deathmtn

Gonna get slightly fancy and have a footer on this thing!

Incidentally, I once worked on a web app that had infinite scrolling and required a notice to be shown in the footer.

Hey, look! Beau has his own simple weblog, too! It's really refreshing to see these pages. They load and render almost instantly, and there's no tracker garbage. Just that alone kind of makes them worth it, though I know that is not the most popular concern out there.

Beau had a little discussion of donation and wealth distribution:

in the last year and a half i gave money to ~150 mostly trans or nb people who i saw requesting money on twitter. i’m still donating monthly to fund club, double union, donors choose (though no longer for sherman alexie books, because he turned out to be a creep), and vocal minority.

i feel gross writing about donating money but maybe someone will read it and consider donating more money (especially directly to people who need it) if they’re able to.

It got me thinking:

1. That's impressive as fuck!
2. No one likes to talk about money, but it is important to talk about it, especially about donating it, as he has done.

I went struggled in the past couple of years to find an effective way to combat this administration's destructive actions. My first instinct was to jump into some sort of job in which I used my technical skills to help some kind of non-profit, as I have done in the past. I talked to a couple of groups, but I realized:

1) I'm fairly sure tech is not the bottleneck in these efforts. I didn't even consider this until my friend Alex brought this up when I mentioned it.

2) For the tech jobs I see these organizations hiring for, it wouldn't really matter if I did that job or not. I can see quite a few people other than myself getting those jobs done well; might as well give them a chance.

3) Feeling better about being active in the fight is not the same as being effective. Early on while thinking about this, my friend Sarah, who is a progressive non-profit veteran, mentioned that the best thing to do may be to just give money to people that know what they're doing. Months later, I accepted this.

I should also point out that, if you are a software engineer, in many life circumstances, you should consider yourself rich. I am a software engineer, and according to cursory searches I do before taking jobs, I have a salary in the average range.

For reasons, many of them related to software capturing the fancy of the speculative investor class, an average software engineer salary is really high compared to that of a teacher, nurse, scientist, or editor. Even though you may see people richer than you every day, even though you grew up not-rich, it's important to recognize that you have substantial disposable income.

If you think that people deserve to be treated with dignity, to have enough food, good homes, to not have their lives threatened by bigots, even if they don't have as much money as you, then it makes sense for you to donate to organizations that know how to fight for them. Find them and fund them.

Here's the organizations my family donates to:

- The NAACP Legal Defense Fund
- Amnesty International
- Planned Parenthood
- Donors Choose (especially the snack projects)
- The Florence Project

I always forget at the end of each stretch of project days: No matter how into it you are, multiple days of no-distractions development will wear you out. I'm going outside!

Finding public domain SVG art is always a disappointment, not because of the quality of the art, but the svg is often from a tracing program and completely unusable.

Pointing nginx around your old backups on an at-home server is kinda neat. It's pretty easy way to look at your old junk.

OK! This site (and more importantly, another site built with the software that builds this) is now backed up on the regular via git to the huge HD attached my Raspberry Pi. Good lord, that took way more effort than I thought it would. But I feel the relief!

If I want to go further, I can also push it to some other git location in The Cloud (though not GitHub because of size limits). Or just tar it all up and upload it somewhere on the regular.

Uh, don't get in the habit of typing `git init` too much.

What if, in live performances, each member of Carpathian Forest wore a tree costume?

I know that's unlikely, but please don't tell me that's not true.

Some minor fortunes today:

- I didn't check up on the car door after the guy closed it on Sunday. It's been ajar since then. No one stole anything (people have rifled through our car twice before when we left it unlocked). Cars made in the aughts are smart enough to turn off the lights and not drain the battery!

- The Chicken 'n' Rice truck showed up within two miles of my house today.

Sometimes you want to make a repo public badly because of an unexamined GitHub sharing habit, and then you realize that you'd have to put 80% of the files in .gitignore to keep private stuff out.

I think the guy will eventually be better than stopping his current activity and moving on to something else than I am. Perhaps he'll even learn to plan for tasks that require concentration! Maybe as early as in, like, five years.

