A while ago I wrote about a failed attempt to reduce the amount of customization in my Emacs setup, back then it was the mode line.

I had in the back of my mind another area to (try to) simplify, and that is pairing. Emailing with Wouter as he tried different combinations of electric-pair-mode and third-party packages for this, gave me the impulse to see how I would fare using only built-in commands.

Note that I am not a user of electric-pair-mode myself. I don't like how it behaves in many scenarios. Yes, it can be customized with predicates, but I tried for a few months and it kept surprising me here and there, at some point the predicate setup was too fragile, adding an exception would break others cases.
Over time, I found that a more manual/intentional approach works better for me.

From delete-pair to insert-parentheses

I can't quite recall how I found out about delete-pair, but I started using it here and there, and eventually found out about M-( insert-parentheses and insert-pair.
But at first I didn't understand how to bind more delimiters to the latter, so I wrote my own command. Which as we'll find out soon enough, behaves slightly different. And now I just can't go back. 🙂

Variables and a helper

I declared my own separate variables, that are similar to the built ins. Maybe that's a clean up opportunity? But, it feels "right" to use my vars for my custom commands. 🤷

(defvar hoagie-pair-chars
  '((?\' . ?\')
    (?\( . ?\))
    ;; a lot more pairs here
    (?\{ . ?\})
    (?\% . ?\%))
   "Alist of pairs to insert for `hoagie-insert-pair' and `hoagie-delete-pair'.")

(defvar hoagie-pair-blink-delay 0.3
   "Like `delete-pair-blink-delay', but for my own pair functions.")
    

And then a little helper to pick one of the "pair-opening characters" interactively:

(defun hoagie--pair-read-opener ()
  (read-char (format "Pick %s :"
                     (mapconcat #'string
                                (mapcar #'car hoagie-pair-chars) ""))))
    

My insert-pair variant

(defun hoagie-insert-pair ()
  "Wrap the region or sexp at point in a pair from `hoagie-pair-chars'.
Note that using sexp at point might wrap a symbol, depending on
point position.

This started as my counterpart to `delete-pair', but I ended up
rewriting that one too.
Emacs has a built in mode for this, `electric-pair-mode', but it does
more than I want, it is more intrusive, and I couldn't get around some
of its behaviours. I eventually figured out how to use `insert-pair' (by
looking at `insert-parentheses'), but I prefer how this command works."
  (interactive "*")
  (with-region-or-thing 'sexp
    (let* ((opener (hoagie--pair-read-opener))
           (closer (alist-get opener hoagie-pair-chars)))
      (if (not closer)
          (message "\"%c\" is not in the pair opener list" opener)
        (save-excursion
          (goto-char start)
          (insert opener)
          (goto-char (+ 1 end))
          (insert closer))))))
    

A lot of the work here is done by the anaphoric macro with-region-or-thing (source here), which binds start and end to the region limits or the thing at point, in this case the sexp.
Turns out that while typing, I don't really need automatic delimiters. But wrapping something in parentheses or quotes after I typed it, that's where the command is really helpful. For example, if the pipe is the point position: quot|es! => call command => pick " => "quot|es!".
And by using the region when it is active, I can rely on the usual mark commands to wrap stuff that doesn't fit the sexp pattern.

delete-pair

(defun hoagie-delete-pair ()
  "Delete a pair from `hoagie-pair-chars'.
If point is on an opener character, use the sexp it delimits and unpair
it. When point isn't under an opener char, prompt for one, then search
backwards for the opener, and remove the pair."
  (interactive "*")
  (let* ((start-pos (point))
         (use-point (member (following-char) (mapcar #'car hoagie-pair-chars)))
         (opener (if use-point (following-char) (hoagie--pair-read-opener)))
         (closer (alist-get opener hoagie-pair-chars)))
    (save-mark-and-excursion
      (save-match-data
        ;; in case the region was active, so the macro
        ;; returns the sexp at point
        (deactivate-mark)
        (unless use-point
          (search-backward (string opener)))
        (with-region-or-thing 'sexp
          (unless (and (= (char-after start) opener)
                       (= (char-before end) closer))
            (error "Can't delimit a sexp with %c ~ %c" opener closer))
          (mark-sexp)
          (sit-for hoagie-pair-blink-delay)
          (goto-char end)
          (delete-char -1)
          (goto-char start)
          (delete-char 1))))))
    

This code ends up being a little bit more involved, for the reasons outlined in the docstring. It has a DWIM vibe: unless the character at point is a delimiter, it has to prompt. And then it might need to "walk back" before delimiting the sexp at point.
This enables scenarios like: (well-well-we|ll (this-is-nested)) => call command => pick ( => well-well-we|ll (this-is-nested).

Alternatives: too many to list

When emailing with Wouter, he tried a lot of alternatives for sort-of similar operations, like Lispy and Paredit, plus the already mentioned electric pair. One nice side effect of our correspondence is that I get to revisit packages that I sort of forgot about :) and discover new ones.
It is also interesting to explain the rationale for why I like something a certain way. Helps me reflect!

Every structural editing package adds a host of new commands that you have to remember. I prefer less specific, and simpler commands.
The built in pairing commands don't operate on things-at-point, and require marking the region first. That's the feature I missed the most when I tried them recently (code here, for reference).

Open to comments!

I wanted to go over this code for a few reasons
One, to hear back from how others approach this editing feature.
Second, to put my code "out there" and get feedback or corrections.

And finally, because I want to keep a record of the things I modified in my configuration. Making it a public record, like a post, means that I can share a link when the topic comes up next and I want to explain myself. :)

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We all have read the articles and posts about how now everyone consumes content via AI summaries, and websites keep losing traffic.
In the context of the commercial web. Not that my site is impacted by this.
Or maybe it is. If it is, I hope Claude picks up all my grammar mistakes and stupid mannerisms.[1]

Last Sunday we were away for the weekend in rural Pennsylvania, and the weather was way way WAY different from the forecast, so our hike plans were ruined. Instead, we were looking for museums, monuments, antique stores, etc. to visit in nearby towns.
On an Easter Sunday.
Spoiler: not many places were open.

I was """researching""" on my phone, and I did what I always do: open the browser, search in DuckDuckGo, start shifting through the usual suspects:

• Trip Advisor's "things to do in place"
• List posts from newspapers and the like, that are usually paid ads for restaurants or attractions.
• Local bloggers that are clearly not bloggers but from some sort of content factory.
• Pages from the county/township last updated in 2013.
• The new kid on the block: sites asking you to confirm you are human because they don't want to get scraped. Can be combined with any of the above, if needed.

Now, when I ask Claude stuff, in don't feel like I am getting an answer, but more like a starting point. I still like to go check the sites it references, on my own.
At the end of the day, the experience feels similar to using Google around 2009. Ask a question, get a bunch of results, start reading them.
And thinking of that parallel made me realize how much the web has changed since then. For the worse.

Generated content was already a problem

AI made fake wall of text sites easier to generate and publish, but those things have already existed for a long while.

SEO ruined search quite a while ago

Remember when Google prioritized the "most linked" content? The system wasn't perfect, as obviously not everything popular is correct, or the best source of information.
But SEO as it works nowadays, means that whoever can afford or made a priority of optimizing their site for Google to give them a thumbs up, shoots to the top of the results. Regardless of content merit.

Login/signup walls

I am not going to complain about paywalls, because we all know expecting content to be free and subsidized paid for with ads is one of the major causes of the current mess. But the way the login and signup pop ups are implemented in most websites is a disgrace. Stealing focus, blocking scroll.
And I can't help the feeling most are not motivated to get you to sign up to pay a subscription, but to inflate the numbers of their platform. So they can turn around and sell it to whoever is willing to drop money to acquire their millions of (not really) active users.

Humanness checks

My site doesn't check that the reader is a human. I don't have robots.txt or agents.md or whatever else there is to prevent crawlers and scraping. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.[3]

On the one hand, I feel for admins that need to protect their sites from a gazillion of automated requests.
On the other...maybe, just maybe, if not every single fucking website were a "web app" that downloads 250 MB of code, they could serve cached pages from memory and not have to degrade the experience for their human visitors?

And look, I am aware that I speak from a place of privilege, as most sites can't be only static HTML and thus served from an in-memory cache.
But we can be honest and admit that most sites are way more complex and "heavy" than they need to be.

AI might be killing the web, but maybe it was already dying?

I don't really think the web is dying. There's a ton of small, independent sites. And a quite a few small businesses building and selling services, which I hope thrive.
But yes, probably "the web" in the sense of "what most people expected of the 2010~2020 web" is certainly going away.

And you know what? While yes, AI is totally changing the landscape, we shouldn't fall into the nostalgia trap when looking back. Things were already pretty dire and annoying when consuming web content (or at least, big web content) and checking with Claude or GPT or whatever you like to use is certainly a much better experience.

The problem of people not reading past the AI answer, is not unlike people who never read beyond the first two results in old-timey-still-useful Google.

Footnotes

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I've thought of this post in the past, but the last couple days I was reminded in a few different ways:

• A friend shared in a group chat a controversial photo - more on this later.
• Coming back from a short road trip, we had lunch and got a little cup of ranch with our fries.
• Already at home, listening to a podcast, there was an ad for Hellman's mayonnaise.

Short detour: condiments vs condimentos

I can't say it is the same in all of Latin America, but at least in Argentina, a condimento is a spice. And mayo, ketchup, mustard, etc. are aderezos.[1]
It happened more than once, and definitely for way longer than it should have (a few months?), that I would go to the store and look for oregano or pepper in the condiment aisle, where the mayo is.
Only thing I can say in my defense is that these aren't things you buy on every other store visit, like milk. But well, sometimes brains just don't do brainy things. 👀 It shouldn't have taken me that long to internalize the difference!

The condiment pyramid of Argentina

At the base of the condiment pyramid is, of course, mayonnaise. Golden-colored mayonnaise. Is that a coincidence? I don't think so. Very obviously it is proof that the universe is the result of intelligent design. Mayonnaise = gold. Checkmate, atheists.

Growing up, I found even mustard more common than ketchup, although not so much after my teens. Was this an exception in our household? Did the situation change as we moved into the 21st century? Who knows.
The only important thing is that mayonnaise reigned, and will reign, supreme.
And there's a reason for that: all? sandwiches can be made better with mayo. If you embrace mayonnaise, no sandwich will ever be too dry for you.
I call mayonnaise "the universal food lubricant". It is good for a number of other foods, not only sandwiches: potato salad, rice with tuna, etc.

An unlike mustard or ketchup, mayonnaise has a subtler flavor that doesn't destroy whatever it is you are eating.
So, mayo is not as invasive, and very important, it is not sweet like ketchup. Who wants a ham and cheese sandwich to taste sweet?!?!?!

The disgraceful condiment pyramid of USA

Here, ketchup is king. You can find ketchup everywhere. Most sandwiches have ketchup. Sometimes with other condiments thrown in, but by then you have ruined a perfectly good sandwich with that hellish concoction.
I mean...it is red. You don't need to be Dan Brown to figure out that symbolism. Wake up, America!!! This should be the true meaning of the "red scare"!

At most stadiums, you can find ketchup packets, maybe mustard, ranch...but no mayonnaise. Ever.
What am I supposed to put on my hot dog, if not precious mayonnaise?[2]. What will I dip my chicken tenders and fries in? I can take ranch as a quite poor mayo substitute, but only because I am trying to blend in with the crowd, the locals. At a football game. Errr I mean soccer. America's sport, of course. (???)[3]

The exception that proves the rule

There's only one, the one sandwich that is not improved with mayonnaise. The one that keeps the universe in balance. And that sandwich is the choripán.
Behold:

The word "choripán" is simply the combination of the words "chorizo" (sausage) and "pan" (bread).
In case the etymology wasn't clear enough: it is a sausage sandwich. Usually served with chimichurri or salsa criolla.[4] It is a staple of street fairs and any decent asado.

And, I am ashamed to admit, among a group of friends, some heathens add mayonnaise to their choripán. This is an affront to the natural order of the universe. Choripán is the one exception to the rule that anything that is consumed in between two pieces of bread, can only be improved with the addition of mayonnaise.
This exception makes the rule stronger, of course. Breaking it is a crime.

But a crime not as terrible as ketchup.
Not a biased opinion.
Of course.

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Remember when I was so happy that I needed my phone to enter our community? But hey at least I found a way to make it better by using, of all things, Siri.

Well, about a month ago I figured it was time to change the phrase from "let me in" to something new, and accidentally discovered that you can set more than one shortcut for the same action!!! 🤯 Tech has come so far (???).

So I added "I am home" and "The eagle has landed" to the repertoire.
Funnily enough, it was the former that gave me trouble. The first couple times I tried it I said "I'm home", and Siri was not having it. It had to be specifically "I am home", because that's how I typed it.

I remembered to share this follow up just now because I was thinking of new phrases to open the thing. Simply so I can amuse the kiddo some more.

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Yesterday Day before yesterday, I realized I haven't posted in a while, not for lack of things to say [1] but because it was a pretty unusual week, in terms of activities, errands and whatnot.
And today we went out to a park and hiked 4 miles. This would have been nothing at certain point of our life, but we haven't done something like this a long time, so we all are tired.
Also the park wasn't close, but that was kinda the point (we wanted to drive for a bit). We spent most of the Sunday gone from the house.
AND! for the last two days, I've been waking up earlier than usual and couldn't fall back to sleep.
My brain is as fried as my body, so no "real" post today.
(And, update "today" when I finally publish this: yesterday I felt too tired and couldn't finish even the "not really a post" post).

But, I did wonder, has it been ever more than a week between posts here? What's the usual "post distance" or cadence I have? I can try to make this analysis using the feed [2] or just the post files, and that seems simpler. So, C-x j, and navigate to the directory with all the posts. There are 209 files, so happy 200th post to me, on checks files 2026-03-02. My first post was on 2024-07-23, checking on a website that does calendar calculations (sorry, felt lazy):

Result: 588 days It is 588 days from the start date to the end date, end date included. Or 1 year, 7 months, 8 days including the end date. Or 19 months, 8 days including the end date.

So, 1 year and 7 months to 200 posts. Rounding 7 months to 30 days each, 365 + 210 = 575 days.
About 2.8 days in between posts. If I made a mistake...remember that my brain is fried.

But, speaking of tasks that I shouldn't be doing right now...
(...and that I couldn't finish yesterday, as I started falling asleep while typing...)
...the original impulse was to get the days between consecutive posts. Using the magic of rectangle selections, I put on a buffer all dates only, and now to write some elisp:

(defun diff-to-prev ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((d1 (date-to-day (buffer-substring (pos-bol) (pos-eol))))
        d2 date-diff)
    (forward-line -1)
    (setf d2 (date-to-day (buffer-substring (pos-bol) (pos-eol))))
    (move-end-of-line 2)
    (insert " " (number-to-string (- d1 d2)))
    (forward-line -1)))
    

The reason I made the function interactive was to then invoke it repeatedly with a keyboard macro. And since this is a one-use-only I didn't even bother with save-excursion or docstrings or anything like that. I even made it go to the previous line after running, so I didn't need that step in the macro. 😎
I tested the command, corrected a mistake, repeated that two more times... And then I followed this sequence to start recording the macro, invoke the command, finish the macro, finally then repeat it 250 more times (| is the step separator): C-x ( | M-x diff-to-prev | C-x ) | C-200 C-x e.

With the list of dates, and days of difference, I can see that this 9 day gap isn't the biggest, there were two 14 days gaps: 2024-08-22 to 2024-09-05, and 2025-01-04 to 2025-01-18. Next longest is 11 days between 2025-02-21 and 2025-03-04.

I could find out the average words per post, or days of the week I publish more often, or most used tag, or...whatever. But it seems I don't care enough to do it. :D

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While Maria is studying, I am cebando mate (cebador is the one that prepares the 🧉 drink for everyone else) and using my laptop in tablet mode.
Except that after about 10 minutes, I already un-folded it twice. Well, three times if we count the impulse to write this now. =P

Which would make sense if I had like, visited Libera Chat, or started writing emails.
That isn't the case, though. I am mostly reading. But, for example, I shared a link in a group chat, which was easy enough to do in touch-only mode. Then I wanted to add a follow up message, and I gave up on touch-typing after three words.

The Signal chat where I shared the link, is the same one where a few days ago I said "I'll tell the full story later, when I am at my desk". I wrote that on my phone, and thinking about that just now which made me wonder if maybe the problem isn't that the Gnome on-screen keyboard is sub-par, which was my assumption as to why tablet mode doesn't stick.
Because in my opinion, no touch keyboard is better than a physical keyboard, but it could be argued that the phone ones are the most polished of them.

I thought a bit about it and (while deciding to write this post, too) I realized that there are three things that conspire to keep me from using tablet mode for long:

• Yes, the Gnome on-screen keyboard isn't great.
• It is too easy to give in to the temptation of a real keyboard.
• I have a mental block against tablets/phones for "real" stuff.

Gnome on-screen keyboard

Since the first time I installed Gnome, the on-screen keyboard actually got a lot better.
The first couple times I tried it, it didn't even have proper predictive. Well, the docs mentioned it, but it didn't work...
When I just started using Fedora, I looked for alternative keyboards (because Linux) but they rarely worked, and if they did, they were even worse. 🤷
I bet there are some new settings in the built-in one since last I looked into it, that I could tweak.

Real keyboard allure

This is a short one: it is just so easy to turn the laptop around and start typing.
Maybe that's how it is supposed to work, with a 2in1. It feels a bit weird, though. Or, annoying.

Tablets are not for "real" work

Ask my wife, every time I have to do something that will take more than 2 minutes I say "Will take a look later, on the computer".
Compared to her, she barely uses her laptop anymore and does everyone on her iPad or phone. Everything, for real.

I always make exaggerated "old people" jokes at her, because she is a couple years older than me, but in this one aspect it seems I am the old man. 🤣
(Well...it's not the only "old person" trait I have, to be honest. >_>)

Going back to the topic at hand, maybe it is useless for me that my laptop has a tablet mode, because no matter how polished it could be, I would still prefer to take my time to sit down and use a real keyboard.

Why do I care about this?

Because first world problems, I guess. Or because...

Truth is, some day I will get a new laptop. Not soon, I love mine, and it works fine for everything I need. Maybe it needs a battery refresh.
But then I will have to decide if I go for something like a Framework, or another Lenovo 2in1, or whatever exists when that happens.

I am really undecided on whether tablet mode is a worthy feature or not. I used it a lot to play Slay the Spire and Into the Breach, and sometimes to watch stuff on Netflix.
But I also tried to setup like 3 different graphical, touch-friendly email clients and none stick. I use Gnus nowadays, about as keyboard oriented as you can get.

Did you make it until the end? Sorry.
I don't think this is a good topic, is just something I thought about...clearly more than I should have.
And for some strange reason I wanted to type it all out.
See you in the next episode of "non-problem problems" 🙇

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It's been a while since I uploaded any pictures, and I figured, why not.

I have no idea if I mentioned this before, but Monty had a rash on one side of his body, and after it got better, he developed the same thing on the other side. Bummer.

Many times in my line of work I complain that people don't read error messages, whether is it compiler errors, exceptions, dialog boxes in general. Well, here's yet another example.
At the bus terminal, all buses drop people off on the same platform, and there's like 6 stairs and maybe 3 escalators to go down to the street level.
In this particular day the lights were off, but the results are the same even with lights on: The cone says "caution, wet floor"., yet people glance at it and keep walking, as if it were closed off. The next stair after this one is always congested, because very few people bother to read the warning and use the stair anyway.
Such a simple thing. But it annoyed me enough that one day I waited until no one was around to take the picture. Just READ THE SIGNS, people.

Last Saturday, kiddo and I went to Yankee Stadium (!) for the second time (!!) for a good game of football.
It was an entertaining enough game. But we lost, so...sad trombone.
I will eventually write a post, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, about the Rapids season so far. Let's say I wasn't surprised by the result.

Speaking of future posts, for a while now I've been meaning to write a big rebuttal to the Rapids subreddit naysayers about the Colorado Rapids stadium and its atmosphere. If instead of my first live game being at our humble DSGP, it would have been a NYCFC game, I don't think I would have gotten tickets again for a while.
(The DC United game at Audi Field was marginally better. Philly Union was even a bit better).

On Sunday I went for a bike ride, the first in a loooong time. It was cold, and slightly windy, but I needed it.
I found the "MLB Network" building, which also includes NHL studios. Apparently they are moving these studios soon to Newark. The satellite dishes on the side gave me a bit of nostalgia for my time working at Starz.
That building had some dishes on the side too, and they were a bit of an anchor for a planned office move that finally happened a little bit after I left the company. Anything related to these antennas requires a lot of permits and red tape, it seems. Installing them, moving them, and apparently decommissioning them too.

From the same bike ride. My humble contribution to the "sidewalks in America are an afterthought" collection.

That's Suzie keeping me company at night while I watch Wind Breakers, on Netflix. A pretty run of the mill shonen anime. It was well animated and entertaining enough. Serviceable. 7/10.
And it was a necessary rest from the gazillion of romance stuff I've been watching since like, January. 🤣🤣🤣
I also got back into Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I abandoned early in season 3. I love this show, I probably just got tired of it from watching 2-3 episodes a night a few years back.

And that's all: a bunch of blurry phone pictures. Let's close the post with Punk Pigeon.
I know the photo is really blurry, but no matter how curious the look of the flying disease carrier is, I am not getting closer just for a pic:

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I won't re-iterate my hesitations around the AI hype, already wrote plenty of posts on that.
But as I said before, I feel it would be silly of me not to take advantage of the resources I have access to at work to...well, at this point it is late to stay ahead of the pack (and I don't believe in such kind of mentality anyway). More like, catch up? Try to stay relevant?

At the very least, I get to know what's the landscape of AI-assisted coding. And learn about the different tools.
From there, who knows. I might convert to a believer, or (more likely, and this is the case so far) I will have more nuanced views on the matter.

So far, doing the chat thing for rubber ducking, and replacing search with a conversational session with Copilot has been working fine.
The former is pretty great (I don't have a Justin-like coworker to constantly chat about the minutiae of each other's code).[1]
Search and conversation is hit an miss. Sometimes it is great, sometimes it misunderstands what I am looking for completely. Other times I "smell" that it is giving me BS, and I am usually right about that instinct. Not always, to be fair.
And, DDG/Google sometimes did send me on wild goose chases, too.

Code completion isn't as great for me. Because it throws me off my line of thinking, and I am fast enough typer. The cost of reading the suggestions and deciding to accept them or not is more than just typing the next thing.
And stylistically, whatever models I tried weren't close to my (code) writing. I hated most of the variable names, or the way they structured blocks, or the logging messages...
All this to say, I didn't have much use for Copilot.el. At first I kept Copilot-chat around, but after watching this video I moved to gptel, which seemed like a more integrated thing, with the feature to invoke it and replace text in buffers in-place.

And last Friday, on a call, someone shared their VS Code screen while they were doing "agentic development". Not sure if that qualifies as "vibe coding". I am not up to date on the lingo. 🙃
But that got me curious enough to try gptel-agent today. I asked it to add a binding to a command, and to commit changes...little things, just to get my feet wet.

Enough blabber, where's the code?

It's not a lot. So far?

(require 'gptel)
(setopt gptel-backend (gptel-make-gh-copilot "Copilot"
                        :host "api.business.githubcopilot.com"))

(require 'gptel-agent)
(setopt gptel-agent-dirs (list (expand-file-name "~/.config/agents")))

(defvar-keymap hoagie-gptel-keymap
  :doc "Keymap for gptel."
  :name "Gptel Copilot"
  "c" '("copilot dwim"  . gptel-send)
  "t" '("transient" . gptel-menu)
  "a" '("add..." . gptel-add)
  "f" '("free form chat" . gptel)
  "A" '("agent" . gptel-agent))
(keymap-set hoagie-shortcut-keymap "c" hoagie-gptel-keymap)
    

F5-c is my "Copilot prefix". I like having a quick binding to gpt-send, although to be honest I should use it more often. I also don't know if over time I will keep using the independent chat, or always stay within the agent thingy.
It is interesting that gptel-agent comes with four pre-configured "personalities" (personas? subagents? directives???): researcher, introspector, executor, and gptel-plan. The last one says it is for high-level stuff. ?_?

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I added delete support to my Paste bin clone, Peanut Butter!
Now when you create a paste, with the name you also get back a UUID, which you can use to delete it.
If you don't make a note of the UUID right after creating the paste, tough luck.

I want to keep PB simple to use, but having the ability to delete makes it possible to use PB for quick-discard sensitive information pastes.
Not that I would advocate for anyone to use PB for sensitive information!!!

Sidenote: An oddity

When I updated the "production"[1] pastes database with the new delete key column, I noticed something:

sqlite> select name, substring(content, 1, 45),date_added from pastes where name = 'NAMEEDITED';
NAMEEDITED|I have a question, can you contact me at mice|2026-03-08 09:04:14
    

This is weird for two reasons.
One, my email is all over the place, so if someone wanted to contact me, they could just send me a message.
Two, I rarely if ever check the pastes database. So this could have gone unnoticed for a really long time.

In short, if you want to contact me, just send me an email!!!
Of course I am curious, and will send a message to whoever left this paste :)

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Via Lars Christian's website, I got a link to this post: ai;dr by Sid.
The quote from the post that Lars shared caught my attention, I completely agree. Sid says:

For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

So I went and read the post, which is pretty short. I use LLMs pretty extensively for work. [...] I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding. Sid continues.
That's the first thing that gave me pause. Documentation is writing just like any other. Why consider it a level below, less important or less valuable, than other written communication? Or at least that's what I interpret, docs are fine to be LLMifyied, unlike more worthy text?
There is more, though... 👀

When it comes to content....I need to know there was intention behind it. That someone wanted to get their thoughts out and did so, deliberately, rather than chucking a bullet list at an AI to expand. That someone needed to articulate the chaos in their head, and wrestle it into shape. That someone spent the time and effort - rudimentary proofs of work from a pre-AI era.

Welp, so much for the agreement. I established before, in probably too many words, that I am of the opinion that writing code and writing prose are more similar than we sometimes give them credit.
So I would say that when it comes to code, I need to know there was intention behind it. That someone needed to articulate the chaos in their head and the requirements they have, and wrestle them into shape. That there was intention behind it.
Sid again:

I'm having a hard time articulating this but AI-generated code feels like progress and efficiency, while AI-generated articles and posts feel low-effort and make the dead internet theory harder to dismiss.

I am going to venture that Sid has trouble articulating this because it is completely wrong.
Which is a convenient interpretation, because it agrees with my opinion =P being honest, I suspect we simply have a different view on the topic. 🙂

I expressed many times in the past (not sure if in this blog, probably yes) that I consider "writing more code, faster" a pretty bad idea. Writing the right code (think before you write), and the least amount possible of it has been my guiding mantra for a while now.[1]
Touting productivity, AI involved or not, as generating more code, or automating the writing of code, is misguided. Just my opinion, of course. And these days, one that is being constantly challenged too.

Time will tell...my belief is that the lower barrier to generating code will lead to a ton of low quality, just as it happens with generated text of any other type. Why would it be any different???
It's not 100% on the AI stuff. It is a tool like any other. But there's ample evidence that most people will go for the lowest amount of effort. And in this context, that means "whatever generated piece of code that kinda works gets committed/deployed/published as soon as possible".

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Spoiler-free section

After my first break up, I read Paulo Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die. The book had a profound effect on me, and then I went on a Coelho binge with my mom. We read like 5 or 6 of his books in maybe a couple months.
A few years later, I started re-reading it. I found it boring, trite, even empty. I didn't make it very far into it. The only reason I can tell you what it is about today, is because I read the synopsis in Wikipedia just now when looking up the English title.
The point of this paragraph is that nothing your read, watch, or listen to happens in a vacuum. The moment in your life, your age, where you live[1], everything makes a difference.

When my niece recommended Goodnight Punpun (the same niece that pointed me to After the rain) she spoke very highly of it. And after reading it, I could see how it would influence me if I read it when I was anywhere between 16 and 25. Or so.
I mean, while I was going through it, there were scenes and character thoughts were I drew parallels to my own life.[2]. So it was making me reflect.
After finishing it, about a month ago, I thought Wow! That was good! Interesting story! and that was it. Yet... I felt like waiting before writing a review, for no reason I could explain.

And it is a good thing I did wait. Since then, little tidbits of the manga keep coming back to me. I find myself revisiting dialogues and how they affected later parts of the story.
Punpun and his story keep simmering in my head. I guess it did hit me more than I thought initially.

I am pretty sure that when I re-read Punpun in a few years, the experience will be similar to "Cien Años de Soledad", a book in which I keep finding "new experiences" every time I revisit it. I look forward to it!

For and against reading Goodnight Punpun

Will this be your first Japanese comic? There are a few character choices that make more sense if you have been exposed to these stories before.
If you can't stomach stories with sad or violent moments, I would skip this one.
Do you think the idea that a number characters being drawn as birds is off-putting, or silly? Feel free to skip.

Now, if you you feel like getting on an emotional roller-coaster...
If you enjoy "life stories" that cover many years of character's lives...
If you are open to a book that makes you feel like putting it down once in a while, because you hate certain character choices, or what they are thinking...
...then you should read this manga. It is totally worth it.

Spoilers below this header! You have been warned!

You still have time to close the tab... :)

There's a lot of little details through the comic to reflect on. For example, Punpun felt he never loved his mother, yet he had a picture of her in his bedroom a few years later. Did he make peace with her, after she was gone? Or is it yet another symptom of how much Punpun does what he thinks he is supposed to do, rather than expressing his true feelings? I am still undecided on that.
And that is just one panel in a single page.

The cast of characters around Punpun is as interesting as it is frustrating. Whether it is friends or family, almost none of them are just good or bad. They change, and not necessarily grow. For example Punpun's father, when he reappears near the end, you can't really say he is a better person than before. He is doing better, but did he grow, emotionally?
Yuichi, was a really supportive figure when Punpun was little, and then a mess of a person. Or was he always a mess, but Punpun couldn't see it because he was just a kid?
And this goes on and on for almost everyone in the cast. I think his landlord, Shishido, is the only person that is good-good. And he is constantly taken advantage of...if we believe his abusive daughter.

Sachi was probably my favorite character, for too many reasons to write.
Even though I am nothing like her, I feel that I understand her thinking and feelings the best

I read some comments online about the Pegasus story being a drag. While it wasn't my favorite part, it was necessary to expand on Seki's and Shimizu's bond, and growth.
The contrast between them is maybe a bit on the nose, but it is interesting how at certain times you feel sad for one or the other.

The "you have to comment on that" stuff

Yes, the rape chapter was rough. In particular because I could see it coming from a mile away, how Midori was using Punpun as an emotional clutch.
The worst part? I think I've been on both sides of that fence in my life. Being "used" by someone as support, and vice-versa. Never with outcomes as traumatic, luckily.

Aiko's suicide was another moment that was building up for a few chapters, and the tension was destroying me. It was clear that the runaway situation she and Punpun where in was not going to have a happy ending, but I never expected it to close the way it did.
And while Punpun's reaction to it surprised me at first, it made complete sense later...let's talk a bit about that.

Aiko

Where to being with Aiko?
First of all, I identified immediately with Punpun's idealization of her (for very obvious reasons, I used to idealize couples when I was younger, been there done that).
Yet the moment she demanded Punpun's total dedication, even as a little kid, I had a knot in my stomach. It reminded me of a relationship way back, with someone that was also experiencing a difficult home situation. We were both too immature, so things went down as you would expect.

Then comes their time together. Another case where I experienced something eerily close: idealizing someone for some time, and then getting together. It is really hard, once you put someone in a pedestal, to build a safe and healthy relationship of equals.
But even if you are hurting while on it, when things finally end, you have with big void inside. The (misguided) idea that "you could have done more".
Toxic relationships are addictive, until you heal and grow enough to recognize them as such and to build better ones.
So the way Punpun was in denial of Aiko's death, and his feeling of abandonment afterwards, made sense after some more thought. Even if their bond was extremely unhealthy, accepting that their time together was terrible was even more painful.

Fake intimacy

A common theme of the manga are fake-deep relationships. Bonds that give the appearance, because the people involved need them to, to be deep.
But they are actually just a cover for sadness, anger, whatever. There are very few moments of Punpun really opening up to someone.
Maybe that's why I liked Sachi so much. Not only was she aware of the ways in which she was messed up, but also she was trying to do better? to really connect with those around her?
(Maybe when I re-read the comic in the future, I come to the conclusion that I was just idealizing her character 🤣 who knows)

And there are more things that I wouldn't put in writing in this space

There's a ton more of parallels between things I experienced and whatever happened in this manga. The common trend is that my own life experiences were (relief!!!) milder than the stuff in the comic.
Some of those things are very personal (even more than what I already shared), so all I will say on that is: thank heavens for therapy.

I will give it a couple years before I revisit Goodnight Punpun, and I am looking forward to it.

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This is a first, a bilingual post. Because I think the story is short enough that I am fine writing it twice.
And because I am rebel, it doesn't have the same title. 🤷

Español: "posá para el video"

Hace unos días en el podcast de Conan O'Brien hablaron con un oyente que se dedicaba a restaurar videos caseros. En un momento de la conversación hablaron de films informales de las decadas del 30 y 40, y que es divertido ver como en esa época la gente no se sabía comportar frente a las cámaras.

Inmediatamente me vino el recuerdo de mi abuela, cuando la filmábamos. Ya sea con la vieja filmadora con cassettes, o con los celulares, siempre que nos veía filmando se paraba en pose para una foto y se quedaba dura como una estatua.
Si nos ponemos a buscar, estoy seguro que entre todos debemos tener decenas de videos de ella, parada de costadito, con una sonrisa, y mirando a la cámara.
Y probablemente todos los videos terminan igual, con alguno diciéndole que estamos filmando, y todos estallando en carcajadas. Especialmente ella.

English: "Say cheese"

A few days ago, I was listening to the Conan O'Brien podcast. They were interviewing a listener that restores and archives home videos.
During the conversation, he mentioned that he loves home movies from the 30s and 40s, before people knew how to react to being filmed.

That immediately reminded me of my grandma. Whenever we filmed her (no matter if camera or cellphone) she would smile and strike this very specific pose, completely still, looking at the camera.
I am sure that if we looked, we could find tens of videos of her, doing the exact same thing.
And they mostly ended in the same way, one of us would tell her It isn't a photo! you can move. and then we all exploded laughing. Her the most.

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En el podcast de videojuegos que escucho todas las semanas, Café Fandango, usan alguna noticia para hacerle preguntas al público. Esta semana fué (parafraseando) "Qué cosa no pudiste hacer en un juego y te molestó".

Desde que no tengo redes obviamente está complicado que conteste (o me entere cuál es la pregunta...) pero escuchar las respuestas de camino al laburo el jueves inspiró este post. Porque hay que justificar la existencia de este espacio.[1]

El "uncanny valley" de la jugabilidad

No traducir "uncanny valley" es medio tramposo, pero creo que se entiende mejor así.
O soy muy vago para buscar una buena traducción.
Un poco de esto, un poco de aquello.

Muchos oyentes incluyeron, en sus respuestas, los obstáculos que no deberían serlo. Por ejemplo cuando tu personaje tiene un salto triple, y en algún lugar del mapa hay una cerca de 10 centímetros de alto, como puede ser que no puedas pasarle por encima?

Y acá es donde hago diferencia entre tipos de juegos, y algo que efectivamente es lo mismo, me genera sentimientos muy diferentes.

Si estoy en un "juego-juego", con ítems coloridos y flechas flotantes que me indican dónde ir, entiendo que no puedo pasar por ese lugar porque es, justamente "parte de las reglas del juego".

Pero si es un juego que tira más para el lado del realismo, entonces me pregunto, ¿por qué no me dejan ir ahí? ¿Qué hace ese lugar diferente de todos los demás?
Y la verdad es que mientras más realista sea la experiencia que me están vendiendo, más me saca del juego una situación así.
Porque yo "sé" cómo funciona el mundo real. Sé que esa puertita de madera, si le tiro una granada, tiene que romperse. Entiendo que si pude entrar por todas las ventanas del área o nivel A, tendría que poder hacer lo mismo en el caso del nivel B, o no son todas ventanas?

Claro que es subjetivo

Mis respetos a los juegos que construyen mundos realistas. Toma mucho trabajo, desde lo técnico. E incluso desde el diseño de la jugabilidad, es casi un arte. Qué cosas cortar y cuales mantener, de "toda la realidad"?
Cada juego encuentra su respuesta, y no es universal. Por ejemplo, no me acercaría a algo como un SimCity, pero hice varios niveles de Tinytopia (y debería retomarlo....). Para otra persona este último puede resultar demasiado simplista.

Ese era un buen ejemplo, pero en el género de simulación, que es muy particular. Por ahí un mejor género para comparar son los FPS. Prefiero toda la vida algo de acción a lo Doom. En lugar de un juego donde tenga que comer cada 6 horas, ducharme para que no me agarre una infección, y anotarme en la moratoria para pagar la boleta de la luz.
En el segundo caso, tarde o temprano voy a terminar encontrando algo que se es muy videojueguil. Y listo, me arruinó todo.

Sé que lo llevo al extremo

También quiero reconocer que el 75% de las cosas que juego son estilo arcade. Siempre digo, un juego me compra si tiene cualquier combinación de estos elementos: combos, plataformas, algún sistema rebuscado de puntaje, y dificultad media tirando a alta[2].
Tal vez, tal vez, simplemente me aburre el realismo porque no probé suficientes juegos que lo hagan "bien".

Por otro lado, hace poco escuché que en Death Stranding dónde tenés que balancearte al caminar, y me pareció lo más ridículo del mundo.
Porque si me das un juego donde no corrés por default, entiendo que me estás pidiendo que tenga el botón de correr presionado todo el tiempo, o que me mueva por el nivel usando el dash constantemente.

Que no hay dash? Uninstall.

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Yesterday and earlier today

The problem with having a public website with your name in the URL is that there are things you just can't say.
Like, I can't say "thank heavens I can at least chat with Copilot, because our group chat on MS Teams was silent for over an hour after I brought up a minor design issue I was wrestling with".
I really like those small predicaments because, since the scope is small, they are as easy to explain as they are to discuss and weigh the alternatives.

Lessons learned: first, the fact that something is easy to discuss, doesn't mean anyone else cares. Second, I can't help but caring, even if no one else does.[1]
Lesson three, Copilot is a good rubber duck, even if some of its suggestions are quite outlandish. So, there you go.[2]

Giving IRC a try. In 2026.

SourceHut provides a hosted IRC bouncer for paying customers. I spent a lot of time in chat rooms in my mid-teens. Like...a lot.
So naturally, I was curious to give it a go. In 2026.

IRC is a shadow of what it was, although to be fair I am treating it like a novelty and not spending hours conversing with a group of strangers. So the fact that most channels I am in don't have much traffic is actually good.
But if I am being sincere, most of them are pretty dead.

Not unlike other chats, sadly.

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Via Andreas excellent weekly linkdump series, I read this post: "The Slow Death of the Power User".
The post is good, although a bit depressing. I don't agree with all of the points it makes, but I recommended it.

Sidenote: don't be too much of a downer, even if you are right

I am of the idea that it is better to focus the doom in one topic at a time.
The linked post starts with Power Users, but then goes on a parade of all the things wrong in tech.
And the author isn't wrong, but when you go over that many negative things in one go, by the time you reach the end the post, you end up feeling like giving up on...well, everything.

Quote on algorithmic timelines

Going back to the main topic. A few days ago we had a conversation in a group chat for podcast[1] about whether Twitter is a good way to "stay in the loop".
Of course, I argued that not really, but didn't quite articulate why in a convincing way. I think this paragraph from fireborn's post sums it up really well:

The algorithm situation is the one that most directly affects daily life and receives the least serious scrutiny. Every major platform uses recommendation systems that are, in the most literal sense, making decisions about what information you encounter. What news exists in your world. Which of your friends' thoughts reach you. Which ideas get surfaced and which get buried. These systems are explicitly not neutral - they're optimized for engagement, which empirically correlates with outrage, anxiety, conflict, and tribal reinforcement, because those emotional states produce the behavioral signals the engagement metrics reward. The platforms are making your information diet worse on purpose, because worse converts to engagement, and engagement converts to revenue.

Nothing more to add. Do your best to get off the algorithms.
I know it isn't easy, that FOMO is strong, but it is really worth it.

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I've been a little disconnected from writing lately. In part because I was entertained with a game, and books, but also for an unknown reason. Writer's block?
It's not like I didn't have post ideas. Or things that I felt like saying out loud.
Anyway...here we are now.

Quite a few days ago I read "I didn't fail" by Kev Quirk. It resonated with me in a few ways.
I didn't have the experience of explicitly stepping down as he did. But after my last time as a manager and then (pseudo manager/team lead) for about 3 years or so, when the time came to find my next job, I knew I totally wanted to be an "individual contributor".
By the way I hate that moniker. But, you know. Simplest way to say what I wanted to say.

And since then I've avoided (if possible) to take on anything above that level.
I will be honest, sometimes I miss aspects of leading a team. I would like to think (citation needed, from people who worked under me, I guess) that my teams were fun and we got a lot of shit done. We all learned, and I tried to make room for everyone to be their best selves. Of course I also made my fair share of mistakes, and faced a number of challenges.
Another thing I miss is the part of figuring out stuff when someone in your group is stuck in some task. Naturally you only are asked get involved with the "fun" (difficult and/or annoying) problems. And those are the most satisfactory to solve, when you bounce ideas together to crack a challenge.
Then again, where I am now I do get involved in a lot of that kind of problems, but informally. So I get to skip the boring parts of leading a team. :D

Speaking of which, I don't miss the 100% managerial stuff: office politics[1], anything to do with compensation[2], performance reviews. That kind of thing.
I know anything above a team lead level is work I can do, but I am skirting the limit of my abilities, and I am definitely not at my happiest.

Kev talks about the ego aspect of it, and I am surprised I never thought of that. When I ran teams, I was always very protective of "my people" ("my"?) and with his post I realized that this (usually) positive attitude, probably came from a place of ego.

There is another side to not being a lead or manager, but having had that experience in the past: it really sucks when you can tell whoever is playing that role, is doing a terrible job at it. I am grateful it is not the case where I am now.[3]
Sometimes it is just not their thing, despite the best intentions. Other times they simply run teams with a philosophy that is counter to my own. Yet others they simple are bad leads.
Whatever the case, the ego usually shows up saying "I could run this thing better than X". A couple times in the past I had to remind myself that if I really believe that, then I should go back to those roles.
But there's a reason I don't...................

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My employer has offices in Argentina[1], and just now I was IMing with a coworker from over there. She was telling me she had blood drawn for some tests.

