within its loving embrace
And, even if I lose faith in it,
I remember it is always there waiting.

May I always find my way back home.

The definition of karma is, "If I perform an action, a result is certain to follow." There is nothing about blame in there.

Beautiful fantasy series available to read for free! I could not put it down.. Arkendrithyst

re my post about dependency management, the issue was Jitpack. Their repository is not responding. That's problematic!

I ended up swapping out the one library I was using in jitpack with one that was hosted in clojars.

I wrote this post about my big dreams for Coffee Time. I wonder if it's time to start thinking about the My Cafe idea again? The gist: Lean Coffee has a place in a lot of tech circles. However, it hasn't really found its way out. I wonder if there is an opportunity to rethink the whole conversation paradigm and do a bit more experimentation on a new platform?

It's been a while since I updated my blog software itself! I get a daily email telling me all of my periodic activities and when was the last time I did that thing. Sometimes things didn't show up at all. I think that's because I was sending the activity report at midnight, and basically all the activities also key off the midnight hour. So, I figured maybe if I send the report a few minutes after midnight, I'd get a more accurate picture of how long it's really been since I did each activity.

Very small change.

The fun part -- part of the build process for the app (the part that checks for outdated libraries) has basically stopped working. So I had to exclude it. Gonna have to debug that more!

This wrongful execution is yet another example of how immoral state-sponsored murder is. We must end capital punishment.

My friend Mike said, “There is something wrong when the scariest thing about Halloween is the November election.”

Today I learned about “learning debt” in which code reviews cause negative feedback cycles discouraging people from taking the time to deeply learn a code base. This is due to biases around how people reading your code only seem to value the code that you wrote instead of the effort you put into learning what was necessary to make that code change effectively.

If only there was a method that flipped that narrative on its head. Some way to get code reviews while also encouraging and amplifying learning!

I continue to wonder when people will be mad enough to organize themselves around repealing the second amendment? I have never liked the idea of anybody but our military having such destructive weapons.

The fun part about tech debt: the cost cannot be quantified until it comes time to pay it. And the longer you wait, the more uncertain it becomes.

Don't write the devil a blank check.

while mowing the lawn
played tag with a grasshopper
could we be friends now?

Today has sucked so much. Power has gone out 3 times in the last 24 hours. Though I am grateful the outages haven't lasted very long.

But it has lit a fire under me to get whole house battery backup going!

Not having power has an impact -- I can't sleep without my CPAP. And we can't have the house get too hot, especially if the car isn't here to use the air conditioning.

Do NOT trust Twitter. Here is a good note about why: https://journa.host/@lolgop/112909214344514852

Lawn mowing again. Lots of exercise and bits of meditation made for a lovely experience.

Yesterday I discovered that SQLite isn’t all that reliable at maintaining integrity of FTS5 virtual tables. Following their documentation to create a content backed virtual table with the recommended triggers lead to database corruption after just 5 operations.

More exercise yay! Plus a bit of meditation. Very noisy mind tho!

Happy to be continuing to lose weight on the new medication. I can’t wait until my blood pressure starts to show the difference.

Surprising how little I’ve been reporting on my coding adventures. Coffee Time is making good progress! Have been working on little things after getting feedback from conversations. Also started thinking about wiki!

My new inquiry: how much default mode network activity is too much? And: would answering this question and somehow training my brain to have the “right balance” mean enlightenment?

It is comfortable to continue in the rat race. I don’t like how comfortable I am.

This update from Scott Santens is worth quoting:

When folks argue that a Universal Basic Income would deter working, think about those million-dollar CEOs. If a modest $15k is enough to make one quit working, wouldn’t multi-million dollar packages make CEOs practically comatose? Yet, here they are, still CEOing. Weird isn't it?

Yes. Quite.

My feelings on the upcoming election (not just presidential). We should vote for whoever will:

• Maximize our chances of restoring bodily autonomy for women.
• Maximize our capacity to celebrate and treat as equals every person. This is regardless of color, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, or other way of being different in ways that don’t harm others.
• Maximize our chances of avoiding the impending climate apocalypse.
• Maximize the chances that every person within our borders has all their basic needs met without conditions.
• Maximize our capacity to welcome, include, and integrate any person who has something to contribute to our culture.
• Maximize our ability to move from punishment as a capitalistic system towards restorative justice writ large.
• Maximize our safety.
• Minimize our contribution to global human suffering.

Our economy is supremely powerful. It is time we harness some of the greed that got us here to do the bare minimum for our fellow humans who have been marginalized due to no fault of their own. In the long run we will become even more powerful. If we can’t get to this new stage of development, very likely our planet will become uninhabitable for us. Just a bit more cooperation and harmonization with our environment can go a long way towards alleviating the suffering of all our fellow sentient beings.

No big deal. Right? 😃

The latest Supreme Court of the US decision about unlimited presidential power fills me with dread. I’m sure I’m not alone! Before the decision came down I decided to host a conversation about the current political climate.

