A few weeks ago, my Fitbit Charge HR rather quickly deteriorated from needing charging once a week to needing charging every day and a half. Thankfully it was within the one year warranty, and Fitbit pretty easily sent a replacement after I sent an email inquiry. I suppose had it happened just after the warranty ended, I could have gotten a replacement through my credit card warranty service, but it was nice Fitbit didn’t make it a big hassle.
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Tonight we had the first of two annual Christmas celebrations, though this year both will be held in the same house.
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Today marks my first Chrome app release! Embedder is a Chrome packaged app for generating embed codes for Google Photos and Picasa Web Albums content. It is available in the Chrome Web Store.
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After returning from Denver, I worked like a mad man, racking up 85 hours within a week in an attempt to launch a poorly managed project. That ended up being my last week working for 601am, finally allowing me to start the next chapter of my life.
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One of my work clients is undergoing a migration from Movable Type to WordPress, and the decision was made to change the URL structure of basically every piece of content. While not ideal, this move can make sense, especially if the old structure wasn’t very future proof and started causing duplicate URL conflicts.
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I started reading a book Yizhen left on my shelf after he headed back to Chicago to begin his second year at Biocode: The New Age of Genomics, by Dawn Field and Neil Davies, is kind of an overview of the state of biotechnology. I apologize in advance to anyone reading this; I just wanted to make a quick comment about the emotional distress warnings for a Stanford class, but this turned into another train of thought whose course was less direct than anticipated and whose destination was so vague the conductor isn’t even sure if we are there yet.
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Thursday I flew to Denver for a quick company outing. I arrived late and ordered takeout, did one day at the office Friday and went skiing for the first time Saturday. It was a rush! And Yizhen went with me!
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I don’t have a lot of knowledge of cooking or motivation to drive the the grocery store and plan meals. I therefore have subscribed to farm boxes from Farm Fresh To You on and off while I’ve lived in San Francisco. They delivery fresh produce from local farms, but I also need to figure out what to do with it. And this time, I received some friends!
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I’m having a bit of a moral dilemma dealing with Amazon merchants.
I’m certainly contributing to the demise of small brick and mortar businesses by ordering nearly everything on Amazon. This I know and accept. But to the extent I can help small businesses that do sell on Amazon, I should be happy to. Yet I find myself rarely rating products, and when emailed by the merchants following an order, I find myself only getting annoyed, and never going to rate the product. I don’t know if this is a problem with incentives or presentation on Amazon’s part, or if I am just an evil person. I wouldn’t have a problem rating the products if it were simpler and more part of my usual Amazon process. But the emails just drive me nuts.
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I’m in Singapore right now, but more on that later. I’m trying to get through some of my email backlog… Tim emailed me a month ago with a recommendation:
Have you heard of David Bohm? Physicist/philosopher, died in 1992. I think you’d be interested in his work. Listen to this summary thing and see.
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I have a deeper sense of the truth of, or more certainty of, the notion everyone is equally intelligent. (If I were high or drunk, this increased certainty may not ultimately even be because of smoking pot or drinking, for I could feasibly have arrived at this position by doing the same mental work without pot. But even then, perhaps that work would not have been performed any time soon were it not for the pot.) It’s possible this question might already be answered one way or the other, and I could gain that knowledge simply by reading the right things. But I admitted to myself I don’t have certainty one way or the other, and even knowing the information may already exist, instead of trying to look it up, I reasoned out cases for and against with Mike. After spending several hours in thought experiments, and even without totally proving to myself the truth of the notion, or totally disproving it, I can confidently say I have more respect for the notion everyone might be equally intelligent. Which is to say I can confidently say I believe it more. I could find out tomorrow this has been decidedly proven in the negative, but right now I’m not sure being shown it is false could possibly convince me. I’m not sure it couldn’t, either, though. Perhaps I will feel differently then. Perhaps in that moment I will look back at this as a crazy hallucination, or perhaps I’ll even remember it as a dream. Or perhaps I won’t remember it at all. How can I say with certainty, then, what I am feeling now really means anything at all?
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This evening I explained what I believe about evolution, how there are no such things as discrete species (by the same logic, there are no such things as races), but rather those are arbitrary labels for a specific populations of living things who can interbreed at a specific time. When …
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This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit 
.
Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.