I've read somewhere in the past, that Americans are sometimes surprised at how open coworkers can be discussing personal stuff in other cultures. Like health issues, or family dynamics.
I don't know how true that is. I talk to everyone about everything myself, so I don't think I can judge that. When you open up to people, your interlocutors also do, in my experience.

Anyway, my coworker told me this and I commented that I recently went for my annual check up[2] and this brought up the very distinct memory of going to a lab to get your blood drawn back home (I wrote about how "home" can mean Argentina or the US, in here ).

In most cases you go to a lab location, rather than having someone at the doctor's office to draw blood. Unless the doctor is at a hospital.
And more importantly, it is customary that after getting your blood drawn you get a coin-like token for the local coffee machine. When I was a kid you used get a little coupon to go to a café near by, which was good business for them: chances are you are fasting, so with your free coffee you will to get a croissant, or sandwich. A tostado sandwich. 🤤
I wonder if nowadays they give you some discount code for a machine or nearby shop, rather than a physical token. Times change...

I hadn't thought about the coffee-after-lab thing in many years, and why would I. It's not part of the everyday experience, you go to a lab once in a while. I suppose my wife and I might have commented on it early into our relocation journey, but after noticing it once, you normalize how it happens here, I guess?

And I got nostalgic feelings because I recall there was lab in downtown Buenos Aires that I visited more than once, as many companies used it for pre-hiring tests. [3] They gave you tokens that looked like coins for an arcade game.
Then I felt like sharing the memory, and you might have felt like reading the post. Or you just reached the end of the post and realized there is no point to this one.
Oooops.

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On his post Why I inlined my CSS in 11ty, ldstephens explains that he achieved faster page loads and an easier deployment process. His post was interesting in a couple ways.

As it is known, the content you are reading now is hand-typed HTML. I didn't feel like learning, and then be tied, to one or another tool. Be it a static site generator or something fancier.[1]
As a consequence of that early decision...

• I became more acquainted with Emacs' mhtml-mode and its bindings.
• I reconnected with "base" HTML, which is nice considering how long it had been since I had written any web stuff.
• My deployment process has always been as simple as dropping the new posts (and modified index) in a directory in some server.

As all developers also know, there's a "stiffness" that comes with templating too much. There's a balance to be had. How much to err on what side of the equation comes down the the specifics of your code base and requirements.
I don't think it should matter for this site, ever, but I like that I can manipulate a specific page if I feel the need.

The other part that was interesting from the post, and it made me laugh, is that during a call with Wouter recently, I used a CSS change in my site as an example of multi-file search and replace operations, using only Emacs built in packages.
And Wouter didn't approve of having inlined CSS everywhere, out of principle.
To be honest, I see his point. I like the simplicity of not dealing with links to the CSS, and invalidating when there's a new version. But as discussed previously in this space, simple is hard to define. You could argue that having a centralized CSS file is as simple as it gets.
It doesn't allow for unique styling per post, but that can be overridden for that single HTML file anyway? If it comes to that? So he kinda made me see that it is "more correct" to have an external file, linked in all posts, and then I see evidence to the contrary!!! What should I do!?!?!?!?!!

For the time being, nothing, because I am distracted and entertained with other things right now. But I am leaning on still going ahead with an external style sheet. For starters, I find the cache argument a bit spurious, you can just version-name your files and the problem takes care of it itself in even the most basic web server configurations.
The speed thing can be argued, although after seeing ldstephens site, and my own...does it matter? Both sites load within a second. Just like with standardizing, you need a balance. Never optimizing isn't good, but how does it benefit your users to make page loading faster than a single second? At that point the "real" page load time depends as much on their hardware as it does on the network not having a bad blip. I think we have taken it far enough by then. Any of the websites that have anti-bot challenges (and there are more every day) take comparatively ages to load.

Conclusion: Do the things The Right Way™️. No, not that right way, the other. The one that is more correct. Not that correct, the other.
OK, I will just spell it, for me, giving my circumstances and goals, I think the right move if to stop inlining CSS. To make things simpler and faster.
What do I mean by "simpler" and "faster"?
It doesn't matter. Gotta go! 🤡

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I got off the bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It's not exactly the most glamorous place. Then again, it is a bus terminal, and it fulfills its mission. What should happen in there? We all get off the bus singing "New York, New York" while doing a synchronized dance?
Sidenote, there's a plan to more or less rebuild the Terminal, and I have a suspicion it will take too long, cost too much, and achieve very little of substance. I mean, the US is a bit better than Argentina when it comes to state-run projects. Or is it? I am not sure. After 10+ years, you see as much the differences as the similarities between the countries...[1]

I started walking to the train station. I like to take the exit on 42nd street and walk outside, rather than doing it all underground. The familiar disabled veteran was on the corner of 8th avenue, despite the cold.
Next to the subway entrance at 7th avenue, a guy covered in bags was smoking. Is it wrong to assume he is homeless? Maybe he is "only" crazy[2]. You never know, in this place. I timed my walk speed to pass by in between the puffs of smoke.

I got on the 3 train, annoyed that people were standing in the door instead of walking in. I hate with a passion people that don't take off their backpacks. I pushed them all, with a bit more force than needed. That showed them, for sure.[3]
I start heading left, and I see now why there is no one one there. A woman is sleeping on the small seat, her head resting on a cart full of bags. The cart takes enough space that no one is sitting across her.

"Well, right it is", I think. In Spanish.
That is not a given, by the way. At this point, my head is a linguistic mess. Most of the times it is fun, though.
Anyway, I turn right, push some more backpacks, and I see why so many people are standing on this side too. There's a homeless guy sleeping on the seat. His legs are shaking, and I feel a hint of sadness. I have enough time in the trip to wonder how long he's been on the train, and think there must not be a lot of alternatives for him, in this cold. At some point I realize I completely lost track of the podcast I am listening to, so I rewind it and pause it for the trip back home.

Finally, I get off at Wall Street and start the walk to the office. I brought breakfast from home, so I can take a different route than usual, no need to stop by my bagel guy.
The sidewalks are still lined by piles of snow, and I see I can cross the street between a small clearing on my side and a clearing on the other side, where steam is coming out of the storm drain.
As I approach the drain, I see a rat trying to climb out of it. It falls down, but when I take the next step, the little head pops up again.

Now, I've seen much bigger rats in Buenos Aires. Well, in New York too. It's not so much that I was scared by this little guy, but I figured I didn't want to risk a rat bite. So I took a step to the side and made a little jump over the snow. I was immediately reminded of a musical scene from The Critic.
I am not as short as Jay Sherman, though. The rest...ehhhh.

Not a hater, though

I still like living here, by the way. "Here" means the "NYC metro". I don't live literally in New York City, but still.
I think the city is awesome, and unique in many ways. I happen to like our NJ town, too.

It is interesting, though, that it took me years to get used to being close to the mountains in Denver. In comparison, I normalized living here much faster.
I had a similar experience when I stayed a few weeks in São Paulo for work, many years ago. The metro area of the city is about the population of all of Argentina, and I very much enjoyed how different the city is from Buenos Aires. Still, I felt comfortable pretty quickly.[4]
Same with New York. The sense of awe lasted a few weeks, and now it is just another city - once in a while I take a moment to absorb the skyline, or Times Square, or some other uniquely NYC detail. But most days, it feels like a place I naturally fit in.

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Siempre me pareció tonto el "featuring" en la radio/videos/spotify.
"Artista ft. Otro artista"
Empezando por el uso de featuring que siempre me pareció una boludés, decí "con", ponele una coma, decí "invitado". Hay mil formas de ponerlo en español!

Si alguien que me conoce en persona lee esto se va a reír, porque incluso muchos años antes de vivir en USA ya mezclaba bastante español en inglés, tipeando y a veces hablando. Pero bueno, ese caso en particular siempre me pareció malísimo.

La otra razón por la que me parecía tonto, es que lo veo como una herramienta de marketing pedorra. No imagino que se juntaron dos artistas con una visión común, o con ganas de probar algo nuevo. Sino que la discográfica los obligó a colaborar para vender más y ya.

De cero a nostalgia

Un día, sin razón aparente, me acordé de Fabiana Cantilo y dos temas muy 90s: Mi Enfermedad, y Mary Poppins y El Deshollinador.
Ya tenía Spotify, y ahí encontré que ella sacó varios discos más durante los años. Escuché algunos, me copé, escuché todos, y BOOM, me armé una lista con temas de ella. [1]

De nostalgia a...Natalie Pérez?!

Un día viene mi esposa y me dice, "te acordás de Natalie Pérez?". Sí, me acordaba, de algún show que miramos juntos o ella miraba y yo pispié de refilón.
"Ella también canta, y ahora sacó un tema con Fabiana Cantilo. Yo creo que te va a gustar"

Y tenía razón. "Pegaditos" se sumó a mi rotación. Y de curioso escuché el resto del disco. Algunos temas me gustaron, hasta ahí. Una semana después le di una chance más y encontré varios temas que me coparon, y un segundo disco que también me copó.
Curiosamente, algunos de los singles[2] la verdad no eran para nada mi estilo, o sea que por lo medios tradicionales de radio o videos[3] la verdad no le hubiera dado una chance a ella.

De Natalie Pérez a...esa bandita que escucha mi sobrina?!

Como dos años después, poniéndome al día con los releases de Natalie Pérez para sumar algunas cosas a mi lista, encontré un tema nuevo, "El Tesoro".
Es una versión en vivo, y ella canta con un invitado. Me EN-CAN-TÓ, entonces busqué quién era el chabón.

Resulta que es el cantante de una banda que vi varias veces en los posts de Instagram de una de mi sobrina, El Mató a un Policia Motorizado. Nunca le había dado bola pero bueno, ahora tenía curiosidad...y dos semanas después, ya tenía una playlist armada con canciones de EMAUPM.

Y la frutilla del postre, que fuimos a ver a Los Fabulosos Cadillacs y quién estaba de telonero...el cantante de EMAUPM, que también toca solista.
Creo que el 80% del público no tenía idea de quién era. Si no fuera por la cadena de sucesos que describí arriba, yo tampoco hubiera sabido.

Y por eso siguen existiendo los featuring....

O sea, en algunos casos supongo son realmente colaboraciones espontáneas, pero incluso si es una herramienta de marketing, queda claro que funciona.
Conmigo, al menos, funcionó dos veces.

Así que voy a dejar de tenerle bronca a los featuring y encontrar cosas nuevas para enojarme y/o amargarme. 🤡

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Looks like I'm big on parenthesis for titles lately. ANYWAY...
We sometimes watch fun movies on Friday night, which usually are pizza dinners too.
We used to do almost always animated fare (which I of course enjoyed very much). But now that the kid is older, my wife is taking the opportunity for us to watch more...well, movies. In a couple years even Juan will abandon my preference for animated stuff. BUT let's not concern ourselves with the sad future. =P

Today, as the post title spoiled, we watched Speed. I thought quite a few times Sandra Bullock is so charming, and not so long ago I was thinking of While You Were Sleeping, I should re-watch it..[1]
The other thing I thought is that the movie was as good I remembered. Yet I remembered a lot less than I thought. Yes, they are on the bus, and they can't slow down, and they make like a 15 meters jump on a highway. But there's a whole section at the start and the end of the movie that I completely forgot about.

I won't spoil it. I recommend it. I mean it isn't an "awesome cinematic experience". But it is a fun, well made, movie. With a tight script, almost no fat, all content.
I am 🤏 this close to writing a post about reviews, trying to distill my stance on the topic.[2] The point being: this is a perfectly fine 7/10 movie, 9.5/10 on the right night, and that is OK. Not everything has to be THE BEST or THE WORST.

There are a few changes I would make to the script. Some of the characters in the bus were annoying. Well, actually, the one guy. Delete him.
Another one is, make the limit less than 80 Km/h. That's like, a lot. Maybe 50? Or even a bit less. It would still be exciting, but a bit more real. According to me, who knows nothing about driving buses.

Mmmmmm that's all I can think of without spoilers. There's a couple forced decisions near the end, but eh. 🤷

There's also a lot to love in the movie. Lots of practical effects. Real consequences, like bystanders dying. Nowadays there's at least a half a second view of the crowd running away safely except maybe the Hostage of the Day. Not here.
Also there are quips here and there but also real emotions. People crying. That is refreshing too.

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I will be honest: I haven't changed my stance on AI, yet. Maybe I will, maybe the bubble bursts before that happens.[1]

But I am offered free Copilot at work, where there's an upcoming event centered around AI. And the memories of my unemployment spell in 2023 weight enough on my thoughts that I figured that I'd rather take advantage of the opportunity to expose myself to AI, and have some familiarity on how to use it.

All my configuration is public, except the "work config", which sits in a private repository, for obvious reasons. I just finished setting up Copilot, and because documenting things is always a good idea, here is how it went.

Picking up a package

There's a ton of options when it comes to LLM integrations in Emacs. Gptel is the one I remembered seeing mentioned in /r/emacs, but I ended up installing two other packages instead: Copilot.el and Copilot-chat.

Why? because they seemed simpler to configure. 👀

On Windows

First, I installed Node[2] as instructed in Copilot.el's README. I went with the MSI installer version.
Then I package-installed both Emacs packages, executed copilot-install-server and copilot-login, and that was it.

It took me a minute to understand that copilot.el offers only completion and nothing more. I actually like it that it is so focused.
In contrast, copilot-chat offers a lot more features. But it also "just works", and I like that it follows the semi-standard design of "provide long input, C-c C-c". Yay!

On Linux

This isn't my Linux laptop, but a shared Ubuntu development server, where I run an Emacs daemon that I installed via Snap.[3] As much as possible I try not to request package installations, so for Node I downloaded the pre compiled binary, and I dropped it in ~/.local.
Other than that, everything else worked in the same way than the Windows setup.

Configuration and bindings

Regular readers[4][5] might recall that I moved away from use-package a while ago. And also that I revamped my key bindings. I remembered both things when setting this up.
Also, usually I wouldn't mix configuration from different packages (the horror! 😱) but in this case, they really are too closely related not to do it.
Enough intro, here is the sauce:

(require 'copilot)
(require 'copilot-chat)

(defvar-keymap hoagie-copilot-keymap
  :doc "Keymap for Work Copilot."
  :name "Copilot"
  "t" '("toggle copilot" . copilot-mode)
  "c" '("complete"  . copilot-complete)
  "f" '("open chat" . copilot-chat) ;; f for "free form"
  "r" '("review region"  . copilot-chat-review))
(keymap-set hoagie-shortcut-keymap "c" hoagie-copilot-keymap)

(keymap-set copilot-completion-map "n" #'copilot-next-completion)
(keymap-set copilot-completion-map "p" #'copilot-previous-completion)
(keymap-set copilot-completion-map "TAB" #'copilot-accept-completion)
(keymap-set copilot-completion-map "SPC" #'copilot-clear-overlay)
(setopt copilot-idle-delay 0.5
        copilot-chat-frontend 'markdown)
    

I delayed the completion suggestions a bit, but I am tempted to disable it entirely (set copilot-idle-delay to nil). Will know for sure when I try coding something meatier than today.
There's a lot more commands in Copilot-chat, but for the time being, I will M-x them.

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I've thought about this a few times here and there, so I suspect this will be a long one.

A while ago, I bookmarked this post by Christian Heilmann: Time to separate the art from the artist, intending to add some comments on the topic. And to make a broader point about how unhelpful it is to make general statements in these things.
It is funny that I got reminded of it by a recent exchange between two other bloggers:

1. Manu Moreale: Moral False Dichotomies
2. Baldur Bjarnason: Books as signifiers, the paradox of tolerance, and Nazi bars

The first post by Manu, I think is a must read, and it is short. I will quote it below.
I will also quote the other posts. I only know about the last one because Manu was mature enough to share it despite being, as he says, a misrepresentation of the point he was trying to make.[1]
And the reason he shared it is, I believe, exactly the point he was making the first place...
But first, let's address:

Manu's examples

Manu has a knack for extreme examples[2] that remind me of certain type of science fiction stories. The type where there's some wild "solution" to a "problem" (irresponsible cloning, abuse of robots, organ replacement, whatever). Some authors might do a better job than others to address the how things got to that point, but the interesting part is the exploration of human issues when taken to wild extremes.
What would would be the effect of X thing happening? How would it shape society? How would individuals adjust?
And from those explorations, we (readers) pare down layers and extrapolate what the story (or Manu post) says about some current state of affairs. Or the human condition. Etc.
In this case, Manu's example is:

Now, some preferences can raise eyebrows: if I tell you my favorite book is the Mein Kampf, you have every reason to be perplexed and ask follow-up questions. But if you just assumed, based on that, that I'm a Nazi sympathizer, that would be wrong. Because you don't actually know what. This is obviously Godwin's law in action, and I'm using an extreme example to make the point clear, but it applies to all sorts of more nuanced scenarios.

It is a wild example. I get the initial reaction.
He says right there that it is an extreme example though. Which I honestly appreciate, because:

I am fucking done with the Rowling conversation

Seriously done. The cursing is warranted. I am fucking done with her being an example every time this topic comes up.
Christian Heilmann:

JK Rowling created an amazing world with Harry Potter [...] built a magical world where love is the strongest power, even protecting yourself against non-blockable death spells. A world full of magical creatures, some of them half human, and a pivotal gay character. A world where the good people stand up for the rights of merpeople, centaurs and elves and the bad people bang on about blood purity. [...]
How a person responsible for a world like that can not mount the mental curb that some people aren’t the gender they were born as baffles me. That a person that did the great thing of paying her taxes and giving back to a social system that once supported her now spends her money on lobbying to get laws in place that limit the freedom of people baffles me even more.

I wonder in what kind of world Christian lives, where it is so baffling that people can see love in one place and not in others. Because (sad as it is) I consider that the norm.
A simple example: the father and mother of a family that doesn't support gay rights for sure love their kids. Yet they cannot conceive that people of the same gender can have romantic love.
A CEO can care a great deal about their closed ones, yet engage in practices that could indirectly harm them. From destroying the planet to distributing terrible drugs.

The point is, the world, people, are complicated. We all rationalize things when we need to. Some people do it as a survival mechanism, others to justify short sighted decisions, or to not deal with the weight of their choices.
And this applies to whether you enjoy Harry Potter or not after the "Rowling controversy". Context matters. Speaking of which:

12 year olds and context

I read the first Harry Potter book when the books were already famous, for a simple reason: it was a novel for kids, and I needed to practice reading English. I had just finished Robinson Crusoe, and needed something with a simpler vocabulary.[3]
While I was happy about the release of the last few books, I read them a few years after they were published. I could never touch the series again, and not mind it one bit.

Contrast this with my son. Because my wife is a big fan of the movies, he loves the franchise. He also loves to read, and constantly re-reads the entire series. It is obvious even now that for him Harry Potter will be a huge part of his childhood memories.
I don't think he ever cared about anything that JK Rowling said, for the simple reason he's been never exposed to it.
Baldur Bjarnason (spelling from the original text):

You can still talk about these books without driving people away. You just can't pretend they exist without context. Everybody today knows about Rowling or Woody Allen. Pretending that context doesn't exist is insulting.
If you keep referencing Harry Potter or quoting Woody Allen (even that McLuhan scene) without acknowleding the context, you are doing so kowning their reputation. You simply can't have missed it by now. Pretending that context doesn't exist just isn't plausible.

There are big assumptions there, starting from everyone having access to the same context. That say, 5 years from now, whatever bullshit Rowling spouted about trans people will still be a headline or information that "everyone knows about". For example, my wife never cared for "celebrity news" that aren't from Argentina, so she had no idea about Rowling until I pointed it out.
And what happens if I keep my kid outside of social media (which we are trying), and then he simply never happens to look up if there's any controversy about the author of the books?
What happens if someone grows up in a house where their parents never talk about trans people, at all. Not negatively and not positively either. And now their kid has a deep love for Harry Potter books, and no clue that they need a disclaimer every time they touch on the topic, because they never even considered trans rights and what Rowling might have said about it.

And that is (in my interpretation) one part of the point Manu is trying to make.
If a person in such circumstances would run into Baldur at a literary group, what I get from his post is that they would be pointed at and shamed for not adding all the "required warnings and caveats#34; to the conversation.
Whereas if they were in the same scenario with Manu, they would start a dialogue to understand each other circumstances regarding these books. And most likely they would both have some growth because of that.
If some day in the future, my then teenage son has to have a conversation about Harry Potter with someone, I'd rather he does it with Manu. He understands that:

All rules have exceptions, even the ones you self-impose

The bigger point, the one that I originally started ruminating when I read Christian's post, is the flawed idea that we have to generalize the place where society as a whole should draw a line regarding any topic. And whoever disagrees should be condemned.
Whether it is supporting or banning artists, or enjoying something controversial, or putting up with ideas we don't agree with.

I have an unbound love for Tex Avery cartoons. Many of those shorts have, to put it mildly, outdated depictions of race and gender. When I was a kid, I didn't know they were offensive. And these days, I don't care to point out that they are offensive for the simple reason that I find it obvious: they are works from almost 100 years ago. Of course they are outdated.
Now, if tomorrow "the people" decided to "cancel" those shorts, I wouldn't care. I would still watch them. Why? Because they were a huge part of my childhood, so I will gladly make an exception. I won't feel this diminishes Avery's genius in any way. But other people might feel so...and that is OK.

I was reading American Gods right when the Neil Gaiman news broke. Since then, I have felt apathy towards reading more of his works. However, I have a childhood friend who loves his writing. I haven't asked him about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if he still regularly goes over his Sandman collection, or revisits Gaiman novels.
Am I supposed to admonish and finger point at my friend? These books were his companions during a very difficult period of his life. His relationship with the material goes deep enough that he might never let go of it. And I find it is his choice. As it is mine to accept it or not.[4]

A made up example: In three separate family reunions, a grandfather uses reprehensible rhetoric to talk about immigrants.
In one case, their grandkid decides to speak up, and leaves the gathering.
In another case, their grandkid changes the subject. Because they don't like hearing those words from their beloved grandpa, but they also feel he won't change by now. And they accept him with his flaws.
In the third case, everyone celebrates such comments.
These meetings are very different. But I would only feel unwelcomed at the last one. It would be clear to me that grandkid number 2 is not exactly in agreement. And maybe talking to them about it would uncover something like "I wouldn't accept that from anyone. But I lived with my grandparents while my dad recovered from a long illness, and they made a world of difference to me in a very dark time of my life". This is another example of Manu's point about trying to find out details before judging, because it can make big difference in understanding.

Conclusion 1 - On Baldur's post

Bjarnason says: The example Many used means he made a very different argument from the one he thought he was making. He sleepwalked into the paradox of tolerance. But if you ask me, Manu knew exactly what example he was making. By focusing only on the book title, even after it was called out specifically as being an extreme, Bjarnason is the one missing the point. This is, of course, just my opinion.
I could also be totally misunderstanding Manu's point. 🤷

Conclusion 2 - Embrace blurry lines

We have all seen this, in movies and books and whatnot. Our main character said he/she would never kill. But then if they don't kill the bad guy, their family or spouse dies.
These kind of conundrums happen again and again in storytelling because, just like with science fiction, it is interesting to stretch "the rules", and see what would it take for us to change or reshape our moral principles. What are the exceptions.

And no one is immune to doing that. I can't separate art from artist in the case of Gaiman. Yet I don't feel particularly betrayed by a writer lady in her sixties having outdated, harmful ideas about gender identity.[5] If someone wants to assume that this means I agree or support her ideas, they are in the right. But I am done with the idea that I need to start every conversation about her works making a disclaimer. It is exhausting. Even dumb.
I started re-reading Cosmos a while ago. A lot of scientific figures mentioned in the book are petty, childish and entitled. I am sure there are tons of examples (yet I can't think of any know =P) of historical artists that we all know were terrible people, yet no one is crucified for not making their apologies before mentioning them.

Whatever "the conversation" is about what we all should feel about art, artists, and how the artists behave, we all will be open to exceptions. You will be disappointed in music band X for selling out for a quick dime. But turn a blind eye to band Y doing the same because you like them that much more. Or their songs mean more to you. Or you have a connection to them through your father, or first girlfriend, or whatever.

Let people enjoy things. Enjoy them yourself. This constant need to put rules and fences and caveats to everything is annoying. Embrace the fact that all "rules" are imperfect.
Instead of blindly imposing your made up rules, have a conversation.
Having a conversation doesn't mean that you then need to agree later. And disagreeing also doesn't mean the conversation needs to stop. Unless you want it to stop - use that power wisely, or you will never leave your echo chamber.

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Since my last "three links" post ended up being too thematically disjointed 👀 I decided to make the next ones focused on one topic. For today, we have tech. And one tech adjacent one.

Sal: Management is hard

In his post, Sal argues that being a manager in a company means there's lots of unseen and unappreciated work. Hard agree, from my short experience[1] doing that.

I know in many tech circles it is popular to shit on managers (or scrum masters, or project managers, or whoever isn't a purely tech person I guess). Which is a shame.
And look, I know there's a lot of people in those roles that are better at selling themselves than actually doing the job. But when you have a good manager, someone that cares, they make such a big difference in your day to day.

I don't think I am suited for that kind of job long term myself, but having done it in the past has definitely improved my understanding with whoever had to manage the groups I was in since.

Wouter: mechanical vs laptop keyboards

Wouter has a post on his experience with a NuPhy mechanical keyboard and how it compares with using his laptop's keyboard.

By chance, I am typing this on my laptop. Very unusual, as I tend to just go to the desk with my Dygma Raise (v1) if I spend more than just a few minutes writing. I am that used to it.
I find Wouter's post extra relatable in that back when I originally got the Raise, I thought it was better to get a keyboard closer to the standard distribution rather than a columnar or orthogonal one. I remember telling a friend I won't buy a Dygma Defy, it is too different. But with a Raise, I can quickly switch between keyboards, no adjustment needed.
How wrong I was. 👀 Just now I hit the space bar and then a letter, because I have a layer for symbols that I trigger with my left thumb in the Raise.

I have no regrets with the board though. It is has great build, it is beautiful, and more important, it helped me get rid of wrist pain. I also I feel I have achieved the perfect customization, and it fits me like a glove now.
But if I knew I would get that used to my split keyboard...maybe I should have gotten the Defy...

Matt: Tired of subscriptions

In Matt's post, he shares he is tired of everything now having a ton of ads, or being subscription based.
I agree, but a bit after reading the post and nodding in agreement, I realized there are a few things to consider.

One is the fact that you need to pay to get your app published in some (all?) stores. So if you sell apps for a fixed price, after a while you will still need to pay the store to keep it published...while making less money over time, obviously. Less new users available.

Another fact, which I don't know if it comes from the idea of doing subscriptions, or if it generated it, is that people expect regular updates to their apps these days.
Everything must add more and more features, until a new app is released that is lean and simple. Users flock to the smaller app, and the cycle begins again.
It is not enough build a tool or client for some service, and let it be stable and have X amount of features forever. Nothing is ever "done" in the world of modern software, sadly (IMO).

I don't know what the solutions is.
Like I said above, I also don't like subscriptions, but I don't see how mobile devs can earn a living if they have a small portfolio of "mature" apps. It makes more sense to sell something that is continually updated, opening the door to subscriptions (or ads).
I do like that we have these conversations, because like Matt, I also like to pay for the software I use. I would like for app developers to earn a sustainable living without resorting to shady practices.

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The wife is on a trip, so it's been only kiddo and me for a few days. One night I sat down to watch a few episodes on Netflix, and got caught up with almost everything I had pending. On the recommendations thing that pops up when you are done with a show, I got Stranger Things (we watched it on my wife's profile), Rayearth (I re-watched it somewhat recently on another service), and Witchwatch.
Now, I had seen mentions of the Witchwatch manga before, and thought it would be to my tastes. Comedy plus romance? Right up my alley. But I never got started reading the comic, the anime was one button away, I gave it a chance.

It took me a short time to finish it. So I was sleepy most of the week 👀 but totally worth it. It was funny, yep. But also, ahhh the romance. That's what really kept me hooked. And the next recommendation, was something I had added to my list a while ago, a show called "The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity".
The name is weird, really. I am sure that there's something about the kanjis for flower and dignity that make this a poetic metaphor (or a pun) to "he is tall and she is short" or something like that.

And the show was....ehhh. It wasn't bad. Or was it?
You know how they say in movies and TV you have to show, not tell? Well, in this thing every single character told their backstory and explained their thoughts with annoying detail. Two or three scenes in a row of just inner monologue.
Also something that definitely is an anime trope, everyone apologized excessively about perceived mistakes they made, and their reasoning for being in the wrong were just bizarre. This was semi-justified as a character trait for just one of them, in the rest it made so little sense. It was almost annoying.
Also, when you are over 40, having "high school rivalries" as a major plot point, doesn't quite land. Well, that's maybe on me, for watching shows about teenagers. :)

Yet, I devoured the 13 episodes. In about half of them, I had a stupid smile in my face for way longer than it would make sense to do. My cheeks hurt from grinning so much. Which takes us to the original title of this post.

The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Excessive Apologies and Spell-It-All-Scenes, but I still watched until the end: a love letter to love stories

All they needed to keep me hooked was advance the main romance about half a millimeter.[2] Is she blushing a bit more? Is he realizing that he is happy when she smiles? BOOM, I am pushing that "next episode" button before the credits begin to roll, and smiling like an idiot.
Why is that? The simple answer is: I am sucker for love stories. And this one wasn't a particularly good one, but I just couldn't help get to the end to see if they get together. Actually, that's silly, we all knew from the first episode that they would end up together. And yet I still watched, I needed to see it happen.

Okay, that's was anime. It's different in live action TV shows, or movies. Or is it?
There's a lot of TV series where the will they, won't they thing keeps you hooked even if you know they will end up together (first one that came to mind is "The Nanny", but there are countless newer, and older, examples).
And we all know the movie rom-com formula: they meet, there's some hurdle (class differences? clashing personalities? some kind of misunderstanding? [3]), but "real love" always wins in the end. And yet those movies (thankfully, hehehe) still exist. Some have a slight twist about them, like "Definitely, maybe". Some make the romance secondary to the comedy, or to the growth of one of the characters in particular, like "About a boy".
Some add fantastic elements, or go into raunchy territory ("Anyone but you") but the basic formula is still there.

After day one

I did put "real love" in quotes up there, because I've been married for over 10 years by now. I've learned that a relationship takes work.
I know that some days your partner is just insufferable, or annoying. I've had to make my fair share of apologies for having those behaviours myself. When someone has to put up with you daily, they eventually see it all, no matter how much you try to hide it. A lot of love is vulnerability.

There's days when things are just off, and the wavelengths don't match at all. And there are many amazing days where I cannot imagine my life without her.
And then, there's most days. Most days are the same as most days. But a little something in the familiarity of what we have built together makes them good. I can't deny that I've found the most enduring love in the mundane little things that can happen at any moment. Not the big gestures (although those still happen), but the small and consistent ones.

Nothing of what I said is on display in most of these movies. Probably in none of them. They are really about the (very real) thrill of just falling in love. Which makes sense, we all fall in love.[4], so they are relatable.
But even at that they are, sometimes, really dubious.

Best not to think about it...

My mom and I are huge "Sleepless in Seattle" fans. Famously, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks share like 2 scenes together. She leaves her boyfriend (or fiancee? it's been a while) behind to go meet this guy that for all she knows, could have stabbed his wife to death.
The boyfriend did nothing wrong, if anything, they try really hard to paint him as boring because otherwise he seems like a great dude. Even when she is leaving on this crazy plan, he is very understanding. I mean, she is leaving the future President of the United States for a voice on a radio show!!!

"While you were sleeping", another common fixture of late 90s cable? Tricking the entire family.
"Notting Hill", with the contrived ending about their misunderstanding, and the press conference scene.
I am a fan of "Love Actually", and even before the internet did their best to ruin it, I could see that some of the stories were...questionable . (If you like the movie, and silly comedy, you should watch this Tiny Idea skit).
More recently, the last season of Bridgerton? With him traveling the world, and getting laid in every port, while she was a chaste lady patiently waiting for him? I hated that.

...because I can't, and won't, stop!

But no matter how far fetched the situations, how contrived the plot devices that separate or unite the couple to the whims of the script, I can't help loving these stories.
The excitement of the first few dates or encounters, the snappy dialogue, the happy endings. When the story is good, just them holding hands and getting into an elevator makes you know they had a happy life together.

We all know how these end. Like when the magician asks your to pick a card, and you know he will pull it out of someplace by the end of the act. But just like the magician, how they put the story together, how they sell it to you, can make all the difference in the world.
And I figure the same can be said about action movies. Which I also like a lot...but.

There's something special about love stories that just GETS to me. And I tried for a lot of words to get to the WHY, and this post is huge, and I really can't explain it. I bet someone wrote about why like them we like by know, which means I should have done some research before writing this. =P

All I know is that now I want to re-watch everything I mentioned in this post, and feel happy and cozy vibes.
The same I felt every time Kaoruko and Rintaro shared a scene...

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To keep things from being only tech, why not have a quick cat update. How is Monty adjusting to life in his new house?
You could say very well:

BUT! He developed a rash under one of his "armpit", and the constant licking kept expanding it and he lost hair in the area. We took him to the vet, they gave him some medication and an acrylic cone. Maria replaced it shortly after it with a nicer one, but still, it didn't make him super happy:

Maria pointed out that he didn't have any health problems when he was a stray kitten, he got them once he "upgraded" to being indoors. 🤣
Once the treatment was over, we let him be, but over time he started (over)licking again in the same area, so we had another vet visit...and another. The cone came back. We got a second cone to rotate them when they get smelly. Right now he is in treatment for a fungal infection. We'll see how he evolves over the two weeks days...

I know the audience is wondering, did the relationship with his sister improve? Well...this is the closest they've ever been, because she was sleeping:

The scene ended with him tapping Suzie (really, a gentle tap, he didn't hit her). She hissed, there was some screaming from both sides, and then they separated.
They tend to spend a lot of time in the living room, each one in their separate areas (usually opposite ends of the room). We would have loved for her to clean him while he was wearing the cone, and fantasized that they would sleep together in colder days, but alas.
In part, it is better she is not cleaning him, as she might have spread the same fungal infection. I guess the princess is above licking or sharing a nap with any commoners...

She likes to sleep over two small ottoman-pillows we have in front of the couch upstairs. One day my wife moved the ottomans out of the way to vacuum, and she also stacked on top the pillows from the couch. I guess it was a deep cleaning day.
Suzie decided she didn't mind the extra pillows at all.

DISCLAIMER: the cats in this post are my own and do not represent any cats that my employer may have.
(Yes, that was a callback to the previous post 🤡)

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In my last post I mentioned AI in one of the sections[1]. I posed the question: As people rely more on AI answers, will then their barometer to discern the actual answer from the ad portion of an AI text also go down?
The next day, WHAM, Bruce Schneier: Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something?.

Paid advertising in AI search, and AI models generally, could look very different from traditional web search. It has the potential to influence your thinking, spending patterns and even personal beliefs in much more subtle ways. Because AI can engage in active dialogue, addressing your specific questions, concerns and ideas rather than just filtering static content, its potential for influence is much greater. It’s like the difference between reading a textbook and having a conversation with its author.

The post is worth a read.
But wait! There's more!!! Today we had an hour-long meeting at work where AI was brought up about 984989848704989384938093938 times.
Exactly. I counted.

Digression: disclaimers

I never added a disclaimer to the site stating "these opinions are my own and not from my employer" but...look around. What kind of employer would have something like this as their public image???
And if you are somehow confused on whether the opinions expressed here come from my employer or are mine...what can I say. That's on you.

But also, having such a disclaimer strikes me as somewhat pompous. "So many people are going to read this, and assume that such elaborate opinions can only come from a team of thinkers paid by a major corporation. I better add a disclaimer".
You don't need to tell me the disclaimer is a case of CYA, it is obvious. But again, who can read these ramblings and come away thinking it isn't just the product of a dude banging at his keyboard at night?
I wish my employer asked me to review romance manga. Then the confusion would be justified...

Back to our programming

Another thing I said in my post was: All the tech giants have invested so much in AI, that unless every planet in the solar system has a need for it, there's no way they can justify the amount of money they are burning. There has to be losers in this race, and it will be us consumers as usual..
Guess what! Today in that long meeting, someone[2] shared this great text by Cory Doctorow: The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us. From looking at the URL, I am about a 8 months late with my observation.
I wonder if I heard something similar to this, and then forgot about it.[3]

It is a great read! Someone from my team also shared a video version of more or less the same ideas.
I recommend either version. Very interesting.

n I also walked out of that meeting hopeful that at least a sizable chunk of people are not taking all the crazy productivity claims at face value. Yay.

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The last two times I started a post of "light commentary on disparate topics", I ended up expanding on only one topic, and dropping the rest.
But this time, they are comments on links, so other people did most of the typing already. :)

On happiness

Kev Quirk posted some thoughts about happiness. Timely post, my sister and I were having a conversation over the last few days about the responsibilities of parenting, and how they impact everything else in our lives.

But the simplicity of my life a decade ago made me so much happier. I don’t wish I’d stayed there, though. Life moves on. We mature, we progress, we change. And I’m happy those things have happened to me, and continue to happen to me.

This paragraph resonated with me in two different ways. On a surface level, I had to agree. My life was much simpler when I was 30ish, and I have fond memories of a specific period when I felt "truly free".
But then I thought about how I feel inside my own head now versus then. And even with all the added responsibilities, the turmoil of emigrating (which had its consequences), the challenges of parenting, etc...I think I am happier now.
The answer to this question, is, obviously, extremely personal and unique. It can even change day to day, as we use different lenses to evaluate what/how to asses something as broad as "happiness".

I know that I feel more at peace with myself than ever before in my life.
I don't mean enlightened, actually the complete opposite. I still have a base level of anxiety, it still takes a bit of effort to see myself doing things instead of just reacting, and old habits pop up here and there.
But I see the honesty and acceptance of where I am and (more importantly) where I want to go as being a good place from where to keep growing.
And that makes me happy.

OpenAI ads

On a completely different topic, ldstephens is worried what will happen with OpenAI when it introduces ads.
Small quotes: I'm genuinely concerned about how the introduction of ads will impact my ChatGPT experience. and Instead of the dedicated ChatGPT app, where I have little control over the content, I plan to use the browser version.

First a disclaimer: to this day, I have barely used AI. I think it is important to be transparent that I am what you would call an AI hater. Well, not necessarily hate...I am indifferent towards the tech, honestly. But like Manu Moreale once said, I hate the circus around it.

So, back to the post: It thought it was completely delusional. We have been through the reddit and twitter fiascoes already, related to using third party clients. And same with being served ads in a web context.
In the best case, since the product you are using controls the presentation, even if it is in the browser, they can still sneak in ads one way or the other. Disguised as part of the same content. An adblocker will block dynamic ads from other domains and trackers, which is great, but you are still open to many ways of being exposed to ads.

Which takes me to the worst possible future for this. As people rely more on AI answers, will then their barometer to discern the actual answer from the ad portion of an AI text also go down?
You ask "good restaurants in city XYZ that are open the two days I am visiting". You will get a generated answer from reviews (which are themselves subject to manipulation, but I can only tackle so many topics in this post) but then one restaurant gets bumped in the generated answer because they are "promoted". Just like it happens nowadays with Google results.

All the tech giants have invested so much in AI, that unless every planet in the solar system has a need for it, there's no way they can justify the amount of money they are burning. There has to be losers in this race, and it will be us consumers as usual.
Expect AI to get even less factual as time goes by.

Shallow discourse

The already mentioned Manu had a recent post on social networks that reminded me of a gem from a few weeks ago: On simple solutions.

I keep thinking about this tweet because to me it embodies one of the core issues I have with general social media discourse: the lack of depth. The idea expressed in that single sentence is so devoid of details and substance that it is effectively meaningless.

It is a short one, I recommend it.
I been thinking about that Manu quote a lot recently. You know when? When reading the news. That's just extra sad. And bad for democracy.
Political and policy discourse has devolved into the same shallow "solutions" that a tweet from a random dude can offer. But these are (allegedly) public servants...
I have examples of this from both the US and Argentina, but since this post is in English: Minnesota shows what happens when governing and content creation merge - NPR.

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Ayer empecé a ver WitchWatch en Netflix. Yo sé que las comparaciones son odiosas, pero: la versión nueva de Ranma, que la vi de a ratos porque a veces me cansaba, es lo más BLEH que hay al lado de WitchWatch.
Lo que me hizo reír ese show, y recién empiezo! O sea, hay tiempo de que se vaya al tacho, pero bueno. Está bien emocionarse también, no?

Hablando de emocionarse, fui a compartir la buena nueva a un Discord y salió el tema de Sailor Moon Crystal.
Iba a escribir un post hace dos semanas, cuando terminé de ver la última película, pero colgué y ahora el destino quiso que este sea en español. Porque no voy a ser tan choto de contestar una pregunta en una comunidad latina con un post en inglés.

Mi historia (inconclusa) con el cómic

La mayoría de las comparaciones que vi después de terminar el show nuevo, y no leí muchas[1] hablan con respecto al manga original como la versión definitiva de la franquicia.

Como para dejar las posturas en claro, yo el manga lo leí hasta la mitad, no lo llegué a conseguir todo, porque dejaron de importarlo. Lo traían de España y el peso perdió valor (porque la historia se repite, Groundhog Day, 100 años de soledad, el tiempo es un círculo, etc.) y bueh.
Hasta donde lo leí (que es cuando aparecen las Outer Senshi), me gustó, PERO es muy distinto del anime, va mucho más rápido. Y peca de algo parecido a lo que le sucede a FMA vs FMA Brotherhood, que hay ciertos eventos que suceden en tiempos más cortos y entonces hay una disonancia entre el nivel de emoción que muestran los personajes y lo que siente uno como espectador.
En el anime cuando todos lloramos porque alguien muere, pasaron 15 capítulos construyendo esas relaciones. En el manga es como: 3 páginas, somos amigas de por vida, yay! Oh no, te moriste, voy a lamentarme durante 8 páginas. Y vos no lo sentís igual que los personajes...

Es bizarro que para ser una serie que me gusta tanto, todavía no haya leído el cómic completo (y encima lo tienen acá en Barnes & Nobles, qué estoy haciendo con mi vida??? aaah sí, tratando de terminar esto antes de que se haga hora de laburar).

Cómo llegué a Sailor Moon

Bueno, esto está tomando dimensiones de ensayo, más que de review. Pero el contexto importa!
Porque el primer episodio que vi de Sailor Moon, y hay pocas cosas de cuando tenía 14 años que recuerdo así de claro[2], es uno que todas se enferman con una gripe excepto Mina y Chibiusa. Y las dos tratan de mantener la casa limpia (creo que el depto de Mina?) y de cuidar a las demás pero rompen todo.