We may feel powerless alone. But we are more resilient together. Will you join me?

Starts Tue, Jul 9, 2024, 1:15 PM PDT

We are headed to San Francisco for a sorely needed vacation! On the agenda: Colombia vs Brazil in Copamerica! And some tourist things and maybe fireworks?

Last night was awful. When the power goes out I don’t sleep because I need my CPAP. And Georgia Power doesn’t exactly have the best track record of keeping the lights on in south Atlanta.

I have not been focusing on my weight lately. It seems to take too much mental energy!

Excited about our trip to Ohio! It'll be nice to relax for a few days with family.

Well, ok, so I've rebuilt all the blog functionality I lost when I removed Patreon integration. At least enough to keep people apprised of things. Now I'm wondering if those posts should be part of the global RSS feed! Gotta think about that.

Also, as I write this post I realize the tag name is not correct. I really need to build functionality to delete and edit tags.

I am feeling the pain of not having a team to work with me on Coffee Time. It is very slow going. Motivation comes in fits and starts. I often wonder if I could have done a particular thing better. I wish I had the energy to grow my user experience capacity. But side projects like this don’t seem to attract people. I will have to go out and find! But where?

Starting to engage again with a solar installer. Thinking hard about doing it not just to save money but also for the planet!

The novelty has worn off. I need a new method to keep me coming back to log my habits. Whatever will I do?

Coffee Time is back! And on a whole new domain!! With embedded video, password-based authentication, and everything. Check it out https://coffeetime.social

There is a ton of infrastructure I built around the old lean coffee app that relied on Selenium WebDriver. Now that I’m developing on Linux for the first time and struggling with it, I’m realizing I should probably throw all that away. Spent many hours trying to figure out why my tests wouldn’t run at all.

I feel like a return to simplicity is in order.

Starting to wonder if the best thing to do is use the old Coffee Time Java codebase to kick start the lean coffee revolution! At least it has a complete set of features.

Really want to do more on my cafe. Maybe this weekend since I’m feeling comfortable in the new job!

Walking this morning
A sheen of sweat on my skin
The air is so sweet

My mind is resisting all the systems I’ve been putting in place to nudge me toward health. Fascinating! I need to figure out what is going on. For now I’ll just keep writing about it in a gentle-to-myself way!

Very sad I haven’t been able to get a solar system yet. I don’t actually know the difference in ROI between getting that and paying off our mortgage sooner and investing in the S&P. Feeling like it has to be less about cash but why? Our economic system needs to solve for big things not me!

Or no? Am I interested in solar because I want to save the planet? Or because I don’t want to have a power outage? Or save money?

Finally made it so I can post a blog entry on my iPhone without zooming in and out. I like it! The side effect of this is that the setup page is much cleaner on mobile too!

Interesting I haven’t had a need to improve my blog. Even now, though, I realize it isn’t easy to write a post on my phone! Maybe I’ll fix that.

Edit event is done! I might add the option to add a url to a video call for folks what want to use apps that are more feature rich than the system we are about to add (LiveKit).

Today I did a bunch of stylistic updates in My Cafe, but no new features. Not sure why I'm stuck. This stuff should be easy!

Lots of progress today! We can create communities and from within a community you can go to a page where you can create an event. Using the native datetime html5 thing hoping people have modern browsers…

Made a bunch of improvements to My Cafe in the past few days! Users can set and remove passwords. Admins can approve user registrations, or deny/block them. And you can also modify the site configuration in the UI. The finally create org/team/whatever. What should that name be??

You should be able to take a penalty free withdrawal from your 401(k)/IRA to buy solar panels. Just sayin'.

This guy took the risk of the penalty and it paid off, but it doesn't always...

My Cafe now has basic email login. Most folks get annoyed with this kind of thing so I'll add passwords next and possibly passkeys in the future! Then we will create organizations/teams (still trying to figure out what the name should be) and events within those. Then agenda management, insights, tasks, etc.

Wherein I write down some of my experiences thus far in attempting to acquire solar panels and batteries. It's been rough!

A week’s vacation and feeling quite renewed!

California reaches 100% renewable energy for 25 out of the last 32 days! A new record!! https://apple.news/Axn9hzc7XQ76nVs4QBBi3XA

I’ve been thinking a lot about authentication in My Cafe. It’s starting to look like you will register/logon using your email address, and then afterwards you can add a passkey so you can login that way if you want to.

Almost done implementing email based authn!

Today's Lean Coffee chat to talk about whether we want to rebuild Coffee Time or reuse the existing codebase was quite good! We landed on starting a new codebase. The source code is hosted at https://fossil.calmabiding.me/mycafe.

Next up: user authentication!