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What we had was never perfect
Since that fateful day, years ago
Hesitant, as usual, I was slow to act
For I wasn’t sure if you knew what I know
Eventually I learned your kindness
And also your sensitivity
But then busy schedules, blindness
We paid the price of passivity
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This week involved not much more than working 56 hours (unusual), though it was at least in the company of my dog, Vera, since her new owner was out of town.
Work has been pretty crazy lately, as two of my large clients are undergoing migrations and redesigns. One of those launched this week, which went pretty smoothly, but just took a lot of time I didn’t have. The other has a lot of work left, but I hopefully finished most of my role and provided enough documentation for others on my team to fill in the gaps. Time will tell, there. As for me, I supposedly have off two days next week in exchange for the overtime this week, and I am already planning to take off the entire following week to get caught up on personal stuff.
I almost forgot to get a new Adderall prescription this week. I am prescribed one 25mg capsule daily, but because amphetamines are Schedule II drugs, it is somewhat inconvenient to actually obtain what I am prescribed. For most drugs, I can get 90 day prescriptions automatically filled by the mail order pharmacy my insurance uses, OptumRx. The two drugs I take, however, aren’t so easy. (Truvada as PrEP is a story for another time.)
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You can of course handle page not found errors entirely outside Movable Type by doing nothing or creating a static error page and pointing to it with your web server’s ErrorDocument or similar directive.
Or, you can make use of a fancy plugin called Clean Sweep by Byrne Reese and Dan Wolfgang that logs errors and allows you to redirect them to their correct pages. It also attempts to guess the correct URL if the attempted URL matches the basename of an existing entry, which is pretty slick.
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Instead of catching up on my photos today, I’ll start gathering some research here regarding ADHD and medications. This isn’t intended to be a cohesive narrative, but a brainstorming work space. It’s public in case it might be of use to someone.
Literature notes
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Earlier this year in February, I broke my Nexus 5 screen and opted to buy a new Moto X (2nd gen., XT1095) since I was going to be leaving the country for six months soon, and wasn’t sure if I’d have time to repair it. Since I had to transfer everything to a new phone, I rooted the Android 5.0 installation right away so I could use Titanium Backup, which would supposedly let me do a full backup and transfer in the future without much hassle.
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As I neared my home, I spotted another man on the sidewalk ahead. There were no street lights nearby, but I could tell he was middle aged and substantial. The fear crept back, but this time it wasn't a safety fear, but rather a social fear. It was just the two of us. I was determined in my pace, but I also felt drawn to the man's eyes as I approached.
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You're about to send the command, and you've no idea whether you're about to be prompted: "Try again."
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I initially sat down to write briefly of how I was having an enjoyable morning getting organized and working sporadically on the many things I want to do today: potting plants I bought on Amazon, processing photos from the past several months, and perhaps blogging. This all seems rather trivial considering today we bombed a hospital, yesterday we lost a ship and 33 people to Hurricane Joaquin, Thursday we had a mass shooting, and Wednesday fricken Congress almost shut down the government, again… but you have to make the best of things.
Anyway, I got the idea to take a photo of myself doing work at my desk so I could later reminisce. That wasn’t too difficult, though it did require my “Hobby Creek Helping Hands Third Hand Kit Soldering Tool” to hold my GoPro HERO4 balanced on top of the closet door.
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May 23
In taxi with William heading to meet his friends for dinner and going out. Slept from around 6am to 4pm and then maybe another hour after I was up an hour, since William was still sleeping and called me back to bed. I started listening to The Language …
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I’ve been at William’s for about four days so far, two nights of which he was away for work. We haven’t interacted a ton other than to laze about Sunday night and last night, watching some Modern Family and Big Bang Theory yesterday and a couple of movies about India Sunday. He did take me to a nice Chinese restaurant Sunday, and we ordered McDonald’s once and Pizza Hut once.
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Last night was my last night in Romania. I expected my host would want to spend the night together as we did all week, but as we lay in bed minutes before going to sleep, I was told I seemed cold and uncaring.
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This was originally going to be a more thorough description of the mobile data situation everywhere on this trip, but I fell off the wagon, so I will just post what is here and leave it at that. :-/
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I recently started doing my local development on virtual machines using Vagrant, and PuPHPet. I really should have started this long ago given all the hoops I’ve had to jump through setting up Perl and friends with every new version of OSX. And even though the new OSXes lately barely qualify as a new version and come out more and more frequently, they still break nearly everything about my development environments. So, virtual machines are super convenient.