Desde ahí, si me preguntás momentos top 10 de Sailor Moon, y seguramente en el 1 te diga, cuando Mamoru le propone casamiento a Usagi en Stars, pero el 2 es cuando quieren comprar entradas para el concierto de Three Lights. Ahhh pero están gracioso eso...capaz es el 1. Y el 3...bueno, no, por ahí 2, el episodio doble de Ojo de Pez en Super S?
Ven qué difícil que es? el punto es, para mí la comedia del show es tan importante como el romance y las vidas pasadas.

Vine por una review y me vendiste un papiro

Sailor Moon Crystal temporadas 1 y 2

Las primeras dos temporadas del show sufren por ser demasiado fieles al cómic.
No es la primera vez que sucede, adaptar un cómic más o menos cuadro por cuadro. Funcionó en 300, quedó a medias en Watchmen[3], y fracasó en este caso.
Bueno, no objetivamente fracasó.
Pero si me preguntás A MÍ...que se yo. Toda las subtramas de Rei siendo re chispita y enojándose fácil, son inventos del anime. Pero suman, hay mil momentos graciosos por eso. Y también hacen que cuando Rei se muera...

No, no es spoiler! Porque 1. la franquicia tiene más 20 años, y 2. Acá hay un plot device más poderoso que la esferas del dragón. Takeuchi no fue inteligente en hacer que el Cristal de Plata esté dividido en varias piezas para estirar el cómic más haciendo que las reunan, pero es eso. De hecho, es incluso más poderoso.
Decía, no es spoiler, porque todos mueren y reviven todo el tiempo.
Y ese es el punto: que igual te duele porque querés a los personajes. Porque compartiste tiempo con ellos...salvo en Crystal. Si, ya sabemos todos que Ami es Sailor Mercury, pero Usagi la conoce y a los 15 minutos ya le dan la birome mágica y sale a combatir. Para ser momentos que estaba emocinado por ver animados de nuevo en formato más moderno, me dejaron mucho sabor a poco.

Ah, y hablando de animación moderna, el show se ve bastante pobre. Yo en su momento lo miré simultáneo con Japon usando Crunchyroll, y tengo entendido que después limpiaron algunas animaciones para el release en DVD o BluRay, lo que sea que reemplazó al laser disc en Japón.
No tengo idea si en Netflix tienen la versión mejorada o la original del broadcast, no volví a ver las primeras dos temporadas....

...y para un show que aprecio tanto, capaz esa es la verdadera review, no? 👀

Temporada 3

Acá la cosa se pone un poco mejor, porque el estilo de animación es un poco más fluido, porque tienen más elementos de comedia. Supuestamente también dejaron de seguir el manga página a página, pero, se acuerdan que no llegué a leer todo este arco argumental? Así que no sé qué tan diferente es.
Pero es una buena temporada. El problema es que S es probablemente la temporada más recordada del show, y más querida. Entonces compite contra algo muy épico, al menos en nuestros recuerdos...< Y de nuevo, si bien hay más cosas divertidas en esta temporada, un tono más liviano, no llega a la cantidad de gags que había en el show original con Haruka y su fluidez de género...[4]
Está bien la nueva, pero...
Ese podría ser el resumen de las películas nuevas, por cierto. Bueno, no...son un poquito peores, digo yo.

Las dos peliculas que son Super S

Yo no le tengo tanta bronca a Super S como supuestamente le tienen en el fandom. Tiene algunos capis muy buenos y momentos que recuerdo muchísimo, como el ya mencionado de Ojo de Pez.
Pero la película doble se queda corta por apurar todo. Los cómics son cómis y las series son series y las películas películas. Me explico.
La misma cantidad de episodios de una mini-serie, puestos uno atrás de otro sin pausa, son una película malísima, llena de relleno. Lord of the Rings son películas geniales y cortaron MUCHO de los libros.[5]
En este caso adaptar un cómic en algo así como 3 horas le saca lo que se llama "breathing room", o sea, no deja que las cosas se desarrollen. Para que algo te importe, tenés que pasar tiempo con ese evento/personaje. Que es lo mismo que dije hace 5 párrafos, je.
La historia está OK, nada especial, la animación es muy buena. Pero...eso. Apurada, chata. Lo épico, para ser épico necesita un crescendo. Sino es como esa música clásica que empieza de golpe: te asustás, y después los latidos bajan...y ya.

El crimen de Sailor Stars

Y en esta review positiva...
Je, no, obvio.

Primero, esa historia inventada con Neherenia al principio de Stars es buenísima. Si, ya sé, relleno, invento, bleh. Pero me encantó. Y acá obviamente no está.
Hay un romance entre Seiya y Usagi, pero es, objetivamente[6] MA-LI-SÍ-MO. Como cuando hice la review de Rayearth, hay un sentido de que hay un triángulo amoroso porque sí, no por eventos del show que llevaron a eso.
En el show original, Usagi se rompe en la terraza (aguantanse las lágrimas, ya casi termino la referencia a esa escena) y confiesa que Darien/Mamoru jamás le contestó una carta y todas se sorprenden y Seiya y...
...esperen que me seco las lágrimas yo.

En cambio acá, Usagi entra en una especie de trance pedorro...si ya sé, es trauma. Y su cerebro bloqueando que él desapareció delante de sus ojos. Capaz que en el cómic quedaba genial eh. Pero acá me dejó sabor a poco. Es imposible animar algo así? o que quede bien a nivel historia? Ni idea. Pero acá, para mí, le faltó, y no me transmite nada.

Entonces la idea de que Seiya, en 4 minutos de diálogo, está re enamorado de Usagi, es como BLEH y más aún que ella le dé un ápice de bola. O sea, duda menos que en anime de los 90, pero Mamoru desapareció hace menos de 10 minutos, qué estás haciendo Usagiiiiiii

Y ya que estamos sacando trapitos al sol, no tiene ninguna escena con esta melodia de fondo.
Como dije, un crimen.

Conclusión

Voy a conceder que en algunas cosas le estoy pegando al show nuevo de más, por no ser como el que yo amé de pibe.
El mejor test, creo, es imaginarme que si le recomendaría a mi sobrina (la que me recomendó Kamisama Hajimemashita y After the rain) que vea esta serie. Y la respuesta es...No.
Le diría (de hecho, ya le mandé mensaje =P) que mire WitchWatch. Amo Sailor Moon. Pero ese amor es producto de 200 capítulos, de pasar tiempo con los personajes, de aprender a quererlos.

Quiere decir eso que la serie es perfecta? No, seguro que no. Y tal vez algún día haga el rewatch que se merece, y me decepcione. Aunque agarré algunos capis sueltos hace unos meses y la verdad estaban bastante bien!
Claro, en los que no recuerdo deben estar los que son más flojos. :)

Justifica este post mirar los 200 episodios del show original, que es una inversión de tiempo desmedida para un adulto con trabajo, hijo, etc.? Y que se yo. Yo creo que es cuestión de tiempo >_>

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Let's preface saying, I was never a good dater. It took a series of coincidences for me to even have a love life. =P
But bizarre and contrived as my dating past is, I am so happy it happened when it happened, instead of this modern era of dating apps. I just don't get it. Maybe if I wasn't old[1] I would be fine with it.
I saw this ad a few days ago in the subway:

W. T. F.
I guess the intent is that the app is about genuine connections, but to me that read like a frigging interview question. Straight out of LinkedIn.
When LinkedIn was about tired interview tropes instead of self-aggrandizing """inspirational""" content.

Imagine showing up to a date, or even in the context of an online chat, and open with "what did you learn about yourself this year?"? I would totally expect the next question to be "in what type of role do you see yourself in five years". Maybe let's go over the list of acronyms in my resume, while we are at it.
This is what hell looks like[2]. I think if I was born just a few years later, I would have died alone rather than go through this circus...Or maybe I would think it is normal (but still die alone, probably).

What's wrong with small talk? let things be awkward, that's the best part of meeting someone in this context...you don't know what to say, how the other person sees you, etc.
I mean, it sucks, but that's real and something you carry with you forever. It gives you fun anecdotes to share with friends and it is something to remember if you do date.
Asking stuff like this as conversation openers (as I understand it is implied in the ad) is crazy.
Mmmm "Guys guys guys, you don't know what happened with in my date last night, I asked her how she was doing and she asked back what did I learn about myself last year". That's an anecdote I guess. 🙃

Maria and I still make fun of our first date, in a tea shop. I ordered a slice of cheesecake, and she got a slice of maracuyá cheesecake, I mocked her choice, she redirected the snark back at me. It was funny. I mean, it wasn't a real life sitcom, but it was fun enough and something we remember very fondly.
Basically we were both nervous messes and that's all we could come up with...stupid comments about what we ordered. That's real...

Anyway...I am open to concede that maybe I am the one out of touch here. Maybe the dating scene in the apps is so terrible that this is actually good advice. Maybe this is what kids crave this day, deep questions. I am not the ad's audience after all...

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The README pretty much tells the story of it, but why not repeat myself.
I found out a quite a while ago about notifications-notify, and used it to show desktop alerts for events in my calendar, using my own CalDAV sync + the built in appt.el. This worked OK, although honestly I am not using that integration that much.
Which makes you wonder why did I build cdsync at all...but let's not go there. Specially as we are talking about yet another package. >_>

So, desktop notifications from Emacs work nice, and I got in the habit of using them for all sorts of little things. At work, under Windows, there's support for W32 notifications, but it doesn't quite work as I would expect? I should maybe report that as a bug...[1] I ended up monkey patching notifications-notify to use an external program (no harm done, since Windows doesn't have D-Bus, I didn't need the original there). And I continued to (ab)use desktop notifications for things that didn't necessarily need them.

Nowadays though I also run Emacs on a shared Linux dev server, on the terminal. There's no desktop notifications, which made me review the different usages for these and think of an alternative. Because honestly...most are not good use cases for desktop notifications. It is usually the output of some long running process, which I ended up checking in some buffer. Also sometimes I would miss the notification pop up and forget about whatever I had running in the background until later.
Enter gazette, available in Source Hut[2]

That's all there is to the package. The number of notifications "unread" is reset when you quit (or kill) the *gazette* buffer, and that removes the counter.
It's been pretty useful, since now all callbacks that sent notifications publish in there, and I just check ONE buffer for output of whatever I was running.

Now, this creates a conundrum, where I am considering having more of my code depend on gazette, but I don't want to impose. Then again, it is 120 lines, including the license header and comments. 🤷
I also have the feeling that there has to be another package that does the same, but I didn't find any. There's stuff for alerts, for internal logging, but couldn't find anything like this, for "non-important" notifications.

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A couple days ago I read Wouter's musings about how to handle email and wasn't it a timely post. I've been thinking about the same thing the last few weeks.

A year ago, I tried Gnus with an offline workflow, but then I realized I am still online 99% of the time I am reading my email, and also the Gnus agent/offline mode wasn't working as I expected.
But the counterpoint to this is, by working exclusively in IMAP while online, I don't have any backups of my emails.
There's a few aspects to keeping an email back up though...

That being said, I am an opponent of blindfully preserving everything "just in case". You don't need that email invoice if you have the invoice stored. You don't need that project mail if the project was done and buried five years ago. [...]

I am with Wouter here. I have zombie @gmail and @outlook accounts. Just like the photo archives from phones tied to these accounts[1], I never ever look at those archives.
I am sure they are full of really nice things, early emails with my now wife, funny chats with friends. But also a lot of noise (appointments, inconsequential conversations). AND a lot of...other things.
Alex Schoeder, on the difference between archiving and keeping records: [2]

[...] People are proud of their email archives going back decades [...] not the same as keeping the love letters you've received, as keepsakes. You're not going to reread all those emails. All you're doing is keeping records. And now you can set the record straight when people change their mind. Those records give you power over them.

[...] Imagine if somebody kept recorded all the conversations, going back decades. Would this be a good friend to have? Imagine if somebody kept video recording every encounter, going back decades. Would this be a good family member to have? Of course not. It's creepy.

This post is the intersection between tech stuff and human stuff that I always find interesting to explore. I recommend it.
Probably influenced by the post, a while ago I realized, what's the value in having these emails stored for years if I am never going to look back at them? But at the same time, deleting them feels wrong. What if there's something important? There's an emotional act in letting go of these...worth it, but difficult.

Sidenote, I think that's also why I am taking less pictures these days. Because I try the ones I take to matter more.

Tying it all together (and bringing it back to email workflows): I stopped archiving every payment and receipt a while ago, unless there's a warranty involved. I am also keeping conversations with real people. BUT I think it can be a good idea to delete those after about a year or maybe two.
During all this pondering, I figured maybe it is a good idea to have an offline backup even if it is only recent stuff, and I still have a little interest in being able to work offline [3]. I leaning on setting again offlineimap (I did so when I tried mu4e), and have Gnus work with that. I get a local backup, and can read email offline.
That's were Wouter's idea of having an archive outside the IMAP sync area is of interest to me, because I hadn't considered doing something like that, and I think it is a great way of dealing with this "infinite archive" conundrum. I can prune the local archive by date, keep my IMAP server lean and free of noise. Win/win.

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I started writing about this a couple times. Once I actually had the post almost done, but when revisiting it, I had a feeling I was leaving out things.
Today I realized the reason is that there's more than one angle on the subject - confirmed just now as I was archiving repositories in GitHub.
What I need for this one, is to focus only on two things: the why, and the how.

Sure, tell me how and why. But first, why the quotes?

Because I am self hosting git in "my" Digital Ocean VPS, not literally self hosting in hardware I own.
Someday...
Or maybe never.

The why

On Monday, I told someone at work I had setup a git server over the weekend and he asked "why do you do these things?". "These" because in the past I was similarly questioned on why bother with Peanut Butter when there's a ton of Pastebin clones. Or why host my own blog written from scratch rather than using, say, Wordpress.

So the first part of the why is: because it is fun.
I wish I had a better reason.

Well, actually, I don't. That's a pretty good reason. Someone already explained this: "You can choose tools that make you happy".

Because people make technical decisions, in part, for affective reasons. They choose a technology because it feels good, or comfortable, or because it's what they know. They choose obscure tech as a form of sympathetic magic, like the guy who uses NetBSD on a ThinkPad to feel like a William Gibson protagonist. They choose obsolete languages, like Lisp or Smalltalk, because they think of the heroic age of Xerox PARC, and they want to feel connected to that tradition.

Today at lunch, this topic came up again, and another person said but why, you can have free repositories in many ways.
And they are right, but they are also completely wrong. There's free hosting and repositories, and they are free from a monetary point of view. But, hasn't the GitHub/Copilot fiasco taught us anything?

We all put our code up there, "for free", with our precious little licenses. And then one of the most litigious and IP-protecting software corporations in the planet scooped it all up, disregarding those LICENSE terms because the fine print in our "free" software hosting said we were also giving away many, many rights.

And this is a lesson we have learned in many other online services.
Everything that is free will be taken down when the angel investors give up on it, sold to one of the few players that can afford the astronomical valuation of the new hot thing [2], and/or enshittified.

So I guess the other reason I have "my own" online space, publish little tools, and now I have my own git server is: it makes me feel empowered.
I have no illusions that it will change the world. But I don't need it to. I content on making the change for myself.

Enough philosophy, how does the thing work?

Eons ago I visited https://depp.brause.cc and got curious about building something similar. Just like with the Emacs theme, moving the blog to a VPS, etc, etc. Once the seed is in my brain, it might take a few days, or months, or years (like in this case, I think). But I eventually give the object of my curiosity a good try.
An extra motivator is that Source Hut doesn't provide write access over HTTPS, and SSH is blocked on the (shared) Linux dev server at work. So when I modified something in my "office dotfiles" I: generated a patch, copied it to the host, applied it in the repo checked out on the laptop, pushed it. Eventually pulled it in my environment on the server, but first I had to discard all changes. Not the worst, but annoying.
(This will matter later)

So anyway, last weekend I followed the guide "Setting up Git on the server", and sooner than I expected I was able to push to a repo on my laptop! Yay!
Then I tested it on my work laptop. It worked locally, but not from the server. So I setup anonymous HTTPS access. I was now in the same state as before, but using my own git hosting. Yay again.
One more decision I made on the initial setup is that maybe some day I write my own "web view" for my repos. But for sure I don't want to deal with that right now, because it seems there's a lot of potential problems with GitWeb/cgit and constant crawling. So I figured I would mirror things to Source Hut and keep it for public use, since it has trackers and other niceties.
For synchronization, I just added a new remote with both repositories and pushed from my laptop. It seemed to work fine.

Then on Monday I went to the office, and from that network I couldn't reach my own repo even from the laptop. Good thing I didn't move everything right away. =D
That night I configured SmartHTTP, with proper security so I could enable writes, and then the problems started. Because the files had to be accessible by www-data without breaking access via SSH, which is the first thing I happened.
But after going over some blog posts and nginx docs and trying a bunch of things, I finally had everything working. 🥳

But why stop there, right?
I sacrificed some sleep to make progress into setting up mirroring via hooks. I finally got it working on Tuesday night and what I think is my final setup is:

• All repos cloned in my laptop and at work are pointing to my own Git server
• When pushing, the repos are mirrored in Source Hut
• I have a quick script to create more repos in the VPS, setting the permissions etc.

I learned about a lot of things: mirroring, configuring bare repositories, some SSH stuff, using git's hooks, some more about Linux permissions, and even more nginx configuration.
So that is a whole yak shaved over a couple nights.
Like I said, it was fun. 😎

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Hace un año, mi abuelo dejó de estar entre nosotros.
Vale contar el último cumpleaños, si es el día que falleció? Se diría que vivió hasta los 95 años, o hasta los 96? Preguntas importantes...

Siento que tendría que decir algo al respecto. Y probablemente algo importante.
Pero...no sé qué.
Hace un tiempo, escribí un post (curiosamente, en inglés) con un montón de recuerdos de él.
Pero hoy, no me sale nada.

Y no es que no estuve pensando en él. Al contrario, hace varios días me acuerdo que es el aniversario del día que lo internaron, de los chats con mi hermana para saber como seguía todo.[1]
De los preparativos para un viaje de emergencia que tal vez no sucedía.
Pero sucedió. Digo, tampoco eran una gran sorpresa, no? Pasados los 90. Pero había salido ya de varias otras cosas en años recientes. Tenía una voluntad de hierro.

En parte creo que no me sale nada porque también estoy preocupado. Pienso en mis papás, en mi tía, que también ya están grandes, y que también deben estar reviviendo todo en el aniversario, como yo. Y yo estoy lejos.

Por suerte, lo que pasó el año pasado no es de lo único que me acuerdo. También me estuve acordando de él, de su voz, de sus costumbres, de su casa.
En algún momento sé que va a doler menos. Curiosamente, el año anterior[2] me estuve acordando mucho de mis abuelas, y si lo comparo con estos recuerdos, eran menos doloroso y más felices. Supongo que con el tiempo, será igual con él.

No todos los recuerdos del año pasado son tristes. Mi amigo de la vida estaba de visita con nosotros, y que él esté acá sumó mucho. Paseamos e hicimos cosas y eso ayudó a que no me coma la ansiedad durante la internación.
Mery y Juan obviamente me acompañaron mucho, y ese es un recuerdo lindo también. Sentirme seguro y resguardado con mi familia.

Y después está el viaje en sí, que fue una cosa extraña.
Porque obviamente hubo muchas cosas tristes, pero también muchas que fueron más divertidas de lo que hubiera imaginado. Estar de nuevo los cuatro juntos (mis viejos, mi hermana y yo) mirando fotos viejas, recuerdos. Mi hermana y yo tratando de arreglar un persiana, digno de un sketch de Mr. Bean. Los chistes negros sobre lo que acaba de pasar...
Siempre me quedó la duda de si esa semana y media que estuve de visita alcanzó, o si hubiera tenido que quedarme más tiempo. Si realmente logré hacer una diferencia.
Por otra parte, hay cosas que tienen que pasar. Hay que estar tristes. Sólo el tiempo puede sanar algunas heridas. No hay atajos.

Hace días que sé que tengo que llorar. Y ni siquiera el final de Stranger Things logró sacarme la cantidad de emociones que necesitaba expulsar. Pero desde que empecé a escribir esto ya tuve que parar como tres veces.
Tener un blog puede ser muy útil. 🤣

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I was in a pickle because I wanted to write down my thoughts on these things, but I didn't have that much to say, just some superficial thoughts.
I guess putting them all in one post makes sense.

Game 1: Blasphemous

A 2D platformer with some puzzle and exploration elements. I don't know if I would call it a metroidvania. I guess?
This game is beautiful. The animation and drawings are excellent. The story and the setting are awesome too, very unique. I finished it! In about 30 hs, as per Steam. The combat is relatively simplistic and maybe even repetitive, but I as stated in some other review, I don't mind that. But...

The game doesn't explain anything. When it does, it is in the most cryptic way possible. Early on I found something that didn't make sense, and I figured I would check online, trying to avoid spoilers. Which luckily I did! But I also found out some quests can be missed, and part of the pleasure of the game (at least, as per people online) is to replay it and get all the content.

Maybe I am too old to replay the same game over and over. [1] Maybe I don't like not having clear instructions. [2] Maybe I was in a bad mood.[3]
I honestly think it was the fact that everything was very obtuse so instead of feeling I was "uncovering a mysterious world little by little" I was expected to "try shit until something works". But whatever it was, I got annoyed. I found a guide with the recommended order for areas and completed the game 95% of the way.
There's three optional bosses, added in some DLC content, and only killed one of them. And didn't bother finding the others, nor trying to get alternate endings.

Do I recommend it? Ehhhh. Maybe?

2.5 out of 5 Hoagies

Movie: The Substance

Watched this one in streaming like a month ago (so it has simmered a bit). I went in blind, only knowing that it was about Demi Moore turning in Margaret Qualley, and it was about aging in Hollywood, and that my wife loved it in cinemas.[4]
After watching it, I can say there's more to the movie that only that. Also that it was really good, until it wasn't.
First the yays: Yay to the lead actresses. The overall direction. The concept. Really, mostly everything.
The single nay: There's a tonal shift in the movie that caught me totally by surprise, and despite loving bizarre comedic things, it didn't quite land for me.

At some point, I was getting somewhat uncomfortable with some of the hypersexualized "young" scenes, and started wondering "would people have complained if this was directed by a man, instead of a woman". I don't know, but!
I felt the point of those scenes was exactly that, to make the audience feel awkward. I saw them as mirrors of other scenes of close ups: both grotesque, in very different ways.

While the movie isn't perfect, I think everyone should watch it because it has many interesting themes other than just living in the public eye, including self perception and acceptance (of aging, of love from others), the recklessness of youth, and finding purpose at different stages of your life.

4.5 out of 5 Hoagies

Book: Unseen magic

A few weeks ago, the kiddo was sick and I finally headed to the Secaucus Library to get my card, and get him a book. I figured I would take the chance to get a book for myself. Yes, even if I was still reading Cien Años de Soledad[5]. Yes, even if I had just gotten delivered Cosmos, which I was really looking forward to reading in the original language for the first time.
Not only that, in the end I got myself TWO books. 👀
I can't help it. Library, or Barnes and Nobles, I end up walking out with at least two books.

So I was in the kids section and a spine caught my attention. I read the text in the back and figured it wasn't really the kiddo's thing...but it made me really curious.

Eclectic, I know.
So, it is a teen book, I guess? Early chapter book? I don't know. The story is of course, relatively simple. But it is SO GOOD.
I wish I read this when I was 13 and very socially awkward. I am elated to have read it at 42, when I am...eh, nevermind.
If you are reading this, and you are a parent, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Doubly so if your child if very fearful. Or anxious. Both themes are touched on in the book, but in a very natural way, as part of the story. No Saturday Morning Cartoon lecturing or anything like that.

I am happy that I know my child well enough that even with me recommendation, he gave one look at the book and was not interested at all. Sad he is missing out, but oh well.

5 out of 5 Hoagies

Game 2: Bloodstained: Ritual of the night

A pure Metroidvania, that was kickstarted a while ago. By the designer of the beloved Castlevania games in the GBA and DS (and a few others that I haven't played).
With this game, I followed my usual Metroidvania cycle:

1. This game seems fun. I will walk around some more.
2. Ohhh I love this ability! And this weapon! And that spell!
3. OMG I can't wait to unlock everything!!!
4. Mmmmm I wonder how far from the end I am
5. (right after finishing it) Oh I unlocked new characters....eh, enough.

With Bloodstained, #3 was a very short period. If you really want to unlock everything, you need to do a lot of crafting, and I found that part extremely boring. Collecting weapons also got old relatively quickly, as I settled into swords and axes.
The gear you can equip has some elemental attributes, but it never matters enough to justify changing it for a boss battle or section of the levels.

I found the story almost non sensisical. About halfway through the game there's a cutscene in some deep part of the castle where more or less every single character shows up to talk to you and I found it really jarring.
A bit after that I started skipping every dialogue and just kept going. I knew who the final boss was going to be for a while anyway. 🤷

Basically, the game's good parts are the ones that can be found in previous games, the bad parts are everything that is new/different, and the characters are super bland. Oh and I wasn't that much into the graphic style either. The music was...serviceable.

2.5 out of 5 Hoagies

I don't regret playing the game, but I could have replayed any of the older games and it would have been better. (But, I only know that now, I guess)

In closing

There you have it. 5 mini reviews that put together might be the longest thing I published.
Ooops.

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This is another case of "a second thing I read pushes me to write what I thought I wouldn't". Just like it happened yesterday.
Sometimes I think of writing a "reply post", but then a couple days go by and I lose the impetus. That happened with the first of these.

Did it really happen?

In a post from a couple weeks ago, Tadaima wonders, If no one remembers, then did it really happen? and shares a good story about how she remembers her grandma's dogs, but no one else in the family does. And none of the other people who might have shared these memories are around.

I sat at the table feeling like I was going crazy. I remembered the dogs. I remembered how they used to yip and bite at my ankles and how one was nicer than the other. [...]
[...]
If I'm the only person alive who remembers a memory, then did it really happen?
[...]
Because, if no one can corroborate a memory, then there really is no difference between a memory and a dream, which is a weird thought. Spiritually, it puts a lot of power in your hand because you can rewrite the past if you want to. You can tell yourself new narratives and shape your future the way you want.

As far as I know, there's no way to contact her, but if I could, I would tell her that indeed memories are extremely unreliable.

As a preteen/teen I was really into Carl Sagan books, and one of them[1] was the first time (but no the last) I read about an experiment that goes more or less like this:
You show a bunch of people some footage of cars going down a street. Then ask them if they noticed the red car. Most of them will say no, because there was no red car in the footage.

Then talk to the same group a few days later. More people will say they remember the red car. And many of them, if slightly pressed, will provide details about this red car they say them remember, but never existed: it is a memory created by the very question about it.

This experiment and its consequences really stuck with me. As Tadaima says, you can create your own narratives about what happened. And the scary thing is, you might not even be consciously lying to yourself! This is you honestly feeling/believing what your mind made up.
Going back to Sagan, he wrote a lot about human fallibility, staying humble and open to the possibility that you are wrong or there are things that you don't know. Putting that together with the knowledge that our memories are imperfect[2], means that we need to treat anything we remember with some degree of mistrust.

But you can't go through life wondering if you really had coffee this morning. It would be unsustainable. So, we mostly accept our memories as an undeniable truth...but we really shouldn't.

A false history

I read this post by Jack Baty last night: A false history.

My daughter has been sending me adorable AI-generated images of her and my grandson[...]
It makes me wonder, though, what happens 20 years from now when she's scrolling back through her photos and sees these. Will she remember that they're faked? How will she know what's real and what's not? How will my grandson?

That's a great question. Based on the previous section, I would say there's a big chance that they will have a hard time separating the generated memories from the real ones.
I am not saying they will believe all of them are real. But I am saying that it will be harder than we would like to think it is.

And because I am really fun at parties, ever since the AI-generated images and videos started popping up I've been wondering what will happen to our collective perception of what's true, and of past events.

For most of the 20th century, having a photo of something meant having proof. As time went by, this proof had more and more caveats.
But at least a video was still definitive proof, right? If anything because even if CGI can make anything look real, it took tremendous amounts of effort and money.

But nowadays anyone can create a photo or video by asking for what they want to see, and the output of these tools ranges from "pretty convincing" to "I couldn't tell it was fake until I noticed this small detail".

Brace yourselves for the next few election cycles, when a lot of people who still believe anything in print is "the truth" will get inundated by generated videos and photos of random crap...except that, this isn't the right approach.
Human fallibility, remember? That means you, dear reader, and me, and everyone else...even if we are tech savvy, even if we think we can quickly differentiate a generated image from a real one, we are as vulnerable as everyone else is to being influenced by fake imagery, generated videos, and who knows what else is coming our way.

Think of this: a US president resigned because of audio tapes. Nowadays we would need a lot more evidence than audio, or photos, or videos. But how much more evidence?
What can't really be falsified or doctored?

The future

We are now in a world were everyone accepts what they see as real, and looks the other side when they see something they don't like.
How is that going to affect future history books? All history books show things through the author's lens. Are the lens of future history books going to be horrible deformed?

But even deeper, there are big events that a society collectively remembers a certain way, like for example the 2001 Cacerolazo in Argentina.
What will happen when future "group events" like these are immediately revisited via fake content that changes the culprits or outcomes of them?

All of these things happen today to a degree. But with images, videos, and audio, our minds are even more vulnerable to influence than with writing or a talking head on TV.
Sometimes I think our only hope is that future generations don't believe anything, but that is the equivalent of doubting your own memories all the time.

Like I said, I am really fun at parties.

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I am subscribed to a few subreddits via RSS, the idea being, I see new posts but don't fall into a doomscrolling rabbit hole (all of them are pretty low traffic).
A few days ago, the post "Deprioritize packages" caught my attention, because I perceive it is not a very common opinion in the subreddit (and judging from the replies...that seems to be the case).

Packages are cool because they get you somewhere and help you see what's possible, but ultimately I've found the most productive workflow improvements come from just chipping away at friction with small functions and bindings that solve your specific pain points.

That's been my impression as well, as detailed in "Emacs pages and micro-packages", where I talk not only about the hoagie-pages micro-package, but also a prior experience where I replaced the entire fill-function-arguments package with just a function to split the rest of the line by a separator.
Is my function really equivalent to the package? Of course not, but it is more useful to me, because it is hyper-focused to my use cases.

An old topic

I was not gonna write about this, because I touched on it before in "Emacs minimalism revisited", the post linked above, and a few even older posts. But two things happened lately that felt too big a coincidence not to mention it. :)

First, I saw another post in the subreddit, with OP stating I have not seen any updates for emacs package list in 3 days and wondering if something is wrong. The question caught me off guard, because I haven't thought about package updates in...a long time.

I remember a long time ago running package-list-packages every other morning. I would also, back then, restart Emacs to make sure I was running the latest packages.
Yes, it would sometimes lead to conflicts between them, but honestly not that often.

Compared to the state of affairs now, running package updates more than once every few weeks seems silly to me. I did the package report from the linked minimalism post and...

Total packages: 8

• nongnu (3): markdown-mode, sly, ws-butler

• gnu (3): csv-mode, debbugs, vundo

• melpa (2): browse-kill-ring, sly-quicklisp
    

But, I do have more custom code that makes up for the reduction in packages.
And also in some cases I replaced packages for built-ins.
For example yesterday I updated the CSS in all the blog posts. A lot of people would do that using wgrep. I instead used find-grep-dired and dired-do-replace-regexp-as-diff.
I can't say that one is better than the other. I can re-iterate (and this time I won't link the older post =P) that I still find that the built-ins have some sort of consistency, and interact between in a way that speaks to me.

Or, maybe, I am just seeing things that confirm my existing biases. Who knows! [1]

Package and workflow recommendations

The other thing that happened is that I've been emailing with someone trying Emacs and it made me remember how I used to run it.
Actually, I thought about that first last week, when there was a post about using Emacs for C# and I was reminiscing which packages and configuration I used back in like, 2020. Around the time I wrote Sharper.

Turns out, it is hard to make recommendations for packages and workflows that are "modern", when I am myself leaning on making the editor less and less blingy and reactive. In a way, I am stone-aging my editor.
I feel any suggestions to other people to follow my lead would get them to run away in horror. =P

I said less blingy, because I ditched all types of pop-ups and automatic typing features.
And less reactive, because nothing happens unless I explicitly request it. No command completion, no code linting, no autocompletion. [2]

But at the same time...all that Emacs power is still there. I can request completion manually, spell check, query a dictionary, trigger compilation, run a shell, etc.
It's just that I "moved it" out of the way of typing and reading, for reasons even I can't explain myself.
I wanted to try it, and then it felt good and productive, and here I am now.

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Yesterday, I walk into the kiddo's room for a cleanness and tidiness check.
Now that I think about it, not unlike an Army officer visiting the barracks in old movies and cartoons.

So anyway, I walk in, and the pants he wore for his band presentation were all crumpled in a chair. So I asked him to hang them, and he put them on the hanger like...sideways? Sideways of how one usually hangs pants, which is...sideways. 🤔
Then I realized why would a 12 year old know how to hang pants.... So I explained it, while showing him, and then asked him to do it on his own.

As I was heading downstairs, I started philosophizing in my head[1] Well, this is parenting too. Not only the "big" life stuff, but also the little things.
I made a trip down memory lane to all the little things you have to teach your kid since they are toddlers. From how to use a can opener to how keys work, tying shoes and how to crack an egg.
And from those memories, to this moment just now, when I taught my son how to hang pants.
I wonder if he will remember this morning, with the pants and the hanger, when he is old and I am long gone...

A bit later, I was in the kitchen and I started telling my wife about all these thoughts, "the little moments of parenting". Yes, you teach them values and to think for themselves etc etc but also the little things, remember when he was little and this and that...
"...because just now, I explained him how to hang pants..."

"Oh really?", she said, "Because I explained that to him quite a few times already"
(Emphasis from the original)

We looked at each other, a moment of silence. She was amused, of course.
But there was a hint of something else in her eyes.
...Weariness, maybe?

"I guess that is parenting too", I said, sheepishly.
We changed the subject.

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On December 7th, I saw Tiny Idea at Brooklyn's Union Hall. They are a sketch comedy trio, that I found from an Instagram suggestion.[1]

The first video of them I saw is probably their most popular, "Can you take a photo of us?".
They remind me a bit of Netflix's "I think you should leave". They lean more into absurd than cringe, though. A dash of WKUK?
Just give their videos a go, they are a click away. I am far from an expert in comedy to rate their thing, or categorize it. I can only say that I enjoy their sketches. :)
And really, how can you dislike a reference to Love Actually, with bit of modern commentary, and a neurotic wife?

On the live show in particular: it was hilarious.
They said the presentation was all new material. Highlights for me were the man with "the most confident face" but a not-so-confident body, the theater kids about to graduate high school, and the Swedish gym instructor.
The absolute best: a play for middle schoolers, that reminded me of educational movies in The Simpsons (starring Troy McClure).[2]

I took a bunch of pictures on the way there, but I looked at them now and found them boring.
I tried to combine them to make the post shorter, but I still felt it was pretty meh.
So, this is all I have to share:

Before I forget, they had an opening stand up that was really good. Took me half a minute to "get" what the girl was going for, but then I just couldn't stop laughing.
To wrap up: the show was awesome, these three guys rock, and I will definitely try to see them live again. They are even better than on video.

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In a recent post (Decaying grandeur) I noticed that the images resized with IMAN[1] were...not great.
Turns out, the original images were of lower quality than usual, because instead of coming from the Camera app on the phone, they were shot using a messaging app. Lesson learned.

But still, I figured I could take a look at my usage of CL-GD to make sure I was saving the JPEG output in the highest quality possible. And also revisit the other "operations" I had IMAN, which were just made up manipulations of the palette that sometimes produced a grayscale version of the source image, but mostly were just senseless.

Moving to Imago

I think I had considered this library when I started working in IMAN, but since I had used CL-GD before, I just went with that.
But, the samples in Imago's README were alluring. And once the migration started, I found that even the code was very clear and easy to follow.
Great library. Highly recommend. 👍[2]

On top of updating the operations, I made minor changes to the text, and added some error handling (empty uploads, invalid links).
I coded the manipulations in the package thinking of chaining them, so you aren't forced to process a file more than once. But to be honest, the only thing I "need" is the resize.
AND I can't think of a way to select more than one operation, in order, without JS in the page.

Samples photobomb!

A random photo I took a couple days ago, while changing my keycaps. Green tea courtesy of Wouter's tips on how to prepare it properly.
Then, there's this photo Maria took a while ago, of Juan and I drinking mate in some NJ park:

I coded these filters for fun, I don't have a need for them. But at least the operations make sense :)
Invert colors:

And here, channeling my inner Jack Baty with a B&W, or better said, grayscale, selfie. Except that mine is a digital manipulation =P

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Earlier today, I was sort of paying attention[1] to one of those "global meetings" that organizations of a certain size seem to be fond of, and I decided to write an Emacs command to quickly add a link to my Stack of Links.

About two hours later (and yes I was in another group meeting) I was like, "hey, I can use my (also newish) command to send a region to Peanut Butter to create a paste with all this code!"[2]. The idea being, I can revisit it later to make it nicer.

So I created the paste, and then I was like "I guess I better add it to my stack, so I don't forget about it...", and for this I used the new command too, so I went full circle with all the tools 🤣

I used two Emacs commands I wrote, to create a paste and save a link for later in a site I wrote too.
It is amusingly silly.

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I mentioned somewhat recently that the RSS aggregator is changing my habits. One of them (I am not the only one) is that I've been "hoarding" more links.
Because now I can save links to re-read/to reply/to comment on later...but then I don't write a reply post nor add my comments on the topic, the list keeps growing and growing.
(I do re-read the ones I mark for that, at least)

The other side effect is that I am (apparently) endlessly behind in my reading list. =D
Anyway, I just saw something that was too serendipitous, and here we are.

Don't become a connoisseur

The one that pushed me to just do a reply post grouping a few links.
What are the odds that the day before I write my rant on why I don't want to get too much into tea, Jack Baty shared this great post that says basically the same, but in a better and more profound way?
And what are the odds that I got to this link today? Anyway...

You can tell the original is better written from the titles: "Don't get much into X" vs Westenberg's "Don't become a connoisseur" 🙃

If I had been on top of my links, I could have shared the very same post and say "this is why..." :)

The fisherman and The Businessman

Last week, I left work with a small group, and as we walked to the subway we were discussing the changes the company has been going through in the last 5 years (even before I joined).
That led to the topic of old timers. Like, people who have been 30+ years here.
And there's a subset of them that are what some would call "stuck" in a role, for decades.

Except that...are they really stuck?
For about two years, I played the role of a "manager". I did OKish at that role.[1] On paper, my next position was demotion. Except that I was so happy to go back to coding full time.

We desperately need to revisit the definition of corporate success. Things like The Peter principle (and The Dilbert Principle) are a known thing. And yet there's an implicit expectation that success only means "going up", rather than giving the best version of yourself to the organization.

Kev Quirk had a similar realization not long ago, and he found a little story (parable?) that encapsulates these thoughts very well.

The original (short) post is worth a read. It is funny that I read "Grow slowly, stay small" last week, and taking a second look now, the part about dedication to improving your craft relates to my rant yesterday...

Tag soup

Ruben Schade shared the nightmarish mark up that's coming out of so-called modern websites in "Tag Soup".

And that's why I didn't want to use any tool to generate the mark up for this site. 👀
Is that too extreme? Probably.[2]

I mean, yes, you can get a script or framework to generate that. But what happened to Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.?
Web development is baffling. And may I point out that I used to write ASP.NET WebForms for a living, so I have first hand experience with dumping a of ton generated HTML in a browser. I know it is a royal PITA to debug, style, etc.
I don't doubt that modern frameworks are miles better and more mature than 2004 WebForms. But there's no way that tag soup doesn't come back to bite you sooner or later.

Why is it so hard to people in the web space to just write code?
I remember when two way binding frameworks were starting to become a thing. Sure, you saved the effort to typing document.getElementById("someField").text = "the value"[3], but for that you added a bunch of non-standard tags, a crapton of JS...and as soon as you deviate from the "happy path" you still need custom code to handle those specific scenarios. Usually fighting against your framework of choice.

And before anyone says that this is because I am old, I will like to point out I was an early hater of two way binding. 😌
I mean, yes, I am old. And grumpy.
But...I was grumpy before being old.
You know what? This paragraph does not help me. Time to wrap it up >_>.

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In the open

I remember the first time I uploaded something to GitHub, in 2013 or so. I feared that I would write bad code without even realizing and someone would see it and I would be judged by the Python elders (at the time, I had just a couple years experience with Python, zero professionally). It literally took me effort to get the point of pushing the code up.

And then I was anxious about it. I am not being hyperbolic, literally anxious. But a few days later: nothing. Because GitHub is huge, my code was a drop in the ocean. I didn't overcome then my fear of writing "bad code", but I found comfort in knowing no one would read it if I did. Yay!

First code review

Fast forward to 2018. I joined a company, and many in the team had double the years of experience I had. My very first PR went up, and the comments rolled in quickly. Some had to do with the fact that I was new in the team, so "our ways" hadn't seeped into my brain yet. But a few others were concerns with how I coded something, whether it was fast, reliable, readable enough.
This happened to be my first job outside the company that sponsored my visa, which also meant the first time working for an organization that didn't perceive me as a second class citizen.[1]. My first time "in the wild": I wasn't hired because I was cheap, or would put up with with the IE6 migration that no one else in the organization would do. This was a group of people that saw some of my code, asked me a few questions, and were happy to give me a chance to be in their team.
And my code was not up to their quality standards.

This is it, it is over. Time to return my green card and head back to Argentina. But I can't code ever again! I know from my time in high school[2] that woodworking is not my thing, but I did well with welding.[3] That's my future prospect, I guess.
But before running away for ever...I had to clean up the code. Atone for my sins in small fixes, comments explaining why this or the other, applying suggested changes that made sense.

The next morning (or maybe next-next), one of the other guys submitted a PR. One of the wise men. I looked over the code, unsure of my qualifications to provide feedback. I didn't add anything.
I checked back the submission an hour later: lots of comments. Not unlike the ones I received.

And the tone of the conversation was exactly the same. Over those first two weeks I realized these people were very matter of fact about code. There were egos, none of us were perfect, of course. But pride of authorship always took a backseat to "team pride": all of us were better coders than any one of us. And if we someone else identified a possible improvement, and after discussion it was confirmed as such, it was implemented.

I don't think it took more than a couple more weeks for me to feel comfortable with critiques of my code, and just a bit more to suggest changes myself.
And our little group developed a bit of a fame for delivering great products: extremely stable, good performance, small repositories of highly curated code. I could see a direct relation from this to our review process.

