October 2019 Notes

When you metaphorically live life “paycheck to paycheck,” you do just enough each week to maintain your current existence. You take care of the urgent and outstanding tasks the neglect of which would disrupt the status quo, but you never take action on things that would improve and progress your situation.

Even with Taskwarrior to help me tackle my TODO list, I feel the pain of living “paycheck to paycheck”:

I have the numbers to show that I’m getting lots done. Somehow I feel like I’m treading water. There’s always more. Both the great ideas and the big goals grow stale as I address the urgent issues that must be done now.

What is the recommendation to get out of that loop?

All it takes is completing one single to-do — one single task that moves your life forward, even slightly — each week.

Okay, I can do that. Well, sort of. I’m still trying to build some kind of idea what “forward” means for me. However, I can make a point of completing one task a week that’s been pushed aside by the high-priority, immediately-due attention grabbers at the top of task next.

Twenty years ago – give or take a couple weeks – I started working as a backend programmer in tech for a real live paycheck, as opposed to designing sites for cigarette money from local ISPs.

About six months later the outer layers of the dot-com bubble frayed and I experienced my first layoff. Couple recessions and a few mental breakdowns later, I’m still at it!

I have no deep thoughts on the subject. I still like writing code, even when I hate it. I also enjoy eating. Being a programmer has made both these things easier.

KEXP used to show their live streaming links on the site. Not the browser stream, podcast library, video archive, or Windows, iOS, or Android apps. An actual URI I can load in Audacious or whatever music player I’m using that week.

I love all the other stuff. Heck, as an amplifier I’m happy to see to see all the work my money goes towards. Just – sometimes all I want is the music.

Dug around and found a Reddit post with current links.

128K MP3 Stream

https://kexp-mp3-128.streamguys1.com/kexp128.mp3

AAC+ Stream

http://live-aacplus-64.kexp.org/kexp64.aac

Now I can listen to the livestream again without having a browser tab open.

I made a foot hat, because someone’s foot is in a cast and their toes are cold.

Pattern via Joan Hamer

Here’s an interesting correlation.

In general, the slower walkers tended to show signs of “accelerated ageing” with their lungs, teeth and immune systems in worse shape than those who walked faster.

The more unexpected finding was that brain scans showed the slower walkers were more likely to have older-looking brains too.

As a fast walker who gets stuck behind slow walkers on the way to work, I endorse these findings.

Decided I wanted a copy of “Learning Perl 6” before it becomes “Learning Raku”.

But I give my bookshelf room for nostalgia.

And of course I needed a physical copy of the 20th Anniversary Pragmatic Programmer.

We went to the Apple store. I played with a new iPad Pro. Tried hard not to like it, but it was a really pleasant experience.

The demo iPad had a great note-taking app that could help my search for an app that let me handwrite notes and then search through their content later.

Been messing with Windows and WSL 2 more lately. So we went to the Microsoft store too. I tried hard to like it, but everything felt a little clumsy and disappointing after the smoothness of the Apple devices.

When I got home I had to find and install GoodNotes, the notebook app I played with at the Apple Store, on my own iPad. Yeah I like it. This will come in real handy.

Oh and I want a matte screen protector. Supposedly gives you more of a paper feel when working on the iPad.