Feeling a bit down lately. But maybe that's just sleep deprivation? Have made some small edits to my legacy lean coffee app in preparation for bringing a few friends down memory lane as we consider rebuilding it! Or maybe I'll find a way to hack up the old one to make it easier to self service? Not sure what I want to do really. But, I'm certain I don't like compiling JavaScript. Ha!

Visit the old app if you want!

Curious.. how many people skip because they want to instead of because they want attention?

Seems like all this investment in AI is going to do much more harm than good. Hope I’m wrong. Hope we don’t kick off an extinction level event. Tho maybe it’s for the best. Our species seems to be a threat to the rest of the planet.

Would love to be proved wrong!

My thoughts so far. Third party auth or local? Simplicity or complexity? Or eventually both?

The new cafe app is coming along nicely. Just copied over the site config code from My Life and tweaked it a bit to correct some sins I've discovered. Next up: authentication!

Earlier I wrote that I would try out SuperTokens. Sadly, I don't think I want people to have to manage multiple server processes, and they require a backend written in either golang, nodejs, or python. Our backend is Java-based. Guess we'll have to try something else!

Well, as I said yesterday, I tried to integrate Ripley. It didn't work. Very much needs to plug into internals I don't want to work with (like http-kit).

So now I'm looking at Inertia, Unpoly, Twinspark, and htmx all thanks to this blog post

🤷‍♂️

Today has been very nice and relaxing. Nice to take a rest from doing all the things.

Small update to the blog -- I no longer show my daily activities on the front page. You'll need to click through to one of the categories to see all that stuff.

I was kind of proud of how easy it was to add this feature -- it's a mix of code and template magic, so I was able to deploy the code without any behavior. Then I updated the home page template and it showed up!

I seem to have reached the limit of my energy to improve my blog. Perhaps that's for the best! Now I'm gonna focus a bit on implementing a small Lean Coffee web app. Or mobile app. Not sure exactly. But it will be entirely self hosted and open source and free!

I just moved this blog from my local PC hidden behind nginx to its own thing out in the cloud! It doesn't run behind a load balancer or anything. And in fact, I was able to run just a single script to get everything up and running. Pretty cool. One step closer to making it so anybody can run this thing really simply. Should anybody want to. Ha!

Well this is unfortunate. Today I woke up and the automatic SSL renewal effectively killed my blog. The web listener restarted, and even accepted a few requests. But then all future requests just timed out. Gonna have fun debugging this one!

“HB 1105 is a draconian bill rooted in anti-immigrant sentiment that would mandate local law enforcement to comply with failed policies and programs like 287(g) and error-prone ICE detainers that will cost counties millions of dollars . HB 1105 in no way promotes public safety.”

Ran all the security updates on the machine hosting my blog. We are back up!

It is surprising to me how often I'm at work and trying to make the case for a particular new practice and some blog post comes up that makes my case for me. Just recently I was thinking about how we continue to maintain siloes even within teams and I was trying to make the case for pair rotation. Then this article on pair rotation showed up literally the next day!

I'm wondering -- is my blog good enough for now? There don't seem to be any bits of motivation at all to improve it. Wonder why that is? Much to ponder...

A long-ish reflection on psychological attachment styles: how they affect my decision making process about whether to stay or move on from a particular job.

It is so nice to wake up to a very good article on basic income on my feed! Balanced reporting by NPR.

Had another power outage last night. This is starting to really suck. Georgia Power really doesn’t seem to care about the south side of Atlanta.

I don't feel much like doing anything today. Completely worn out from yesterday's exertion!

Seems these past couple days have been a bit of a whirlwind. My sleep schedule is all messed up and I haven’t been on top of what I needed to accomplish.

However! We did get several significant things done for the house and other out of the ordinary things. Started up a new D&D group, and booked vacation flight and hotel, for example!

That will be good for me in the long run I think.

Now I just need to find a new equilibrium and rebuild my routines to stay on top of health. While also getting all the other things done.

So happy my husband is home! The weekend night time shoots were keeping us extra apart since we couldn’t really talk at all. I really missed him!

This morning's project was making more space for meditation practice. Feels good to be all set up!

Did my taxes. <sarcasm>Yay.</sarcasm>

Re: yesterday’s weigh in, I seem to have dropped 2.4 lbs overnight so I suppose all that gain was water weight. Yay!

So the weight loss trend continues apace with a modest 2lb lost over the last month.

Today’s feel good message: a mastodon post “RIP Bob of Bob’s Red Mill who gave his company to his employees when he retired …”

So, after running it on Jetty, the server doesn't seem to need as much memory, but it's still a lot. After about an hour on aleph, the heap was about 340m in size. On Jetty after about an hour it was at 192m.

Hoping that this issue gets me some clarity!

And now we are back on jetty. Gonna run it a while in a constrained memory environment (192m heap) and see how it goes.

My blog is now running on aleph instead of jetty. Interestingly, it uses up a lot more memory. Capping the heap at 340m makes it performant enough. Was able to cap the jetty implementation at 192m.