"In the wild" code reviews

Around that time I wrote a bunch of Emacs packages to interact with tools that I used at work. I was definitely not very proficient in (any) Lisp[4].
When I submitted the first of these packages to MELPA, as customary, the code was reviewed and I had some changes to make before it was published.

And I felt...happy?
Because many of the things suggested were more idiomatic than what I wrote. I was learning! I was on my way to becoming a better Lisper![5]

The change of attitude about receiving feedback, in about a year since my first review, didn't register at the time.
But whenever the topic of reviews comes up, I tend to go back to the contrast in my feelings on that first review at work, and the time someone I had never interacted with until then critiqued what I was putting out there in the wild.

What triggered this post

The topic of code reviews and feedback came up a few times in my current team - usually for unhappy reasons.

And in trying to understand the reticence of others to having their code reviewed and/or modified by someone else, I was thinking back to my own early struggles with "coding in the open". Like, how I went from feeling ashamed of someone reading anything I write, to having even the pages of this site in a public repository.

So, what was that initial shame? The impostor syndrome that crept on that first work review? And I guess it was pride. Even if it sounds backwards: if you are so proud of something, then why would you be ashamed to have others look at it?
But it makes sense, if you have a sense of ownership over your code (which is good, by the way!) that you would feel maybe attacked by comments about it? Because it is like they are attacking you?

I mentioned in another post that you want to have people that care about their code, so they do a good job, but that no one should care "too much", because then they are open to changes and feedback.
And maybe that wasn't right.
Maybe the ideal is aiming to replace the individual ego for a team ego: recognizing that we are all in the same group, that any suggestions made are to improve "our" output, and that reviews are a knowledge exchange. We all keep learning from each other.

Although, that wouldn't quite account for the "solo open source" case, like the MELPA review I mentioned before.

No conclusion, just putting some thoughts out there as I try to process that last exchange on this topic.
My only immediate action right now is to try to be gentler when reviewing other people's code, I guess. It is a slippery slope though, once you reach the point that everything is a "gentle suggestion" rather than a "request" to revisit something.

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I think I hinted in past posts that I want to enjoy tea, but I don't want to "get too much" into it. Here are my reasons.

Contrasting mate...

I remember the first time I saw "organic yerba mate" at a store here in the US. I found it almost ridiculous.
It's a shrub. It just grows. What would it mean that it is "organic"?

And that's the thing. In Argentina, you can have a preference for one yerba brand or the other, but you just drink mate.
Heat water to your preferred temperature (between 65 and 85 C), put yerba in the cup, drink. It's a ritual, and for some of us[1] an important one of every day life. But that's the point: "every day life".
Daily things, in all cultures, are relatively simple. Or else they get in the way.

...with coffee

Coffee can also be simple. But the way I was approaching it, was becoming too complex for something that I was doing several times a day.
And honestly, I was enjoying the process of preparing it, for while. When a cup tasted just right, it was awesome.
But when, after moving, I "lost the touch" and tried to get back into it again, it became overwhelming.
Maybe I really need to buy a proper scale? Maybe I need to control the water temperature with more care? Speaking of water, what if the tap water in Jersey City is part of the problem? I have seen enough videos and reddit posts suggesting using only filtered water.
Oh no, it really is the size of the grind. Wait, what about the reusable filter? The time of "blooming", is it too short for these beans?

There were just too many things that could go wrong. And I figured I did it to myself, by "getting too much into it". Now, if you look at coffee like a hobby, I guess it is fine. But that wasn't my case, obviously. That's why I got tired of the intricacies (that I brought upon myself).

A simple tea approach

A few days after I started using that forgotten kettle, I got curious and looked online for some tips.
I particularly remember a suggestion that for some teas it is better to use a glass teapot instead of ceramic one, because it retains less heat. I don't care if this is true or not, but I knew right away...

• I don't have an interest to develop such a delicate tea palate that this would matter.
• And I also don't have an interest in getting such fine teas that using a glass or ceramic teapot makes a difference.

Instead of focusing on the higher ends of the most expensive and delicate teas ever, I'd rather go for the "slightly above average" of what people usually drink around the world.
I don't doubt there people doing elaborate tea rituals in say, Japan. Or China, or some small European country. But there's also tons of people in those places having a cup of tea before going to work, and they aren't changing teapots daily or making it a complicated process or measure water temperature with a thermometer.
And those are the experiences I am aiming for: The tea equivalent of what the mate ritual is for me.

Slightly related: about reviews

In a similar line of thought, there's a post that maybe I will write some day[2] about why I am reading less reviews. Whether it is for TV shows, movies, appliances. Whatever.
The wisdom of the internet can be a helpful guide, but if you don't put a limit on it, it is impossible to enjoy anything.
And also, I find more and more value in approaching things with fresh eyes. There's a point where vetoing everything in your life, trying to find the perfect way to brew coffee, the perfect movie to watch, the best book series to read, becomes a chore that takes away from your own enjoyment.

Keep things simple. Want a cup of tea? heat water, brew for X minutes. Feel like watching a show? Pick something that looks interesting, no need to read 5 professional reviews and 10 reddit threads about it.
Maybe I hate the show, maybe I am pleasantly surprised by something that later I found out no one else watched. Maybe it is good, but not quite for me. Whatever it is, that experience has more value than reading a gazillion of opinions.

Conclusion

I think that last paragraph is a good enough summary of the post I was meaning to write about reviews.
And I'll have some Quiktea now.

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Peanut Butter: better paste names

When I was putting together Peanut Butter, I was a bit annoyed that all the pastebin clones I found had features like syntax highlighting[1], login walls, and web-only interfaces.

And then, a breath of fresh air: Cathedral Network's c-paste service.

Even if PB's homepage is way less plain-texty than theirs, a lot of inspiration on how it should work came from this page. Of course they offer a more rounded up service, which supports binary uploads and a way to delete pastes.
But the feature I kept thinking I should implement was their "paste names":

The URL generator uses readable English word combinations that are easy to remember, in case you happen to be physically running between terminals.

Step 0: finding a word list

I searched for word lists until I landed in one generated by the EFF. Going simply for "list of common English words" would include things like "though" and "thought", they are common but easy to mix up.

The brave new world of databases

When I started the website, I decided to save each paste in a text file on disk, so I didn't have to deal with databases: picking one, learning a new library to use them, etc.
It proved a good choice, as the second tool, Image Manipulator, didn't require any data storage.

I always knew I would pick SQLite, though. I have used it in a few Python thingies, and despite being the most deployed database in the world, I still think it is under utilized. That's how much I respect it and how useful I think it is.[2]
After implementing Stack of Links, I had working knowledge of a Common Lisp system to access SQLite. And I knew sooner or later I should move the pastes from files on disk to a DB.

Putting it all together

Or, from a terminal:

Speaking of delaying decisions, the algorithm to generate the paste names is extremely naive. It picks a first word, tries 250 second words until it finds one that hasn't been used already. If it can't find any unused combination, it will try a different first word, again, 250 times.
There's no check for "I already tried this word", or anything like that. Instead, there's a fallback to the old-style IDs generated from the current date.

I also loaded all the previous pastes in the DB, with their original names. I honestly don't know if anyone other than me and maybe some friend used the service, but it felt like the right thing to do. 🤷

Other (internal) improvements

I made a few other changes. I couldn't quite figure out why I stored saved links in SOL[3] by username, instead of user id. When I decided to change it, I realized that I only stored the username in the session. 🙃 Mystery solved.
So I added the id to the session, and updated all links saved for all users. It's not a visible change, and it really doesn't matter much. But just like storing pastes as files on disk, it felt a bit wrong.

There were also a few other errors that I corrected while testing the login and session changes.
The downside of having almost no users other than myself, is that less visited sections of the code can be broken for a while. 👀 These were things that I missed when I moved the HTML generation code to its own package.

Now that I know feel comfortable working with Common Lisp with SQLite and web stuff, and as I find little things that annoy me in FreshRSS, I start thinking more and more about building my own aggregator. Because, why not!

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A few blogs I follow are building (or did it a while ago) music collections, and setting up their own private streaming services. This is great for a few reasons:

• The usual: privacy, sense of independence.
• Ownership of music.
• Better retribution to the artists.

On the last point, you would think paying a couple bucks in royalties only once when buying a CD or digital download, is less than the...well, stream. Of income. Like, if you listen to a song over a streaming service...stream of income...no puns intended. Now I hate this sentence. ANYWAY.
Because music services pay about 0.000000000001 cents per playback, I am not so sure that they are better, even in the long run.

Privacy is self-explanatory.

The ownership and independence thing are related.
There's an Argentinian singer I discovered by chance[1], but then out of the blue when 2024 started her two albums vanished from Spotify.
If I had downloaded those songs, that wouldn't happen.
When we moved to Apple Music, I checked and her first two albums were still not available. Suddenly a few months ago they showed up again. In both services, so clearly it was some licensing issue...but I wonder for how long will these records be available...?

Some artists offer their albums via digital downloads. But not this singer in particular, and it's not the only example. There are a few songs that are from like, anime openings. I have no idea if they offer digital downloads that I can also buy from the US.
If they don't, there's always the CD route.
But in that last case, I would have to import the CD...from Japan? I guess?
And I don't even have a CD reader in any device in this house. Funnily enough, the last CD reader we had available was in the 2016 Dodge Journey we sold before moving back to the east coast.

And honestly, I don't think I have the willpower to spend the time ripping the CDs. Even if I buy the CD and then download the music illegally just to skip the process, there's quite a few things that I've been checking how to get legally and it is huge PITA.
Of course, the real option is to...just not listen to those things. There's an lot more music out there that I can get easily.

But I figure at least the 0.000000000001 cents are better than those artists getting $0 from me. So...Apple Music it is.
You can tell I've given this quite some thought, and I reached the pretty lame conclusion that it is something I could do, but it is more effort than I want to put in it, and the replacement isn't 1:1.
So at the end of the day, I take the lazy way out.

This one is one to keep in mind when I get judgy with other people, like "bUt YoUr PrIvAcY". Look how easy it was to get me to give it all up. Just because I want to listen to Card Captor Sakura's second ending on a rainy Sunday morning.
Sigh.

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Earlier this week I finished watching the anime Kamisama Hajimemashita (Kamisama Kiss), on recommendation from one of my nieces.[1]
I enjoyed it a lot, and will probably read the comic at some point.

While messaging with her about some story beats and the ending, she recommended again that I give "After the rain" (AKA "Koi wa Ameagari no You ni") a go.
And I just finished it, 10 minutes ago.

The premise (spoiler free)

Akira Tachibana is a high schooler that works part time in a restaurant. When the story starts, she is in love with her manager, a 45 year old guy, divorced, with a son.
The manga is mostly about their relationship, but there's a very solid cast of supporting characters that have their own challenges. And also their interactions with the main cast help flesh out the backstory for all of them.

What's good about it?

I am 42, very close in age to the manager. There's a lot of things he is thinking/going through that I found relatable, which was nice, and unexpected. And a few interactions between Akira and her mother gave me some deja vu, too :)
At the same time, there were a lot of things that Akira thinks and feels, that took me back to my youth[2] and my own struggles. In particular, her intensity about everything felt..."real", I guess? Her line of thinking and reactions were completely in line with how I recall my teen years.
In short, I found the writing very good.

On the visual side, the comic is pretty traditional, although it does make very good use of the medium in a few scenes here and there. And the drawings themselves are clean, and I would describe them "moody".
By that I mean, there's an airy feel to some scenes, and others are more oppressive. Which works just perfect. The "energy" in the scenes impacted how I read them, too.

5 out of 5 Hoagies

Is it something that I think "everyone should read"? I am not sure. But if you like romance stories, or slice of life comics dealing with youth (or midlife) crisis, you can't miss this one.

Light spoilers

So close your browser tab now :D

So...I guess it is a bit spoiler-y to say that the story is very wholesome.
And it is a spoiler because...we can all agree there's only one outcome that is wholesome, and not super creepy :)

But just like a rom-com can follow certain story beats and end up being surprising in small ways, or fulfilling (or both), so does this comic.
I really enjoyed the way the ending came around. And how honest all of the characters were in their inner speech through the story. The author took some risks with those, and managed them very well so by the end you accept their flaws and limitations, and also eventually understand their reasons.
That also makes it all most satisfying when they overcome some specific challenges.

Only thing I can say maybe could be improved, is seeing a bit more to the endings of the rest of the kitchen staff.
Maybe.
But the manga has the perfect length just as it is, so.

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One of my favorite buildings near the office has a beautiful...mural? made with tiles.
I absolutely love it. For some reason, it gives me Soviet vibes.[1]

And yes, I know the photo is not level 👀.
I sometimes wonder if the original doors were also detailed and decorated. It is a tad obvious that the current doors are not the original ones. Technically, they aren't even doors, since they are perpetually closed.
But that's not the only sign of lost grandiosity, if you look closely at the tile work...

...you can see a lot of them are missing. This thing needs a restoration, like, 15 years ago.

A long time ago, at a birthday party, a guy who works in construction told me the amount of scaffolding in Manhattan is a problem. But it is cheaper for building owners to pay the fines for having scaffolding up for too long, than to fix the elaborate, ornate decorations.
It made sense, because working in the financial district, I see a lot of buildings covered like that. But I hesitated to repeat the story, until a couple months ago I read a news article explaining the same thing. And it said the city government wanted to tackle this problem.

I don't know how, though. Raising the fines?
Sure, but the cost will probably be passed down to the tenants, and I figure at least some companies will move out. The city would want a balance there, since they have incentive to keep tax-paying employers, and their tax-paying employees-consumers around.

Should the government cover part or all the reparations?
I find it hard to believe companies renting office space in Manhattan are short on cash, honestly. Maybe after COVID, they are? But these repairs seem to have been delayed far longer than 5 years. Shouldn't they be responsible for something they caused themselves, by negligence?
If I don't pay my bills, no one is coming to rescue me...
If I buy a lavishly decorated house, and then I can't keep up with maintenance of the facade, I don't think anyone involved (bank, city government, etc) would think twice about evicting me.
Yet for big real estate owners, we fall once again in the fallacy[3] of "too big to fail"...

Eh, I don't want to go too deep into these rabbit holes. I am just a dude ranting, not an expert in economy, real estate, city regulations or building maintenance.
I will pat myself in the back for a thought: a while ago I was thinking that these things were made when labor was cheap and there was less concern for safety. And then a few days later I read an article[2] talking about why modern construction tends to be "plain and boring". One of the few people interviewed said the same thing: these turn of the century/mid XX century buildings are a product of their time. He/she gave more or less the same reasons I thought of a few days before.

Anyway, the reasons why these buildings aren't restored have nothing to do with lack of wealth. If any of the billionaires in this planet took on these repairs as their pet project, it could be done in a relatively short time.
I am going to venture this is yet another example of the failures of "the system". Little cracks that show up here and there.
The real reason that these buildings aren't kept in shape has nothing to do with a true impossibility, and is just a case of misaligned priorities, lack of government enforcement, and maybe...lack of pride?
Weren't these symbols of wealth, power and prosperity? What are we (collectively, I guess? society?) saying when we let them slowly fall apart?

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There are two interesting side effects of using an RSS aggregator.

• I follow blogs that aren't updated as often.
• When I follow them, I read more of their older posts. Because in the aggregator I can mark things as read, and start up again from where I left easier.

One of these additions to my feed is Rach Smith.
A few of her posts resonated with me. The one I am linking today, is a post that hits on one of the topics in my "to blog" list, so here we are :)[1]

"Comfortable with the struggle"

A highly edited quote:

Sometimes I get asked by newcomers how one can become a developer like me [...]
If I had to pick one trait, it would be the ability to be comfortable with "the struggle". That part of the day/hour/minute where the code isn’t doing what you expected, things aren’t looking like they should, or where things are going wrong and you don’t know why. [...]

The full post is here. I recommend giving it a full read. It is short, insightful, and goes down a different road than this one.

Developers and optimism

Despite being stereotyped as the grumpiest group of people in any organizations[2], I have the theory that the only way you can make your career as a developer is if you are full of a very naive optimism.
And maybe lots (most? many?) developers are grumpy because they spent all their jolliness in the technical side of things.[3]

As I established in my last post, I think writing software is potentially a very creative act.
And it is closer to writing prose than erecting a building, or any other "engineering ideal" that some people like to lean into.

Following from that, what happens when you are hired to work in say, a mid-sized project? Well, after a bit of time, you are given access to the code, and some minor task to accomplish.
Let use again the "writing a novel collaboratively" analogy I brought up before.

You join a group of 5 other authors. 3 of them weren't there when the 850 page novel was started.
Also the ending for the novel was changed a few times. One of the main characters was removed from the story. Another one was changed from minor character to protagonist, but her personality is totally different now.
Shortly after you join the group, one of the other authors says: "I think you have a clue of this goes by now. So in chapter 27, change a few paragraphs so the dialogue flows better". With the expectation that whatever changes you make follow continuity, style, and story details coming before and after that chapter.

Any sane person would sit down, open the source code the novel's manuscript and break down crying.
How can they expect you to make these changes, without altering the continuity, unless you read the whole novel at least once? Not that it is a bullet proof plan, because by the time you finish it, other people in the group will have made changes too.
At face value, it is an impossible task.

The struggle

And here comes the connection with Rach's post. Developers struggle, a lot. Not only in the cases she mentions (which by the way are very real). We feel also feel overwhelmed. We make changes in the dark, a bit by instinct and a lot by hoping this is the right thing.
There are mitigations. You consult with other authors. Take a look at other chapters where the same characters interact.
But you have to, as Rach says, enjoy the struggle. Even revel in it, and she hints at the end of her post. :)

And the implications for estimates

Developers are, in general, notoriously bad a estimating.[4]
And I have the theory that the same traits that makes us functioning developers, make us bad estimators.
And by the way, that's also why we aren't good at identifying potential blockers and bad requirements.

You enjoy struggling. And you also think that even if there are a gazillion things you don't know, with a little more time, and a little more trying, you will solve whatever it is that you are being asked to do.
And when you approach your work such naivety, such innocence...does anyone really expect you to have an accurate idea of how long the task will take?
That's why we end up with rules of thumb that are more or less "multiply you initial estimate by 500".

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There are other things that I want to write about, related to code and programming, but first I need to establish this fact share this opinion for it all to follow from here.

Prose is art, then...code is art?

Is all prose art? Well no, there are many novels and stories written every year that are considered "not good enough" to be seen as "art".
This is as obvious as it is a point of contention. Who says some novel that won the Nobel for literature and was read by 15 people, has more merits to be considered art than any of the YA series of novels that touched the lives of millions of people?
I don't know, and for this conversation it is besides the point. We can all agree that it is subjective, and leave it that.[1]

But then, why don't we usually extend this distinction to programming and code?
Maybe a lot of people do, but searching for those opinions online right before writing mine is ill-advised 🙃 Maybe a couple days after I finish and publish this, I do it.[2]

The artist's fingerprint

Given the same skeleton for a story, no two authors will write it the same way. Dialogue, descriptions of people and places, the pace of the story, they will all be different.
The same applies to code. Given the same requirements, and even the same tooling (language, frameworks, etc.) it is relatively easy to identify who wrote what.

For bigger teams it might take longer, but sooner or later you start reading a function/method at work and think to yourself "this is such a Justin code", or "yep another Javier idiom". The style of the artist, will reveal itself regardless of conventions and stylistic limitations (via formatters and the like).

I see this as a sign that code is creative expression. And that's why each programmer/artist leaves behind their mark in it. It is not unlike writing a novel, except that sometimes one chapter at a time, or even one paragraph at a time.
The fact that it is written in pieces, by lots of different people over time, makes it actually pretty unique. Specially for bigger projects, the "boring enterprise" stuff.

Ah! But enterprise software is not creative

That is a distinction I used to make internally. The stuff I wrote at work, the C# APIs dealing with mortgages, the insurance websites, those are not creative. That's "just work".
But the open source stuff! Python libraries, Emacs packages. Those are The Real Deal.

But...I tend to put the same care on the "work stuff" than in my "personal stuff". Because I enjoy writing code! How can software that I am paid to do, and that has to fulfill some externally imposed limitation, be considered creative and artistic?
In 2022, I realized there was obvious precedent for this...

Patronage

Nowadays we consider a lot of paintings that were commissioned by the church, or nobility, as art. No one denies artistic merits of a Renaissance portrait because it was commissioned and expected to fulfill certain "specifications".

But being honest, I came to this realization not via historical observation, but because of a more personal situation.
In 2022, when visiting family, I commissioned from a fileteado artist in Buenos Aires a sign for my home office.[3] Which says exactly that, "the office":

The photo is at the only angle where no reflections obscured part of the sign.
When I was growing up, most buses in the area I lived were decorated with these designs, so I had thought about getting a sign in that style for a while.

One afternoon, before meeting a friend for coffee, I walked into Dario's shop, and we had a pretty brief conversation about what I wanted. He offered some suggestions for background colors, elements to include or exclude from the design, and that was it.
Now, I could have given more detailed instructions, and instead made a conscious choice to leave many elements up to him. But even if I had more specifics about how the sign should look, wouldn't it still qualify as art? As being an artistic expression?

And a few days after getting the sign, I made the connection between commissions or patronage, being like working for a company. And I completed my mental puzzle of how to understand code that I write on the clock with something that can, potentially, have some artistic merit.

Now, some code is absolutely written to be as utilitarian as possible. Almost the equivalent of getting the walls in your kitchen painted white. And there's nothing wrong with that. sometimes that's just what you need.

But it is my opinion that a lot more of the stuff we put out there is a proper expression of the person who wrote.
And I have the impression that by trying to equate writing software with building a bridge, rather than writing a story, we are making ourselves a huge disservice.

And by "ourselves" I don't mean only developers or programmers or authors or whatever term you want to use.
I think organizations that need software also lose a lot when they approach the process of putting it together[4] in those terms.

Conclusion

I think too much about code and programming.
Which isn't news to anyone who reads this space regularly, I guess. :)

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Three completely unrelated topics, for a single post.

On my walk of shame comment

It's been bothering that my comment in my fail story about not having a walk of shame reads like I was a ladies man of some sorts in my youth.
It's been bothering me enough that I want to set the record straight, right here: I don't even remember having a one night stand. Not something that makes me particularly proud, nor ashamed. It just is. 🤷

But I did collect mistakes as Pokémon! What I was referring to with those are the long term relationships that I should have ended way sooner than I did. Or let them die when the other party gave the chance to do so. Or not even start them, FFS, what was I thinking. Oh right, I was young :)
But indeed, you never experience a walk of shame when your mistakes live with you. 👀
With that out of the way...

Did anyone ever buy these unironically?

Today Maria and I went to an At Home, and we found these:

Now, won't claim to have the finest taste. I still wear cartoon tshirts to most places. And also, there's nothing wrong with anyone's choices, whatever floats anyone's boat is fine by me. Honest.

But...has anyone ever bought any of these pseudo paintings "unironically"?
Let's take a look at the possibilities:

• If you are 12, you might love stuff related to surf, or riding horses. [1] But then Santa isn't cool anymore
• If you are an older lady who loves all things Christmas, you probably find these depictions horrific.
• If you are in any other age group, you probably find these kitsch.

I don't know. Maybe there's a biker granny somewhere that finds these amazing...

The next project?

I don't know if my tools site is "done-done". But the thing scratched the itch to write some Common Lisp code for a while, so mission accomplished. That means I have a bit of bandwidth for the next thing.

And all it takes is a bit of inspiration. Wouter of BrainBaking wrote a post about moving his repos to Codeberg. His reminder that we should "Give Up GitHub" and other details from the post left me thinking about this topic...

For starters, all my new code is in Source Hut. Which I like enough, but I have considered taking advantage of the VPS to use my own self-hosted git as primary, and Source Hut as the mirror. Reading that post was a nice reminder of that idea.[2]
I like Source Hut now, but we never know what's going to happen in the future.

I've been meaning to ditch GitHub completely, but putting it off for the usual reasons:

1. I have very few projects that receive bug reports or pull requests, and they all live in GitHub.
2. If I remove the code, what's going to happen when people look up my name online? I don't want LinkedIn to be the only thing that shows up.
3. They have my code anyway, why bother moving off it now? It's too late.

For #1, most of those projects receive one pull request (or issue)...per year. Combined >_>.
I am thinking of "the users", but all these are niche enough repositories (mostly Emacs packages) that anyone that wants to report a problem is more than capable of shooting me an email, if it comes to that.
The usual argument of "but then the barrier to entry is too high" has merits, but it's time we change attitudes about this. Do you care about a project? Then you should care enough to send an email, or collaborate in a forge that isn't GitHub.
Let's normalize other forges or ways of working, for a healthier ecosystem.

The last point (#2 above) has to do with having an "online portfolio" of sorts, so people can see my code. I should ask at my current employer if anyone perused my GitHub profile.
In the past, no one had ever seen it. They all relied on my CV and some sort of take home assignment to evaluate my merits. So it's not a great argument, really.

I dream of a future when searching for my name brings up either of my websites instead of GitHub and LinkedIn.
Or maybe not, given some of the things I write here >_>
<_<

Bonus heading

The git stuff should have been its own post. Who knew I had that much to type about it.
I certainly didn't. Oops.

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https://tools.sebasmonia.com got a little make over, and one new tool.

The most important change, I guess, is that the Pastebin clone is the only tool that doesn't require a log in. For all others, you need an "account".

Changes to what was already there

Let's start with the account stuff then.
A friend of mine made me notice that the Image Manipulator's ability to fetch an image for you, from any URL, could be abused in many ways.
So I added logins to the site.
And that opened the door to the last new tool (more on that later).

Also, the code got a big makeover, I split things in more packages.[1]
It is interesting how doing that made me realize that I was leaking a bit of behaviour here and there. Functions to save pastes that also returned HTML, display code that accessed internal structures of other things. I was really careful, but still.
The other realization I had with this, is that adding more packages isn't difficult or complicated. Whenever I start another project, I will modularize it from the start. Pinky promise.

With that clean up, I also decided I needed a better way to generate HTML than just concatenating strings. Most of the HTML is still sourced from plain old files, but for things that are generated on the fly, I am using this generator: hsx.
It's easy to use and perfect for the little snippets I add some pages.

A new tool, "stack of links"

Behold!

I guess this will be the last one for a while, because I am out of ideas.
So much out of ideas that I basically created my own clone of a little tool someone else showed me.[2] It is a tool to store links to read later. It isn't "the poorest Instapaper knock off"...well, it is. But it is also a "perfect clone" of the original work. If you look at it that way, it isn't a knock off ;)

The only real difference is that the original uses a table for the list of links, and mine an <article> for each link. So I can claim it is modern, I guess. Semantic 👌
I also used a Common Lisp system for SQLite, so the links are stored in a local database, which is nice.
Taking advantage of this, I modified the auth stuff to use a database too, instead of a text file in the server 👀 and then I figured I could make one more change...

A silly thing: "x-hoagie-key"

I created Peanut Butter thinking it should be easy to use via curl, so I could quickly call it via the CLI or Emacs to store pastes.
And then I made sure IMAN also supported that usage, even though with all the typing, it is just more convenient to go to the webpage.[3]

For "Stack of Links", I though why not make it convenient to add a link to your reading list via CLI (or, via an Emacs wrapper...). Which also required authentication, since you don't want people adding links to your stack. Everyone's stack is sacred, of course.

So, for example, to add a link to your reading list, you use...

  curl -H "x-hoagie-key: the_api_key" --data-urlencode "link=https://example.com" https://tools.sebasmonia.com/sol/add
    

Calling the header x-hoagie-key is juvenile and silly, and I frigging love it. 🤣

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Since the day I moved the site to a VPS I've been thinking of changing the site's name.
Mostly because I think it is bland. There's nothing wrong with it, but nothing memorable either. I think?

And as I established in earlier posts, I won't change the domain. Because it seems like a lot of work. Well, and also because I don't have a clue which name to choose. But also, it is work.
Changing the title? That's easy, just a search & replace on the site's repo, and I am good to go.

The last in a long list of terrible names is: "Hoagie's bin of thoughts".
I gave up on trying to use the word "rant" in the title, because it always sounds more negative than I intend, no matter how much I try to pair it with another word that highlights how ridiculous the fact that I have a website is.

I find amusing that I care so much about the name of something as lighthearted and un-self-important[1] as this place. Or at least I like to think of it as that. It is just a little...corner? A small...place...? My internet...something?
My corner of the internet?
No wait, that's the current name. 👀

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About a month ago, we made a decision to open a new bank account. We have a digital-only bank, Discover. Which is great, but there are small annoyances that come with not having a branch to do some stuff in person.
For example, every two years or so, we need a certified check or cashier's check. Always a problem, because there there's no branch to get it. You have to order the check a couple days in advance and it is mailed to you...annoying. [1]

Oh you are not in the US? Allow me...

I never wrote a check until I lived in this country...
Actually, let me take a bigger detour: in Argentina, when I was growing up (so, in the stone age of the 90s) you could make a bank transfer and have the money in the destination account by the next day. At worst.
In the US? well, a "wire transfer" can take like, a couple days. It's bonkers.[2]
Same for funds from checks, which seem to work as if they were transfers. The bank, because you are their customer and they love you (?) might give you the funds as soon as you deposit the check. But they will deduct the money if the check bounces. Days later.
Yes, that's the basis of check fraud.

A certified check or cashier's check, is a check that has been certified (wink wink) by the bank as having funds. Which to me, sounds contrived...you go to the bank, get them to print a check by taking the amount from your account in the moment.
Why not make all checks certified? Why not make transfers and check validation faster? I am sure there are reasons, and I am reasonably confident that they are all BS.

Opening an account online

I went to the financial institution's website, and then...

I know. You are thinking, surely, you typed your names with the á and the í, because you still insist that anything that doesn't support at the very least extended ASCII needs to go down in flames, so developers change their ways. And yes I heard you rant before that anything less than UTF-8 support in 2025 is a disgrace. I don't think I agree with your prediction that nuclear apocalypse will come not in the form of authoritarian governments having access to ICBMs, but from converting decimal 89 to "Y".

But, I swear dear reader, I typed the names just as they are spelled in my driver's license. I tried, two times. But no more, because I didn't want the bank to assume I was a bot. Or, you know, a criminal immigrant.
Time to head to a branch!

Weeks go by. Can you blame me? Going to the bank: 😴

Getting there

I spent the morning drinking mate 🧉. Like, about two liters, by myself. While having breakfast and doing stuff in the laptop. And then I lazily got ready. I figured I could stop by the Secaucus Library on the way back, to get my library card I need my driver's license and proof of residency.
Yesterday I happened to put a bank statement in the same shelve I keep my wallet at home, just for this.
So I grabbed: the bank statement, gloves, beanie, coat, house keys, and headed out.

The wife is on a trip, and took the car. Which I don't mind at all, as I can bike or walk anywhere in town. Or, worst case scenario, rideshare.[2]
But today was really windy, so instead of taking the bike, I decided to walk: 40 minutes
I have the day off, I can listen to some messages and a podcast. Why not?

Minor inconvenience 1: I didn't check the weather

It is as windy as yesterday, but not nearly as cold. By the fourth block I take off the gloves and beanie. Halfway there, I take off my coat, and check the temperature on my phone: 9 degrees.[4][5] So now I have my hands full of crap. Sigh.

Minor inconvenience 2: Remember those two liters of mate?

Yes, I did "go" at home before leaving, but still. It was just too much too drink.
I really need a restroom like, 15 minutes before getting to the bank.
Those 15 minutes felt like an hour and a half. By the time I got there I was starting to wonder if I was a victim in a Saw movie, and I would die of bladder explosion.

At the bank

I wait five minutes by the entrance, until someone approaches to ask me if I need a teller or account manager. I try not to speak too fast (because accent) and explain that I would like to open a checking account.
No, I do not have an appointment.
No, I don't mind waiting. Smiles, smiles.
Oh, by the way, can I use the restroom?
"I am sorry, we don't have a restroom, there's a Starbucks 5 minutes from here though".

I walk to Starbucks. On the way there I ponder my life choices. I remember this Animaniacs clip. The scene of Wakko turning on the light is just perfect.
I walk in, head to the restroom as calmly as possible. Once inside hang the coat, gloves and beanie as quickly as possible, pray they don't fall and touch the floor.
Release. I can breathe again. Angelic choirs. All is right with the world.

I get back to the bank, sit down. Play with (spoilers) my freshly installed FreshRSS.
A few minutes later, someone approaches. Small talk. Sit down at her desk.
"Can I have your ID?".
Of course, one second. Check usual wallet pocket. Check other pant pockets. Check coat pockets...But let's be honest, after the first one, I knew...

Remember the list of things I said I got when leaving the house?

So I grabbed: the bank statement, gloves, beanie, coat, house keys, and headed out.

No wallet? No wallet.
I thought I would never get to experience a walk of shame. Mainly because in my youth I had no shame, I collected mistakes like Pokémon.
But today...Yep. 40 minutes is a long time to feel an absolute idiot.

And because I am not totally over the ordeal, I decided to write this post. To try exorcise it out of my brain.

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So, last weekend I finally moved away from use-package, like I predicted it would happen in an earlier post. In that post I also hinted that I was going to write about my keybinding changes...and here it is.
This post is as much self-documentation, as it is way to hopefully get some feedback and comments from others.

I had started typing a section with the history of how I got to this system, but I deleted it. The truth is that the setup I have now has some influence from what came before, but it is a complete redesign based on the the idea that commands correspond to different needs/categories.
Also, remember that I have F6 as a key right next to the spacebar, courtesy of the Dygma Raise "8-key spacebar". And F5 in the Enter key.[1]

And if you think code speaks louder than words, you can see the bindings here.
Now that I moved all of them to single file, that runs after all packages are loaded, it is very easy to detect inconsistencies or forgotten keys. The code is separated in neat pages:

6 pages in buffer bindings.el (delimiter: "^^L")
    28: ;; Custom prefix keymaps: editing and shortcuts (45 lines)
    73: ;; Other custom keymaps (82 lines)
   155: ;; Mode-specific bindings (28 lines)
   183: ;; Remaps (16 lines)
   199: ;; ctl-x-map (23 lines)
   222: ;; Repeat keymaps (47 lines)
    

The three types of commands

According to me, of course. According to me today, who knows what I came up with in the future.
And like with most categorizations, some commands will blur the lines between the labels.

Pure text editing: while typing

Example of these are copy-from-above-command, kill-whole-line, and hoagie-split-by-sep.
These are commands that manipulate text at the lowest level, and don't have default bindings (or are commands I wrote). I put them in their own prefix keymap, hoagie-editing-keymap. It is assigned to F6.

This makes them all accessible under my thumb[2]. Also, none of them are long sequences, just a quick key press, since they are used while typing.

Shortcuts: often used

These are things that I use often enough that I consider it worth it to have them under a key sequence. But they aren't part of the "typing flow".
It also includes keymaps that have "menu options", like the one I described for find-* commands here.

These are assigned to F5. Tapping in succession, F5 f {another letter} and I can invoke find-name-dired or find-grep-dired[3].
Other examples of commands in this group are ediff-buffers, and rgrep.

Also, as per the Emacs manual, it is suggested that users assign things in the key sequence C-C LETTER. I use these for some long-but-mnemonic sequences. For example, C-c l for Eglot:

(defvar-keymap hoagie-eglot-keymap
  :doc "Keymap for Eglot commands."
  :name "Eglot"
  "r" '("rename" . eglot-rename)
  "h" '("help"  . eldoc)
  "c" '("code actions" . eglot-code-actions))
;; "l" for LSP
(keymap-set hoagie-shortcut-keymap "l" hoagie-eglot-keymap)
    

Everything else: M-x

There are things are useful, but seldom used. For example align-regexp, or flush-lines. It is good to know about these commands, but I use them once a month (if that). I don't need to assign a key to them.
I learned from experience that if I put them under a key sequence, I will have to use the command name to find out what was the key binding anyway. So it is OK to just M-x them.

Repeat maps, too

For the longest time, I used expand-region to...well, expand the region. But after reading Mastering Emacs (specifically, the section about mark-* commands, I gave the built ins a try. And turns out that most times it is easier to use those instead.

And there's one scenario that expand-region doesn't cover: What happens if you are moving or killing or transposing two sexps or lines in a row, right next to each other? There's no "outer semantic unit" for that, and it is a pretty common scenario.
For those cases, I lean on repeat-mode:

(defvar-keymap hoagie-mark-repeat-map
  :doc "Keymap to extend selections after a mark command"
  :repeat t
  "SPC" #'mark-sexp
  "@" #'mark-word
  "h" #'mark-paragraph)
    

Another example of how I use repeat maps: some quick navigation without holding modifiers down.

(defvar-keymap hoagie-sexp-movement-repeat-map
  :doc "Keymap to repeat a few \"C-M-something\" movement commands."
  :repeat t
  "u" #'backward-up-list
  "d" #'down-list
  "f" #'forward-sexp
  "b" #'backward-sexp
  "a" #'beginning-of-defun
  "e" #'end-of-defun)
    

In closing

I think the biggest lesson related to this I've learned over my few years as an Emacser, is that if I didn't use a bound command, I should try to keep it in mind in the coming days.
But by the second time I notice I bound something and I never call it, then I can free that key.
It makes no sense to have a gazillion bindings that you don't remember, and you can M-x command-name if you need it. They don't go anywhere!

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Via Joel's weekly recap I found this Brain Baking post : "Thumbs Up 👍".
As I kept reading, I couldn't help but feel the vibe was very much...

...and I guess that readers can imagine the tone on the rest of this post, based on the fact that the starting point is a meme. And I guess another clue is that I regularly use emoji in my writing... 🤓

Ambiguity happens

Clear and effective human communication is one of the hardest things to get right. The widespread adoption of emojis only made the problem worse.

n And the starting point is that I agree with this. Very much. Look, I am not here to say emojis can't be problematic. Or that they aren't (ab)used.
I used to despise the use of even a single emoji, but now I have come around to find them "funny".[1]
Do I use them in communication, say, at work? If it's in a chat window, you bet.
But I won't write a Confluence document using them, and I am pretty sure all of the README files for my open source projects are emoji-free, since I tend to treat them like documentation. To me, emojis are an informal thing, so they don't belong in those places.
So far, so good. But then...

This gets worse in cross-cultural communication according to Cominsky. It’s not just a cross-cultural problem, it’s also a generational problem: a study by Zahra and Ahmed revealed that emojis such as thumbs up, crying laughing and skull are more likely to cause mix-ups between generations. Or how about surrounding the emoji with textual context in order to reduce potential confusion? That was disproven by Miller et al. in Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication [...]

And here is where the author started losing me. "This gets worse in cross-cultural communication"...just as using "plain English".
In fact, the first read I made of the article, I assumed this was written by an anglocentric American[2], because of the underlying tone of "emojis are ambiguous, words are always clear".
I don't think anyone can look at the history of words, spoken or written, and make such a statement with a straight face.

Same goes for the fact that communication is hard when it happens across cultures or generations. I can see it all the time with my wife and my son.
On the former case, I am (well, was) way more embedded in online culture and "meme of the week" stuff than my wife. And she is more in touch with the argentinian cultural zeitgeist than I am. Quite often one of us is helping the other make sense of a joke, headline, or comment from a friend.
In my son's case, he displays his own lingo nowadays. He and his friends have inside jokes, and there are generational things that I don't understand[4]. Sometimes I have to ask him to explain something just so I "get" what he means. And to be honest, many times I only do so at a surface level...

Digression: on parenting and understanding

A lot of times lately I've been thinking of my own poor parents, given that I was (was? >_>) chronically online in my teens. I bet there were times when they had no clue what I was saying or meaning with a particular phrase.
AND GUESS WHAT! Now I get to experience that myself!
I don't say anything new by stating that time is a circle, or that some experiences never change through history, or that a lot of parenting is looking back and having renewed understanding for your parents. So I won't elaborate on any of these.

Context always matters

Emphasis below is mine:

The last piece of research I’d like to share here is that of Shandilya et al. on using non-contextual communication in virtual workspaces like Slack and Google Chat. It looks like new employees first have to read between the lines and learn the intricate interpretation details of the micro-culture, sometimes even differing from team to team within the same company. Before we can send out a thumbs up, we first have to decode how others around us are using and interpreting it. Which might differ greatly from your habitually usage in causal app messages to friends.

I argue that getting acquainted with your team's "micro-culture" is crucial, regardless of emoji use or not. Heck, acronyms alone can make life very difficult, last week at work there was mass confusion over one during a group presentation.
Why single out emoji as the only cause of ambiguity?

And that's how I arrive to the conclusion of "old man yells at cloud". The author has a particular dislike of emoji, and he is well in his right to have it. But it is never voiced as a preference, using instead linked research as if it were an objective matter.
It is not. 🥰

But! I relate...

I think that gender-neutral Spanish is an abomination. My only "real" argument, is that there are a lot of constructs that make things contradictory and confusing. Only one I remember now is a joke about how the gender neutral of "hombro" (shoulder) would be "hombre" (man).

And what do I do with my dislike of gender neutral Spanish? I use it ironically, of course.
I secretly hope that it goes away, and that we all think of it as an excess of political correctness. But I also know that it is completely out of my control.
The language will keep evolving, and it is up to me decide to keep up with it, like I did in the 90s when it incorporated hundreds of acronyms and English borrowed words.
Or I can complain like the old man I am. Regardless of which one I choose, the language will do its own thing.

And that is the bottom line. Things change, languages and communication etiquette evolve outside of anyone's control. They changed a lot when we moved from postal mail to emails and chat rooms, and again with T9 typing and now with emojis.

We can hate the change, or embrace it, but it is hard to pretend it is more than a preference, no matter how many studies we cite.
I will still follow to the blog, BTW, because even if I didn't agree with the post's conclusion, it was well written and a breeze to read. And there are other great posts, and that's just looking at recent history.

But I will note, when checking Brain Baking's About page (to see if he was American - he is not) I noticed he is using Latin words to define himself.
Obscuring meaning through an ancient language, rather than emojis or acronyms. 😉

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A couple months ago we went to Sandy Hook. The beach was busy, but we found a relatively good spot quickly, and jumped into the water.

For those of you that aren't familiar with the Atlantic coast in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland: none the beaches in these states that I've visited, are exactly calm waters.
With big waves constantly breaking, most of us in the water were jumping over/diving under them as entertainment.
At one point Maria and Juan went back to the beach, and I was on my own, lost in my thoughts. Then I noticed a seagull resting on the water surface.

Waves were rocking it back and forth, one side to the other. But the seagull was completely relaxed[1], just floating along.
Observing the seagull made me think of my struggles with anxiety, a few years back. Part of the work I did had to do with living "in the moment". Accepting things the way they are, not how I idealized them.
Understanding that my expectations are exactly that, mine. And when things are different than how I wanted them to be, I have to accept the disappointment. Or even better, give way to the possibility that things might turn out better than how I imagined them.
Just be there. Again, "in the moment". Let that be the starting point.

