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I was "late" starting my sourdough this week. The last two batches I made had various issues. The first was the better one; having developed properly and baked well; just in a formless blob resulting from not having proofing baskets. The second batch I over-proofed; and that is just not a satisfying bread to have. I intended to wake up my starter Wednesday night, then make the levain Thursday morning, then making the dough Thursday afternoon/evening. But it turns out it's a good thing that I didn't. Thursdays are busy with Lily having soccer at 5:30pm; so I have to start supper (hotdogs and french fries every Thursday due to timing) at 4pm. This schedule leaves no time to really due the autolyse and bulk fermentation. So the part I actually missed here was doing the Wednesday night feeding. I fed it Thursday morning by doing the levain... but I think that wake up feeding is necessary. So I wound up treating the Thursday feeding as a regular feeding and I did the levain again this morning. I should have the time this afternoon to do the autolyse and bulk fermentation normally; thus avoiding the issues that lead to my over-proofing last week. This schedule of: Thursday evening feed - Friday morning levain - Friday afternoon dough - Saturday morning bake; was presented to me by the person who shared the starter with us. (They handily wrote it down on a piece of paper.) I wanted to see if I could try out some other schedules; but I think their schedule is great; especially after having stumbled through a non-schedule there last week.
I took the time to do a proper shave with the disposable triple or quad blad razor I have instead of using the electric razor. I've been listening to "Listener Favorites: Tim Collins | Overcoming Anxiety" from "The Unmistakable Creative Podcast" this morning.
I decided there's no time like the present to start actually writing. I've been struggling a bit with praxis here; the typical writing styles I've used haven't meshed well with my need to just get stuff out. Thankfully, I was inspired by "How to Write a Novel in Half a Month: A WMG Writer's Guide" by Dean Wesley Smith. This book was notably *not* what I was expecting, but the perfunctory journal style of the writing serves as an excellent template for just getting thoughts written down, so thank you DWS!
I did my ten minute mindfulness meditation. I'm using Insight Timer. I did all the guided meditations you can do for free; so now I just use it as a timer. It's nice that you can configure sounds for: start, stop, interval and you can do ambient sounds as well. I've been finding myself appreciating unguided meditation more; but I feel like I need to recalibrate with a guided meditation once in a while. Guided meditation is tricky; however, because the voice or the ambient sounds or the frequency of interruption or the manner of speech or any number of things may be off-putting. I really liked Sam Harris's guided meditation in Waking Up; but that app is very expensive to subscribe to. Headspace seemed alright. I might spring for that one next time it goes on sale.
And now it is time to focus on work. :-\
One of the ongoing issues at work is a lead is chronically shitting out work for others to clean up. I was working on a task to connect the full CI/CD pipeline for a new service and he sidetracked me by introducing several new dependencies and saying that it doesn't work now. This is right in line with every "collaboration" I've had with him so far, so it's par for the course. Anyway, I've come to realize that I have a better way of dealing with this problem. I generally like to work in coarser grained tasks that allow for a lot of iteration and discovery. I'm finally realizing that this does not work well when other people are involved. There's poorer visibility on where I'm at, and the chance of getting sidetracked by random external inputs increases tremendously; as in this case. This particular case involved the lead working on a separate task and introducing new dependencies. The CI/CD pipeline doesn't account for one of these particular dependencies properly, so that needs to be investigated and resolved. But that is clearly a separate task from hooking up the initial pipeline as I've now completed. So going forward I'm going to have to be extremely cautious when working with this developer to ensure the work to be done is explicitly scoped, split into small, discrete chunks and documented well for expectations. This is the typical defensive posture when working with overly aggressive stakeholders.
We have our daily standup at 9:30am. It's unfortunate, but my current mental state is really coming through in video calls where my voice is monotone and my responses are terse. I'm sure everyone can see it, and I kind of feel bad in that regard; but I don't think there's a big benefit to faking an upbeat attitude. To the extent that it will provide a facade of cheeriness to my peers, sure - that helps them maintain a positive outlook and that's a good thing. At least I won't be interacting with anyone for the rest of the day, so I don't have to worry about how I'm presenting myself for any supposed interactions.
I wish Disroot was actively supporting custom domains right now. I'm forwarding emails from those custom domains via NameCheap to my Disroot account; but this has limitations. Specifically, I can't actually set the "from" field in emails the way I want to; because Disroot is like: "Nope! That's not actually your email!" And this makes sense to do; but it's frustrating on my part because I'm only forwarding to work around the lack of custom domains! Apparently they are working on tooling to improve support so they can do custom domains again in the future. I hope that time comes soon so I can pay them to get that support. All this is to say that I really want to spend my time hacking Emacs-lisp to configure my mu4e mail configuration; but I feel blocked until Disroot has this support again; since my issues right now are around multiple account support in mu4e and migrating away from other email providers I've been using.