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Random notes I sent myself while not sober.
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My stay in Croatia was a bit different than the other stops so far, as it was the first time I stayed by myself instead of with a friend. I ended up doing less than I imagined I would, but it was relaxing, and I saw some sights at least.
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When I began this journey around the world March 12, I forgot two things: my new microfiber towel and the charger for my Braun Series 7 shaver.
I realized this in London, and since my ex was then staying in my room in San Francisco, I asked him to take those things with him to Chicago (It was Sunday) and mail them to my upcoming Portugal address Monday morning, which cost $25 for priority international shipping. It was to take 6-10 days, so I was banking on the earlier end.
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Back on February 19, about six weeks ago, I saw an ad on Facebook for Credible, a company that supposedly helps you consolidate private and government student loans. I had done a consolidation before through the sort of official Education Department route, but only some of my loans qualified, so I was still left with six loan accounts to deal with, ranging from 5 to 6.5 percent interest rates. For a few years they have been on auto pay, so it wasn’t a big deal, but the OCD me would prefer to see just one nice loan account instead of a bunch with weird payment amounts.
Credible claims to solve my “problem” with ease, in just three steps!
So I filled out the Credible sign up form and waited.
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Italy was great. Portugal was great, too. Staying with people who can show you around and give a local perspective has many perks compared to traveling with friends and stayed at hotels. I theoretically strive for traveling with friends to make venturing out easier and to share my life with someone, but I would like to find a way to do that while not losing out on staying with locals. But it’s also harder to find someone to host two couch surfers than one.
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A month ago I wrote about how well my Wealthfront IRA was doing after the first six weeks. Well, I decided to also try one of their competitors, Betterment.
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Back in January, I booked a crazy trip around the world. It was originally going to be two separate trips, one to Germany to travel with Beam, my Thai friend I lived near in Japan, and another to visit William in Singapore. For a bit less than double the cost of those two itineraries, I discovered I could fly to more than a dozen countries using Indie. So here I am.
My first stop was originally going to be Lisbon, Portugal, followed by London. This would enable me to go through immigration another time (and get another passport stamp) before heading to Rome. My flights got rearranged a few times, though, and London became the start of the trip. This was just as well, since I could ease into the trip before tackling language barriers. It turned out I had even more trouble understanding “English” in London than I did in Australia, though.
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It’s late. I have a morning flight. Time for sleep. And I’ve been trying. My friend, the Buddhist, has long been slumbering, but I stayed up catching up on work. Though I wasn’t at my most productive, I wasn’t really sleepy.
He is beside me, facing away. His left arm decided to go adventuring, and it came to rest across my chest. No big deal; it’s nice to be close, even if it wasn’t a conscious choice. I’ll take what I can get, after all.
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Not having had a hamburger for about a week, it was time. I didn’t have to feel bad about it as I usually do, for while I was indeed in a foreign country, the United Kingdom isn’t like China or India, where I should obviously be experiencing something other than a burger.
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Saturday I decided to go for a long run, but as often happens, I didn't muster the motivation till well into the afternoon. Finally driven by the certainty I won't make it back till after dark, I headed out around 3 p.m. I may come back to narrate this later, but for now, the captions will have to be good enough.
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Two years ago I stumbled on startup called Wealthfront that automatically invests money for users and seemed to have the lowest fees. It was actually a web development blog post I stumbled on, "Reactive Charts with D3 and Reactive.js" (entry is kind of broken now), but it prompted me to look into the company nonetheless.
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Given that a typical visit to Facebook with its auto updating news feed complete with preloaded videos could easily blow my daily data cap in just a few minutes, I have no qualms about saying the notion of Japanese technical prowess is dead, and I would not be surprised if the state of the Internet here is indicative of where this country and its economy are headed. People come here and try very hard to throw away money to get some work done, and still fail. They say Japan is in a crisis; perhaps this is why!
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Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I found a link to (a blog post linking to) the below video of some boys known as the Rhodes twins, coming out to their father. I wasn’t going to click, as I’ve been experiencing strong overhyped-sentimental-click-baiting fatigue, but then I caved, maybe because they appeared to be cute. What the hell kind of person am I?
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I’m on a Greyhound bus returning to Milwaukee from visiting my ex in Chicago. This time, I boarded first, and I have plenty of room to sprawl and use my laptop. There are apparently only about 20 people on the bus, and everyone has two seats. The last bus …
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