And this seagull was completely accepting of what was happening to it. Sometimes it was floating farther to the left, and back to my right, and farther from the beach. But it just stayed there, over the surface, unfazed. "Be the seagull" I ventured.

But then I wondered, "is that right?" and a new line of thought formed.
Like I said, I had to learn to deal with negative emotions. And part of "the work" related to that, was acknowledging those negative emotions.
If anyone asked, I would always say I was doing OK. Nothing affected me!
But in reality, I've always been sensitive.[2] And the cumulative effect of "swallowing" all those feelings for years and years, just to avoid any kind conflict, was consuming me.
I had to learn, and practice (a lifelong journey), to surface these things, admit them, and if necessary deal with them.

And the big challenge for me, is, how to tell apart the situations where I am "being in the moment", from the ones where I am resorting to my old mechanism of ignoring any negative feelings?
When do I go from acceptance and observing reality as it is, to ignoring it and pretending it doesn't matter?

In one of the last sessions, talking about this with my therapist, he said something like, "the fact that you are asking this is a good sign". And then he gave me recent-ish examples where I walked away from situations that were hurting me, instead of pretending that I didn't care.
My impression of all this was that, as usual, the secret sauce is the middle ground.
Don't be a control freak that falls apart in the face of change, but also don't pretend everything is the same and nothing matters.
And in my case, I experienced first hand how trying to embrace both extremes at the same time isn't the healthiest of behaviours ...

"Well, then the seagull is not a good example. Because look at it, just floating. Letting the waves rock it without reacting at all. That isn't healthy either!".
Not even five seconds later, the seagull took flight. On its way to the sky, it made circle above me.

I don't want to give myself more importance than I should in this story...but, that's hard to avoid that when you are retelling something that happened entirely in your head. :)
It totally felt like it the seagull was humbling me.
"Of course I am in control, lame human. I can let things be for however long I want, and I can fly away whenever I want. You are the one that needs to practice awareness, to choose between them. I know what I want.".

After the (perceived?) life lesson from the bird, I watched it fly away until it turned into a speck in the cloudy sky.
"Be the seagull" I thought.

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I had to do a lot of stuff over the weekend, instead I made different choices...I might regret that in the coming days...
But, I had a new little thing to obsess over :) and because it is too late to turn back the clock by now, I figured I can just give up 100% on "responsibilities". Apply the sunken procrastination fallacy, and just let it all go.

"How about I spend maybe 30 mins or so catching up in my almost-out-of-control reading list", I thought, "to close the weekend with a bang".
I was even considering opening the instructions to install FreshRSS in the VPS, as I want to move away from browser bookmarks and into the shiny world of RSS.[1]

Instead, I am dealing with a kid that ate too much candy, brewing a digestive tea, and I feel like my only consolation - if you can call it that - is to vent about it here.

In a way, it feels like karma. Because I made "bad" choices during the last two days, I don't get to do this particular thing now.
If I think a little more about it, I realize that makes no sense.

And yet...so many little moments of parenting feel exactly like that. You put off something, decide to focus on an interest, give up some sleep for enjoyment. And the decision comes back to haunt you. Pretty soon, usually.

I will be honest, it happened way more often when the kiddo was younger. But the dejavu I had just now...
Time to go 🫠

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Update 2025-11-12: despite saying I wouldn't do it below, I did update all the links in the blog to the new URL. 🙃

I don't think anyone but me used Hoagiebin. And that is ok, since I wanted a self-hosted Pastebin for my own use, and I shared the URL with the world [1] out of joy that it worked more than anything else. 😁
I also mentioned in a previous post that I wanted to move some code around in the Colibrí repository to separate the pastebin portions from the purely web stuff (Hunchentoot and easy-routes related code, mostly).
The other thing that bothered me was that the URL might be too long[2].

And also yesterday, when thinking of the naming for the next tool, I realized that I can't have all of them use the "Hoagie-something" moniker. That would be terrible.

Arriving to a new name and URL

Because it is a pastebin, I started thinking of something that shortened to "pb". And this morning I landed on "Peanut Butter". It makes for an easy to remember name (I think?), and gives the same initials as "pastebin". Can't ask for more.

I guess I should update the previous posts to refer to the new name, but meh. These posts are close enough together.

Visit the slightly revamped Hoagiebin Peanut Butter page here: https://tools.sebasmonia.com/pb.

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Time to put an end to the reign of tech-related posts. Meet Monty:

My wife had been thinking of adopting another cat for a long while now. She wasn't sure when to do it.
She was pretty shaken after our last pet goodbye, just a few weeks before moving back to the east coast. Our old lady, Bella, was super close to her, so it hit her the hardest.

I could sense a new kitty was coming in the last couple months, though. The signs were there, checking out shelter webpages every other week. And one day, she told me about this rescue, and it is a boy so it should be easier for him to get along with Suzie[1], and poor thing he lived on the streets and...and few days after, Monty was home.

He was really scared the first couple days. He had been moving between foster homes, and wasn't really fully domesticated since being taken off the streets - except for the litter box (luckily 😅). But he started getting more and more confident after about 4 days. And now, a month later, we can say he is definitely a house cat.

Still can't pick him up though, he immediately runs away. But he does come sit on your lap if he does it on his own terms, so it's fine. 😺

We should check with Suzie, to see how she feels about this, right?

That's her looking at Monty on the couch.
Not amused, I would say.
And no, it hasn't improved one bit since that photo :)

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Update 2025-11-12: Hoagiebin was renamed to "Peanut Butter" (updated link)

I don't think I've written this many "techie" posts in a row since I started the blog 🤔

In this post I mentioned that I now have a small dynamic site. Yes, it is written in Common Lisp. How could it not be? 😎 Here is the repo.
I set up the site, and created a Pastebin clone, which seemed like an easy enough thing to get started with web development in CL.[1]

You can play with it here: Hoagiebin

Original state

Now, the version I published on the the very first try worked only via curl. The next day I added a page to paste text.
A couple days ago, I figured it could support file uploads from the browser too, and while thinking about it I realized it had...other problems.

Improvement 1: paste rendering

Take for example this paste created from the main function in Colibrí:

Even before testing it, I knew it would display like crap. Because the text was returned as-is, without even setting the Content-Type response header.
I had two options[2], set the header to text/plain, or render the output in a pair of <pre><code> tags. The advantage in the second case is that I can also set a nice title for the page. So I did that:

Later, when testing, I realized I also needed to escape HTML characters.
And I put this feature behind (brittle) detection, via the User Agent request header, of whether the request came from a browser or something else.
So that curl requests still get plain text directly.[3]

Improvement 2: upload from file

The renovated Hoagiebin homepage has a button to upload files. Pretty early on I thought I didn't want validation of file types, but after testing for a bit, that opened the door to a bunch of errors. Instead of trying to predict the problems, the error message is printed back in a very plain page, with a link to go back.

I find this one the most "scary" features in the tool, but I think I did just enough to prevent something/someone from breaking the site.
If they aren't actively trying, I mean. I am sure there are a lot of ways to break it :) but my concern was that it wouldn't break during normal usage.
And also, the textarea is probably as vulnerable as the uploads... 🤷

Improvement 3: HTML templates and nicer(?) pages

Ahhh, who doesn't love a good template, right? That's how all the posts in this site start their life as: a "sample" file with some example markup, and some markers here and there.
I moved the all three pages in Colibrí out of the code, and into template files. And then I added a bunch of other pages! And made the pages more beautiful...for my extremely limited design sensibilities. I mean, look around this site. Right?

But, I still didn't want to invest the time to learn a proper HTML generation framework (I think the one I would use is Spinneret), in part because I am only replacing one or two values in each template. And also because I wanted to focus in Hunchentoot and the routing part first.

Other code cleanup tidbits, and what did I learn

I moved around some of the code, because I think long term, the colibri.lisp source file will have only the routing/pure web parts, and I will divide the system in smaller files, one for each site (hoagiebin.lisp, tool2.lisp, etc).
So I removed more things from the routing definitions and moved them to individual functions. And the vibe that gives me is that of ASP.NET MVC applications, and the routes would be the Controller part.
But that's were the similarities end. So far?

I will still keep everything in the same package, as I don't anticipate anything I can build being big enough to justify living in a separate namespace (that's what packages are in CL, more or less).

And then I had to deal a bit with reading and changing headers, and revisit with-output-to-string, which I discovered somewhat recently. I could have imported another library for that string clean up, and probably eventually will. But for this single project, that is all.

What's next

Earlier this morning I could have shared a snippet using Hoagiebin, but felt like I shouldn't because the tool was unstable and ugly. It still is ugly, but I would like to think now it is stable, which is why I am writing this post talking about it.

And other than fixing bugs in it, I don't know what else I could add.
OK, there are things to add, stuff like syntax highlighting for example. But I have no interest in such features.[4]
All that is left now is using the site, and thinking of the next tool.
Or finishing the dict server...

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The context

I am not a user of RSS feeds. I only added one to my site after a couple people asked, via email.[1] But...lately I follow enough blogs that checking for new posts in my bookmarks has been a bit of a chore. In particular for rarely-updated blogs.

If I had to use a reader, I would go for either Newsticker (built in Emacs reader) or Elfeed (by far the most popular Emacs reader).

The problem is...I read blogs in my personal laptop and my phone. Sometimes at work too. So I need a way to "share the state" between Emacs instances, plus a solution to sync with an iOS reader. What to do?

Well, I could use a third party service! And then all devices would share the same "state". But since I now have a VPS, I could instead host my own RSS aggregator! Looking at lists of self-hosted software, there's a ton of them. Which one to choose?
I want something minimal, that "just works". I don't care if it has extensions, or it is super configurable. And ideally built with Python...

The trigger

I was checking out a blog post that compared a few of these self-hosted readers, and the guy did an OK job.
Except that every single review started with the GitHub stars count and date of last commit. And points were deducted from the review if the commit date was "not recent enough".

Since I can only be a curmudgeon once per night, I am picking on "date of last commit" for today's rant.

An eye opener (via Lisp)

I was guilty of those crimes too[2], until I read a few years ago the excellent, and still relevant, "A road to Common Lisp" by Steve Losh. In particular the sections "Escaping the Hamster Wheel of Backwards Incompatibility" and "Practicality Begets Purity".
Sure, Common Lisp is blessed with being particularly immune to bit rot, because of the curse of its specification being untouched since 1990.
And it gets away with it because the language (and ecosystem) has the ability to add new features without touching said spec, in ways that no other can.

But there's a deeper lesson there, one that I was thinking about when, some time after reading that post, I was evaluating libraries for some work thingy[3].

My advice is this: as you learn Common Lisp and look for libraries, try to suppress the voice in the back of your head that says "This project was last updated six years ago? That's probably abandoned and broken." The stability of Common Lisp means that sometimes libraries can just be done, not abandoned, so don't dismiss them out of hand

What if one of these libraries is done?.
And I will be honest, I had been programming for a long time by then, and either this thought never occurred to me...or I had forgotten the possibility, caught in the whirlwind of constant updates for everything.

Brief digression

This is not unlike a mini-revelation that I had around 2011/2012, that I didn't "need" to be on top of every language/framework/major library release.
Eventually I would work with them, and then I can get caught up, or the update would never be relevant to me.

This sounds silly, but it was a huge relief. It helped me slow down a lot.
Maybe even helped me "go deeper" into some stuff, as a developer? Mmmm I know I gave myself permission to exaggerate a bit in the post, but that sounds like too much. Anyway.

Things to evaluate WITH the date of last commit

I am not saying "date of last commit" isn't important. I am saying that you can't only look at it as a measure of a project's health, unless you also consider...

Project maturity

If a repository has a library that's been built since 1999, then I would expect it to be stable enough that it doesn't need to have recent commits to be useful. But you also have to consider...

Feature set

When a project's scope is big enough, it is going to be perpetually fixing bugs.
But if a repository hosts a small GUI application, that has a single window with two file pickers and a button, maybe it is done? Done-done? But you also have to consider...

Platform stability

In the same post quoted above, Steve says: My current day job is in Scala, and if a library's last activity is more than 2 or 3 years old on GitHub I just assume it won't work without a significant amount of screwing around on my part. .
So yes, if a Python repository hasn't been updated since 2011, I would look closely to make sure it is actually Python 3 and not Python 2. 🙃
But maybe a project's last commit is in 2016. It depends on Requests and the built-in CSV module, and some smaller PyPI projects that are also stable...then, it is fine?

Back to RSS aggregators

I still don't know which one I will pick. Or if I will take the opportunity to build something on my own, very basic. Like, not even a proper aggregator: just a SQLite database, and regularly update a list of feed entries. Which I then manually mark as read in a very plain-looking front end. Sounds good?
No, it doesn't, to be honest.

But, as far as evaluating the different projects: since I am interested in something as small as possible in scope, and the more conservative in library and platform choices, the better...I wouldn't look as "date of last commit" as a very good metric.

Conclusion

Feature creep everywhere.

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Update 2025-11-12: Hoagiebin was renamed to "Peanut Butter" (updated link)

I mentioned in my last post that now that I have this site running on a VPS, I also have a playground for other things.
For a while I wanted to have my own private Pastebin-like service, and I figured I could learn some new Common Lisp stuff if I built my own. So I did that this past weekend.

Initially I thought I should keep it private, out of concern that it could be abused or broken if exposed (since of course it doesn't have any security measures 👀), but from the moment the site was up, I shared it with a friend.
And then in next few hours, with more people, in semi-public forums. I couldn't help it.

The joy of creation

Once I polished the tool a bit[1], and published that version, I had a feeling of euphoria.
I felt that before, when I wrapped up the initial version of open source tools and libraries, but also when getting a PR ready at work for something that makes me feel proud.

The joy of creation. Of seeing something you imagined, typed in, tested, changed and re-tested, finally reach a stable state and being usable. Even if it is something as small as this CL website. I had to learn a lot about Hunchentoot, setting up nginx to reverse proxy. Try alternatives until things worked more or less the way I envisioned.
And seeing it all come together and "work", it is awesome.

Side note: the joys of Common Lisp

When I settled on using easy-routes, I kept reading the somewhat sparse documentation and timidly trying things.
Then I remembered that CL is all about interactive development!!!
So, with the web server running, I keep re-defining routes and hitting the server with curl and eventually the browser, making adjustments.

It was awesome. No compilation step, no restarting, no conflicts. Redefine one or several routes at time, change parameter names. Extract things from the route to external functions, try again on the fly. It was almost magical.

The need to share

Few people cared about this thing, and I knew that from the beginning. There are a gazillion Pastebin clones[2], there's zero novelty.
But I had to tell someone about it.
Because I was just happy. Still am. It is a thing I made! And it is live! I saved a paste from work yesterday and I was like "yes! it still works!"

I figure this is how people who are good playing music, or building things out of wood, or painting, etc. feel. But software is my thing. Maybe the only thing. 😅

Let's do more! Of WHATEVER

Since the morning after I wrapped up Hoagiebin I've been itching to build something else in the Colibrí repo.

I was never much of an ideas person though, so I haven't quite figure out what. For example, all of my Emacs packages are the result of "I find this or that annoying, I need to a tool to make it easier." Zero inspiration.
The tricky part is not trying to do something too ambitious. Like, I don't use Fastmail's WebDAV storage as much anymore (since I moved the site), but it is convenient to have it. So I thought "well, I can write my own WebDAV server". But once I think a bit more about it, it can get quite complex...

I can also let things be until I come up with something organically, I guess. But I am overjoyed now, not later!
Web all the things! Common Lisp all the things! 🙌
(Or, you know, I could finally wrap that dict server...I know it isn't related to my newfound web superpowers, but...)

PS: I just closed the post, and when picking the tags, I noticed that I have one for "failures" but not one for "successes". It says a lot about me, I think? Fodder for another post LOL.

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Well, I guess because the title isn't a yes/no question there's something to explore here...

I am a parent of a middle schooler, work full time, and I realized yesterday night that I have more hobbies and interests that I can realistically give my attention to.

So of course, writing and moaning is the way to get more things done. Obviously.[1]

The list (like, what I remember now)

Esperanto

A couple years ago I got quite far into the Duolingo course, but eventually dropped it and forgot all about it. It didn't help that the Esperanto meet up in Denver didn't recover from COVID.

Being in the NYC metro could potentially help with finding more people practice with.
And about two months ago I bought a book, because I am old school like that. But since then I have only read one chapter and listened to the audio thingy once too.

Common Lisp

I want to become more proficient with Common Lisp, and the way to do that is to build things, which of course takes time. The last couple days this took center stage as after moving this site to a proper server, I now have a place to host web stuff and I experimented a bit already.

But I also have a project to build a dict server in pause, for months now.

Emacs refinements

There are changes and cleanup I want to make in my config that will take at least a day. Maybe two.

Fishing

I have started fishing lately, and I would like to do it more often.
Yes, despite not catching anything so far LMAO. I just enjoy the time away from the screen and outside.

For this, the cold weather won't be a deterrent for me. I have no idea if it impacts the fish quantity...although, can it be less than 0 fish caught :)

This blog

I really don't want to stop writing often here. It helps me, gives me focus, and a way to express my thoughts and feelings. It is therapeutic, a release, and I just enjoy it.

But...there are topics that I would like to write about that are complex, nuanced. And those posts take time and the right frame of mind to attack them.
I would like to write about taking sides, about separating art and artist. Some long form ramblings on software: what I think is good software and what I dislike, and how that changed in the years I've been writing it.
Speaking of software, I also have some techie guides planned, around Windows 11 and SSH, Emacs and TRAMP on Windows, and a few other things I learned at work lately. Those also take time, and need extra review to make sure all the information is correct. I know the information is already out there, but I would like for other people to have an easier time than I had, reading 900 blog posts and tech articles to distill what is really needed.

Gaming and reading

These are the ones I've been doing a bit better with lately. I finished a couple games (took me quite some time) and read a couple books (bus commute helped with that!).

The sum of finding everything interesting and being too optimistic

I am a curious person by nature, and then there's hardly a topic that I find boring.
A language that barely any people speak, but it is touted as helping you develop skills to learn more languages later? Bring it on!
A programming language that is the cradle of 90% of the features in other languages nowadays? Why use Python, Rust, Go, etc. if I can go straight to the source and learn more Common Lisp?
And so on and on.

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Usually when I start thinking about something like this, it means I will do it sooner or later. It happened with moving the site to a proper server, changing my keyboard keycaps, revisiting all my Emacs keymaps[1], and a long etc if I keep going back in time.
In some cases it takes me a few days, in others even months...but I eventually do it.

Let's take a look at my considerations for and against use-package.

The good

Everyone else is using it. Which is not a minor thing: most packages provide a use-package declaration to install and configure them.

It abstracts away repetitive code, in particular around keymaps and bindings. Also hooks I guess. It also helps with package dependencies and conditional loading, thanks to :after, :if, etc.

And finally, probably the biggest selling point, it makes lazy-loading of packages the default experience.

The not so good

When I moved my configuration to use-package, I expected it to become shorter or more "compact". But I remember once I was done, I didn't feel like my init file was much different. If anything, it read a bit more cluttered.[2]
I recall I even considered reverting all the changes, but figured I would give it some time.

use-package abstracts away a lot of repetitive code, as with any abstraction, sometimes you have to really think about what happens under the covers to understand why something works/doesn't work.
And some newer keymaps macros and functions don't work directly in use-package yet. I figure support will be added very soon, and that those kind of "core" changes aren't common, but still.

Things that matter to me

We have to normalize things being "because I feel this way about it".
These aren't objective reasons. They might be wrong, and eventually I read something that makes me reconsider. They might only apply to my use cases. Or maybe is just a matter of taste about code and style.
In any case, I am open to feedback about them! :)[3]

The network effect of use-package is not very relevant to me lately, as I only have installed about 4 external packages.
I've read a few times people suggesting their init file is more organized with use-package, but I find that mine is about the same. I used to organize the packages alphabetically...and I still do.
I think I would lean into splitting my config into smaller files, maybe, which is orthogonal to use-package.[4]

And finally, the big one. Lazy loading helps with init times, which should matter to me, since my work laptop runs Windows. 🙄
Except that I start Emacs once in a while, and I am more bothered by some features that don't work right away. Example, I try to find-file using TRAMP syntax, but TRAMP isn't loaded.
I mean, I have to fix my config to load it, but this case in particular, I am not calling any command or binding. So a simple (require 'tramp) in my init would work.

And once I go down that line of thinking, I figure, why not change this or that other block too to be just a couple function calls and keymap-set...and well, here I am, arguing for changing everything.
Combined to also feeling that I'd rather wait 2, 3 or 10 seconds more once, than have a little stutter when I invoke something in a package that wasn't loaded yet. And yes, this mostly applies to my work laptop, but I am not maintaining two sets of configs.[5]

A more stylistic/philosophical point

For a while now I've been wary of the sins we developers commit in the name of not repeating code, or to reduce our typing effort.
You know what? I will take some repetition and boilerplate, if it means the code is more straightforward to reason about.

Up to what point, you might ask? When is too much repetition worse than an abstraction?
And I say...I don't know, it depends on the case :)

Which is another thing I have been thinking about (and maybe will write about) for a couple months now: let's embrace "it depends". Not everything needs a hard rule or to be applied consistently. It's OK to adjust to the circumstances, or to change your stance based on some parameters.
And when is it "adjusting your stance to the circumstances", and when is it "you are just an inconsistent mess"? Well...it depends. =P

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This weekend we drove to Pennsylvania to visit the Bloomsburg "Covered bridge & Arts Festival". It is the second time we attend, and we recommend.
Most if not all of the crafts are really artisanal. And not cheap imports re-branded, as we have seen in some other places.[1]

I have a little story, and since it is quite short, I added an extra bit.

Pass with care

As we were driving down a county road, I saw yet another "Pass with care" sign.

I turned to Maria and said Do you know why the signs say "pass with care"?.
Before giving her time to process that a dad joke was coming her way, even before even she had time to roll her eyes, I added It is because you are supposed to roll down you window as you overtake the other car, and ask the driver how they are feeling today, and if they need a hug.

She had a hearty laugh. Which goes to show that you don't need great jokes, passable ones will do, as long as you surprise your audience.
Or that she was being charitable, being in a good mood as we were on a road trip.
Eh, I'll take it, whichever it is.

Sleep voyeurism

Speaking of surprising your audience, I expect this title misdirected you, esteemed reader.

During our cruise trip earlier this year, Maria and I entertained ourselves finding people who were sleeping in the pool deck.
Something about being all day in the ship...maybe exhaustion from the constant stimulus, maybe being too relaxed. Maybe a bit of all those, or something else entirely. But people would just pass out on the pool chairs.

We didn't laugh at them, but admired (and ranked) the degree to which they were relaxed. The more they looked like very peaceful rag dolls, the better.

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The site has moved to a new host: a VPS running in Digital Ocean.

I don't expect the site to change. I could have used Fastmail's static hosting until the end of time.
But...I am a developer. Heck, I used to do web development.[1] Shouldn't I have a website hosted in a server, that I configured myself?

The thing is, all web development that I ever did was .NET corporate stuff, I never had to deal with DNS, and up until today I had more familiarity with IIS than nginx.
Well, at this point I am pretty confident saying: I don't know anything about neither of them. Yay!

Shout out to this guide, which I followed to a T to get the site running locally in the VPS: Danny van Kooten: "Setting up a VPS for static site hosting".
That last 20% that I walked on my own, that's when the headaches started.

How do I get the site running outside the VPS? How do I configure the DNS? Will this break my email, which uses sebasmonia.com ? Etc.
All those networking classes in college where I barely paid attention, eons ago, came back to me in the form of a nebulous mass of ignorance.
I had a passing idea of DNS entries having records, and that I needed to get it right or everything would stop working. No pressure. 😬

Well, after a few hours of reading Fastmail's docs, Iwantmyname docs, Digital Ocean's docs, and some blog posts...Not only I seem to have working email, but also felt confident enough to setup OpenPGP WKD without revisiting the docs: created the A record for the subdomain, the new site in nginx, updated the certificate to include the openpgpkey subdomain.
Look ma! no hands!

Then I had to look online how to configure the CORS header thingy so https://www.webkeydirectory.com gave my setup a greenlight.
But I got pretty far without searching anything.

Q&A

Q: Why not self-host for real? You are still depending on a third party.
A: I have to thank my friend Diego[2] for convincing me that hosting at home was going to be more than I could handle, at least for now. I could barely make it in this setup. Maybe in the future?

Q: What cool things you wanted to try, that you felt this work was justified?
A: Well...stuff...that I read about. The other day.....ALRIGHT FINE, I don't know yet. But I am sure I will find a use for a server like this! Like...file storage with WebDAV...? And some other service...yep.

Q: Why didn't you take the chance to change the domain name?
A: No joke, I was really looking for domains that I liked, but 1) I wasn't going to change the email anyway, and 2) I wasn't confident I could pull off having a single domain properly configured, much less two.

And oh boy was I right on that last on. I would have had twice the amount of things to misconfigure.
I swear I am not touching this setup until I really, really, really need to.

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I was born and raised in Argentina, lived there until my 30s. We almost pride ourselves in being a land of contradictions. I take this as giving me some "insider knowledge" to point out contradictions in culture and social discourse for other places. 😎
Here follows a handy guide to "name" your cultural background, from a real immigrant.
I will also point out that overly categorizing things is a very American trait. The need to put everything in a box, reducing a textured reality full of gradients to a single word or group.

"I am a (something)-American"

1. Were you born in another country?
2. Did you come to the USA as a kid? or at most a pre-teen?

A few years ago, in school, when talking about this, someone said he is "Argentinian-American". I thought, and still think, this is reductive in one case, and wrong in another.
Literally, he was born in Argentina, From that point of view, he is Argentinian.
But he also spent most of his life in the US. I think calling him Argentinian-American, putting the country he was born in over the one in which he grew up, where he is spending his formative years, is...mmmm...I don't want to say wrong. Like I said earlier, reductive.

There's also the fact that not everyone who grows up in an immigrant household goes through the same experience. I've seen siblings, under the same roof, and with little age difference, really connected to their parent's culture in one case and completely ignore it in the other.
Here comes into play what I said in the intro: can't reduce all immigrants to a pair of demonyms, everyone has their own journey.

In any other case: you are "American".

Let's say my son decides to have kids. And he still lives in the US.
I would love if in this scenario, my grandkids are connected to Argentinian culture. Speak rioplatense Spanish, use the word "football" when referring to soccer, and drink mate. And maybe they do, and maybe they don't care.
In either case...they would be American.

They would be born here in the US, to parents at least once removed from another country and culture. So, they would be American. There is nothing wrong about this, it is a fact of life.

I find it, honestly, dumb and maybe cringe, when someone claims to be Irish-American, or Italian-American, or Japanese-American, but they are like five generations removed from their immigrant ancestors.
You can be connected to a cultural heritage, but at that point, it is a real stretch to make it part of your identity to put it in front of "American".

In principle, I don't care

Of course, you are free to call yourself whatever you want. You are not bothering anyone by it, knock yourself out!
I feel and behave the same about a lot of other things. You want to identify as gay, member of X or Y religion, transgender, libertarian, communist or furry. I really don't mind. I would like for your to be able to do so in the open, and to live your best life being...a furry. Or French-American. Or whatever.

As long as everyone has the same freedom, we can all coexist[1] in the same place, and not impose things on others, I am all for it.

But you can't have it both ways

I can't stand double standards.
For example, you can't seriously fly (for example) an Irish flag next to an American flag in your front porch and then use hateful rhetoric when talking about immigration. Even I know, and I haven't studied that much American history, that Irish who emigrated here in the early 20th century faced a lot of discrimination. And same for most if not all ethnic groups.

If you are so connected to your immigrant ancestors, you would know how hard emigrating is. Even if you do it out of choice, it is still a very difficult one, and that isn't taken lightly.
So you should be able to see immigrants today through that lens, and identify their plight and willingness to seek a better future for themselves and their families.

Yes, I generalized, so if you think I am being unfair to you, a 4th generation and proud German-American, who loves all immigrants, I am genuinely sorry.
But at the same time, about half of the US voted for the anti-immigrant hate rhetoric, so my comments here apply to a good chunk of people. And you know it, dear reader.

And in the case of those people, I find the idea that they identify as XYZ-American, and they are cheering for the way immigration matters are currently being handled...baffling. To put it mildly.

One thing for a future post...

The way latinos are singled out is particularly hilarious to me, on two levels.
First, because a lot of the current economy is sustainable only thanks to their presence and the fact that so many are undocumented and have no rights or legal protections .
Second, because in a country with places named "Montana"[2], "Conejos", and "Los Angeles", this seems like a battle lost a long, long, long time ago. The USA has been heavily latino influenced for longer than many would like to admit.

But I prefer shorter posts. So maybe I will expand on these another day.

You can tell it's been a while, because I have five reviews.
Almost all of them are from iN-TEA, a small store in Littleton, Colorado. My wife got me a big box for Father's Day back in July, earlier in my tea journey.

The fact that these were presents matters. I used to get mostly fruity & sweet teas, and a few varieties of herbals. With the occasional Earl Grey. So the selection in the gift box reflect that earlier preference.
One my initial objectives when I started treating tea as a hobby, was to try as many "plain", or "pure" varieties of tea as possible first.

I still enjoy herbal teas, of course. And this box has great teas so far, and one excellent surprise...that I will review last.
It's not only about click bait (?), I also do that for example, when eating a tasty pastry. Eat all the sides first and leave the middle portion with jam or custard for last. 🤤

Raspberry garden

I used to get boxes of Celestial Seasonings teabags once in a while. Like for example, Wild Berry flavored.
Well, this tea is the upscale version of that. Mmmm I think I am selling it short. It is as flavorful as those, except that the flavor is more textured. And the tea has a bit more body.
AND it can be re-steeped (MANY times) for variations in the flavor profile, as the sweetness subsides.

2.5 out of 5 Hoagies

This is actually a really good tea. The score reflects some of the competition in today's post, being honest.

Spiced Apple Pie

This was included in the box as a sample gift.
It tasted exactly like an apple pie, so I hated every second of it, and after the first steep I just let it go.
Now, if you like apple pies, sure, get this tea.

Speaking of that

I don't understand what's to like about pies anyway. They rank somewhere in the top 5 of my culinary disappointments in the US.[1]
Dear America: easy on the cinnamon. Less is sometimes more...

0 out of 0 Hoagies
Not even half.

Blackberry Mist

When I tried this one for the first time, it completely surprised me. It is sweet, but has a kick of sour/bitter in the back of the sip (but it happens on your tongue, not the throat or exhale)[2][3]. When I had Maria try it, she explained blackberries have that exact quality in their flavor, so it would make sense for the tea to represent that. I will pay more attention next time I eat blackberries...
Because it surprised me, and because it is a "slightly different" kind of sweet/fruity tea, the score goes up a bit:

3 out of 5 Hoagies

Small break: supermarket Quik Tea Darjeeling

For a palate cleanser[4], let's talk about this one:

I want to try many tea varieties, and I would like to do it by trying "regular folk" tea.
I see it with Yerba Mate, in Amazon or some particular stores. They sell yerba as an organic, specially treated, premium product. While for us in Argentina, any yerba from the store is good.[5].

Maybe after a while I go for special varieties or qualities of teas that are more expensive and delicate.
But I think to really appreciate those, first I need to be familiar with a more "standard" flavor...for, in this case, Darjeeling.

There's a grocery store in Secaucus that carries a lot of Indian products, including the tea in the photo above. I would like to think this is what people drink on a random evening. It doesn't strike as a product aimed at connoisseurs or anything like that.
It is very aromatic. The flavor is less bitter than regular black tea, and flowery. A second steep unlocks more of a "woodsiness"...and that's about how much I get out of a spoonful of it. A third steep is almost flavorless.

3.5 out of 5 Hoagies

This one has become a go-to for later afternoons and sometimes evenings.

You have to try this: Cranberry coconut

Where to begin.
The flavor is just perfect. You can taste every ingredient on it. But what I loved the most about this one is the texture. I swear, it is a creamy tea. I didn't know that was possible, but...this tea exists. Maria says it is probably because of the coconut.

And it is a tea I've steeped up to four times and it was still flavorful and aromatic. Although by then it would lose the oily/creamy texture.
I know I will order this marvel of a blend again, and again, and again. Forever.
I LOVE this concoction.

11 out of 5 Hoagies

Closing thoughts: Scoring things is hard

I started writing this yesterday, just today I read this post by Manu: Scoring books.
And in this set of reviews, I rated a tea 2.5...I think in a previous post that tea would have been a 3, but compared to the rest of the post, 3 seemed like that too much.

Is that the correct approach? Would a 3 then mean a tea is fine, and most teas would be a 3? No clue. Half of why I did the score thingy was for the fun of coding it - I didn't think at all of the scale I would use long term, or what it means to have 1 or 5 mini Hoagies.

My conscience is at peace, I wouldn't expect anyone to be swayed to buy a tea just because I rated it a 4. 🤣
Now...if I rate something too high. Like, I don't know. 11.
Well, then you have to try that tea, while supporting a small business too. 😉

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I have a deployment running and I guess I could do something else than write (and I did, during yesterday's deploy). But here we are :)[1]

I finished Little Women yesterday, and I am sure my literary analysis is what will make or break this little book's fortunes.
If my review is glowing enough, who knows, maybe there will be some stage and screen adaptations...

Started slow, for my tastes

Since I am sharing my thoughts on a very celebrated and famous novel, I will jump straight to LOL OPINIONS M I RITE and skip intros and plot summaries.

The book starts slow. For a while, I managed to read only a chapter on each commute to the office, before putting it down.
The intro chapters work as a way to get you acquainted with the girls, but have a bit of preachy tone, and read very much like fables. But not in a good way of "this makes me reflect on life stuff". But in a Saturday Morning Cartoon lesson kind of way.

Also, and this is completely subjective, Mrs. March gave me vibes of holier than thou. Specially as a lot of lessons had a "perfect Christian" undertone[2] - be humble, hard working, quiet and obedient.
Or, at least, that was my interpretation...because of life experiences. I guess.

Stuff started happening

After the party where Jo meets Laurie, I felt like something happened instead of the book being just slice of life vignettes, and the story picked up some steam. And despite my reservations about the "slow intro", by then I had a clue of the character of each girl, what to expect of them. And then appreciated it more when they grew as characters.

Mrs. March's redemption

When "Marmee" confides in Jo some of her faults, it helped me let go of the initial preachy impression, and from there on I saw her as more of mythical motherly figure.

In the literary world, she gave me undertones of Úrsula Buendía, from Cien Años de Soledad.[3] Although no one can match her, in my eyes, as the perfect representation of the matriarch that holds a family together despite itself.
But you know, understanding that Little Women is a book of less magical inclinations and presents more mundane problems, I can form a parallel between the two.

Of course, with the religious underpinnings in many of her speeches, she also reminded me of my own mother. And my grandma, too. Both of them share the distinction, with Mrs. March, of being the support pillars of their families.
And I say distinction and not "burden" because in all three of them, there's a theme of sacrifice and seeking the best for their children, and achieving true happiness through them.

The ending felt a bit unearned

Meg's romance plot read as somewhat underdeveloped to me. But that might be because that is usually the part I enjoy the most: romance, some back and forth of dialogue, courtship scenes. And this case, it all happened with little interaction between them, more of a formality.

But hey, at least there was time for the parents to express they wanted their daughter to be happy and loved over having a financially interested marriage. So that's good.

Closing thoughts

There are none. I went away for a bit to fix my scripts again and lost all impetus for the post 🤣 so I wrote "closing thoughts" and now I don't know what to put in the paragraph.

And I was about to say "it's OK I can update this later" but we all know better.[4]

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A couple months ago I found out (can't remember how) about the re-release of Apollo 13 for its 30th anniversary, in IMAX.
I got tickets right as they went on sale.

The movie and the IMAX experience

The movie is as good as I remembered it, the intro is just long enough that you are invested in the characters and know about them. And will eventually worry about their fate. Counterpoint, Maria felt the intro was a bit long.

The launch and all the space scenes in IMAX looked great and sounded awesome. All the effects hold up, or at least I was so into the movie that I didn't notice anything too dated.
I could tell it was filmed in crafty ways in a couple scenes, using the very cramped and claustrophobic lunar module to "show less". They probably got away with a lot of things by doing that. And it worked great.

I also forgot (or didn't notice earlier, who knows) that there are a ton of close ups to people's faces. Like, AN AWFUL LOT. So it helps that the cast is as stacked as it is, as they all do their acting thing and you can read emotions on their expressions.

"I was there" moments

In one of the earlier scenes, they are talking about Saturn V rockets. Then came the iconic Mission Control.

Juan and I toured Houston Space Center in 2023, when I had to renew my passport. Yes, if you are argentinian and live in Colorado, your designated consulate office is all the way down in Houston...
So I made a first trip to submit the paperwork, and then arranged to pick up the passport a few weeks later, on a Friday. And the kiddo and I spent the weekend there.

In a lot of those scenes Juan and I shared the emotion of seeing in a the big screen the same places and objects we had seen during our visit. Sooper cool. 😎

"I am old" moment

I made a point to talk with Juan about how little power the computers had back then, since that's a field closer to my heart.
I also did my best to convey how many other things they didn't have access to, other than just computers. Yet they still made these amazing things happen.

I mean, these guys sent people to the moon with extremely limited hardware, and nowadays your web browser struggles to render a page unless you have fiber connection and 500 GB of RAM.
I hate us developers. So wasteful.

Speaking of wasteful

The movie closes with narration from Jim Lowell (Tom Hanks) about the fate of the characters, and also a line about when are we going back to the moon. One of them was supposed to go back to space in a latter Apollo mission, but funding was cut.

There are a few key scenes in the movie about funding and lost of interest from the general public about the space race. Both topics being depressingly current...
And also, what the hell are we doing as a species. There's a lot of investment in stuff for the potential to make money off it (LLMs is the latest example, but there are tons) and no desire to push the envelope in space exploration in the same way.
Yes, I know there are a bunch of private investors, and space agencies around the world are still working on it (even NASA). But if we pushed for space exploration[1] in the same way, with the same hunger, as for money making...we would be so much further...

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A couple days ago I took the recycling to the garage and realized I finally managed to complete my masterpiece.
We don't drink that much soda, so it took a few weeks of not getting this particular bin out to have enough cans to do it:

I took the picture because I found it funny. Or rather, slightly funny. Amusing?
Amusing. 👍

For a couple weeks, this was my private recycling project. I would forget about it, until I headed downstairs and I was like "oh right! I wonder how much longer until I finish it."
Once, earlier in the project, either the kiddo or my wife took some cans to the recycling bin. I had to repair my work. In their defense, this was early enough that you could see it and not realize there was a deliberate effort going on.
Or maybe they didn't even look, because who takes the time to arrange the garbage? (Not that it was much time, a few seconds once or twice a week, but still).

After taking a first picture, I had a stroke of genius. For a very low bar definition of genius.
I realized I could turn this really dumb thing into a work of modern art, and went ahead and replaced a single can for a unopened one.
My initial instinct was to put it right in the middle, then I figured it was more interesting[1] to have a random can replaced.

As for how to sell it, I have a few ideas. They all revolve around the obvious fact that the single unopened can is hard to tell from the others.
It could be about having little acts of rebellion and individuality in a society of "sames".
Or something about consuming and wasting too much, like, in a sea of waste, there are drops of useful things that we don't even look at.
Could it be about mental health? Like, the one that feels left out...?

To wrap this up

This was a waste of time. Unless you happen to want me to arrange cans for you.
Then I am a specialist in can sculpture.

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I wrote before about my custom mode line.
To briefly recap: it is text-only, based on mood-line which is itself based on the very popular doom-modeline.

Region size indicator

From my time using doom-modeline, I came to appreciate the convenience of having the region size displayed. Yes, I can use M-= (default binding for count-words-region)...but turns out that it presents the same problem that my mode line indicator had!

You can see the region size displayed above. The way this information was calculated until this morning:

(setq-default mode-line-position
     (list "%l:%c"
           '(:propertize " %p%  %I" face shadow)
           '(:eval
             (when (use-region-p)
               (propertize (format " (%sL:%sC)"
                                   (count-lines (region-beginning)
                                                (region-end))
                                   (- (region-end) (region-beginning)))
                           'face 'shadow)))
           " "))
    

Counting the lines in the region was provided by (count-lines (region-beginning) (region-end)), and then the number of characters was simply the difference between the positions of the beginning and end of the region.
Except...

rectangle-mark-mode

The problem is, when the region is a rectangle, the positions of the beginning and end of the region do not reflect accurately the character count, because obviously, a number of chars are excluded in each line.

I don't use rectangles that often, and I could live with the count being off the few times I do. But...you know.
Once I realized it was wrong, I had to fix it. 👀

Updated code

My first reaction was to look at how count-words-region does this. To my surprise, it doesn't account for rectangle selections. Maybe I should report this as a bug?
Then I took a look at how to figure out that a rectangle selection is taking place, and from there, if any of the code in rect.el was counting the number of characters. I didn't find anything, but figured that extract-rectangle (used internally in a number of operations) could help me, since it returns the rectangle as a list of strings.

(setq-default mode-line-position
  (list "%l:%c"
        '(:propertize " %p%  %I" face shadow)
        '(:eval
          (when (use-region-p)
            (propertize (apply #'format
                               " (%sL:%sC)"
                               (hoagie--mode-line-region-size))
                        'face 'shadow))
           " ")))

(defun hoagie--mode-line-region-size ()
  "Helper to calculate the region size to display in the mode line.
Returns a list with the number of lines, and the number of characters.
For the latter, it uses a more involved calculation for rectangle selections."
  (let ((lines (count-lines (region-beginning) (region-end))))
    (list lines
          (if rectangle-mark-mode
              ;; first line or last line, both have the same amount of
              ;; characters.
              (* (length (car (extract-rectangle (region-beginning)
                                                 (region-end))))
                 lines)
            ;; regular region
            (- (region-end) (region-beginning))))))
    

A first approach used seq-reduce to sum the length of all lines in the list, then I realized I only need the length of the first line, the rest are the same. Because rectangles. 🙃

After testing this version, I found extract-rectangle-bounds, which returns the positions in each line as a list of conses. I could have used that too, getting the difference in the positions of the first line instead.

I find the code is getting too complicated for something that runs constantly (the mode line is updated all the time). But I guess unless I run into performance problems, it should be fine?
You can see in the screenshot the end result, with the output of M-= in the echo area.

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The always insightful Andreas has a new post up, "Is the ability to think going to become a rare and valuable skill?".
I won't spend time recommending his blog, because everyone seems to know about it already. :)[1]

I suggest you go over his post first (it isn't very long), I have one comment about it.
And in the next section there will be a reference to a science fiction story, the first thing that came to mind after I finished reading Andreas post.
The closing section explains why we must keep the story a secret...