Perhaps it is more resource efficient in other ways? You can see what I had to change.

I might try out yada next. But it seems to be a lot more opinionated.

Why haven’t I taken an intentional day of rest in so long? Perhaps a chillax retreat is in order…

My brain is currently noodling on why I’m using nginx to route traffic to fossil and so forth, while simultaneously allowing mylife to host its own SSL cert, thus losing out on tracking which IP is hitting the app at any given time. Looking for alternative approaches! I don’t want to go deeper into virtual networking but I may have to!

Much as I hate Substack, this article is worth reading. It outlines how the media has totally skewed the conversation about Biden’s mental fitness.

Back from extended power outage. Can't wait for solar to be installed. Quite ridiculous!

Lately I’ve been cheating a lot in the evenings. Feels like I need to combine calorie (and protein) tracking with fasting. I don’t know exactly if I want to fast through breakfast or dinner. I don’t like the anxiety I get from hunger. But I also vaguely remember that it goes away after doing it enough times.

Ok. I start today!

Lovely walk with my husband at the park!

Seems it is hard wired in us to not want to exercise. So you need to hack yourself to make it happen. That’s what my quest to build this blog platform has been all about! Just on a larger scale. 😀

Thinking more about the social aspect -- what would it take to discover all the necessary information if someone else's blog doesn't support the webmention protocol?

I feel like I need to write a reflection. How has working on and using this app affected me?

Possibly I will later. But for now I can say it has been a roller coaster of emotions. I go back and forth between hyper focusing on my goals and blaming myself when I burn myself out. Then a spark occurs and drags me back in.

Still missing the social aspect. Not sure how to build it, either technologically or otherwise. But I know it’s critical to keeping motivation going!

The gray rainy day is definitely affecting my mood. 😂

I can now add, delete, and update activity configurations. The final step is going to be actually using these configurations to quickly log the fact that I did something.

It is starting to feel like spring around here! Went for a lovely walk around the neighborhood and decided to cut down some weeds that are starting to grow in. Hope I didn’t damage the lawn!

An interesting data point from work — I paired with someone who previously inspected, async, code I paired with someone else on. After about an hour of pairing with me he noticed things about the code he had previously inspected and offered solid advice to correct things neither of us had noticed previously.

Anecdotally, then, in this case pair programming produced higher quality than asynchronous code inspection.

Stayed in zone 2 on the rowing machine for a while. Feeling tired but pleasant. Accomplished! 30 minutes.

Yesterday we splurged and got some dessert with lunch. But I said to myself at dinner time, “I will not succumb to temptation” to continue splurging. It was soooo tempting! But woke up today having lost another 0.2 lbs. Proud of myself!

Lost over a pound these past few days! Feeling proud. Gotta get under 190# before I give myself another treat haha.

Work circumstances have changed temporarily so my habits have to change too. Already finished my workout and about to go do some meditation hopefully in time for a shower and then I start work!

Feeling very good after having a gap in working out. The rowing machine has been a fantastic investment!

Also found time to meditate a bit thank goodness!

• ✔ Meditation 10min

This activities stuff is taking a while. Wrote up a simple HTML form to add a new activity configuration. This will allow someone to say that a particular activity is available once a week or once a day for now. The cron language isn't perfect, so things like "every other day" seem impossible to say. I'd have to write something custom for that and I'm feeling lazy.

Well my session fix worked perfectly. I’m still logged in on my phone! Yay!!

"When our experience of mind shifts, so too does our experience of samsara." --Lama Justin

🤯

Looking forward to first class covering Mirror of Light, which promises to be a reasonable meditation program for busy people. :-) Like me!

Today's work on My Life revolved around making it easier to log in and stay logged in. I realized my phone was purging session cookies basically every day, so I changed the cookie management to set explicit expiration dates. And extend those expiration dates every time you use the app. Therefore, so long as you keep using the app you won't get logged out.

So I was in the middle of scheduling our site survey for a solar and battery backup installation and the power went out. Fun times!! It was out for 3 hrs.

Very pleased I was commended today by my manager for advocating and teaching xp tools, including pair programming and test driven development. He expressed his appreciation in an engineering all hands. It feels nice to be supported!

Back to losing weight. Last long weekend was bad for me. But so far I’ve lost 5lbs since getting back from Colombia. Time to get back to it!

Have I really not worked on the blog in so long? I really want to finish the activity feature, as I want to just push a button to say I did a thing. There isn’t much left!

Then I think I’ll add simple images. Tasks isn’t THAT critical.

• ✔ Ngondro!
• ✔ Rowing

• ✔ Yidam practice!
• ✔ Rowing

• ✔ Ngondro!
• ✔ Rowing 30 minutes
• ✔ 1x 7min workout
• ✔ DuoLingo

I was obsessing over how much it would take to meet all the requirements for the next empowerment. I’m craving it! Wondering if this is a sign I should let it go. Or watch the craving as I go with the energy and try to enjoy it without having to hit the goal? Do I think this yidam will be “the one” for me?