It's a fine day to listen to A Fine Day to Die, as always. Black metal, mostly, is not very headbanging for me, but this is, as they say in modern parlance to mean something else entirely, a banger.

Aw yis, hot-coffee-appropriate weather!

This early summer has been fantastic, as it has been noted by many. It's warm and bright while breezy and non-sweltering. Apparently, that ends Monday.

The guy said he wanted to go to the sun yesterday because it had a lot of gravity. Katt told him we have gravity at home.

My secret hope about getting up early is that I will eventually become someone that works on their projects early in the morning, before kid stuff and work.

If I had that schedule, I'd:

- Feel less anxious during the day because I'd have gotten something done right away.
- Sleep better because I wouldn't be programming after the guy goes to bed.

I have attempted this in various forms for several years, though, even before having a kid, and have always failed, though.

Tiny two-day streak of getting up at 6. When the guy was a baby, he'd often get up at 6 or earlier. Lately, he's been sleeping in, and so have I, as a result.

The day is smoother if you get up before him, as Katt does, though. You get some moments to think by yourself without having to oversee anything, and you don't have to dig as deep to be relaxed if he's being confrontational when he does get up.

I had dinner with two college professors and somehow ended up ranting about how universities are ripping people off and deceiving students about what they'll get. I kind of reverse read the room.

I like when cars at stoplights that I walk by are playing jams that I approve of. It's a nice bonus to hear Rakim Allah on your walk.

I kind of wanted to do something really out there with my day off, but building something mundane that I've been meaning to do for six months feels good, too. Relieved to not be visited by the Demon of Day Off Choice Regrets!

I've been noticing a few problems I've been having with Twitter, besides the problems of it enabling Nazis and being shitty to developers.

1) I used to use it to put down thoughts that I might want to come back to later, and if people like it and have reactions, hey, that's cool, too. You can download your archive, but without that, it's rather hard to find what you have said before on Twitter.

1A) I've become uncomfortable in general with user-exploiting companies having my data.

1B) I've become re-charmed by static HTML and don't like loading apps that have more in them than they should.

2) Reading Twitter, while sometimes satisfying, is always really distracting. Sometimes, I want to say something without getting distracted. You used to be able to post from the iOS Notes app, but no more. (And before that, I had my own mobile journal app that posted to social media.)

3) The Twitter feed, chronological or algorithmic, tends to amplify the most-frequently tweeting and most-frequently retweeted voices. It will drown out your quiet friend. (And I, certainly, was a frequent tweeter that probably drowned out your quiet friend.) One nice thing about the days of weblogs, which of course, had it's problems, was that either you visited individual weblogs or you clicked on individual weblogs in Google Reader. Usually, you ended up with the amount of each weblog that you wanted. On Twitter, there are hacked to help with this, but they're not robust.

And so, I built this thing (mostly by modifying a thing I originally built to simulate Vine when it shut down). There's a simple http service (https://github.com/jimkang/note-taker) that listens for posts from a really basic web app (https://github.com/jimkang/note-sender), and then updates a set of static HTML pages, served by nginx. If things fail, the HTML pages will still work. It does lack features (like automatic hyperlinking, I just realized), but that is OK, I think.

So, this doesn't solve problem 3 unless everyone goes back to having their own blog, which isn't going to happen. But if you want to use this system, let me know! jimkang@gmail.com

I was thinking of building it so it'd work for people other than me, but at this point, I know to never build anything unless someone explicitly wants it. So, I left the door open, but didn't go through.

Hey, look, I'm on my phone, getting down my thots!

I'm…weirdly satisfied with having this going?

Supporting line

breaks

but not arbitrary non-breaking spaces

yet!

On one hand, I didn't think it'd take most of the day to get this going.

On the other, I know all too well that it's quite possible for something you thought you could get done in a morning to turn out to actually be impossible!








Hello


Again

On one hand, I didn't think it'd take most of the day to get this going. On the other, I know all too well that it's quite possible for something you thought you could get done in a morning to turn out to actually be impossible!