Ask, copy, paste, repeat

This particular colleague is very fond of using ChatGPT for basically everything, and watching him work is nothing short of horrifying. I've seen code that he produced and often I could refactor it to be about half the number of lines of code within a couple of minutes, because he just copy/pastes whatever ChatGPT produces into his IDE and if it works, then that's it, nothing more to do here.

I have seen this kind of thing before, and before ChatGPT existed:

Ever since StackOverflow is a thing, we had people randomly copy and pasting examples and "solutions" without understanding why they work (or don't).
Usually (not always) the people who do this kind of thing are the ones that are the least passionate about software development, and see it as "just a job".
And there's nothing wrong with that![2]
But for some of us who care a great deal about it, we need a reminder once in a while that it is OK to just solve the problem by any means necessary.

Of course this opens a whole can of worms about the whole team having to maintain the disgraceful code, but...topic for another day.

The apparition of StackOverflow, for people like me who started when the only way to know how to use an API was to read its manual[3], was a weird thing.
On the one hand, it made getting started in software development a lot easier.
On the other, it made going over the documentation for something a bit of a vintage thing. And reading error messages too. Did something blow up? Don't read! Just copy-paste the error in a SO query and get answers now.

I am not sure how much of this is rose-colored glasses, and how much it is a real effect, but I don't recall documentation in the 00s jumping straight to a few code samples. Everything was more book-ish: introduction, explaining some concepts and lingo, and then some code, starting slowly.
So the "StackOverflow effect" even changed how we write tutorials.
Or...I am old enough to exaggerate how things use to be.
And, the best? worst? part is that both can be true at the same time!!!

Isaac Asimov's "Profession"

I had two HUGE books growing up, full of short stories by Isaac Asimov. Vol 1 and 2, and I never found out if there were more volumes. Or if they were translated too.
Anyway, I remember quite a few stories pretty vividly, and the one that came to mind immediately after reading this paragraph...

But I'm also wondering if there's an opportunity in there for people who keep their minds sharp to become really valuable on the job market in the not-too-distant future when everybody else has turned their brain into the equivalent of an atrophied and useless leg due to solving every single problem they encountered by immediately turning to AI to provide an answer.

...is one called "Profession (Wikipedia)". It isn't very long, and it can be read entirely from this website (and no, I have no idea if this page is legal or not, but it seems harmless):
Read the "Profession" by Isaac Asimov here (abelard.org).
If you don't feel like visiting fringe websites[4] or going over the summary in the Wikipedia page, I have learned about the greatest and latest of HTML from other small web bloggers, so you can witness my very first "details" tag:

So, the answer to Andreas' question, will people who have the ability to think for themselves, and bang their heads on a problem, become more valuable in the near-future?, has existed since 1957, and it is a resounding yes.

...but we can't let people know about this story :(

This wonderful 50s story of awakening and superation has the following passage:

"We bring you here to a House for the Feeble-minded and the man who won’t accept that is the man we want. It’s a method that can be cruel but it works. It won’t do to say to a man, 'You can create. Do so.' It is much safer to wait for a man to say, 'I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not.' [...] We can’t allow ourselves to miss one recruit to that number or waste our efforts on one member who doesn’t measure up."

I know that the intention here is to make for a good narrative, but even Asimov couldn't predict the current state of tech.
I can imagine a group of startup financiers feeling legitimized in their world view of "the only ones that make it the ones that overcome this hunger-esque challenge and want to create despite all hurdles", and citing this story as validation.
Or how about the revamped Big Tech hiring process, created to break you down until you show that "you are one of the good ones", only after your indomitable creative spirit overcomes being told "no" over and over.

So...let's not popularize this story 👀

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There are still people surprised that I like football now. It all started because of Juan: he enjoyed it, and was attracted to it. Eventually we attended a game, the rest is history.[1]

Next I can surprise people because I enjoy fishing now.
Yes, I still haven't caught a single fish...haven't fished a fish? Anyway.

After Juan got his rod as a gift from a friend, I bought a cheap one off Walmart and have joined him a few times.
The first time we went out on our own, I even had to disassemble a reel and figure out how it works, after Juan tangled his line and the wire got inside the mechanism.[2].

Becoming a parent and emigrating (and both happened very close together) taught me that I knew a lot less about myself than I thought.
And also that I can still grow and discover new things. For example, fishing and football, which I wouldn't even know I could like if it wasn't for my son...[3]

Sidenote: Colorado Rapids

Rapids just won 2-1 with a goal in literally the last minute of the match. It was an incredfibly tense game. I screamed my lungs off. Wish I was at the stadium.

For the time being I won't do any in-depth analysis of games anymore, they take forever to write and I don't think anyone enjoys them but myself.
But, maybe I start again, just because I like them =P

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Remember when I said I was too lazy to change my browser? And when I said I shouldn't buy more keyboard crap?

At least I never said I shouldn't change a bunch of major Emacs bindings in one go...

Browser updates

Is this what growing old is? Something works mostly the way you want it to, so you put up with it?

Well, maybe I am not that old![1] Because the weekend after writing that post, I was already using Vivaldi.
I do have a bit of guilt about not supporting the one alternative browser engine, but at the least the mobile experience is already better in Vivaldi. And the desktop has a few other things going for it, too.

I was thinking of using Vivaldi Notes to replace Fastmail's note taking feature. The main reason being, Vivaldi can update notes offline and then sync them - Fastmail's app couldn't, but they just added support for offline updates.
I haven't tried it yet, to confirm it works OK.

I use the notes for links that I capture on the go, and to store post ideas. Neither can be edited from Emacs using an API, although Gnus can access Fastmail's notes via IMAP and with some care, you are able to edit & add new notes.

Keyboard updates

In a footnote of the "First world keyboard problems" post, I said: Get my fix of novelty without generating garbage....
Look, in my defense, I want you all to know that I gave away a lot of keycaps I didn't use, and even keyboards that were retired, in the last year. (This is how you know I did, in fact, get a few new things...)

About two years ago I started using Kailh Box Black, which made me fall in love with linear switches.
BUT I wanted something heavier.
I saw online a couple recommendations for the Hako Royal Pink, and got a set. These are tactile (I confused them with other listing...). But I liked them enough to keep them, while I kept looking for the heaviest linear switch ever.

Disclaimer

Yes, I do want "the heaviest linear switch ever". But I am NOT disassembling 70 or so switches to change their springs (or lubricate them, for that matter). Whatever I am using has the do what I like right out of the box.
No, seriously. Stop tempting me. Stop, I said...GET THOSE TOOLS AWAY FROM ME...AHHHHHHH.[2]

...where were we?

Ah, yes. I was not really looking but kinda curious about a really heavy linear switch and I found the Kailh Speed Pro Heavy Berry.
They are what I am using now, and I absolutely love them. It took a bit of time for the break-in period, but they are now buttery-smooth, not scratchy, and they feel wonderful.

For two years too, I've been using a set of POM Jelly blank keycaps, Cherry profile, that you might have seen in pictures of my keyboard before. Such as this one:

You can tell I put some keycaps upside down: the ones that in most sets are convex.
Because if I put them correctly, my thumb hurts from hitting the side of the key sideways.
Well, I've been looking for lower profile keycaps, and the one thing stopping me was whether the sets had enough oddly-sized keycaps to cover the 4-key spacebar in the Raise (even if I had to use some of the keys upside down).
And now...

These aren't translucent. And the legends aren't even printed that nicely, to be honest. But of course after using blanks for so long, I really don't look at the keys.

What I feel I have achieved with the combo of the switches and keycaps, is a perfect[3] mix of a laptop keyboard (my personal laptop's in particular is pretty great), but with the feedback of a mechanical keyboard.
I loooove clicky switches, and adore the look of super tall SA profile keycaps.
But I type like shit on the former, and the latter are not good for my fingers. This feels awesome. Looks OK. Some day I will get xvx translucent keycaps. 😌

Emacs keybinding revamp

For a while now I had an inconsistency that was bothering me immensely.
I have two "big" personal keymaps in Emacs. F6 was the first one (way way back, I used the Context Menu key). It had commands that I wanted to recall quickly.
Eventually, F5 showed up, with bindings dedicated to my "register system".[4]

Except that hoagie-register-keymap was eventually renamed to hoagie-second-keymap, because of all the crap I added to it...

In a few cases, it was because the mnemonic key for a command was already in use in one, or the other.
In other cases it was because their activation keys sit in opposite sides of the keyboard, so it made sense to use the opposite hand for key sequences[5].

The thing is, sometimes I couldn't remember where I had assigned a command because there was no clear logic. At all. I mean, it helped me see that some commands don't "deserve" a binding, just M-x them instead. But still!

So today I had a bit of time at the computer and decided to re-organize it all. I had a choice of doing everything ergonomic and use always opposite hands for the bindings. Or pick based on some logic, and adjust the bindings later, but always keeping the theme I used for each keymap.

The new rules

The keymap that is under my left thumb, is for small, quick, purely text-editing commands. Examples of the things I have there are duplicate-line, hoagie-toggle-backslash and kill-whole-line.

The secondary keymap (where normal people would have the enter key, so right pinky), is for window management, toggling things, LSP. Examples are ediff-buffers, multi-occur-in-matching-buffers and hoagie-occur-symbol-or-region.

Finally, I am following the manual's advice and using the sequences C-c LETTER for some other personal bindings. Mostly for menu-like things like my find commands keymap. But a few other things too, like EWW.

Oh, and now the registers keymap lives in C-z.

Will I love this change, or revert the configuration by Monday noon? No clue. Writing this post was a quick test, but things will get real only when I work using these keybindings for a few hours.

Well...

That was a lot.

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A couple days ago I mentioned that I learned about page-ext, a built-in Emacs package that adds page navigation features.[1]

Turns out page-ext has some things going against it:

1. It clobbers C-x C-p with a its own prefix map that has lots of commands. A very minor crime, except...
2. Many of said commands are geared towers using a text file as an address book. With entries separated by page delimiters.
3. It really likes to narrow-to-page, which can be disabled in most, but not all the commands.

And at the end of the day there is only one feature I really liked and want to explore: the "page directory".

Reducing scope to reduce complexity

I figured I could do the same thing I did with a few packages by now, which is to create a less featureful, and more tailored, version of the code. Most times it ends up being completely different, because for the one or two things I want to do, I don't need to deal with edge cases or complex scenarios.

The first time I did this was with fill-function-arguments, which "pretty prints"...well, function arguments. And literals of lists, dictionaries, etc.
Except that sometimes it would not indent things correctly, or put the second argument in the wrong place, and a bunch of other corner cases around comments and strings.
And after adding more and more little tweaks in my own code to account for these problems, I figured I might as well replace the whole package with my own version.[2]

Writing that was an interesting exercise because as I dropped more and more features, I came to realize that what I really wanted was: to split a line by separators (but keeping strings alone), and indent the altered text. That was equivalent to 90% of my uses of fill-function-arguments.
So I wrote a single command that does exactly that.
It is way more limited in scope, but it is also just a few lines of elisp. And since it does less, it also has less surprising or unexpected behaviours.

page-ext to hoagie-pages

I wrote today hoagie-pages. It is v1, so might take some time until it is polished. The code is in my config repo.

It does away with almost everything in pages-ext but the "list all pages" portion. When I was formatting the output, I wanted occur-like bindings to navigate to the next and previous page[3]. And that made me realize that maybe I could get the result I wanted using said command instead of the pages functionality.

The most promising version of this approach was capturing occur matches to get the page "title", but there was always something a little bit off with the output. Unless I used a numeric prefix to show multiple lines around the match, and by then I had to determine how to augment the page-delimiter regexp to capture what I wanted, or find other mechanism to keep the "delimiter regex" easy to use and...

Yeah, it was getting complex rather quickly. And the occur internals are gnarly. So I decided to stick to the "mimic the pages directory" ethos.
After all, I don't even know how long the pages stuff will stick!!!

The one thing the I kept from those experiments, was making the output occur-like: on top of the bindings mentioned before, I also went for the same look. Compare these three set of results, first using the original pages-directory, then occur, and finally the new hoagie-list-pages. First in the page-ext.el buffer:

Note that for occur, I used a prefix argument of 1 to include in the output the line with the page title.
Now same comparison, but running the three commands in this very buffer:

Bonus: Some page-delimiter ideas

As spoiled in the screenshot, I have a couple suggestions of page-delimiter values that I already set in my config:

• For Python, "^\\(def\\|class\\) ", which matches classes and top-level functions. Removing the "beginning of line" restriction would match methods, too.
• For HTML, the one already seen in the screenshot above, " *<h[[:digit:]]" , to match any heading tags.
• I am experimenting with variations of prompts for sql-interactive-mode and shell to use input lines to delimit pages. Although in comint derived modes, navigating between inputs is trivial with C-c C-p (or n).

As a counterexample, when I learned about M-^ (aka delete-indentation aka join-line) I thought it was cute, but I already had cycle-spacing (with negative argument), so I didn't need it.
Yet nowadays I always join lines, and mostly cycle spaces without prefix argument. 🤷

Time will tell.

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I was reading a book on the bus, and halfway through Lincoln tunnel, I started moving the bookmark forward every other page.
As we got closer to the end of the tunnel, and I started moving the bookmark after every page, in anticipation of having to put the book away for the walk to the subway.

And then I realized...this is no different from constantly hitting F5 in an old FPS with quicksave.

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I've seen some Emacs commands that operate on "pages" before, one that comes to mind is narrow-to-page, but I never paid too much attention to them.
A few days ago I found online a mention to the built-in page-ext package, from its header:

The page commands are helpful in several different contexts.  For
example, programmers often divide source files into sections using the
`page-delimiter'; you can use the `pages-directory' command to list
the sections.
    

The package documentation then explains that it adds a few navigation commands to jump around a buffer per page, add and remove pages, and list all the pages (mentioned above).
So, what is the page-delimiter? By default it is the regexp "^^L", which matches any line beginning with the form feed character (Wikipedia). But of course you can change it to any other regexp, to match whatever you are writing currently describes as a page.

After finding out about these "page extensions", I searched a bit online about using form feeds to separate sections. It seems other than Elisp, it is also used in Python code. But it is not very common.
I wish C# would have used them to delimit regions instead of #region.

Digression: You could use page navigation in C# anyway

I thought earlier "it would be nice if the .NET world used ^L instead of #region"...but it wasn't until typing this that I realized, it doesn't matter, you still can use the page commands.

If I set page-delimiter to " *<h[[:digit:]]>" in this very buffer (and add a few fake headers for display), listing all pages in the buffer results in:

==== Pages Directory: use RET to go to page under cursor. ====
<!DOCTYPE html>
Digression: You could use page navigation in C# </h2>
A section</h2>
Sub section 1</h3>
Another section</h2>
Sub section 1</h3>
Sub section 2</h3>
Footnotes</h6>
    

Awesome. Back to the main content...

Using pages as better code sections separator

In a lot of my Elisp packages, I used the same separator format: A bunch of hyphens, and then in the column 20, the section name. For example, from Sharper:

{more code before}
;;------------------Customization options-----------------------------------------

(defgroup sharper nil
  "dotnet CLI wrapper, using Transient."
  :group 'extensions)

{more code after}
    

Then I would use occur, to list all lines with the text ;;------------------ . But instead, I could use form feeds, which I think are much cleaner. Just now I made a couple of changes to my publishing tools[1] and while I was at it I added form feed page delimiters, like so:

{more code before}

^L
;;; Creating posts

(defun site-start-post (&optional alternative-template)

{more code after}
    

And now I get the benefit of listing pages and moving between them.
I don't necessarily have to change my older packages, since I can modify the delimiter as I did earlier for this very buffer. But I think the single "invisible" character is an improvement.
Time will tell.

What's the takeaway?

One, I will never stop finding out about features included in Emacs.
Two, that through Emacs I end up finding out about how things were done "in the good old days", which is interesting, and sometimes useful.
Third...there's no third.

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Today, Vélez defeated Central Córdoba 2-0 and won the "Supercopa Internacional". YAY!
The translation is "international super cup", which reads so close to the Spanish name that you would think it doesn't need a translation.

But since the name is a bit nonsensical, I feel like I need to confirm that you read what you think you read...and I get it, why "international" if it is an Argentinian cup???
Well, because the cup was supposed to be played yearly in Abu Dhabi.
Why? Money, obviously...I bet someone took a hefty payment to approve such bizarre arrangement. How many fans can make such a trip, for single game???

Anyway, a single match is played between the winner of Copa Argentina[1] and the winner of "Champions Trophy", which is another cup played by the winners of the two shorter tournaments played each year.
While they did play it in a neutral venue, it wasn't in freaking Asia, but in Argentina.

Confused? And I glossed over a number of changes that the association has been making for the last few years.
So in short, the prestige of this cup is questionable, since it has been played only four times, and in a turbulent era of league rules re-definition. So even those 4 winners have some sort of caveat that makes each trophy somewhat unique each year.

But I am still happy =P

There are some parallels to the Club World Cup earlier this year, in that the whole thing is obviously a cash grab, but if your team is in it, you care.
And the players care, too. Because it is their job and they are naturally competitive types, so you send them to play the Play-Doh cup, and the will try "for real".

Today's game was quite spicy, at times. You could tell it was being treated as a proper final, even if it lacks history.
And the AFA counts this as an official title that goes in the books, so there you go.

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I have used a lot of different browsers over the years.
The one I have the fondest memories of is Opera. Not whatever that is now, but Opera with the Presto rendering engine and all the amazing customization options.[1]

When Opera died, I moved back to Firefox. Eventually Vivaldi was released, by the same guys who made Opera Presto. I was an early adopter, and happy about it. But since Vivaldi is using the same underlying technology as Chrome, and over time I started caring about Free Software and monopolies yadda yadda, I switched back to Firefox.

Here is the deal. A friend mentioned Vivaldi in passing in some group chat a few days ago, and since I've been tempted to go back to it.

Firefox hasn't been doing exactly a great job as stewards of the only viable Chromium alternative, and the fact that their fate is so tied to Google, maybe more than Chromium's (ridiculous as that might sound) doesn't give me great confidence...

Also, Firefox in iOS is pretty meh. Yeah, Apple's partially at fault for sure. Still.

Now, here's the deal. Right now, instead of downloading Vivaldi and reviving my original Sync account, I am here...because...laziness?

That's all there is to it. I could download Vivaldi, but then I think of all the things I have to migrate...
Ohhh, brief digression: how come Firefox puts all the bookmarks you create from the phone in a separate folder and you can't change it to use a shared folder for desktop and phone. That is some BULLSHIT.
...as I was saying, other than bookmarks and some history, there isn't that much to migrate. I use BitWarden as my password manager, so really my FF account doesn't have a lot. (Although, likely I am missing something else)

And the truth is, annoying as FF is...it is just there? It gets in the way in minor things, but doesn't really bother me that much, so the incentive to change out of enthusiasm for trying something new dissipates.
Lately, I actually use EWW a lot, for small web stuff. And Firefox only for "big" sites.

Is this what growing old is? Something works mostly the way you want it to, so you put up with it?
That explains why my wife is still around, putting up with me. =P
And is that why I don't try any new Emacs packages? Because what I have works, and I don't feel like adding anything to the mix? Like, anything that would complicate my current setup is an annoyance.[2]

Anyway, maybe this weekend I will write a post about how I moved back to Vivaldi. For now I will just turn off the laptop and head back to the Steam Deck to play some more Bloodstained.
Aren't Metroidvania games a wonderful thing?

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Today we returned from the Adirondacks. We left early-ish and took some back roads to enjoy the scenery and spot our potential next destination in the area (Long Lake, probably).

In all of the roads I experienced a variant of this scenario:
Car in front of me starts breaking. Slows down a bit more. And more. At this point I think...Unless they had a mechanical failure...they are about to turn? because why else would they slow down so much? .
And right as I think this and their car is moving at a snail's pace, the blinker goes on. And I am like...Oh I see.

But that is in the front of my mind.
In the back of my mind I am cursing my fellow driver in very colorful terms, so colorful that they might get my blog canceled.
So I will leave it to reader imagination to picture the worst curses, and then try to picture words with an even stronger level of offensiveness, unwarranted hate, and pettiness.

How to make me happy

Oh, what a beautiful day to be a driver. What a marvel of engineering this vehicle is. I love the interstate/this winding mountain road/this city.
Look! I can see the intersection/highway exit/corn farm I need to make a turn on. I will reduce my speed slightly and then turn on my blinker. So the bald fella I can see from my rearview mirror, has a clue what's about to come. I have seen him a while ago because I check my mirrors so often! And apropos of nothing, by golly is he a fine specimen of manliness behind the wheel.
Anyway, not to get distracted by that spectacularly shiny forehead...I can now safely keep reducing my speed, since everyone behind me knows I am about to turn or take an exit.
Being a driver is so joyful. I hope everyone around me is having a great day.

I don't think I am asking for anything too special here. As you start slowing down, turn on your blinker so I know you are about to turn or take an exit. Everything else is optional.
But thank you for the compliments.

What really happens

People go from 60 mph to 25 mph in 3 seconds and then turn on their blinkers.
Yeah, by now I had to slam my brakes and I figured you were about turn, and that you are...genius...of the first order.

I am also considering that maybe we do deserve extinction.

Another disgraceful variant

People who turn on their blinkers as they are turning. I can picture them inside their cars, going "ooops, forgot the little light hohoho" and then they turn it on.
Dude, I've been there. You get to feel dumb that you forgot to turn it on, and carry on. Own it and let it be.
To turn on the blinker that late, it is malicious compliance.

Oh so you are so perfect in your driving that you criticize others

LOL no, I drive way faster than I should, fit my car in the tightest spaces when I could wait for a minute[1], and treat yellow as a variant of green.

But guess what:

1. I have a blog, the other drivers don't.
2. I am somewhat confident my wife does not read my blog
3. Even if she did, she doesn't have a blog of her own to set the record straight.

In closing

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We are in the Adirondack mountains for the weekend. The cabin has spotty internet, there's spotty cell signal, so I don't know if this will go up now or once we are back home.
I don't even know how to pronounce Adirondack. Well, I didn't even know this mountain range existed before coming here...

Me time

Kiddo was on his room, now taking a shower after much complaining. Wife probably playing a game on her iPad. I figured it was a good time to do my own thing.
In the past, any kind of couple or family vacation was seen as "we are supposed to spend every second together, or else something is wrong". Actually, even non vacation time was like that.
Echoes of my upbringing, and probably more on my mother's side. My sister and I talk quite a bit about these things lately...foreshadowing for posts to come? Maybe.

Writing

I told Maria, I was about to bring the laptop in case I felt like writing. Advantages of driving, you carry something "just in case", until the car is comically tilted from the weight of all the things you definitely won't use.

But then I felt like it wasn't worth it. Maybe a bit ashamed? "Oh, so now you write all the time". Yet we were on the cruise, I felt the urge to write, and annoyed I didn't have how...[1] If this shame? sounds stupid: it is. Who cares?
Then I remembered Colorado and Vélez play this Saturday. I am not even sure we'll get to watch the matches, I wouldn't change any vacation plans to do so[2], but that was a good enough reason to bring the device.
Why is that a less embarrassing reason to bring the laptop than writing? It is a creative outlet after all. I have no idea...
But speaking of fútbol....

Remembering Pascual

Last week I was listening to the Vélez match "on the radio". That is, on my cellphone, over a YouTube broadcast of a radio.
(When I was thinking of writing about this, I figured I would include a link a video or audio of an argentinian broadcaster commenting on match. But, no signal, so...it is up to the reader to find one, if curious enough.)

There's something very particular to extremely fast speech, barely any pauses to breathe, so that no second of the game is lost to the listener.
And it was this time, and not any other, on the 129 bus heading back home, that I felt my eyes giving in, the memories unlocked...why this time, and not any of the previous ones? I have no idea. Why do I feel so urged to write this down now instead of any other time? Also no clue. I thought it was because I needed to cry a bit, and process feelings. But right now, I feel another reason creeping in: I fear I will lose these memories.

Spartan

Pascual was so dry. He barely had friends. Growing up, I was full of pride he would tell me he loved me, but not anyone else. Now I understand it as another sign of how emotionally stunted he was, something that only changed as he grew way older.
He had a ton of clothes, gifts from his kids and eventually his grand kids, but only wore the same 3 (admittedly ugly) polos, the same battered watch, the same 3 pair of pants, always.

Food

The one thing he was more than happy to spend money and time in was food. That's one thing that connected him and my mom, their enjoyment at serving tons of food even if there was a small party at the table. I always assumed that this is a consequence of growing up in poverty. I know of my mom's childhood with some detail. My grandfather never talked much about his, and by the time when he would really open up a about his childhood, I was already living far from him.
Yes, it makes me guilty, wondering the stories I missed. Yes, I am trying really hard not to let that same guilt define the relationship with my parents for the rest of their years. I have no clue if I will succeed.

Both my grandparents expressed their love through food. And I had, growing up (and I can see it now) a big emotional hole to fill. So any time I visit, my grandfather would suggest I make myself a sandwich, heat some leftovers, grab some cookies.
I would always say yes, because I knew it made him happy.

Holidays and weekends

I so much enjoyed my status as the favorite grandchild. Even if I was raised to be modest to fault[3], I feel no shame saying that. Everyone knew.

Such favoritism made me eager to spend many weekends, and school breaks, at my grandparents house. I would get up, make myself breakfast, and sit down with them to talk about people I never knew or barely remembered, discuss the news (watching the 8 pm news, and eventually the 24hs news cable channel, was a staple of the house), and help them cook lunch or dinner.
It was specially fun to help them make pasta from scratch, stretch the dough, spread the filling. Then Pascual would get the ravioli rolling pin with his giant hands, make a whole table of perfect squares. It was my job to use the rolling cutter to separate them.
Such an italian thing. Big family meals with pasta on Sundays.

Fútbol

My dad never cared for football. My grandfather wasn't a super fan, but he did follow Boca Juniors. That's why when someone asked which team I supported, I said Boca, no hesitation. As I grew older, I followed that statement with "because of my grandfather, I don't really watch a lot of football".

He was born in 1929, and would sometimes watch the games, but the most common way he would follow the team was on the radio, which I guess felt more natural to him, but I didn't quite get it. He could watch the game!
Instead, he would lay down in bed, and put this little "AM/FM" radio on his belly, and listen.

I could only catch the names of the players. The traditional "gooooooooooooool" screams. And the rushed ad reads when the ball was out of play.
But I didn't really get it. I hadn't watched enough football in my life to do so.

But now...I do get it. I can picture the pitch and the plays and the movement of the ball. And this last week, on the bus, I realized that this is how he followed football. I remembered him and the echo of the little radio in his bedroom, and I haven't stopped thinking about him since.

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I am thinking of making my football posting more regular - I don't expect much reader interest, but I need an outlet for my thoughts. So.
Now that I have tag navigation, and potential readers can easily find all the fútbol posts, I might share this in the Rapids subreddit - so potential readers can find it. And start weaning myself off reddit, for reasons exposed before.[1]
Speaking of reddit, I will quote a couple things I wrote about the matches here, expanding them a bit.

Before jumping into the Rapids analysis, there's some good news, but much shorter, on the Vélez Sarsfield front.

Vélez - Copa Libertadores and local tournament

Vélez won last week the second leg of its knockout game against Fortaleza for Copa Libertadores.[2]
The first leg, in Brazil, was a 0-0 tie where Vélez played better on the first half, but didn't capitalize on controlling the ball.
On the second half, we played worse. Lots of hoofing the ball as soon as we touched it, but then we didn't win any duels. You would think after 10 minutes of that, the players would realize that "urgency doesn't mean only kicking the ball forward", but no. Only the last 10 minutes there was some proper football played.
The second leg we played much better, but the reality is that Fortaleza didn't really show up to the game. They didn't generate any danger, no creativity on the ball, nothing. I am not complaining, we won 2-0, but it wasn't a great test for the team IMO.

Next Libertadores match will be against Racing (another Argentinian club) mid September.

We also won a game in the local tournament. Reminder that relegation is "worst team of this year, and worst team over the last 3 years". I still didn't write my "Hoagie and football" post...but 2023, the year my allegiance to Vélez was awakened, we were very close to falling down - and that season still plays a role in our average calculation. So we need to place well enough this season to stay away from the relegation-by-averages zone.
I didn't watch the game, but listened to it on the radio. Which made me think a lot of my grandfather, so another post to write in the near future...

Colorado Rapids

The game against Minnesota showed us a new approach for the Rapids - summed up as sit back, bet on counters.
The following weekend we played Atlanta, who aren't doing too hot. So just like the Vélez match against Fortaleza, it wasn't the most taxing test for the team.
And finally this last weekend we played LA Galaxy, who destroyed us last year, but are (were? #spoiler) doing terrible this season.
Another thing to note is that our new playmaker, most expensive signing in Rapids history[4] was on the bench against LAG. Paxton Aaronson. Another US National Team player, repatriated from Europe - just like Djordje Mihailovic. Except he is younger, and signed to a five years contract. Quite the bet...

COL vs ATL - The good one

We played a 3-4-3 again. We scored on the 18', off good ball movement.
And Atlanta tied in the 21' 🤦 off really bad defending: no pressure on a talented player running in front of our goal, so off course he took a great shot and that was it, 1-1.
Second half we only managed to score off a penalty...
Brief digression, it was a good PK, as it came to happen off our pressure to score. I would still prefer scoring from open play or a set piece. But I'll take it.
Second goal at around 70'...and we were extremely lucky not to concede after that, since to tap-in from one of the Atlanta players was deflected off one of his teammates.
I commented on reddit...Second half something changed [...] we attacked more in the middle and Harris stopped being invisible. . I am happy that I noticed that, as on the press conference for last weekend's game our coach said:

The 4-2-4 won us the game last week. So, the three in the back, we weren't as sharp in it last game. We changed at halftime last game, and that sparked press, sparked energetic football. It gives us an extra attacker on the pitch to go after LA.

Chris Armas, quoted in Burgundy Wave, under the headline "Another Switch in Formation".
My read from that half was a bit different[3], because while we had possession and movement, we weren't that effective until the PK, and we also allowed quite a few shots - including the failed tap-in. So there was still more to tweak on defensive aspects. In my opinion, of course.

COL vs LAG - The terrible one

LA Galaxy is still playing Leagues Cup, so they started a lot of younger/bench players.
Six minutes in, it was 1-0.
Ten minutes into the second half, 2-0.
Ended 3-0, but could have been worst.

Quoting myself from the MNUFC analysis: Makes you wonder what will happen when we play a team that is more creative on the ball, and makes good use of their possession [...] Even today, Steffen had to make a number of close saves to keep things even in the first half, and only 1 down in the second. Well, thanks to Steffen heroics we didn't end even worse than 3-0.

I will be honest: I think if we managed to defend well for the first 15 minutes, the result would have been very different. I didn't see anything in the game to make it a "gulf in quality"...except when their trio of starting attackers were subbed in. But we were down 2-0 by then.

What I did see though, was an extremely flaky defense. You can't leave unmarked players right outside your box. You can't have opposing players make a cross more comfortable in the pitch that I am on the couch. Or in the second LAG goal, have a player make a run unchallenged for like 20 meters.
Not pressuring crosses, and unmarked players behind your back, have been staples of the Rapids defense for all of this year. You would think by this point in the season they would have been addressed - but here I am, complaining about it.

Speaking of pressure, I think that is the start of our problems last weekend. Our attempt at a high press in a 4-2-4 was just lacking. LAG dragged people up the pitch and made the nicest passes across our lines. Going back to my quote about "what will happen against a more creative team"...well, this. They find ways to bypass you thin 2-people midfield, because the pressure of your attackers is very disjointed: one guy goes up to press, but no one is even near the next LAG defender, so he gets the ball with time and space to find the next passing lane.
They could cover 80 meters in three passes, and then our defense let their attackers shot at leisure.
The third goal was a typical Gabriel Pec counter, he is too fast and clinical finishing for us...but maybe if we didn't have to spread all around the pitch chasing a result, we could have closed lines to frustrate him. Chasing the game? we were just playing into his hands.

I will admit we were having an unlucky night: Aaronson came in and hit the woodwork, every ball deflected landed on a LAG player. But still. We just played bad fútbol.

Oh, and Ku-DiPietro read my comments online from the previous week and played a horrible game, in all cases held the ball more than he should have, made bad passes, or tried to dribble in bizarre places. I hope he calms down a bit, he can have good vision, and needs to use it.

Conclusion

Maybe this needs to be a separate section on the blog, but that's just too much work. It took over a year to have tags - imagine a new section =P

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I have this command to create a PR using the GH CLI directly from Emacs.[1]
For the reviewers, I have to type the GH usernames, so what I did is setup completion with my teammates users to make sure they are correct. But, I can still type in any other username, just in case I have to add someone that I don't regularly interact with.

Well, just now, I had to manually type in a name. And I had to stop myself a couple times from grabbing the mouse to copy and paste it from the browser window. I had the name right there, I verified it, but I still felt insecure about it.

This reminded me of when I removed company-mode (basically, IntelliSense) and then eventually all automatic completion from Emacs.[2]
And also when I was in college and had to solve some equation and was doing even 9x5 in the calculator. Like, sure, I already had it there and turned on, but I know that 9x5 is 45, why "verify" it?

I don't know if it is a compulsion only I have, or if eventually anyone with access to tools stops trusting their own eyes or memory. But it bothered me enough just now that I am writing this post...

It is somewhat similar to going back in shell history to find ls -la , when just typing the command is fast and easy enough. Yes, we can have some tool fill the details for us, or recall the previous input, but is typing it that much work?

I don't have a conclusion. I recall some article I read once about how our memory might end up working differently over the generations, now that we all have access to all the knowledge in the world in our pockets.
Same with completion in code I guess. And that might get exacerbated with AI - automagically getting not only a function name, but the code for a whole operation. Will some people stop remembering how to open a file in Python, because the boilerplate is generated each time by tools?

Does it matter?

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I created yet another Emacs package, in this case it is just a few commands. With room for improvement, but since they are good enough for daily use...and I thought it was time to remove some of the vc-mode extensions from my config and "promote them" to their own little island.

The packaged is called[1] Stubvex: stubborn vc-mode extensions.
Why stubborn? Because, as the README says:

[...] the solution to these "problems" is just use Magit. And I did! And it is great!
But at times, I have to work on Windows, and Magit is really slow there. Then, why not Magit and deal with the slowness on Windows? Why not WSL? Why not a Linux VM?
And I have my reasons, rationalizations, explanations...but maybe a short explanation covers it all: I am being stubborn.

How this came to be

A few days ago I found out there's a way in vc-git-log-view-mode to mark commits. Then you can use the function (log-view-get-marked) to get the list of commits selected. I find it strange that this is not a command, that show a message but has a prefix argument to kill the selection as text - so you can paste it in a shell o something.

Anyway, I figured I could make a bare-bones cherry-pick implementation using that and the newish[2] Emacs command to log other branches. And then I realized my config has already too many "custom" vc-git commands, and I might as well put them in a package.

So here they are: Stubvex in Source Hut.

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A few days ago, Maria and I were at a ShopRite near our place. While she looked at the flowers and plants, I was checking out a display with some small gifts and this one caught my eye:

Given the tendencies to self-aggrandizing and denial in the USA government in these tiring times, I would totally expect any government official to proudly declare that this is exactly what they meant when they said they would bring back manufacturing jobs. 🙃

(I feel obligated to point out that I am happy someone has employment and can earn a livelihood.[1] A job is a job. What bothers me is highlighting this, of all things, as "assembled in the USA".)

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This photo was supposed to be in yesterday's post announcement about tag navigation, with a legend about "getting ready" or something like that.

I finished so late though, that I completely forgot about the photo until now, when I was looking for something else in my phone.
But I like it, so here it is.

I was having some hojicha...but WAIT, look how adding tags at the end is already paying off. I knew I had written my impressions of hojicha, and just now I see that in that post I also commented about Teapigs Earl Grey Strong, and closed with:

I am still experimenting a bit with this one, so maybe I should have skipped the review...

I will be honest, I was planning to revisit my review, but didn't remember I wrote that. Turns out I was right.[1]
Rather than using less tea, as I said in that post, I had steep it for 4 minutes instead of 5.
Then a second steep of 5 minutes yields a still citrus-y black tea, and it is probably the best steep in terms of balancing that flavor with the black tea.
And a third one of 7:30 minutes has just a hint of citrus aroma, but a still good (but of course lighter) tea.
The revised score for this tea is:

3.5 out of 5 Hoagies

So I guess now I get to tag this text as a tea review, too.
I have a few more reviews to write, from the batch of teas I got for father's day. Some real gems in there.

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A few years ago, still living in Colorado, one of my nephews who is very much into fishing, was obsessed with going somewhere in the mountains. The problem is, I don't fish (more on this later, although the title is a bit of a spoiler). I didn't have a license, I didn't know where to go...and I tried fishing in the past, it wasn't something that I was particularly excited to do again. I didn't hate it, just indifference.
He was visiting just for a couple weeks, so we never got around to going fishing. BUT it made Juan curious about it...many, many, many times he asked about going fishing.

Now, the parents in the room know that if you indulge into every single thing that piques your kid's curiosity, you will soon burn out from trying things without rhyme or reason. You gotta let things simmer a bit, to make sure the interest is genuine. And you have to prioritize what to try, based on what you know of them, and what they'll enjoy.
We actually had a taste of fishing one afternoon near a friend's cabin, it was fun, but Juan wanted to go to the woods or a lake. And I was planning to take him for a weekend...some day.

The curse of a blessing

A few months ago, a friend that loves fishing[1] took Juan to a reservoir near his place. A blessing! Kid gets to try the activity, and I get to stay home. Two thumbs up.
And he loved it. So much so that our friend got him a rod and other equipment for his birthday. More blessings! Except...the curse...

Now I don't have any excuse not to take him fishing! 🤣

But it worked out in the end :)

One day I went with them to the reservoir and turns it the way he goes about it is kinda nice, because after casting the line you have to reel it in slowly to attract "hunting" fish[2]. It's not like how I did it when I was younger, just cast the line and wait wait wait.

And honestly, I got the feeling that nowadays, older, with more patience, and more open to enjoying my time chilling, I will enjoy the activity even if it's just waiting.
What growing old does to a MFer...

The story

To wrap up the preamble (yes, that was the preamble, but we are almost done, don't worry): I have a small rod now (smaller than Juan's), and took him fishing a few times around the heavily contaminated rivers near Secaucus. 😌
And honestly, I enjoyed it...I even had to learn how the mechanism for the line works, to undo the mess the kid made a few times with it. Of course, I never tangled my line >_> never ever <_<.

Before going out for the first time on our own, I headed to the NJ Environment and Wildlife website[3] and paid for a license that is good for the current season. It asked for quite a bit more information than I expected, among them one that threw me off:
Do you pay child support? If yes, are you late in any payments?

I read the question like..."what?". No, I don't pay child support. But the question was in my head the whole day. I even mentioned it to Maria: the license is not expensive, so it feels like it is a weird place to ask about child support.
Like, you could be behind your child support payments and, I don't know, lose all your earnings in a casino. But going fishing, well, that's a step too far!

So over the last few days I came up with a story: I bet there was a dude that was very much into fishing (of course). And he was a "free spirit, love life" kind of person. You know, the ones that, when depicted in movies, their life is a mess but they are still lovable. Like Robin William's character in Mrs. Doubtfire[4].
And he was constantly late on his child support payments.
His ex wife got tired of it, and decided to hit him where it hurt him the most: his precious fishing. She started campaigning, and over a couple months put together a proposal to send to the New Jersey Legislature. And at first it didn't get much traction, because it is a relatively minor issue, but she was persistent and very smart and figured who to push to get the proposal through.

And that's why 5 years later, I am asked if I am late on my child support payments before buying a $20 fishing license.
Ask me how may variants of that story I played in my head in the last two weeks.
Actually, don't, you don't wanna know.

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I really don't have any excuse to have taken this long to do this, but: the site finally has tag navigation.
The glorious feature is linked in the home page, but since I feel like gloating: posts by tag.

Before

So far, when writing a new post, I would get prompted for a title, and then the tags. This also updated the list of recent posts, and the list of all posts.
Once done writing the post (after spellcheck. Allegedly) I would call another command that added the current buffer to the RSS feed file.

Sometimes I start a post, and then I figure I am writing terribly[1], or that the topic is of no interest[2], or that the post is too rambly[3]. And then I close the buffer, but also have to reset the repository, so those changes in the different lists aren't in place next time I want to write.

The other problem with picking the tags first, is that sometimes I would go back and delete or add one. Like, when I start writing with one objective in mind, and by the time I was done, the post landed in a completely different place.
Changing the tags after the fact meant that I would constantly break the list of post by tags, which could be OK if I had an easy way to regenerate it, but that sounded difficult...so better to postpone the whole thing :)

But it still bothered me, because lately I've been thinking of sharing some posts here and there - say, something about football. And then that person would like to read other things I wrote about football, I assume. Or programming. Or Emacs. Etc etc.

And after

I realized a few days ago, that if the problem is that I want to change the tags later...why not pick the tags when I am done writing. Then I avoid the problem in the first place.
Not only that, but since my workflow already involved calling a command when I was done writing, not much changes for me...

So, I....errrr..."""""designed""""" a page for posts by tag, and wrote some code to pull all the tags and populate the page in one go.
At some point I thought of having a page per tag, but I didn't quite like how it looked, even if it might have been easier to update each page. I also didn't add any way for my code to add a new tag: I have to manually put it in place in the per-tag page, with the correct mark up so all the scripting does the right thing. And I am perfectly fine with this, I think it is a good trade off.

I also thought I would revisit all posts to simplify and/or unify tags, or create a new one. But of course I gave up on the idea after opening the second file. I only re-classified a few recent posts.

Priorities

I had so many other things to do 🤣 but you know, once I figured how to approach this, I had to go ahead an implement it ASAP. And that turned out to be now.

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There's a "blog carnival" going around asking people for their Emacs elevator pitch. First things first, I loved this post by Randy Ridenour:

It’s very simple. There is one thing that I have never heard an Emacs user say:
"I’m forced to use Emacs for this particular task, but I sure wish I could use something else."
Why would you not want to at least try something that its users love that much?

It is a great answer. Of the couple I read so far, it is by far my favorite.

While the thought exercise of simplifying something to present it is good, and being concise is an art in itself[1], the notion that everything needs an elevator pitch is, in my opinion, flawed.

Busy people

I see this as an extension of the modern tendencies to have everything, now. "If you can't explain this idea in 15 seconds, then your idea is not worth it".
How about if you can't spare 5 minutes to listen to me, you are not worthy of my time.