7min workout kicked my butt! I need to keep doing it!! But there was serious pain in my shoulder doing push ups. I need an alternative or modification.

Today was a visit to the zoo. This has been a busy weekend! I need a vacation. Ha!

We went to the natural history museum and center for civil and human rights. Lovely day of learning and enjoying time.

We went to the aquarium and Coca Cola museum today. Nothing else accomplished. I ate too much. It was lovely. lol!

• ✔ Rowing
• ✔ DuoLingo

“You know all the random unforced tech layoffs are just labor disorganizing, right?

“That's it. That's all they are. They're making us play musical chairs with our jobs to keep us from ever building enough trust to organize. Their ideal outcome is a labor pool that's too traumatized and reactive to act collectively.

“Just pushing everyone into a scarcity mindset on purpose. It's the whole US economy writ small.

“If you liked that toot then you'll love this book https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union”

post on mastodon

🤯 I have nothing to add. This sentiment is perfect.

Made a bit more progress on "New Activity" -- had to refactor the front page to have a "new..." link instead of separate links for each "new" thing I could do. It just didn't look good on mobile! On the new options page I'll add "new activity" or just put the activities directly there. Not sure!

re my note about our sonos roam, it is officially dead. They will send us a discount code for buying a new product if I send back the old speaker. Wondering if it's worth the effort, since I'll have to pay for packaging.

Update: it's likely worth the effort. 30% off any item, including any set. That could be a LOT of cash savings.

Lost 0.1 lbs today. This is feeling more like it.

• ✔ Rowing
• ✔ DuoLingo -- finished section 2, unit 2!

Almost ready to wire up the activity code to the UI! Soon I'll be able to configure and execute recurring activities.

One of our Sonos Roam speakers died after 13 months. Just outside of warranty range. Gonna have to contact support. Doing all the resuscitation activities I can find on the net to no avail. 😓

Lost another pound. Also the scale reports my visceral fat level has gone down by a point to 11 which makes it well within the healthy range. Makes me happy!

Tried doing meditation right after Pilates. My thoughts were mostly preoccupied with things I wanted to do but there were flashes of awareness. Feeling positive. If I gave myself more time and posture support I might have a few more insights!

• ✔ Rowing
• ✔ Pilates
• ✔ Meditation

The morning as a bit stressful with a tornado warning but all is well. Did some things today:

• ✔ Rowing
• ✔ Standing Meditation
• ✔ Wrote some code in My Life to set the foundation for tracking recurring activities (habits)

Had a break last weekend but only gained a bit of weight, so that’s good! Will update this post as I accomplish things.

• ✔ Rowing for 30 minutes
• ✔ Pilates
• ✔ DuoLingo

Sat still for an hour with some Quakers today! It was lovely. The only weirdness was someone quoting the Bible, which felt a bit off-putting. Was good practice. Am I the only person who wants something like an Unprogrammed Quaker Meeting but without the Christian baggage?

No exercise or anything today. Kind of a rest/cheat day. ;-) Assuming my weight will go up tomorrow. Back to it tomorrow tho!

DuoLingo is getting harder! Does that mean I’m getting a bit better? I need to focus more.

The weight loss continues. Down 0.8lbs today. Still wondering if this is a healthy amount of weight loss.

Feeling so lazy to do any goal-related stuff today. But I did* anyway! Possibly my body is telling me I need to chill.

I at least got the rowing in. 😀

No, it isn’t possible to have too much psychological safety. I’m very glad to have the reminder that this is the foundation of any work with teams. Especially ones that are right at the beginning of adopting XP.

I can now export the entire blog, including page and post edit history. Very happy about that! I'll still keep my pages checked in so I can easily use a fancy editor to modify them, at least for now, since I'm still stuck on not having any JavaScript.

Very inspiring post about how we can fix the internet.

Getting kind of excited about the next batch of My Life tasks! :-) Gonna allow for the explicit management of habits and tasks next. So far I’m kind of proud there is not a bit of JavaScript in this thing and it runs very quickly!

Things appear to be improving. Not sure why. Didn’t accomplish as much as I’d hoped today.

Lovely meditation session after work. Yay!

Rowing after strength training. Never thought I would find the energy but I did it!

Made a few styling improvements to the blog today. Suppose I should check in on the task list and see what I can work on next!

Did a core yoga routine using the Nike Training app. Wow! Feeling quite good.

Also today’s blood pressure measurement was a bit lower stress. I enjoy the 5 minute meditation I do beforehand and the self-reassurance that things are fine and we are doing this to be in control as much as we can. Not perfect tho.. my anxiety remains higher than I would like.

BP down to 112/85 — still a bit strange. Few people have high diastolic but not high systolic blood pressure. One article suggests it is because of sleep apnea, which I have but have a CPAP. Also still a bit overweight, which is a factor. Lost another 0.5lbs tho!

