Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them, for it’s continually in your power to reignite new ones…. It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did—that is how to restart life!
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.2
Finished reading: Shift by Hugh Howey 📚
Book 2 of the Solo series. Was a good book to spend a Sunday reading. I very much lean into the idea that we should face our past and process our traumas in order to grow as a species. Masking it, hiding it, drugging ourselves to forget will just lead us to destroy ourselves.
When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.
.tap
https://ruby-doc.org/3.4.1/Kernel.html#method-i-tap
tap {|x| block } → obj
Yields self to the block and then returns self. The primary purpose of this method is to “tap into” a method chain, in order to perform operations on intermediate results within the chain.
What a weird method, but a method that seems pretty useful.
I have used tap
to capture output from a running docker container to shove into a cache that was fed to users via action cable. I can see how useful it would be for debugging and testing though too. At least if you werent using pry.
Outside of that, I actually do like how it looks as a way to organize code. I can see that being contentious in the community though
notes
- purchased a computer to support my deep work this year as a “grand gesture” to help support and ensure i do the thing. it’s a work machine, for work and study. Went with a System76 Thelio Spark Premium with a slick racing stripe so you know its gonna be fast :P
- morning runs are feeling good. added some pushups and light core work after the run this am and it was excellent. Looking forward to warmer mornings so I can get out in the world and off the treadmill ☀️ - just more things young me would be shocked to hear me say
- Silo season 2 finale was excellent. I read Wool this week and enjoyed seeing how different the show was to the book, but ultimately how it ends up mostly the same. The journey was different, the results the same (mostly).
- No time for video games, no desire either, so that’s interesting.
- For fun I have been working on a git server & api to host my own repos in my homelab and provide an interface for creating and managing repos. I dont want to use github really but I do want some sort of central storage for repos
Second Week
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Second week and the momentum is still there :D January is all about strengthening willpower. The linchpin to all of this is going to bed earlier. And that seems to be true. I am consistently going to bed early and waking early. Consistently meditating when I wake up. I am meeting the non-negotiables of the day. The efforts to build up willpower seem to be working. Here’s what I have noticed so far:
Im learning that the answer to the question, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?”, is: it does not matter.
why not. why shouldn’t i build my own personal github
LA fires are terrifying. we have family mere blocks away from the devastation. feeling very helpless being so many miles away. ktla was helpful this morning though, really grateful for their live stream
4 hours into my work day and I have done maybe 30 minutes of real meaningful work so far. I have spent 90 minutes dealing with slack messages and reminders. Then another 30 minutes handling emails. I have meetings spread out throughout the day and so there’s little ability to do any meaningful work in between and while waiting. Plenty of room for shallow work though. Certainly no room to get deep into anything. Kinda fascinating
well I do have an opinion on go lang. It is pleasant to write. Like Ruby. It just makes sense. Big fan I want to do more go work in my future.
now how do I convince my job (which is a wordpress shop) we need to do more go projects 😂
It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgments. —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 6.52
something i really want to make part of my self. aspiring to not give a fuck when i dont need to give a fuck. to liberate myself from having an opinion on everything
January is not for getting into the deep work. BUT I have been taking advantage of the morning and doing some foundational drawing practice. Kinda preparing myself to tackle some figure drawing deep work in February.
I’ve also had time for coding practice so again, not the point of this month, but I have the time so might as well :D
First week.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
It’s feeling really good. My intention for this month is to build willpower. To grow this muscle so that I can start to tackle the deep work later. And to break some bad habits. How am I developing the willpower muscle? By implementing a level of discipline and routine I have never had in my life before. Willpower is at its peak early in the day. It’s easier to push yourself to workout and do the things you want to do when you have that willpower.
ssh’ing into a server to create a git repository is so 2005 im going to build a tool that will let me create and manage repositories from my workstation. we don’t need github.
I want to do something like:
gitrepo new [name]
gitrepo sync [githubrepo] [name]
Finished reading: Kingdom Come by Mark Waid 📚
Art by Alex Ross, who is just excellent. His classic realism adds such a cool element to the superhero thing. Makes it feel epic and human in a way that no one else can quite do. Story was also pretty good ;)
The only race to run is against yourself 🏃 💪
A Scanner Darkly is so good
I believe God’s M.O. is to transmute evil into good and if He’s active here, he’s doing that now. Although our eyes can’t perceive it. The whole process is hidden beneath the surface of our reality. It will only be revealed later. And even then, the people of the future, our children’s children, will never truly know this awful time that we have gone through and the losses we took. Maybe some footnote in a minor history book, a brief mention with no list of the fallen.
Watching Surveillance Cinema on #CriterionChannel - look, i am obsessed. this is the best movie streaming platform
Good start. Good sleep. Up at 6 am. 25 minutes of drawing forms. 10 minutes meditation. All of the non-negotiables were handled. Even got some coding practice in.
A sketch book for January has been acquired. There is a space to do drawing. There is desire to do this.