That is of course just an opinion, but fear not, I did my research! I opened the Wikipedia page for "elevator pitch", wondering if this was another silly VC-fueled idea, or something older.

One commonly-known origin story is that of Rosenzweig and Caruso, two former journalists active in the 1990s. According to Rosenzweig, Caruso was a senior editor at Vanity Fair and was continuously attempting to pitch story ideas to the Editor-In-Chief at the time, but could never pin her down long enough to do so simply because she was always on the move. So, in order to pitch her ideas, Caruso would join her during short free periods of time she had, such as on an elevator ride. Thus, the concept of an elevator pitch was created, as says Rosenzweig.

I feel like that story is proving my point. Isn't part of the editor-in-chief job to hear pitches for stories? She was too busy to her job? Then she needs help, not for others to chase her down the hallways.
There's also...

[...] another known potential origin [...] Philip Crosby [...] suggested individuals should have a pre-prepared speech that can deliver information regarding themselves or a quality that they can provide within [...] the amount of time of an elevator ride for if an individual finds themselves on an elevator with a prominent figure. Essentially, an elevator pitch is meant to allow an individual to, with very limited time, pitch themselves or an idea to a person who is high up in a company.

...and it follows with story about how he proposed something to the CEO in the elevator and then the amazing happened.

I guess that's another part of the elevator pitch that bothers me, it keeps the narrative that you need some sort of magical encounter or nothing changes[2].
Most products are developed over time, hitting roadblocks and going back to the drawing board. Not everything is a leap of faith by an about-to-go-under-company that suddenly becomes rich, and not every executive has to be so busy that your only chance of having a human interaction with them is in an elevator.

Actually, if they are so busy, they probably want that time to wind down. And play Candy Crush. Or write on their personal blog about dudes randomly approaching them with sales pitches in elevators and how annoying that is.

But seriously, if an organization "needs" random encounters in hallways instead of having proper channels to hear all voices and ideas, as they should...then they deserve to go under. Update your resume and take your pitch somewhere else.

Not everything should be condensed

The other problem I have with the elevator pitch has more to do with my recent tendencies to slowing down, whether it is in tech, life, work, etc.

Maybe an idea, product, or in this case software, needs time to be appreciated. Notice that the pitch I shared above is great, but doesn't really explain anything. It appeals to your emotions, maybe even to FOMO.

That's because to appreciate how Emacs is different from other editors, you have to use it at least for a few days and try to configure something and experience how malleable it is. But that statement, at face value, sounds like a gazillion other tools. To appreciate the difference, you have to really sit with it.
And maybe you don't feel like that commitment is worth it, and that is perfectly fine. You have to have a certain need or curiosity to make it over that initial hurdle.

There's a similar problem with Common Lisp. Take this with a giant grain of salt because I am far from an expert lisper, but the real unique power is not macros, or at least not anymore.
The thing that is still unique to CL is how you can build the program is as you write it[3]. Not write then test, but test as you write. One block at a time, compiling each individual function and method with type checking.
Then you hear counter arguments, yes I can also reload a Python module in the REPL. Or XYZ compiler is so fast that it achieves the same result of being immediate.
And yes, maybe it is the same when pitched in 30 seconds or less, but try it for some time, build a couple things, and the difference is noticeable ...or maybe not, and that is fine too.

In short

It's good to be concise, but elevator pitches are overrated.

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Today my boss and I booked desks in a different area of the office than our usual spot. And he said he didn't like the keyboard on this particular desk, but felt it was silly to complain about it.
Then he glanced at my desk, and said "of course, if anyone would understand this, it has to be you". Cue laughs.

That is because every single day, I pack my Dygma Raise (v1) and carry it with me.[1]

For a few weeks now I've been toying with the idea of changing either the keycaps, or the switches. I have a combo that I like, but you know...it's been stable for too long. Who wants that, right?

Keycaps

I am rocking a set of Cherry profile POM keycaps. I really like them, this is my first Cherry profile set and despite being so close to the OEM one, typing on the feels so much nicer. Can't explain why, honestly.

I've been thinking of getting some lower profile ones (XVX I think? Or alternatively, something like these ones). The problem is this keyboard has a number of keys with non-entirely-standard sizes, with the set I have now, I made it work by using some keys from other rows but setting them upside down. So my thumbs don't hurt from hitting the edge, see:

(If the keys look disgusting up close...I have no excuse. I do clean them from time to time >_> I promise)

Switches

The keyboard is hot-swappable, but somewhat recently I broke a socket changing the switches. And then faced the option of waiting for 4 days to get a new PCB from Dygma, or to solder it myself using a guide I found online.
I did order replacement PCBs (one for each half of the board), but I also soldered to keep it working until then. Right now I am typing on a badly soldered board, and have those spares ready to go if needed.

Still, since I have a bunch of switch sets at home, I figured I would try one that I used too little instead of buying keycaps[2].
Yesterday afternoon, I disassembled the board, and replaced the switches while holding onto the sockets to avoid any breakage, so it took even longer than usual.
Except that the keyboard still worked, so if you look at it that way, it took less time. =P

I went from the quite heavy and tactile "Kailh Hako Royal True" to a set of light and linear "Kailh Speed Silver". And of course I hated it, but I told myself that I had to give it an honest try.
For example, initially I thought I disliked all linear switches, but turns out it only disliked these ones. I tried (and used for over a year) a set of really heavy linear switches, and found out I looooooved them.
So, you know, maybe I just needed more time with these and they would grow on me...

I wrote two posts last night, and I was still unconvinced. But it was quite late and I figured to really try them, I had to force myself to use them a bit more...so here I am now, at work. And getting a lot of keys activated by mistake and this time it bothers me while working. It bothers me a lot. It is driving me crazy.

Conclusion

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I made a couple comments in the Rapids subreddit (yes, the same I said I was going to quit) about our away game against Minnesota United, and I figured I could recycle some of that and expand it just a bit more.
Part of me wishes someone reads this and emails me and I make a Rapids pen pal. Heck, I would be OK with another MLS sicko even if they support a different team. ;)

Both the "official Rapids app" and the MLS one give our line up as 4231[1], yet during the game it was displayed as 343. Only FotMob shows that line up, which I assume is the correct one:

Some day, I will write an Emacs command to insert mark up for line ups as plain text, because taking a screenshot and uploading the image etc is not "a lot" of work, but I didn't enjoy it.
Maybe something that queries me for names until it fills a line, then the next one, finally writes it all in a glorious monospace block of text. Anyway!

Trying to be newbie friendly (since I was one myself, still am in some aspects). The picture above shows 3 defenders, 4 midfielders, 3 attacking players.
In modern football, players "starting positions" are more like guidelines. Usually they will move all over the pitch, and the areas they occupy at different times will change. Some (most) teams are OK with players moving completely out of position as long as there's another one covering their space. Of course some players are more suited for attack, and others for defense. And even within those groups there can be more specialization: players that are good attacking at speed on counters, vs attacking players that are better at finding spaces in congested areas (like, when the opposing team has 7 guys covering their goal).

MNUFC and expectations

Going into the game, we knew MNUFC[2] was 3rd in the standings, and that this year they are a team that pundits would say "are ok ceding possession" or "don't play with the ball". Basically they are counter machines. They let you have a lot of ineffective possession, in hopes that your failed attacks leave your team completely exposed (like, maybe a defender or two gravitated up the field too much, leaving space behind them).
For this, they have fast attackers, good long rage passing, and a very organized defense. You can get a clue of all this from their own line up: 532. Park the bus, let you move your team around trying to break them down, and punish you when you fail.
If they are 3rd, it is because they are carrying out their plans very well.

As I mentioned in the post linked above, we just lost our best attacking midfielder. A player that was very creative in finding good passing lanes, dictating the tempo of our attack (good decisions between moving the ball quickly up the field, or holding it to open spaces in other part of the pitch). So breaking down MNUFC was going to be difficult.

I think a tie was a fair expectation, even if we really need a win in each of the games we have left in the season. Losing by 1 would have been sad but understandable.
We won 1-2 and we are over the moon.

Five at the back

Us Rapids faithful know Vines and Cannon have played as full-backs, in our coach's favorite (and most standard nowadays) line up of 4231. We know that they are expected to join the attack, in most cases carrying the ball up the field to whoever is playing winger.
Were they today really that far up the field? Yes, but also no. Guidelines, as we said earlier.

Out of possession, when MNUFC had the ball, both of them tracked back to have 5 players defending. If I weren't lazy, I would look try to screenshot of today's match to show this.
UPDATE: I wasn't lazy, but getting an screenshot of exactly that I wanted wasn't easy. But I pinky promise that's what happened, we noticed it while watching the game[3]. :)

In possession, our three defenders stayed behind, but wide apart to cover more area. The numeric advantage (3 defenders to 2 of their attackers), was necessary as their attackers are fast. And in that case Vines and Cannon joined in the attack, which was needed to overload their well organized bus defense.

You won! So you did break down their defense!

LOL no. Our two goals came out of quick counters...so while we should celebrate today's victory in what was a very difficult week for the team, the question of who takes the mantle from Mihailovic remains open.
And also, he was a free kick goal machine, and while Basset has been effective in that area in the past, he hasn't been doing that hot lately.[4]

But, our defense hasn't exactly been solid this year, and today they endured quite the attack, AND spared some numbers to execute those counters. In particular for the second goal, where we had enough personnel joining the attack up the field and dragging their defenders, to keep Yapi completely open to score.

I am not much into stats, one of the reasons I enjoy football is that I think it is a game that cannot be reduced to numbers - you have to watch the games to "get" what happened. But, it's hard not to point out that MNUFC had 23 shots, 10 on target. Contrasting this with the Rapids' 12 shots, 5 on target. Makes you wonder what will happen when we play a team that is more creative on the ball, and makes good use of their possession.
Will our five at the back hold then? Even today, Steffen had to make a number of close saves to keep things even in the first half, and only 1 down in the second.

Conclusions

First one is that the post is all over the place, I started beginner friendly and then turned it into a Rapids-lore dissertation. Ooops.

Second, is that in my replies today I mentioned that I don't think we'll play exclusively the "3(sometimes 5) at the back, 4 and wide midfield". But maybe I was wrong. It seems from the teams we have to face next, none of them are doing particularly hot, so maybe we see this formation some more.

Third, in our last game of Leagues Cup, we tried a number of young players that maybe should get more minutes. And I bet if today at halftime we weren't 0-0, Armas would have subbed in a couple of them. I hope in the coming games we try them more, partly because they were good, partly because any injury could derail our entire season. To be fair, being bench thin is a very Colorado Rapids thing.

And finally, up the fucking pids.

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I was doing the rounds on my bookmarks, and found out Jack Baty's blog turned 25 today. Doing 25 years of anything that you like is an achievement. So, you should totally visit his post, and then drop him a congratulations email.
Chances are that you already know his site, because he is a prolific and very well regarded blogger.

A few minutes ago, Colorado Rapids finished their game against Minnesota United, and I was thinking about that Jack's achievement and wondering for how long other people in my bookmark list have been blogging. And then I realized this blog had it's anniversary in July!

My very first blog, focused on Emacs on Windows, had a grand total of 3 posts (maybe 4) before I abandoned the idea. I had two drafts disappear, among other weirdness with the GitHub-based blogging software[1], and I just gave up on the whole enterprise.

Years later came Gemini, and I jumped in after finding out that Source Hut has support for it.
I just checked: the capsule existed for a year, and I wrote exactly 13 post in it. For comparison, this is post 118 of this blog (although, to be fair, at the exact year mark I was at 111).

I still think ease of posting is one of the biggest things that helps me keep going.
Also, unlike with the very first site, I don't write thinking of the content being useful, but just drop whatever is going in my head at the time.
Last couple months, I started putting a pin on random thoughts, when I think it can be interesting to elaborate on them more in writing later.

2017 Hoagie

I was already married, and a dad, and living in Denver. And I hadn't met yet the two closest friends I made in this country, despite living here for so long.
Was barely starting to get interested in free software, but still used Windows full time.
I still hadn't attended my first fútbol game live, but I didn't know how important it would be that this hadn't happened yet :)
On the work side of things, I was still using C# full time, doing things here and there with Python for my own use. Was transitioning from an (allegedly) full managerial position to more of a team lead role, in a different line of business for the same client.

2023 to 2024 Hoagie - AKA Capsule Hoagie

I was still married, but we had a brief separation in 2020. Moved to Jersey City, after facing unemployment for the first time in my career. Turned from Go developer to full time Python developer.
All my devices used Linux, except the phone (a compromise). It was also the year I started licensing my open source stuff with GNU instead of MIT. Yes, I went full crazy :D

Fútbol

One of the things that pains me the most about moving is not attending every home game for the Colorado Rapids. And I am not joking...
In a story that I might share another day, the threat of relegation and how much it "worries" me[2], made me realize that Vélez Sarsfield is my true argentinian team.

Today's Hoagie

Rapids won :D
Vélez lost on Thursday (Rapids did too, but we were already eliminated from that tournament anyway).

And related, I wonder...with fútbol, I know I am a newbie, that there are finer aspects of the sport that I don't understand, or don't notice. But that I still feel OK sharing my thoughts and trying my best to analyze things etc. Putting myself out there.

Similarly, I know I am not the best writer. I know I still haven't made a post in Spanish (I might never, I have no idea). I know that it's been just 1 year instead of 5 or 10 or 25. I haven't done one post a day, or per week[3] or follow any particular cadence.

BUT!

I know I have readers (no analytics, so no exact numbers). Exchanged emails with other authors, not many but still. Heck, once I got an anonymous email asking me if people were emailing me 🤣.
And I've been keeping this thing more or less active for a bit over a year.

So...

...is it too soon to call myself..........a blogger?
Maybe not. Like with fútbol, all it takes is a dash of overconfidence, and being OK being wrong. In this particular case, I will be wrong if the site dies soon(ish).

(I guess a good goalpost for "I am real blogger" is finally adding the goddamn tag navigation)

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I was listening to a Mike Birbiglia interview on a podcast, can't remember which one[1], and something he said stuck with me, paraphrasing a bit:

On stage, I am relaxed because I am in control. Outside of that environment, I am a mess, anxious and intense.

And it resonated with me, thinking immediately of my 20s and how I used to tell friends that I wish I had the calm and collectedness I have at work, in my personal life.

But I never connected that with this idea that I was more in control in one place versus the other.
And thinking a bit more about it, the periods that I was relaxed when working back then, were the ones where I was just programming, or leading a small team. The more I moved up the ladder into managerial-adjacent roles, the less I felt that calm and confidence.

Nowadays, and for a few years now, I've been in an "individual contributor" role. It was a nice thought exercise to imagine that if I were again in a position like those I despised so much, I would fare better - because I am more mature and calm in general nowadays.
But the only way to know for sure would be to try it, and I have no interest right now, I think.

I also followed this train of thought into the past. I think one of the many reasons I was attracted to software from an early age was that, unlike building things in the physical world (where I tend to suck[2], with software I could build and rebuild, until I got it right. And I could do it on my own, away from the shameful gaze of others. And because I kept trying and repeating until I learned enough to feel confident, I made software my stage.

There you go...the guy that relates everything to software and programming did it again. Thank you, and good night.

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This week the fam traveled to meet up friends. I had some ideas of how to spend my time alone, until I realized I am working the whole week. AND they took the car. So I tempered my expectations. :)

There were some positives, like for example I went shopping by bike, and it was great. I even did a short leisure ride yesterday, early morning.
I got caught up with two dear friends, which was really nice.
I read a tiny bit.
But, something happened that dragged me (or, I let it drag me) over the dark side of The Socials, and I wasted so much of my "me time" there...and even some time during the day.

The facts

It was reported that Toronto FC is buying Djordje Mihailovic from the Colorado Rapids for $8 million. We are paying him ~$1.25 million now.
He's been with us for only a year and a half. The trade happening mid season, as we are trying to make a playoffs push, is really bad. He asked to be transferred, which makes it sting more.
He made a big impact in the club since we brought him over from Europe in 2024, and he was supposed to be a long term investment. We were supposed to build the squad around him.

I could explain more about why this sucks, but I guess not many in my readership care.[1]
If the assumption is wrong, maybe I get an email asking for details, and will happily type a lot about it in another post. 🤓

The consequence

The MLS subreddit saw some movement over this, but the Rapids one exploded. Relative to our regular volume of posting, at least.
There were lengthy threads complaining about the club's front office, the scouting, lack of investment from ownership, how we are stuck being a mid team that just exists, etc etc etc.

And...I couldn't stop scrolling. A couple times I stopped myself from replying, unlike during our horrible 2023 season where I replied to every single message that was spelling gloom and doom, trying to make more measured takes. Still, I couldn't help myself reply here and there to "set the record straight", which is stupid.

But then as my phone usage shot up, I also started wasting more and more time in other apps and sites :(

A wake up call

The only reason I kept reddit around was to stay on top of MLS and Rapids news. But then I found myself using the site more and more, until I went back to "normal" usage.
And you know what? It isn't worth it.

The truth is, I have too little self control. I have found a website for Rapids news. They reported the Mihailovic transfer about 2 hours after it showed up in r/MLS, and that is fine.
Reading about it "as it happened" only got me to constantly check reddit for wildly emotional takes, going as far as saying we started 2025 strong until the club's management blew it (we didn't, that's why we are 9 in the standings...) and excusing the player for wanting out because the club sucks.

I mean, yes, Colorado Rapids isn't the most ambitious club in MLS. But even I knew that coming into the stadium when we attended our very first game. Mihailovic could (should?) have known that before joining the team as the centerpiece.[2].

I also follow the Emacs subreddit, but lately I don't have any interest in trying out new packages. One in a while I peruse other people's configs, but within a minute I give up. I already know what I want in my editor, and if I need to change something I can find it in the manual. I get better value from Sacha Chua's weekly news round up and being subscribed to the Emacs devel mailing list.

I don't think I will delete my reddit account (yet?). But will remove the login from my phone and maybe my laptop, just to stop myself from using it.
Over at Koldfront, Adam posted about deleting his LinkedIn account. I am so tempted to do that, except that when I was out of a job, guess what kickstarted the process of getting the one I have now...? Yep, a former colleague noticing I was in the market via LinkedIn. And unlike the others, this isn't an account I really use much. Deleting would be more about rebelling against The Man than about making a more conscious use of my time.

The one that can't seem let go of is Instagram. I almost stopped posting, and I don't interact with posts anymore. But one of the friends I caught up with, it was via Instagram chat. My wife and I send each other jokes and news and places to visit. I have a couple other friends with whom I interact mostly via sharing posts and chatting there.
So the strategy might be to set a time limit, so I get use out of it but don't give in to doomscrolling.

And anyway, that's also why I didn't spend any of my solo time writing on this site[3], despite having quite a few ideas and thoughts in the queue. Because I was stupidly scrolling on post after post about how bad the Colorado Rapids are, and then instead of putting the phone away, heading over to other apps and doom scrolling more and more, and then getting back to r/Rapids.

I hate that I have so little self control, and I hate that my first post back is about this instead of the other things I feel like saying.
But I also needed this out my system...so here we are.

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I need a tag for "silly". Or "juvenile", to sound a bit more cultured. 🤡

The community we live in has a little barrier for cars at the entrance. I find it silly, because there's a sidewalk in the same place, you can just walk right in. And the barrier is not exactly reinforced concrete...so I am not sure what the point of all that is...except to make me really mad!

Because turns out that the little barrier thingy uses the app ButterflyMX. Yes! I LOVE IOT IN THINGS THAT DON'T NEED IT![1]
And nothing better than driving and start fumbling with your phone to open the barrier.

Luckily for the kids crossing the street as I drive in, the app has "Siri integration" (it's unreal how many things that I absolutely love we are fitting in a single post).
Except that the voice command to activate it is "Unlock Residents Gate", so obviously the first time I tried it I said "Siri (brief pause) OPEN Residents gate" and Siri said "What are you talking about" (paraphrasing a bit). So I had to unlock my phone and open the app, as if we were still in the 00s, and swipe the little widget to open the gate.

Also, and this might have to do more with my accent than anything else, but "Unlock residents gate" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Anyway, last night I found out that the Siri integration is through an iOS feature called "shortcuts", and that you can rename them. I was ready to change the shortcut to "OPEN residents gate", but then I figured I can use any phrase I want![3]

This morning I went out with the kiddo to pick some groceries and as we were approaching the gate I give him a side eye and say...
Siri...let me in
He found it really funny.

I did the same thing when I picked up Maria from the train station later in the day, and she didn't find it that funny. But she was amused at how happy it made me.

It's the little things in life...

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I just realized I have a tag for Suzie and not for my family. 🤣
In any case, I need to revisit the tagging...and maybe finally implement tag navigation... >_>

This weekend Colorado Rapids visited Philadelphia Union, as part of the MLS regular season. So we took the chance to go see them, and Maria joined us.

To start the day though, we left our place and headed to the Mütter Museum, which we had visited way back when we lived in northern Delaware and Juan was just a baby. It is great, and unless you are a very impressionable person, I totally recommend it. It has a very unusual collection of organs, skeletons, wax models and old medical equipment.
There's a newish series of tags around the museum talking about medical consent, the history of the things on display, etc. that wasn't present before and I found interesting too.

Football musings

Last year, we saw the Pids beat NYCFC 0-2 at Citi Field, and tie but win in penalties the 3rd place match of Leagues Cup against Philly Union.
This year, we visited DC for a loss, and now another defeat against Philly. 2025 is being less kind with us :)

NOTE: Reminder that I am a complete newbie, corrections to my observations welcomed.

I think the start of the year was a bit worse, from a tactical point of view, but by now I can see Armas (our coach) has figured out how he wants the team to play: a 4231 that pressures slightly above the midfield, and defends in a narrow shape. In possession, the wingbacks move up and we end up with 3 and eventually 2 at the back, in an inverted pyramid.

The problems we have seem to change every week though, which makes me think we need to adjust better to our opponents. Sometimes we are terrible at defending counters (OK, this one is a pretty recurring problem). We had a string of games were we dominated the match but couldn't finish our chances. A few times we weren't aggressive enough progressing the ball, keeping possession without generating any danger, because we couldn't break the other team's defense.

Earlier in the year we played a more aggressive 4222 shape, pressuring higher up the field, and I really liked that, but I have to recognize that our defense is too slow to risk that much pressure. And now we lost one of our starting center backs (Chido Awazeim) and it showed this Saturday.
(The other alternative tried was playing with 3 at the back and putting more numbers in midfield, which was something we did last year in our second match against LAG in playoffs...)

This week, Leagues Cup starts. I don't expect us to repeat our excellent performance from last year...except that last year's run was completely unexpected, too. We did waaaay better than anyone thought. And that got us into CCC. It also completely derailed our season.
I don't know what I would prefer. Qualify to CCC again? Get rest to make a push in the final games of the season, to make sure we enter playoffs?
Well, winning the thing would be nice, but being realistic...[1]

Fútbol musings

The same night, but in Argentina, Vélez tied with Instituto for the Clausura tournament (second half of the season). Not a great result. The season has just started, but Vélez is playing Fortaleza (Brazil) for Copa Libertadores in a few days, and the way the team has been playing in league lately, doesn't give me a lot of confidence.
Although, I didn't get to watch this match, so maybe the actual game was better than the highlights suggest.

There's some worry on the tournament side too, because we ended almost last on Apertura, and despite winning in 2024, the year prior we almost face relegation. So our average points over the last few years aren't great, and that's the other mechanism to get relegated.
So we can't do well in Libertadores (IF we do well...) without keeping an eye on the local tournament too.

(The relegation year is how I discovered that my true allegiance was with Vélez, but that's a story for another day).

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I meant to write this on Friday, but was too sleepy, and then the weekend was a whirlwind.

Manu Moreale's "People and Blogs" series has reached its 100th interview. On the post "Why this matters", Manu says:

[...] doing something for 100 weeks in a row, collaborating with 100 different human beings in the process, is something worth celebrating.

I fully agree. And I also agree with a lot of his statements about the web. We can (and I sometimes (often?) do) give in to pessimism about the state of tech in general.
But out of all tech, the web has the lowest barrier of entry to make it our space. And it is already filled with a lot of weird and wonderful things[1], if you look just a little outside the mainstream.

I was self-conscious to mention it on the blog when it happened, but I was featured on P&B a while ago.
When Manu contacted me, it felt surreal, because I am using P&B interviews as a tool to find new blogs. I suspect most people who visit this site arrived via that interview.
But if you are reading this and weren't familiar with the series, I totally recommend it. One thing I really enjoy about it, is that it features all kinds of sites, not only techy people blogs.

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Dubious connections

This week I read two different articles about how taking a stance can be perceived, mostly in relation to consumerism. There's a (very tenuous) connection to something I've been thinking about for a few days now...and that was the final push to sit down and write this post.
I felt like clearing the idea with my wife, which I did earlier today. Because this story starts with a conversation we had in our recent vacation.

But let's go backwards in time, like all the cool shows and movies do nowadays...and also so I link all the relevant posts. Sharing is caring.

The Billionaire Boycott Conundrum

Checking out Nicola Losito's reads for this week, I landed on the post "The Billionaire Boycott Conundrum". These passages caught my eye:[1]

Some decisions are easier than others, for all sorts of reasons. But not every decision you’ll make will be a pure one, because very few things in the world are pure. Don’t worry, the people who criticize you for your decisions have their own baggage. [...] You will get shit from some people if you boycott. You will get shit from some people if you don’t boycott. You will get shit from some people if you boycott one company or billionaire and not another. You will get shit from some people if you talk publicly about this stuff. You will get shit from some people if you don’t talk publicly about this stuff. Whatever you do or don’t do, you will get shit from some people.

(Emphasis is mine, by the way.)
Nowadays, every topic a person can conceivably have an opinion on, feels like a minefield. Heck, even proven scientific facts, like "the earth is round", can be seen as controversial. And we are at the point where not having an opinion on something, can be labeled as being as bad as having the "wrong" opinion. Things like You sure show your privilege, since you have the luxury of not thinking about X ethnic group/the animals/this or that war/the children/etc.

On using Apple products

Those paragraphs reminded me of something I read earlier in the week, in Manu's post "On using Apple products". This post touches on a similar topic in some way, but from a more individual point of view. So it gets closer to my original thought. Emphasis is mine, again.

If I find out that the Volvo CEO is eating babies in their spare time, what should I do? Sell my car? Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.

And this doesn't want to be a condemnation of the people who are doing the switch. These are all people I have nothing but respect for, and they’re free to do whatever they want with their lives. If they think this is something worth doing, more power to them. And I deeply appreciate the fact that they take time to share their perspectives publicly on their site. That’s why I love the open web.

More on Manu on the post I am intending to write after I finish this one.[2]

Swimsuits and daughters

Manu's I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life was so close to the conclusion I had arrived just a few days earlier, when I was floating in a swimming pool, in the ocean. Probably ruining something in the environment, instead of philosophizing at home.

Maria commented getting changed that day, that she didn't feel comfortable showing off her body in a swimsuit, even after seeing women of all types wearing them during the last couple days in the cruise. So she still preferred to wear shorts on top of the suite.
I was reassuring, but at this point in the marriage (and adult life I guess) I understand the problem is not how I perceive her, or any others do, but how she feels comfortable or not herself.

A few minutes after that, I was swimming on my own and noticed by the poolside two unrelated, not-in-the-same-group women, side by side. Their bodies couldn't be more different, and that plus Maria's earlier comment made me have a well meaning, but very stupid thought: "If instead of a son we had a daughter, maybe Maria should not wear extra shorts. To show our daughter all bodies are OK, and setting an example of bravery and acceptance".

And while I imaged how that would be a great for this little girl, that she will be inspired by her mom's bravery, I had a slightly more coherent thought. "Isn't it also a great example of agency and independence, to show our[3] daughter that Maria can wear whatever she wants to the pool? That she doesn't need to conform to any norm about what to wear or not?"

And then I felt ashamed, because, how do I dare put the weight of being exemplary in Maria? Is she supposed to be miserable because "she needs to be inspiring?". It's her body, her clothes, and her choice. Heck, she could decide to wear something different every day based entirely on her mood that morning.

And because I was floating and didn't have anything else to do, my mind started (not racing, but wandering) in all these thoughts about "being inspiring" and how everything you do and don't do nowadays has an implicit message or hidden meaning.

I am chubby[4] and I am having a pizza. Is it a statement about how I respect my food choices and bravely pick something I like over the healthy option? Or I just felt like having a pizza today.

Oh I have a blog. That means I am rebelling against the Big Corp internet establishment. Or maybe I just wanted a space to write, and was narcissistic enough to get my own and put my name on it, instead of using a readily available third party service. What if it's a bit of both at the same time?
Should every reader of this space care about it? About either of those two. Or care about neither...

I reached a similar conclusion to Manu's. It is exhausting that every single thing you do or don't do needs to have a hidden meaning. What if some causes are closer to your heart, and others not. Does not caring about world hunger invalidate your effort to say, generate less trash?

And the impositions

What bothered me the most about my initial """idea""", and makes me a bit ashamed, is how quickly I was assuming I should/could have a say in someone else's choices, bodies, preferences.
Yes, I didn't do it in the name of a religion, I had "good intentions"...does it make a difference? Aren't the people I mentioned in that other post also full of "good intentions"?

Anyway, the thoughts and realizations that I had that afternoon stuck with me. So much so that I saw a thread of connection when I read the other posts. Even if the topics were not really related.
I would like to think I learned something important that will stick in my skull for the rest of my life...

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As I mentioned yesterday, I had a week-long vacation.
I contemplated taking two books with me, but decided against in the interest of leanness...and I finished this one by Wednesday 🙃.

Yes, I had little to do a couple nights (by design), but also, the book was just great. I couldn't stop reading.

How I got it

Summarized version: I liked the cover and it was cheap.

I was in the Littleton Barnes & Nobles, looking for Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Which I got, and read, but I completely forgot about it by now. I should probably re-read it (I do love, and remember, the amazing stop motion movie[1]).

Anyway, I was there at the store, and as it happens whenever I visit a library or bookstore, I feel like getting everything. This particular book caught my attention because of the cover:

And the title made me curious. It is not the type of thing I usually read.
No research about it, just a glance at the summary in the back, and I was like, "sure why not". Turned out to be a great decision. Hooray for impulsive choices.[2]

Plot summary (intentionally vague)

There's a few storylines in two main locations: a village in the woods, and a swamp in which a couple mythical creatures live.
The characters are two-dimensional - not totally flat, but not completely fleshed out. Which works really well, because it is not a book about their day to day lives, but more of an overarching story about what happens in like, "the end of era" in the grand scheme of things.
It is more of a macro story, with some key events highlighted, if that makes sense?

I told Maria that one way to describe the book is "Tolkien for kids". There's some myths, centuries of previous history referenced, and a world with its own rules and terms. But it's not dense, thick and opaque. Some things are not fully explained, but in the interest of keeping the story moving.

Why I loved it

Are the characters "simple"? Yes. BUT, they aren't "boring simple". They have some depth, just the right amount so that their motivations make sense. Just enough that you care for them, and their personalities are clear and distinct.
None of them (despite the title) are a clear protagonist, because their stories are intertwined. The way this was done, made the world feel more alive, and complete.

Maybe for someone who reads "proper" 34984099 pages fantasy books, the story and world are too simplistic and not detailed enough. But for me, a total simpleton =D, it was just perfect.

Some passages toward the end felt rushed, and maybe played too much like I expected or imagined. But since by then you are invested in the characters, it works OK.
It feels like a payoff rather than the book being predictable. And there were a couple surprises, too.

I cried so much in some sections at the end. I finished the book and felt lighter. In a good way. It was a perfect journey.

5 out of 5 Hoagies

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I was on vacation for a week. Which was refreshing, and exactly what me and the fam needed after a non-stop roller-coaster of happenings between August 2023 and last week.
We were on a cruise, with very limited internet access. We made a conscious choice not to buy any internet access package, which was an interesting experience.

Now, as I mentioned a couple times before[1], I feel like I have outlet for thoughts that before were just gone.
Many times I had some idea in passing, but now if that idea lingers for a bit more, instead of just letting it go, I figure that maybe it is a good topic for a post.
That starts a process where the idea comes and goes a few times, and then some "stream of text" about it makes it onto this site.

Last week, since I was experiencing so many things for the first time, I put a lot of little observations in an (offline) note, as topics to write about when I was back.

Well, during this morning's commute, I looked at the list and everything on it seemed like garbage. 🤣
Just stupid "ideas", uninspired observations, or little snippets where I didn't even know what I meant with the note.

I had this site long enough to know that stuff that seems like a amorphous and unpublishable thought at first, might take shape into something more coherent later[2]. I am giving last week's Hoagie the benefit of doubt, and won't delete all the notes. Yet.

So while I celebrate that I feel I have a safe space for whatever I have to say, I have to also recognize that I still don't have a clue what makes the blog, and by extension my own head, tick a certain way where something makes sense.
Or at least I think it makes sense enough that I push it online.
(I rarely, if ever, revisit what I wrote other than to correct mistakes. That's one way to not have regrets about "bad" content).

I am not a fan of the "blogging about blogging" thing, but I had an irresistible urge to write and this is what was in my head the last 10 minutes. That "I don't know how to blog".
So here we are.

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"Graphic design is my passion faith".

This week I was curious enough to go into the Our Lady of Victory church, where I saw the above sign.

I am not religious. Like, at all.
My mom did her best to raise me and my sister catholic. I didn't even make it into Sunday school (or, catechism classes, as they call them in probably all of Latin America). My sis got a bit farther into it, but if I had to guess, to this day, I probably have a better understanding of the church than her. If only because I am curious about history in general.

Funnily, a few minutes ago I sent an email about cringe memories from your younger self. Well, when I was around 13 and until my early 20s, I was that kind of atheist that wants to challenge every religious person to see how ridiculous their "thing" is.
Age gave me the wisdom to accept that faith is a complex topic. Even if I have a suspicion I will never share their world view, I have learned to respect it and be able to engage in very interesting conversations about religion and history.

The flip side to being more accepting, is that it made me completely intolerant to people trying to impose their ways of living on others, on the grounds of religion.
I will respect, and even defend, your right to believe whatever you want. But I can't stand you if you try to impose any of it on others. Or, heaven forbid[1], dictate how they can or can't live.

I did have once a deep emotional experience in a church, but that is topic for another day. It is a long story, and I wasn't even planning writing as much as I just did. All I wanted was to share the horrible and funny sign.

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A few days ago I wanted to setup a donation. Or tip. The language around these things is weird. A subscription? Support?
And when I tried, it turns out it was a ko-fi page, and I recalled I had setup a profile a long while ago.

The thing is, even though I had the password in Bitwarden, I couldn't login to ko-fi, because it was set to an old account and I wasn't getting the one time code to log in forwarded.
I panicked a bit, then eventually contacted ko-fi support and they changed the login email as I had requested.[1]

Digression: ko-fi

I think this was setup around the time of GitHub Sponsors launching. A few of my Emacs packages started picking up users, and GitHub launched the sponsors program, and I figured I could setup a donation page. I was disappointed that initially[2], GitHub Sponsors seemed more oriented to recurring subscriptions, than "one time thank you" donations.
I will be honest, I never expected to earn money to like, sustain myself. My expectation was more of a "someone liked this enough to drop a dollar as a sign of appreciation" kind of thing.

The old email system

I had an seb.hoagie@ account for most things, and an smonia@ one that I listed in my CV and used for "serious" stuff. This system was OK, by the time I moved away from Outlook.com(last one before paying for my email)[3] I was savvy enough to make "smonia" an alias and centralize my inbox.
Ko-fi was setup to one of the smonia@ accounts, which at first I thought had been closed from lack of use. I finally was able to reset it today, and what happened was that the one time code email was classified as Spam, so it skipped the forwarding rule.

The "ideal"(ized) system

When I started using Fastmail, first I made an effort to clean up any subscriptions to newsletters and promotions, to make sure my inbox only had useful things.

But then I overdid it with the aliases, thinking it would help me manage my email better by hyper categorizing it: capsule for my Gemini capsule contact, subscriptions for newsletters, steam for...Steam.
The silly thingstopay, which I am never giving up because calling a bank an confirming your email is "thingstopay" will never stop being funny.

There are two problems with these. The first one is that all messages go to their own folders, which sounds good (don't get a notification for "subscription" emails, for example), except that sometimes I would expect an important email in one of the folders and then this was a curse rather than a blessing. And the second problem is that many times I would forget to reply from the same alias I was receiving the mail, or would change it without realizing. Which would confuse the other person.

What I am doing now

Use the same email for 90% of things, and then setup a few rules for mailing lists, and a couple other items. Use less, not more, folders.
Turns out following advice from people who receive probably hundreds of emails a day was really stupid for a guy who gets a one random contact and two credit card statements a month.

But...now I sometimes have 8 unread emails in my inbox, and none of them are "important", so I need to stay on top what I receive a bit more.
So the temptation to divide things again is there, except that I know it won't help.

Let it be

Maybe it is just that no system is perfect, and some amount of friction is just the way it is. And maybe that is fine. If you care about something, spending two frigging minutes taking care of it daily is more than reasonable.

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I was filling up my thermos with hot water for my morning mate, to chow down on a bagel with cream cheese. A true clash of cultures, the typical Argentinian drink[1], and a New York City staple, acquired in a street cart.

And on the lunch area TV, there was this news ticker thing about Superman being canceled (paraphrasing) and I was like what? and when I got back to the desk, a quick search later:
"Superwoke:" Fox News rages that new Superman film has "pro-immigrant themes"

Feel free to follow that cancerous link, and share my outrage. Actually, if you haven't yet...stay here. Let's go over a couple quotes that caught my attention, and then I will make an argument to not follow the link. I fell into the trap so that, hopefully, you don't.

Is this newsworthy?

There are so many conflicts in the Middle East, the Ukraine-Russia war, Texas floods...and this is what you decide to use your screen time on?
Then again, you have to fill 24 hours of "news", so at some point you are going to veer into banality, it is almost unavoidable. This has been said a lot of times before, but doesn't stop being true.[2]

The movie's director said [...]Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me, it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value., and this in turn caused these reactions:

"I'm going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release," conservative radio host and OutKick founder Clay Travis groused. Fox News star Laura Ingraham, who has demanded that celebrities with liberal political opinions "shut up and dribble," made sure to inform her followers that this was "another film we won’t be seeing."

Positive outcome: I learned what "grouse" means.
Now, all superhero movies have been pushing what they would call "woke" themes. So how come this particular statement is the one that caused this Travis guy to skip the movie. Is this a real stance, or something he is making up now just to sound angrier?

And same goes to Laura Ingraham. After a quick search (didn't know who she was), I found out she is very quick to tell everyone to shut up...and apparently fond of telling people what to watch, since she is suggesting her followers join her in not seeing the movie. But, again, is that a real sentiment? Probably, she only cared to comment about this just to have some fabricated anger.

Is there anything to do?

Yes, you read these statements, probably got annoyed (or mad) that such hateful people get paid to spew their stupid opinions...and then what?

For starters, how long can you be mad, before it is bad for you, as I argued before?
And then, what about the people they are influencing? If you go to a radio host, or a Fox News star, for your media recommendations...is there any point in arguing about anything with you?

What kind of dialogue can you expect to have with people who get that mad about a comment like "Superman is an immigrant"? Or someone who sees the screenshot above in the (allegedly) news, and gets more engaged, instead of switching channels?
If you buy into the fabricated hate for a movie that hasn't even premiered, what kind of critical thinking are you equipped with?

But let's go one more level deeper in the reflection: I got triggered by the news, then looked for the link, read the article, got mad enough to spend time thinking about the manufactured hate. If I keep engaging with this too, aren't I as much a "victim" of the machine as the target audience of Fox News?

Sometimes Juan would get annoyed about something a classmate said, and I would explain to him, "their words only have as much power as you give them". I think I should take my own advice to heart.
I engaged with the "Superwoke" moniker, because I thought it sounded too ridiculous to be true, but the more I read, the more serious it all turned, and then I starting getting more invested.
If we all ignore these things more, they will naturally stop. The more the crazies are screaming into a void, the less their opinions will matter. No?

I don't think I have a conclusion.
Whenever someone falls for an obvious lie, I like to remind myself it could happen to me too, to stay intellectually vigilant.
This is similar, "oh the conservatives got all triggered by a stupid movie", well, guess what, I was getting all triggered by their stupid opinions on a stupid movie. They got me with the funny and silly Superwoke, and I fell into the rabbit hole without even realizing.

Let's not engage with these ridiculous pretend news anymore. Or at least I will try not to.[4]

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This Friday the weather went from "scorching hot" to "tolerable summer heat", and Juan and I took the chance to have a bike ride together.
The Secaucus greenway is a 1.6 mile trail that borders the Hackensack river, going over the marsh in a boardwalk, and passing through a few small parks. The trail ended and we rode some more on the streets, and then head back home. Probably 4-5 miles total.
A far cry from the longest rides we did in Denver (25 miles or so). It was nice to ride together again, we'll get there.

After we came back, I wanted to go some more, and left to Laurel Hill Park, on the other side of town. All the pictures below are from the solo ride.

Riding through the warehouse side of Secaucus, through closed office buildings and empty parking lots, wide streets with no trucks, was slightly eerie. And fun.

Maybe it is obvious to all locals, but ever since moving to the New York metro area I've been surprised by how many industrial areas there are. One time Juan and I went to Coney Island[1], part of the way by bus because of F train track maintenance, and Brooklyn had so many places that looked like the area I grew up in: tons of mechanical shops, for cars and industrial machines.
If you think about it, it is obvious: the city can't be only financial stuff and Broadway. At least not in the 1900s to the 50s.
Another angle of this is also that the NY/NJ harbor complex is huge, and of course you gotta move those goods. There's a ton of cargo train tracks, everywhere.

Probably the only cool thing about Jersey City (my experience, of course) was seeing so many cool bridges crossing the river. Lots of iron structures.
In comparison, this NJ Turnpike crossing is pretty bland. Although the cool old-timey tracks below it make up for it. It will be converted to a pedestrian trail crossing, which sounds super cool.

The bridge in the background is the Upper Hack Lift.

These are all the train tracks heading into Secaucus Junction. Behind these signs, the tracks divide, one going into the Upper Hack Lift pictured above (I rode almost to the bridge) and the other heading to a different line.
I plan to go train watching here with the kiddo :D

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The last tea review post, I used for the first time a scoring system, based out of mini-Hoagies. I thought the idea was fun, and for a few days after that I was thinking of more things to review and grade, just to justify the amount of effort. Of course I didn't have any good ideas, and then forgot about it. 🤣

Well, am sipping a tea right now[1], which reminded me of it. And I figured, why not review the score system itself?