OK, I did a little bit of work, but my head _really_ isn't into it. I setup Ripcord again. I also grabbed a Protein shake but I decided to skip the snack this time. I typically do an apple or banana each time I grab the shake; but I'm not feeling it lately. Maybe it's this malaise ... who knows? I grabbed a club soda and it's really hitting the spot. Listening to some tunes; specifically "I Am Steve" by Hey Steve, which is just fantastic. This reminded me of something that I felt needed noting down here.
In my taxi responsibilities for my children, I often listen to radio. One song that's come on that I've enjoyed is "Really Wanna Let You Down" (RWLYD) by Monowhales. Anyway, they other day we were driving as a family to Nono and Nona's house and the Mrs was playing The Beatles. "Don't Let Me Down" came on and made me immediately think of RWLYD. Is there a mashup for that? I haven't looked yet; but there really should be. I started singing: "Don't let me down... Really wanna let you down." :-) I did a Spotify search for RWYLD and listened to all the songs that came up automatically and I've been digging it. It's an indie/alt-rock feed that's been hitting the spot. There's a few new favourites added to my gigantic, unsorted liked songs list; so that's all good.
OK, I'll try to get a little more work done here before lunch. I'm a little worried I will weasel out of push day today for workout since I am 100% not feeling it whatsoever; but I don't want to skip it either... Maybe post-lunch or mid afternoon when I do the autolyse.
I started listening to "Christopher Kelley | The 4 Quadrants of Well Being" on The Unmistakable Creative Podcast. I ate some balogna sandwiches for lunch, added beer to the steaks to marinate for supper and took a nap until my 13:30 meeting at which point I joined without video or audio and made my coffee then sat down to write this. I am definitely not going to do my push workout today. If I try it, I'm sure I'll injure myself. Hmm. On the other hand, I could just half-ass it. A half-assed workout is better than no workout. And I don't mean actually doing a half-assed job; but paying extra attention to how my body responds and being super careful not to push it too hard. Yeah, I'm actually liking this idea, and I think it will help with my mental health to get this going, too. So, sure, I'll still anticipate doing this after the autolyse for the sourdough. Oy, this meeting is that other lead I referred to before. He keeps calling "RDB" (Relational Data Base) "RDP" (Remote Desktop Protocol). It's killing me. Gah.
Hot damn. Every thing somebody says I'm interpreting in the most negative way possible and everything is just pissing me off. I'm a fun person today!
OK, I did my workout. I did the dough for the sourdough. We're now in bulk fermentation stage, so I just leave it at this point until 19:15 at which point I shape the dough and let it start proofing overnight. So far so good. I'm hoping this next batch is the best batch yet! My workout was minimal; just three exercises: chest press, tricep extension and overhead press. But that's okay; this whole week has been more minimal like that with the exception of my leg day, and that's because leg day is not as intense as I build up strength with posterior chain exercises with my physiotherapist. I'm done for the workday, too. I made some progress; but folks are filtering out of availability depending on their timezones; so I'm getting blocked on code reviews. That's all fine. I like not being the bottleneck for others; and my mind has not been into getting actual work done anyway. I'm happy with what I managed to get done today! Tonight will be steaks. The kids always fuss about it; but Dee and I love it. So I expect a bit of a fight at dinner again. After that, it is more dank than it's been lately, so movie night might be an actual movie night today. That will be nice.
The kids are in bed. We watched Zootropolis (aka Zootopia) for movie night.
I managed to get the dough shaped and started proofing with relatively little error.
Supper was OK. The steaks were relatively low quality; but they seasoned well. Unfortunately, the BBQ didn't get hot enough to give them a nice finish; but they were certainly servicable. The boy fought his food, which was a bit of a surprise. He's fine with meat; it's our daughter who's picky in that regard; but she did a great job. She's been doing great all around! She typically has a sunny disposition and is adapting well to having more responsibilities. I feel she's getting the short end of the stick often; so I go out of my way to tell her she's doing well and to tell her we love and value her. Still; gotta keep doing that often. With kids quantity IS quality.
I picked up Apocalypse Now with the making of documentary. I'm not sure if we'll get around to watching that tonight or not. Dee noticed my demeanor; and while I feel a *lot* better now than I did for the majority of today, it's as good an indicator as any that we should have a *serious talk*. :-\ I mean, this is nothing new; but maybe the angle this time can be on productive mechanisms. Planning that trip to a small town, thinking about systems to put in place to get me where I want to be. Her, too!
Alright, I think I'll cut it there. The goal was to start writing and I have surpassed my expectations. I was thinking about 1000 words a day, and Emacs is telling me I've surpassed 2000 words by a decent enough margin. Great! Catch you next time!
Published on June 01, 2021