Was tempted yesterday to overeat but resisted. For some reason I didn’t feel too hungry. Maybe because I was making my own food for the most part? Starting the day with steel cut oats seems to be an excellent plan.

First day back to work. Tired! I need a chair massage.

I now have a local Nexus repository running that allows folks to download the docker images I publish for My Life. However, the links are all wrong because I don't have it configured properly. It'll get there! I hope? :-) Will set up a link to it soon as I have it all figured out. Or shut it down because it isn't worth it. Likely this is a path I didn't need to tread down, as nobody really wants to run this software anyway except me!

Today’s health related info. Kept it updated through the morning.

Did a bit of research on what it takes to host the container images for My Life today. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world! And that’s basically all I accomplished today. Did have some fun playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with my best buddy though! So, a bit of coding and a lot of rest.

Feels fine. :-)

Need to get back on track and find a smaller bite to take.

Happy New Year! May we all find the circumstances and energy to live happier, healthier lives.

Feeling great after 20 minutes of rowing. Closed my exercise ring!

Weighed in for the first time in a while. 196.4lbs. Yikes. Started the new diet today: targeting 1.5lbs/week in weight loss for 2 weeks, then 1 week of normal eating, then repeat. Hope this makes it sustainable. My spreadsheet says I'll hit my goal weight (150lbs) on Nov. 19, 2024. That's a while! But I can do it!!

re: this post, I mean, that's just like the HIIT app I used to use the 7M workout app which has now been retired! That makes me so sad! Gotta find another one.

Back to DuoLingo Spanish! Feeling proud of myself. Heh

We have upgraded to JDK 21! I attempted to make this thing work with native image compilation using GraalVM, but that failed miserably. I didn't try too hard, so maybe if I did somehow find the energy to build that skillset it would happen later?

We are home safe and sound! So happy to be amongst our fur babies and our house. Time to rest!

All set for our flight home! Very excited to return to our lives. Definitely gonna get on my exercise routine.

Made it to Bogotá and tried on my pants for the first time since we left Atlanta. Very tight. Oh no! Super committed to losing the weight and keeping it off.

Was it the chocolate at night that made it so I had a bout of insomnia? Or the anxiety about our trip home? Who knows? 🤣

It is a bittersweet feeling to be saying goodbye to our Colombian family tomorrow!

Re: need to research strength training, maybe this set would work for me?

I need a separate habit for strength training. First step: finding an exercise I can do to increase strength without hurting my injured shoulder.

It looks like users of micro.blog won't be receiving replies from my site. That's because in order for my replies to show up on their timeline I have to have an account there. Makes me sad!

re: https://notes.jatan.space/2023/12/20/im-so-happy.html, I agree, but I wish it was easier to build small apps that you can self host that also federate. I'm doing an experiment using just IndieWeb constructs and avoiding ActivityPub because of how ill defined it is. Fingers crossed it goes somewhere!

Reporting on the status of my blog's infrastructure. How much CPU, disk space, and memory is it using?

It strikes me that this past week I've been playing fast and loose with the rules a bit too much. Mostly because the stakes are quite low if something goes wrong. So what if folks can't see my blog for a day? Nobody reads it that I can tell.

Looking back over my past posts, I realize I made a conscious choice to stop my TDD discipline for that one task. Fascinating how as the days wore on that conscious choice reinforced an unconscious habit to avoid the discipline.

I think it might be good to imagine the stakes are a bit higher and amp up my discipline again. I'll make a separate "xp" tag as a reminder and hopefully strengthen a new habit!

I never thought I would find a way to test the job scheduler but when I broke it and didn’t notice for a day I realized I had better! So I did.

Wrote a unit test to validate all the schedules generated a next time to run successfully. That made me feel quite safe!

So I guess that five minute task actually took a bit longer. ;-)

After a lovely trip to Barichara it is a day of rest before we begin our trip back to Atlanta! Digestive issues continue. Will be glad to be home and in control of our food intake.

How dare my family interrupt my coding with trips to beautiful places in Colombia?

re: cache invalidation, a simple cron job every 6 hours to clear all caches seems a decent stopgap. Got it done in 5 minutes!

Cache invalidation continues to be a bane. The charts don’t change when the day goes on. Ha! But I keep learning as I use my software. Kind of fun!

This article about how private equity-owned hospitals are more dangerous than others is a strong reminder that the profit motive is more likely to be at odds with the motive to benefit others.

I’m going to try this new eating plan so I can hopefully avoid hitting a plateau!

Finally added time zone support to the app so now my blog is displaying Eastern Time instead of GMT. You’re welcome. 😜

My latest thinking regarding using my blog to keep myself motivated generated a bunch of change in my task list. Soon the task list will be managed by the app! That is, if my inspiration holds. Ha!

