Monday morning rolling start
Overall we kept it a fairly quiet weekend. Friday night was spent hanging out with friends, but after that Katie's cold reared up and so it was a fairly chill weekend. Saturday we were supposed to go to a Sounders game (which they ended up drawing) but with Katie not feeling well we decided to stay home. Sunday we mainly binged ABC's Will Trent, which features a dyslexic detective and I gave Elwood a much needed bath.
Now it's back to work for another week. This Monday morning is serenaded by the best of Led Zeppelin after I had Immigrant Song in my head.
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As you'll see in the end of day summary, it's been an absolutely miserable day of playing chess for me. Feels like one of those periods I need to stop playing for a while and refocus on some analysis and practice. I have lost every single game today I think.
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Facebook reminds me that ten years ago today, I mistakenly yelled Animal House rather than Animal Farm as an answer (well, question) to Jeopardy. I will never get over my shame.
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My dry spell of losing endless games of chess seems to finally be at an end as I continue to win more than I lose. Feels good.
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Modifications for my end of day posts
As regular readers will notice, what started as just collecting a handful of Mastodon posts each day has evolved and now includes my daily chess results on lichess.org. This is, admittedly, primarily for me and I expect the audience for it to continue to be very small. I am currently thinking about how to continue expanding this post.
The top ideas right now, in a very rough order of likelihood of implementation:
- Add the day's weather - Mainly for posterity, so I can look back and see what the weather was on the day of various posts.
- Add a daily motivational or inspirational quote - I already have a list to pull from, it is trivial, and would be a nice little add in. It feels odd to do at the end of the day, but if I did this I'd add it to be something I email myself or somehow otherwise put in front of myself earlier each day.
- Add posts I snag for reading later - I have this integrated in a rolling manner on the sidebar of the site, this might be an interesting way to archive them. This would be ones I've added to be read later, but might or might not. I snag dozens of articles and only come back to read a handful. It also moves them more central, and inserts those links into the RSS feed, which isn't done in the current manner.
- Writing stats - As I mentioned earlier, now that I have a new larger writing project, I'm tracking my progress on it. Currently it's done in a Google sheet, though I could code it into a custom web app. If I did so, it would be trivial to start including the day's progress into the end of day wrap-up post.
- Blog traffic - There's an interesting seed of an idea to publicize traffic to the site, newsletter subscribers, etc. Would require a bit more coding and finding the best way to access this data automatically from where it's gatherered.
Who knows. Just musing as I get my day started and think about things ahead.
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The Simple Things
I can't help but be satisfied and pleased after making a TV swap this morning. It wasn't brain surgery by any means, but I still find great satisfaction in having done it and the new system being fully up and running with our antenna, Roku, and Raspberry Pi connected to it. I also took the opportunity to vacuum and clean up all the dust that had accumulated behind the TV since the last time I did a cleaning of it a few years ago.
It is, unfortunately, not a dumb TV. But I only connected it to the internet to do a system update, and then removed its access. I ended up going with another LG tv, found a solid deal for it from Target, and was able to pick it up from a store rather than risk it being shipped.
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Musing on RSS
It is hard to understate how much happier I am now that my RSS feed reader updates throughout the day automatically. Previously I had tried to get it working but couldn't, and so had to manually refresh which took a few minutes and left me with a mountain of articles to read and skim.
I hope more sites bring RSS back next year, it's a shame how many I am finding these days without accessible feeds.
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Woe is me
I am in a serious 'woe is me' funk because of a series of issues I've had today:
- Work computer needs a clean wipe
- Blog code not cooperating with Mastodon API
- Home Linux PC needs some work to figure out kinks as I get it set up and run into driver issues
- Struggled as I work to try and make my first raspberry sorbet ever
- On an unprecedented losing streak in chess.
And then I look at this list and think - Holy fuck that is some entitled first-world problem whining going on here
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An idle thought I had: I wonder how much of America's backsliding on education bleeds over to its sports. Obviously many amazing athletes still find ways to excel and reach a global stage. But with the fewer teachers, some number of them were coaches who likely would have helped drive young people to pursue sports and excel.
Zero proof. Just a random thought as I watch the World Cup and work this morning.
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The thing I am seeing over and over in society is a growing belief in "I'm doing it, so it must be okay." Whether we're talking about a former US President, a Russian dictator, or an ex-Navy veteran. There feels to be a growing sense that personal morals supercede common societal law.
This is hardly a unique thought, but I think it bears commenting that - I firmly believe people cannot strictly derive their morals from governmental law, but that there must be an underlying willingness to participate in the larger society as a balance against it.
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As I grow older, I become less and less patient with drivers who feel the need to zig zag back and forth through traffic. I guess this is middle-age.
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There are few things which make me feel more grown up than talking to contractors and spending money on my house. Rather than, you know, video games, gadgets, etc.
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I wonder if the someone who berated me for not watching the CSPAN feed of Clinton's Benghazi investigations, as were discussing the stupidity of electing Trump over her, will be as glued to CSPAN for the second impeachment trial of his disgrace-of-a-President?
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Working from home has certainly made dealing with repair people and home appointments simultaneously more and less convenient. More convenient, because yes of course I'll be home. Less convenient because I still try to get work done while on the laptop while they are working, whereas when I was full time in the office it was easier to knock off working under the excuse of being home.
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