Just a short 10 minute meditation made such a difference. Today I was attempting to “wait with curiosity for nothing in particular.” Even with noises of people doing their normal everyday things all throughout the house there was a profound sense of peace.

Family walk today was better! Started by climbing the stairs in the stadium to get the heart rate going. Closed my exercise ring for the first time in a while!

It’s kind of hilarious that most of the words I’ve learned this trip have to do with sickness.

Feeling so much better today! Rest does wonders.

Christmas Eve was quite eventful. Didn’t sleep at all because people were setting off fireworks nonstop. And I have had GI issues all night as well. Today will hopefully be a day of rest!

Now we are passing quite a few webmention tests! It's amazing what you can accomplish when you get a stomach bug on vacation.

There was one issue with webmention receipt that I found when testing in production. It had to do with using a function that relied on the internal domain/port setup, which was not the right thing to do. Only worked while testing locally. Fun times! Anyway, it should now be working!

Ok, in reference to my post about how hard it is to receive webmentions, I believe I have done it. This will probably be the first test in production.

Walk with the family was nice! Didn’t quite close my exercise ring but that’s ok. Kept the energy moving!

Profound: “I think the word ‘should’ may stop us living full lives.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/dec/24/ask-philippa-my-parents-died-and-my-brothers-do-not-speak

How have I not said anything about my Spanish studies yet? It’s because I forgot all about it! I will do better.

So far I’ve been immersed in it and picking things up here and there. But I’ll get back to DuoLingo!

Yet another platform has succumbed to white supremacy. Avoid Substack!

It’s like choosing the right bar to hang out in.

It is surprisingly complex to receive webmentions, at least if I want to display some useful information about them on my posts. Have been working on it all day!

So far I can parse some simple microformats2 info and may fall back to open graph if I don’t find anything. Generating a unique ID requires my first use of crypto (for generating hmac hash of a webmention).

Just gotta store them and then build the white / black listing logic. And finally attaching the approved ones to the correct post and rendering them.

In which I admit that I chose not to use TDD and why. Trade offs!

Haven’t really had a lot of social interaction lately. Most of this vacation is introspective and when I’m with family it’s with some shopping or eating purpose but the conversation goes too fast I can’t keep up.

Mother in law has been sick, too, which makes me sad! Was looking forward to gaming with her!

Very happy with the new tag management workflows. Not really visible to folks who don’t run an instance but it makes me happy 😃.

Made possible by feedback from my amazing husband! Everything is better with feedback.

Meditated for the first time in a while. Feeling fantastic! Herein is an experience report.

Thoughts on evil big corporations eroding our culture.

Still gaining weight on this trip. My self control sucks. I must cut out as many carbs as I can. Husband’s parents love to feed me sweet things! Ha!

Also, cache invalidation is the bane of my existence. There is something to be said about a blanket content cache. Much simpler than what I’m working with. Perhaps in the rewrite of tagging I will switch to that! Not sure.

Fascinating how much my mind is moving with the tags stuff added. Now I’m starting to wonder how often I write about various things. I think the sparklines page is going to be interesting!

We have tags!

Sort of.

Ok so I have written some code but not checked it in. This is what I suppose I would call a “spike solution” but with a fun twist that it’s running against a production database. No idea how that will break things if I roll the code back!

I don’t want to roll it all back. But it wasn’t test driven! So I gotta try test driving it so I don’t miss anything. It was a LOT of functionality.

I suppose simultaneously that trough is perfectly reasonable. It was, in fact, vacation, which I supposedly am on. But that's no excuse to stop paying attention to my health!

Also I need it to keep me logged in longer on iOS. Not sure why the sessions don’t last as long.

Yes it appears I absolutely must get the tagging features working. My motivation is a bit low. Didn’t post once yesterday! Though I did close my exercise ring. Ended up doing a few ad hoc meditations as well but those weren’t intended to improve my mental health but instead work with stress I experienced due to my lack of stability.

Yesterday was something else. Suffering from heat mixed with picturesque scenery and good company. Overall a wonderful experience. If you can tolerate the heat I recommend Chicamocha highly!

I need to figure out how I feel about keeping animals in captivity. For wild animals, it seems like it creates great suffering so that some humans can get a little enjoyment. No brainer that this is generating negative karma.

But then what about domesticated ones? So long as their life with their human is better than it would have been in the wild are we doing the right thing? Is this karmically neutral? Hard to tell!

The spa was fantastic. Had a very strong massage that I’m still sore from today. Enjoyed a very relaxing day.

I really enjoyed my walk today with my husband! Didn’t close my exercise ring yet but we got some “us” time which I sorely needed.

Huge fan of this vision! https://tech.lgbt/@some/111602180542613484

“Imagine a world without corporations, or rather, where corporations have gone extinct. Every family and community has their own servers, federating with others in a ritual process, defending their own against other groups with enmity.”

Going to a day spa today! Starting to realize I should give myself the ability to upload images.

Every time I visit Colombia I imagine retiring here. The fruit situation alone is a huge draw! Less than $1 US for a whole papaya. Amazing!!

I just read an article about why I’m not losing weight and realized that I need to find a strength training setup that won’t hurt my shoulder even more. Ever since I became unable to do sun salutations I’ve lost my motivation! However it is critical not just for weight loss but also for quick recovery from illness.

More research to do!

Fascinating experience sitting through a Catholic mass in Spanish. Excellent time to practice meditation!

Feels like the language and stack I picked make it want to be a multi tenant thing instead of many small things running independently.

That is if I want to minimize electricity waste! Will need to see how much memory it takes to run this thing and do some thinking.

Starting to wonder — what will it take to make it super easy for folks to interact with my blog? While retaining control of all their content?

Wondering if “My Life” as a service could become a thing?

And so it came to be that the blog list can now be limited to the most recent X items. I continue to be pleased at how easy it is to add functionality to the blog. Starting to wonder how to make the content management part a bit easier. Like, should folks be able to include pages into other pages? Doesn’t seem that tough!

On that note.. seems it is time for a “view all” button. The feed is getting long!

Sometimes I enjoy coding up the boring stuff. Makes me feel like I’m doing something important even though I’m likely the only person who benefits. Seems my side projects really feed my sense of self importance!

Who knew fried bananas on a burger would be delicious? I didn’t!

I cannot express the abject terror of having your house sitter leave the back door open and your cats who are indoor-only sneak out. And the relief when your sitter successfully returns and corrects the issue, likely because your overly paranoid security system warned you of said back door being open within minutes of them departing. That was still a harrowing 10 minutes, though, knowing there was nothing I could do from Colombia!

Fascinating how easily I fell out of my health habits over the holidays. Especially when I visit my family my old habits resurge with a vengeance! I need to figure out a way to keep my new habits in those circumstances.

Breakfast of freshly cut, perfectly ripe papaya, banana, and kiwi.. one could get used to this! I have missed Colombia!!

And.. I need to make it so I stay logged in longer! And make it easier to post quickly from my phone!

The sleep deprivation is real. But we got to walk around outside a bit. That helped my mood immensely!

Did not sleep well last night. The little hotel we stayed in has very thin walls and our room is right next to the lobby. Tonight will be better!

There is something surreal about writing a note while flying on an airplane to Colombia. The magic of the internet is mind boggling.

The new line chart has made me want to post more just to keep the line high! I need to figure out how to moderate it. Maybe set a limit to the amplitude per day?

Good problem to have!

This article on the weaponization of therapeutic language is quite helpful. I can now more easily pinpoint when someone is using inaccurate language to garner attention. An interesting intersection between narcissism and Machiavellianism.

New question: am I now falling into the same trap?

Woke up today excited about our trip to Colombia! Also having thoughts about what I want in my long term future. Do I want to be building software forever? How is that helping humanity at large?

Aaron has some adorable kitties! This makes me want to be able to upload images to my blog now so I can post some more photos of our babies.

By the way, I need to thank him for his patience as I fumble around with all this microformats stuff!

Oh, and the upshot, I suppose, is that the site is now successfully sending webmentions! I need to go find some blogs that accept webmentions and reply for real to one of them.

Sometimes I test in production and things go horribly wrong. Today was one of those days. Thank goodness I was using a bitemporal database! Today, I needed to rewind history on all my blog posts while testing sending of webmentions as I was accidentally overwriting the creation time of a post when setting a flag that I had successfully sent all its webmentions. Lesson learned!

Side benefit -- I now have the ability to show the history of a post and so forth. Sometimes taking off the safety net forces you to garner unexpected benefits. Of course, one must also have made good decisions leading up to the moment of removal of said safety net. 😅

My good friend John made some excellent suggestions for this app's styling! I hope I integrated them well.

I'm torn -- should I "finish" the webmention stuff so that this site complies with the spec completely? Or should I move into the stuff I'm most excited about? I'd really love to have conversations with other folks on my blog, but that seems to be a long way off! Very hopeful at least a few folks will find this app useful enough that they won't have to go through this pain. 😁

Super excited / nervous about our trip to Colombia!

Oooh look! I have a profile on wedotdd.com

Very nice.

Holidays are terrible for my health. The sugar addiction is real. 😢

A confession about how I broke this website by not using TDD properly!

This is a test of this site's webmention functionality

Why do I now feel so sad?

There are so many out there who dream of what I was somehow able to achieve who can’t seem to get there due to some inequity in our system.

I find myself drawn in many directions!

The 6 team conditions framework seems like the work of psychodynamic therapy. The way my therapist puts it, the approach is for the therapist to create a space for the patient's mind to heal.

Talking about how hard it is to (re-)build healthy habits.

As my first blog post I figured I'd write about the blog platform I'm building and how I'm building it.