Prelude: review of Bigelow Earl Grey (teabag)

It's not bad. Not the worst tea I've ever had. BUT...
The citric flavor is more sour than it should be. Like, compared to Teapigs "strong" Earl Grey, this one is less flavorful and aromatic, but about the same sourness. And the underlying tea is pretty bland too.
Will drink it again, but that has more to do with circumstances than the tea itself.

1 out of 5 Hoagies

The mini-Hoagie image

I thought of using little hoagie roll breads, but they looked like mini hot dogs when in a small size. Or like just a blob, if using a picture of a proper sandwich.

So instead, I took the "front" view of the Hoagie sprites in my homepage, and reduced the size enough that it would look small, but not like a little dot, in my 4K monitor. I also checked that the image size was reasonable in my phone. I won't link the end result, since you can see it in the score below.

4.5 out of 5 Hoagies

The command

The markup template

All this site is based on text templates, where some values get replaced and inserted as needed. Even the RSS feed.
For this template, I ran into a number of challenges.

First, I still had to decide if I wanted scores out of ten, or out of five. I was leaning on out of five, which meant it was important to have the ability to do half-stars half-Hoagies, for more granularity.
It was at this point, and not before, that I decided to go back and create a half-image, which I foresaw (correctly) would make things simpler down the line.

Then I put up a page, not linked anywhere, where I uploaded different iterations of the mark up. The first tests were horrible, though, and I couldn't understand why the images looked huge.
Then I remembered that I have a little CSS on the site - it is hardcoded on each page, because it is part of the "common template" that I don't even think about. And one thing said template does, and it is very important, is to make sure big images don't take up a lot of screen space on mobile:

img {
    width: 80%;
    height: auto;
}
    

The way this works, for you non-developers out there (although I think I lost them all by now. And developers too, probably), is that ALL images are set to 80% screen width maximum. If I want images to display at their "real" size, I need to override the property, to the default value, which is "don't resize this, display in original size.". So:

(tag-template "<img style=\"object-fit: none; width:auto\" src=\"%s\" alt=\"%s\">\n")
    

The more attentive readers will say "you also define the object-fit CSS property". And I will say, I don't remember why, but I needed that.
I think.

3 out of 5 Hoagies

Reading a score

Since I wanted to grade things in halves, I tried the lazy way out of reading the score in two parts. Like, 2, and then 5, for 2.5.
When I tested it, it was annoyingly unnatural. But also stupid, because I don't care for a 2.3 or a 2.6. At the same time, I didn't want to have a lot of code to validate, or parse and round up, invalid entries.

Then, while trying out different ways to read the input, it hit me that 1. only I will use this and 2. I only care if the score is not a simple integer. In any other case I can add a half mini-Hoagie.
Hooray for interactive development! I realized these things as I was testing a small skeleton of the final command, that read and printed back the number(s).

(total (read-number "Total score: " 5))
(score (read-number "Score: "))
(add-half (not (= (truncate score) (ceiling score)))))
    

The other thing that I realized was that I didn't need to hardcode total score. Because I wasn't going to show a "grayed out" image, so I wasn't tied to grading things out of 5 or 10 or whatever.

10 out of 5 Hoagies

Really proud of my thinking there.
And also of how silly the one-liner for "add a half" looks: is the integer part of the number the same as the number rounded up? If not, then I have to add a half.

Inserting the text

(insert "<p>\n")
(dotimes (- (truncate score) 1)
  (insert (format tag-template one-hoagie "One star")))
(when add-half
  (insert (format tag-template half-hoagie "Half star")))
(insert (format "<br>\n%s out of %s Hoagies\n</p>" score total))))
    

A younger me would have built a single string with all the mark up, then (insert...) only once.
Many years of Emacs Lisp later, I've grown to love working directly in buffers. As it is supposed be.

4.5 out of 5 Hoagies

The full command

(defun site-insert-score-minihoagies ()
  "Prompt for a score and total, insert minihoagies and text to match."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((one-hoagie "/media/minihoagie.png")
         (half-hoagie "/media/minihalfhoagie.png")
         (tag-template "<img style=\"object-fit: none; width:auto\" src=\"%s\" alt=\"%s\">\n")
         (total (read-number "Total score: " 5))
         (score (read-number "Score: "))
         (add-half (not (= (truncate score) (ceiling score)))))
    (insert "<p>\n")
    (dotimes (- (truncate score) 1)
      (insert (format tag-template one-hoagie "One star")))
    (when add-half
      (insert (format tag-template half-hoagie "Half star")))
    (insert (format "<br>\n%s out of %s Hoagies\n</p>" score total))))
    

Conclusion

This was a waste of everyone's time. Final rating:

0.5 out of 999 Hoagies

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Someone emailed a reply on a previous post. And as I typed half of the following story I realized if I stretched it a bit, it could become a post, so why not.
=P

Jump start

One time in Littleton, my wife and I were walking back on the parking lot, and passed by two youngish-looking couples[1] that were trying to jump start a car. They had the cables, and cars next to each other. But were looking at things as if it were a puzzle.
As we exchanged looks, I offered to help.

I have no idea what came over me, because I had never jump started a car. I didn't even own a car until I was 30!
I have seen or helped my dad change the car's oil, battery, plugs, that kind of thing. I also did attend what in Argentina is called a "technical high school", where you have a shift of regular classes, and a second one of mechanical or electrical work.
So I have a bit of knowledge from these things, that I almost never use, and to be honest I don't trust :)

Anyway, they said they had tried but it didn't work. I asked what they tried, when they explained, I realized they put the negative clamp on a painted part of the chassis. When I pointed this out they all looked at me puzzled.
Now, there's a chance that they were puzzled because my accent is too thick (a fact) and they didn't understand a word of what I said (which happens in Spanish too - I just speak too fast sometimes most of the times). But their eyes were more like...

...so I said "paint is not conductive". Which didn't help at all, so I offered to connect the cables.
And they let me.
And it worked.
Obviously. And surprisingly.

Heading back to our own car, Maria was amused. I was still surprised.

Observation 1: Be confident

Nothing new here, but: speak with confidence and people will believe and trust you.
Even if they shouldn't.

If someone else had been around, and offered to help these guys, I would have happily taken a step back. Since it was up to me, I just went ahead and made things happen.
(Could have made things worse, too).

Observation 2: No one knows anything anymore

Also not a new observation.
And also an unfair one, coming from me. I have no idea how half the things in my car work. I can change a tire, and that's about it.

But honestly, that out of four people, not one of them knew that they needed an unpainted piece of metal to make this work, is weird. Electricity is so ubiquitous nowadays. Understanding which materials are conductive should be the bare minimum, it is safety knowledge.
And we all should have minimum safety knowledge, like, "don't put out a gasoline fire using water", or "don't heat metallic objects in the microwave".

But this is a problem, as things grow more complex and specialized, but at the same time simpler to operate. You can drive for years nowadays and not need to change a tire. I see it with computers too, my son is a "digital native"[2] yet he knows a lot less about how computers work than I did at his age.
That might be unfair, since I ended up working in the field. But I bet most 11 years old back then had a better understanding of their computers than most kids do now, because there was no choice: you had to understand things to make the computer work.

Observation 3: Maybe it isn't that bad (or was always this bad)

Maybe I am exaggerating, and I am just old and grumpy :)

Once in a while I catch myself having and recognizing these "old people opinions" and try to be conscious that they probably aren't as real as I think they are. And surely I am older and grumpier.

So I should just...chill.

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Welcome to another edition of "Hoagie's venting posts", where I get fed up with something, then remember I have a place where I can rant about it.[1]

I am (was?) setting up a codebase in my work laptop, a Django-based website with some scripting around it and dependencies on other repositories and infrastructure. And it didn't go well.
The first problem is, our servers are Linux-based, and our laptops are Windows. Why? Because everyone's laptops are Windows I guess, which is another way of saying there is no good reason.
The theory goes that everyone having the same environment makes administration by IT and security easier. In this post, I will argue that this simplicity is just a hurtful lie, and reality has many more corner cases than people want to admit.

Security

Caring about this is a good thing, don't get me wrong. The problem I have with it, is that it is usually implemented assuming no one will ever need access to anything.
Developers always need permissions to more services. I am not advocating for a "free for all", but make it so that extra access is easily obtained, and regularly audited. As opposed to needing 7089304890 layers of approval, and relying on teams that are 12 hours away from you.

If you are scared that developers might fuck up your network or servers, then:

1. Get better developers.
2. Have a good recovery procedure.

The other thing that happens with overzealous security is that because people know permissions are hard to obtain, they ask for more access right away, lumping more things in the same request.

Or even, they don't say anything about existing holes!
For example, this totally made up scenario: access to domain lookup of users is blocked in laptops, and you are offered a VM as an alternative (more on this later).
Then you find out that when you work from home, you can reach the domain controllers using the corporate VPN!!! It probably is less secure that it works outside the physical office...but, do you bring up the inconsistency, and risk having that access closed? Or stay silent, and when in office, use "guest wifi + VPN" and move on? The latter certainly makes your life easier 👀

Windows (and WSL) or Mac

This is a "solution" that is just a shifting of burden.
All laptops are Windows! Or all laptops are Macs! Then there's a central administration for IT stuff, and the same rules for everyone. Problem solved!, they say.

Just as with the security rules, people will need exceptions that ruin the illusion of sameness: install drivers for specialized hardware, permissions for a debugger, specific compilation tools.
Use x86 based tools in your M1 laptop, which means workarounds or alternatives for half the things in your stack.

Or your servers are Linux based, and all developers need to account for that when writing and testing code in Windows. You can cover maybe 85% of the most common scenarios with WSL, or VMs, but that leaves you open to the more annoying and difficult to bypass corner cases.
And many times, that same extra layer introduces new testing complexities. "Does this not work because of external permissions, or something in the WSL-Windows layer?".[2]

Possible solutions?

I was OKed in a previous job to use dual boot and run Linux. It was understood I was on my own, and I kept the Windows partition around just in case. I could run the same containers we deployed natively, much simpler than the VM-based "Docker on Windows" experience.
In another case, I was offered BYOD and using that previous experience, I knew I could run all corporate MS services via browser[3] and access the VPN with the Linux CLI client, so I didn't even boot their laptop, ever. Worked 100% from my own laptop with no hiccups.

Of course that approach doesn't work for non-power users. You still should offer a "default experience" that works for a good chunk of your organization.
But maybe have a second "power user" setup? Yes, make those people responsible for their environment and how they use the powers they are granted. But it streamlines the process!!!

If you are gonna make it more work for me to get things setup, I'd rather spend that time figuring out how to configure things on my own, than creating tickets and chasing approvals in Outlook. 90% of the time, the approvers don't even know what they are OKing...

The current workaround

I am ssh-ing to a Linux dev server to setup the same website.
But I really tried my best to make the darned thing work in Windows, even if meant more effort to get it running. Out of principle! You gave me a Windows laptop, and you bet I will get this working on it.
It helped that I know Windows really well from my many years as a C# developer[4]...except it didn't really help. Now I feel like a stupid quitter 🙃

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As I mentioned in the last post, we just moved. We are now residents of Secaucus, NJ.
It wasn't a planned move[1], and it all happened very quickly since we got the keys to the new place on the 15th and last weekend.

This week, there was a hackathon at work. I have to applaud that it was done properly: all planned work was put on hold, meetings canceled. There was a lot of buzz about it. Even someone as cynic as I've been for the last few years had some level of excitement about it!

I made a pretty small, very doable, proposal to improve something in an existing app.
Yet personally, my hackathon was a bust. And I have a couple theories why.

Definitely tired

I was tired. Really tired. I slept like crap the week before starting the move, extremely anxious. Then I had to deal with the move itself, lifting boxes and furniture. Moving things up and down the stairs, etc...And I am certainly NOT in shape.

The end result was that I found myself exhausted, not only physically, but more important, mentally.
During the hackathon I was sometimes stuck looking at some code or configuration, wondering why it didn't work, and ten minutes later I would look at it again and realize my mistake was very obvious.

Maybe too old

Of course I am over 40 now[2] and recovery takes longer.
Maybe I should have taken just one more day off after the weekend, to recover.
I have no evidence, of course, but I am almost convinced that resting more, I would have done a better job in 4 days than what I did in 5.

(Certainly?) wiser

A realization I had many many years ago, is that sometimes the best solution to a problem is to walk away for a bit, rather than trying to push through at all costs. Heck, I have a friend that credits me with passing him that lesson.
But of course, aren't "lessons" what we learn from our own mistakes?
And aren't those mistakes the results of our own inclinations to do "the wrong thing"?

1. Do the wrong thing. At least a few times, usually a lot of times.
2. Learn from it. Hopefully.
3. Help others avoid your past mistakes.

So even though I stopped using "do more, harder" as my only tool to overcome a challenge, I might revert myself to that basic behaviour if...

1. I am emotionally invested in whatever the problem is.
2. I am tired.

And guess what? In the hackathon I wanted to succeed (because I cared), and I was tired.

An unanswered question

What prompted this post is that I was chatting with a friend at work, and I told her - what if the point isn't that I take longer to recover, but that I am more reflective and recognize that I am doing a poor job?

In my 20s, with less experience, I had no baseline to know when I was writing good code. So I just kept forcing myself to the keyboard and probably delivering sub-par solutions, without realizing.

There is room for both possibilities too, and that is the most likely scenario... I do take longer to recover and need more rest because I am older (undeniable), but with that age comes the self-awareness to see that I am overdue a rest.
Self awareness...except this week 🤦 when I needed it the most.

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We are in the middle of a move to another town (the why is long story, and something I want to write about at some point), and of course because this would be the worst time for it to happen, I got a flat tire.

I was driving back from the new place, after unloading some boxes, late at night. It had been raining all day, and I was waiting at an intersection with the longest red light known to humanity. Suddenly a beep in the dashboard, I look down and one tire was at 25 psi instead of 35. I had lots of time to ponder on trying to find a place open at 11pm, or to go to a gas station to pump some air and see how long it would hold, or just go home.
While thinking about these options, the tire went down to 22 psi, and I figured I had a really bad puncture, or a faulty sensor.

Obviously, it was a bad puncture. 🙃

This made me really worried, thinking of the move, and taking days off for it, and trying to make the best use of the time, and what if we can't fix the tire and I have to buy a new one "now of all times", and I can't even move the car with the tire so flat....
I went to bed and woke up in a very anxious mood.
Next morning, on the way to Juan's school I stopped by this little independent shop, with a picture of the piece of metal stuck in the tire. They said it was patchable, so I went back home, used the emergency pump to inflate the tire enough to roll a few blocks. It was a 7 minute drive and I lost like 10 psi getting there. 😬

Other shops

I've been to car dealerships, Les Schawb, Costco tire, and an independent shop in Littleton. And they all looked neat and tidy, there was someone handling people coming in, and the mechanics working in the back, small waiting rooms.

Jesús tire shop on Ocean Ave

I walked in, two guys were having breakfast sandwiches, standing next to little table covered in beaten tools. The shop had an open air section, with piles and piles of tires of all sizes. A few rims in slightly neater piles. All walls painted grey. A couple greasy rags here and there.
They were wearing street clothes: no name tag shirts, or same colored pants, or anything like that. Just regular "work clothes", like when you wear an older tshirt to fix stuff around your house.
They were speaking Spanish, they said morning how can I help in English, I replied in Spanish, and that was it.

When I went back with the car, they were having coffee and one of them was smoking. He extinguished the cigarette on a column, and walked to the car to start working on it.
While they patched the tire, the three of us were chatting about the disgrace it is that many cars nowadays don't come with a spare, the possible mods for the car, how was it that I got this puncture, the size of the hole...and then they were done.

As I was driving back home, I was in a great mood.
First of all, the puncture was bad but I could get to the shop on my own. Then, the tire was fixed, no need to replace it. And finally, it didn't take a long time and I could get back to focusing on the move.
But that wasn't all of it, I realized.

Familiarity

The whole thing, the shop's look and feel, the way they worked...it was a callback to the tire shops I used to ride by with my bike on the way to the office in Buenos Aires, in the Constitución area. Minus the NSFW calendars and posters. A couple times I got flats in my bike fixed on those shops.
The conversation, about everything and nothing at the same time, was so Latin America too. We complained, we laughed, we stated facts. As if it wasn't the first (and probably last) time we were chatting.

It was just what I needed to reset. After such a long time in the US, there are still things that feel like a callback to "home", and give me a little jolt of joy.

Digression: What is "home"?

This is so context dependent. Home usually refers to the US, although sometimes it still means Argentina, even 10+ years later of living here.

And when talking about the US, there's a "home" that refers to Littleton, Colorado. Even though we left over a year ago.
In part because New Jersey hasn't been very welcoming to us, in part because we have a few friends that are like family over there. We didn't think we were that rooted in Colorado... until we left.[1]

I wrote before, about how simple words are hard to define. "Home" is even more charged, with meaning and feelings.

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Last time I mentioned calling these reviews sounds pretentious, since I am completely unqualified. But any other name sounds worse.
In any case, keep in mind that I know nothing about tea :)
AND I am trying to keep it that way a bit, not getting lost in rabbit hole of reddit reviews and "professional" opinions. Which is something I've been meaning to write about for a while now.
But not today!

Tierra

Maria ordered some goods online and got me this tea from an Argentinian brand.

It is a mix of gunpowder green tea, mint, peppermint, lemon verbena, and common marigold.
If there was a moment to feel like an impostor, it was looking up the translation to cedrón online.
Greens aren't my favorites I think, but maybe I just need to know how to prepare them better. That said, this one is pretty good. The instructions in the package are garbage though. 70 C water, for 3 minutes is too cold for my taste. And it reduces the flavor to "peppermint".

The website instead offers the more acceptable "70 to 90 C water". I found that 90C and 4 minutes of brew time worked the best. I re-steep with a 5 minute time. Tried a third steep a couple times, but it didn't have any taste, so that was it.

I forgot that this blend had mint until I was writing this. I can tell there's more than just green tea and peppermint - but not exactly what.
Is the tea at fault? or is my palate too limited? We'll never know.
Do I recommended it? It is interesting, but this brand delivers only in Argentina, and it didn't blow my mind enough that I would justify hunting for it.

2.5 out of 5 Hoagies

Sugimoto Hojicha

Another one I got at the Asian store in Edgewater.

This is another green tea, which is roasted. The instructions gave a brew time of 1 to 2 mins, and because I like stronger taste I went for 2 minutes. The tea literally made me sick, I couldn't finish it.

So the next time I tried with one minute, and I loved it. It has kind of a burn taste, which I like a lot[1]. But it doesn't overpower the natural green tea flavor, it's just...different.
A second brew of minute and a half to two minutes is possible, but anything after that, the taste is gone.
I recommend this one, and the Wikipedia page (linked above) suggests it has less caffeine than regular green tea, so it is ideal for a post-dinner cup. Just remember that it goes extra sour if you let it steep for just a bit too long.

4 out of 5 Hoagies

Teapigs Earl Grey Strong

I got this one when I impulsively bought my teapot, after resisting the impulse and giving it to a different one...
Anyway, it seems the Teapigs brand is well known.

The name doesn't lie, it is a strong cup of Earl Grey, very aromatic. It can easily turn out too bitter though, so I tend to use a little less tea than the recommendation. Just a pinch less.

Can be steeped once more, after that it has even less taste than regular tea. I am still experimenting a bit with this one, so maybe I should have skipped the review...
Or not!

3 out of 5 Hoagies

Closing

I received my Father's Day present early, an order from iN-TEA[2]. I now have a lot of teas to try, so that's fun.

Also embarrassed of how much time I wasted doing the minihoagies for the scores 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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I wrote the "only a tip" version of this post while my tea was brewing. But checking it out for errors a while later, before publishing, I realized it was a good opportunity explain in detail my mode line setup.
So now I have a chance to introduce new grammar and typing errors. Yay!

What is it? For the uninitiated

It is a status line of sorts, at the bottom of each "panel" in the UI, that gives you information about the contents of it.
Here is the manual entry, but I figure if you don't use Emacs, you will skip this one :) [1]

Why write your own?

I explained before why I don't use the default mode line.
There are tons of alternatives but they do a lot more than I need. At first I didn't care, and tested whichever one looked fancy, like telephone-line. If you want maximum customization, that one is pretty cool. But even something as tuned as doom-modeline would have the occasional bug or slowdown. And it required a lot of config...just to disable all the features I don't use.

Behold! My mode line

The code lives in my "dotfiles" repository.
From the left:

• Modified segment: Shows "×" for read-only buffers, "!" or "-" for modified/unmodified. It adds a trailing "R" for remote buffers, and "N" when narrowing is enabled.
• Buffer name.
• Position: line and column. Then in "shadow" face: relative position and buffer size. When the region is active, the number of lines and characters in it appears at the end.
• Activated overwrite-mode in the screenshot, just to show its indicator.

• A "REC" indicator for keyboard macro recording, same format as the one for overwrite. Also only visible when needed.
• vc-mode segment (branch, etc).
• Misc segment.
• Process segment.
• Major mode. Minor modes are displayed on mouse hover in the echo area, as seen in the screenshot.

The tip (or, the original post)

So the tip that prompted the post, is a simple but an important implementation note. Lets look at how I defined the mode segment in older versions:

(defun hoagie-mode-line-major-mode ()
  "Mode-line major mode segment.
Show minor modes in the echo area/a tooltip."
  (propertize (format-mode-line mode-name)
              'face 'mode-line-buffer-id
              'help-echo (format-mode-line minor-mode-alist)))
    

Then I would (:eval (hoagie-mode-line-major-mode)) when setting mode-line-format.
Contrasting with the new version:

(setq-default mode-line-modes
     '(:propertize mode-name
                   help-echo (format-mode-line minor-mode-alist)))
    

The difference is, instead of defining a new function or variable to hold the configuration, I rely on the standard variable.
And it makes a difference! Because if a mode adds information to the mode line, it will rely on those default variables. I have an example.

I noticed csv-mode was supposed to display the column at point. Checking out its code, I found out that it was concatenating the information to the variable mode-line-position. But by using a custom function, I completely ignored its value!
And rather than add the variable in the function definition, I just revisited the entire thing to re-define it, in terms of the standard mode line constructs.
And this in turn led to using fewer (:eval... segments.

Since then I have seen quite a few custom mode lines using their own segment definitions. It might be fine if they incorporate the default variables...but honestly, it is easier to just re-use the defaults.

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In the US, there's a lot going on right now, in particular with the LA protests and all happenings related. And it is so hard to know what's really going on.

Social media was supposed to be this amplifier of truth: what's real, that will survive among the cacophony of hundreds of thousands of voices.
Yet, the system is broken, because it doesn't survive the influence of mob mentality. People sharing, retweeting, upvoting whatever narrative agrees with how they feel, instead of addressing the fact that maybe what they were told was a lie.
I am not even concerned with bots in this, or malicious agents. I worry a lot more about real people, spreading whatever they see as an impulsive act.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness

That's a quote from "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan (emphasis is mine). Just checked the publishing date: 1995. No further comment.

And then we have the media. Whenever I try to find out more in the news, I am exposed to these heavily sensationalized headlines. Sometimes you can tell it is the same "fact" exposed in different ways.
Other times it is news organizations giving a voice to only certain opinions, to the detriment of having balanced perspectives.

And again, this wasn't how it was supposed to go. Being a reporter was seen as something prideful, being above your own biases, and observing things from all possible angles.
That has been replaced by being a marketing tool for whoever is ready to either pay, or to further your own agenda.

Vibe reality

There's a parallel with "vibe coding". I understand it is the practice of asking an IA for code that does something, without really knowing how to write software.
In such scenario, correctness becomes a secondary concern. Because you only care about fulfilling your request in a way that satisfies your perception of a problem - you might end up accepting a "bad" solution, as long as you think it is "good".

I see the online echo chambers and rejection of anything contrary to your worldview as "fake news" as trying to vibe reality, if you will.
Twisting and molding facts (which is by definition impossible), prompting and searching until you find a "good reality", without ever challenging yourself or questioning you arrived to your "solution" - Did I have to discard tens of opposing opinions and headlines? doesn't matter, because now I have what I wanted..

A closing observation

Related to the Sagan quote. In the same book he argues that the scientific method is unique in that it has a built-in mechanism for corrections when exposed to new information. And also that it accounts for revisiting our earlier assumptions and looking at them in a new light.

Maybe we are onto something with that idea...maybe human fallibility, and vulnerability to manipulation, should be front and center in many of the subjects we teach our kids in schools.
They need to be better equipped for critical thinking than we are.

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Story 1: Contrasts

Last week, we were waiting at a traffic light and I noticed one of those electronic billboards that rotate between several ads.
A dark background, in somber tones, got my attention. In BIG letters, "To stop drinking is only the first step". As I am about to read the second, smaller, sentence, the billboard switches to the next ad.
Colors! A party! Only two words, right in the middle: "Happy Vodka".[1]

Story 2: I got hurt

There's these billboards all over the place "i got hurt in jersey dot com".
Actually, there are so many of them, that I knew I would very quickly find a picture online.

We assumed (because we have lived in the US for more than five minutes) that these are ads for a law firm.

Once I told Maria, imagine a dude going to their website, sobbing and alone at night, and typing in their contact form: "I thought we were meant for each other, but she left and I am so sad now".

And since the day of the initial joke, I can't help but imagining a poor intern filtering all the incoming messages to remove the ones about heartbreak, or friends drifting apart, etc. as if people were using their website as a confessional of sorts.

If any reader needed something to keep their heads busy when the NJTP traffic is bumper to bumper, you are welcome. =P

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I've been mulling some of the ideas for this post for a while, separately. But reading "Stumble Purposefully" by n3verm0re pushed me to write it all, connected to a concert. Will quote some sections, but of course I recommend reading his full post.
The images on this entry come the two Instagram posts I made about the event.

OK Go in NYC

For about three years, Juan and I did our 35~40 minute drive to the Colorado Rapids stadium with a small selection of rotating playlists. One of them had songs by OK Go, who recently released a new record and are now touring the US.
I asked him if he was up to attend their show in NYC, he said yes, I got tickets...months went by and without realizing, the concert was "next week".[1]

The trip from Jersey City to Brooklyn went by quickly. It was a very rainy night.

By the way, the concert was great, I totally recommend seeing this band live. Very fun and electric show. They sound amazing.

Phones up

I took about 7 photos once we got there. We have more photos playing around with the camera on the PATH train than of the show itself. This was conscious decision. We didn't check out the pictures until we were on our way home.
N3verm0re says:

Lest I be accused of being a Luddite, I’m not complaining about taking photos on your phone. It’s more about questioning the value of constantly recording so much in the space of a moment that’s here and gone so fast. Whatever the media, there’s something to be said for allowing yourself to be more present in an experience.

For the last maybe six months, I have been aligned with this point of view, and more aware of the implications. So during the show, I limited myself to put my phone up here and there, make a quick snap, and put it back in my pocket.
Around me, a sea of people holding their arms up, making videos, in particular at the start of each song or on any "big moments".

Sidenote, I have learned to respect that this is how people enjoy their experiences, through the little screen. I used to be more judgemental...until I realized that there isn't that much difference between capturing 50 photos or recording a video. 🤣
And hey, maybe it is own limitation that I can't enjoy something while trying to get """good""" photos.[2].

Why capture so many photos and videos? How often are people going back on their "digital rolls"? My experience is that not that much, and the social feeds are the equivalent of the photo albums of yore, but not quite, because they are also potentially infinite:

Limitations encouraged conservation, and conservation typically meant that you spent less time sitting with a device in front of your face.
[...]
Previous generations also collected photos in albums, but the limited scale and physical presence made for a different style of consumption, awkward as it was.

We as a species have decided that scarcity makes something valuable.
I know the sum of all the photos in my phone is very valuable to me (maybe invaluable) but what's the value of single photo? Depends on which one I guess, but I cannot tell that in advance, with few exceptions.

Memories are can be seen as our brains "recording" things all the time, a constant stream. But because a moment is associated with an emotion, the value of it is known immediately.
I knew this concert was special because I was sharing the moment with my son. Our little conversations in between songs, gestures when one of our favorites started, his excited cheering next to me. Would I have perceived these moments similarly if I was recording them, or the show?
And the fact that these moments were literally unique (even if we see the same band, it won't be the same: he won't be 11 again, different songs, etc.), doesn't that make them a perfect 10 in the scarcity scale?

Digital conservation

Semi-related to this (and maybe deserving its own post, but here we are) is the idea that everything that exists digitally should be conserved, perpetuated. That not doing it is wrong.

Is that the case? There's been lots of things thorough history that were lost forever. In fact, there's a lot of preservation bias in, for example, the paintings and sculptures in our museums.

Just because we can (potentially) do that with our digital footprint, doesn't meant we should. Maybe it is OK if some things are gone: we already generate more content than we will possible remember, or be able to consume in the future, I think.

There was this group that backed up all Nintendo 3DS digital store games before it closed. My initial reaction was that they were doing something great. They had to overcome so many challenges for this noble cause.[3]
But after a while, I wondered, how much of that is worth it, really? How many people are gonna play some of the most shovelware-ish titles preserved in that collection?

And similarly, how much sense it makes to keep several GBs worth of photos around, without any curation happening? At what point we move from striving to preserve a moment, to capturing for the sake of doing it, as a compulsion of sorts?

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This week there's a big training thingy in the office. I just walked by to get a coffee, and people were doing a "small group" activity with...you guessed it, Legos.

This is what I understand happened (yes, you can quote me on this): a bunch of people in the tech training industry took a philosophy course in the mid 90s, and heard that thing of If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A couple days later, still engaged with the philosophical aspects of the question, they formulated their own version of it: If a training took place and no Legos were used, did any learning happen?
And soon they realized this wasn't an open-ended question, because:

• Legos make people seem engaged. Which is the most important thing in the corporate world.
• With Legos, you can stretch time and need less content. I sympathize with this one, not gonna lie.
• Using Legos makes you seem modern and hip, a very important attribute in the tech corporate world. Because nothing matters most in corporate tech that to look like you are not a corporation.

Cue X-files music

There's a group of truthers out there that think know that it was Lego Group who paid for that philosophy course, and planted someone to formulate the questions.
Do your own research.

...and one more thing

I knew one of the risks of having a blog was to make myself unemployable, and I have to be honest...it took longer than I expected.

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So a while ago, I managed to switch the fam to Apple Music. Here are my thoughts on the topic.[1]

Prelude: my relationship with Apple

I was having trouble with my phone, like, third device in about the same amount of years. And at this point in my life, getting a new device wasn't an exciting and fun thing, but an annoyance.

I really wanted a Linux phone or a hardened Android, but as I hinted here before, you can't run, for example, banking apps on them. Switching to an iPhone is the simplest alternative to anything requiring a Google account.

Now, why do I feel I need to justify the decision? It's beyond stupid.
I could just say "I figured I would try the alternative". Who cares? Well, lots of people seem to, but why care that they care?

In short, that's my relationship with Apple - one of reluctance. I see them as a bit less worse than Google (I can't even say "slightly better"). When I was looking for a streaming box, the Apple TV was the only one approved in Privacy Not Included and I will be honest, the positive experience with the iPhone as a consumer played a role. My review is linked above, and with the device came a trial for Apple Music.

The trial period (or, a short review)

The interface is cleaner, only music, no podcasts, audiobooks, etc. Search features are about the same, library is equivalent for my uses. But I will reckon I don't listen to "fringe artists".

I am no audiophile, but I immediately noticed that it sounded better than Spotify. I went back to the Spotify app(s) and checked settings to make sure I was getting the best quality during streaming and downloads, but still, a noticeable difference.
One day on the car we used my phone to play music and my wife commented that it sounded crisper. When I told her it was Apple Music, she sighed and asked if I was trying to convince her to switch. Which might or might not be true.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention, is that Music doesn't have the concept of cross-device listening. Depending the day, this is great or terrible.
If I am listening to a jazz playlist on my laptop, and want to play something while driving, the fact that the queues are separate experiences is great. When I get back home, I can pick up where I left.
If I get home while listening to an album, it is nice to open my laptop and resume from the exact same spot. So, the opposite.
(And this Spotify feature doesn't always work well, sometimes it would reset the playlist when moving between devices)

The ethics

Yes, ethics.

Apple is a terrible company, from malicious compliance with right to repair, to many instances of choking their competition, and the closed down ecosystem.
On other side of the equation we have Spotify, which pays artists even less per stream than Apple, and gives millions to Joe Rogan.
It feels like choosing between the Devil and Lucifer.
I hate this timeline.

The real alternative: buying music

I looked briefly into this. I knew the fam wouldn't be up for it. And a lot of bands are not in Bandcamp. And when they aren't, the alternative is to buy music...usually through Apple.
Would love to know if there are other options, but still, wife and kiddo will want, understandably, a streaming option.

The trials worked too well

A long while ago we had an Apple Arcade trial, which was good to let the kiddo try games knowing they didn't have micro transactions crap nor ads.
With the Music trial ending, and while watching a couple new shows in the TV+ service[2], I figured I would look into the Apple One subscription.

Every time I get their billing email, I feel a hint of shame that I am giving money to what I consider a bad company...but I find their services better than the alternative. And I am not principled enough to not use any music streaming service, it seems.

Oh, one more negative is that there isn't an Apple Music client for Linux, and probably there never will be.

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From a few weeks ago. I am not sure if this is actually a safety feature, because the suit will deflate if the machine is turned off.
But they could achieve the same in more boring ways, so even if it really is useful, it is also quite humorous.

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When I mentioned how I broke the site a few days ago, I said "I want to keep the small, simple, manual system I use to maintain things". I was referring to the ad hoc functions and helpers I use to write and publish this site.

I received some email correspondence[1] about this text, edited below (keeping the parts relevant to this post):

[...] my goal of using a static site generator and some automation around it, is essentially so that once it is in place, I don't think about anything, I know it is working and I can focus on just writing.
Interesting that you took the opposite approach...

Their point is around the adjective "simple" in my description. It is meaning completely different things in our contexts:

• For one person, it is "Automate post generation, I want to just type, and stuff happens, then it is published".
• For me, it was "I want a system as transparent as possible, even if I manually type mark up and manually upload files, that's fine".

So yes, both are "simple." I would maybe say that my setup is "simple and primitive" and theirs is "simple and automated". This goes to show that even a word that, instinctively, we all agree is...simple to define[2], can be charged with meaning depending on its context.

I tagged this post "meta" (and yes, I still haven't implemented tag navigation 🙃) because I see this related to a topic that I touched on before: the site and it's tools are poorly defined, not specified. And even the one adjective I used to describe it them can be interpreted (and was interpreted) in completely different ways.

For people that work in software, this is something we should all keep in mind. When a user, or even someone from another team, describes a feature, they probably do it from their context, and even """basic""" words are charged with assumptions
I guess this is a problem for any profession or craft where you receive requirements on what or how to build something from another person.

When I started writing, I thought I would make a bigger point about how many of these nuances are missing in today's polarized times.
But I am running out of steam, so maybe that will be a topic for another day.

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A couple weeks ago, I saw in a store in a cute ceramic teapot. I almost buy it, but decided against since I already had a teapot and I am trying to live a leaner life: buying and using less things (with mixed success).

The morning after I broke my (big) teapot, I had the thought of driving to the store to get the ceramic one. But decided that was silly and impulsive, so instead I started looking online for recommendations (in /r/tea, mostly) to get THE BESTEST, PERFECTEST TEAPOT.
One usually mentioned was the Hario ChaCha Kyusu "Maru"[1] glass teapot.

It is perfectly functional. And unlike the one I had before, the strainer is low enough that I can make half a teapot. Still, I got the smaller 600cc model. And, bear with me, because I am getting pseudo philosophical here. Unsurprisingly.

A couple days into using the teapot, I realized that I made a bad impulsive decision buying this item:

• I got it because of a touted and obvious feature of glass teapots that is misguided, or at least of little value to me in particular: that you can see the brew.
• The fact that it was cheap really pushed me over the fence.
• I got it in Amazon, just to get it faster.

And here is the philosophical part: What's the point of being able to see the brew?
The color won't let me know how it will taste, unless it is a tea I've been brewing often enough that I have a reference point. And it creates preconceptions, instead of letting me evaluate it just for the taste.
I can always throw the tea away if I don't like it.[2], but maybe I find that the way it turned out this time is better than last time. I just have to give it a try!
And also, obsessing on something I can't control is silly: I add some tea, then hot water, and wait a fixed amount of time. By the time I am ready to pour the tea, I cannot change anything about the outcome. Unless I plan to sit and stare at the pot, to remove the strainer at the perfect time. Or keep checking regularly for the color - and again, what if a happy accident happens and I like it better, after trying it?

Well, last-last weekend we happened to be in Montclair again and, against my initial instinct (because, you know, I already had a functional teapot) I just decided to go for it...

Now, the points for this teapot are:

• Ceramic keeps the tea hotter longer, which turns out to be a feature that's really important for me.
• I bought it because I like it, so I simply enjoy more using it.
• I got it in a small store, in person. Support small business. 👏

I think the bigger lesson here is to stop trying to find the perfect and most recommended of anything, and just enjoy things as they are.
Just like my tea. And I think I can extrapolate from this experience to other aspects of life.

Also, I learned that not all impulsive choices are equal, once you think a bit about them.
Mmmmmm although I guess if you think long enough, then it stops being an impulsive choice...

And, if I had given in to the initial impulse, I would be writing a post about how following your impulses blindly is great. I guess?

Conclusion

I really like my ceramic teapot.[3]
And you can't control everything. Even if you can, you probably shouldn't. Brew your tea, and enjoy the little variations in the outcome.

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So, two nights ago I installed Fedora Silverblue again.
That was quick, in January I said: maybe in 6 months I will regret the mess this installation turns into.

That isn't what happened though. The tipping point was that DNS resolution stopped working after a regular update.
This is the only time I recall having something not working in Fedora after like...4, 5 years? of using it. So, I would still totally recommend it as a good compromise of a very stable distro with latest packages.

Going back to Thursday night, at first I wasn't sure what was wrong. I had the brightest idea, "I'll just reboot and get back to the previous, stable version. Easy peasy".
Except, that's how Silverblue works, not Workstation. There's no version rollback in the "regular" distro.
I troubleshooted a bit, realized that only DNS was down, but WiFi itself was working. So I connected the VPN, and boom, I had proper internet access again. And right there, without second thought, I started downloading Silverblue and copying my keys, documents etc to an external drive (it wasn't much, after only about 5 months of usage).

Pros of Workstation

AKA the traditional Linux experience

There's a lot more information about how to troubleshoot things. Installing new software is very simple, just use the package manager. I was relying more on Flatpaks because I got used to them, but if an app isn't in a Flatpak nor in the official repos, there's always COPR (and PPAs/AUR for other distros).

I guess if you have a GPU? or something else that requires some kind of custom driver? then using a traditional distro might be better, too.

Pros and Cons of Silverblue

AKA atomic desktop

It is annoying to reboot after installing a package (or "layering", since the process creates a new entire image for your system).

If it hurts, then don't do it: install via Flatpaks instead.
Or use containers: The Emacs I am using to type this, was compiled fresh in a container and I am running it from the host system.
There are others alternatives, Dygma distributes their keyboard configuration software in an AppImage for example.

And the same "it is just a reboot" philosophy applies to everything. And it is great.
Minor update to the OS? Just reboot.
Major upgrade? Just reboot.
When I moved from Fedora 41 to 42 a couple weeks ago, I had to give it a while so the installation completed. Every major upgrade I did in the couple years I used Silverblue before that, was a matter of downloading the new version, and rebooting. In 30 seconds I was running the next version of the OS.

I was recalling during the backup and install "fun" on Thursday[1], that I had some hiccups with Silverblue before. But no matter how bad it gets, you can always reboot and pick a previous snapshot, to seamlessly move between the last few configurations. It even works between major releases!!!

So I guess unless you hate Flatpaks...or need to use very specific proprietary packages that are only available as RPM...I recommend you try an atomic desktop.

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At some point in the last couple days I did something funky with the site, and one post disappeared from the index, post list and RSS.

And then I added (an unusual amount of) content over the weekend. Today I was trying to sync the repository clones I have and found this discrepancy. I am sure something as silly at this is what caused the last RSS breakage, a few months ago. (There is one more undocumented breakage, where someone kindly tipped me on an email).

It's getting to the point where I am thinking I need some better safeguards against these problems, but of course I don't want a site generator or some other thing like that.
I want to keep the small, simple, manual system I use to maintain things now. Because if it were more complicated, I would probably just stop writing.
At least, that's how my first blog died.

In happier new, after some correspondence with bacardi55, he suggested I setup "Web Key Directory" (or WKD, as its friends call it). I did, so I credited him in the index page of the site, and I guess now more people can keep not using the key.
But I learned something :) and made friends along the way <3 and that is all that matters, as the endings of 90s cartoons taught us.

(I also made some other minor edits to the index page, while I was at it. Honestly, I was about to write "a tale of two teapots"[1], but I spent the time I had with the RSS snafu. Next time!)

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While I wait for something to download (party like it is 2009, hadn't waited for a download to complete in a long while) I figured I would write a small detailed medium? review for this game, as I am very close to finishing it.

Introduction

Why didn't anyone tell me about boomer shooters???

Seriously, y'all saying I could have been having a blast since 2019 or so? And instead I felt alienated from the FPS genre thinking all that was released nowadays was online, survival, open world, or any combination of those three.
Boomer shooters are a sub-genre of FPSs that make their gameplay closer to 90s/early 00s shooters than to more modern takes on it.

My background with the genre

As most people my age, I played a lot, A LOT of Wolfestein 3D, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D.
And other relatively less popular FPSs like Rise of the Triad, Shogo, and a bunch of others that are probably forgotten by now, because back then a new FPS was released every other minute.
And I am sure I played others that are popular, but just can't remember them right now. Because I am old. Maybe I'll edit the post to add them later.[1]

I played quite a bit of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, mostly in LANs. But by then I was starting to feel left out of a lot of games, since I am not much of an online player.
It's not an entirely "old man yells at cloud" moment, there are a bunch of modern shooters I enjoyed, but my heart is clearly with the oldies. When think of newer shooters, I think of the ones that that are modern but also callbacks to simpler times, like Bulletstorm and Doom 2016.

There was a sale

There was a publisher sale in Steam, and as I was checking out the offerings, Dusk caught my eye. It a Quake-looking first person shooter. Its description promised to take you back to those gib-infested late 90s feel. Reviews were positive. Game was cheap. So I went for it.

The review

Everyone should play this game. First of all, it is simple: no reloading, no regenerating health, no cover. Just you, and your guns.
The arsenal is relatively tame: pistols, shotguns, rifle, explosive guns. But most of the weapons are just satisfying to use. Even the crossbow, which has the simplest shooting effect, but makes up for it by going through enemies and walls. There's a "mortar" that is very similar to Quake's grenade launcher, which makes it perfect. The shotgun can be dual-wielded, which looks and feels awesome.

The game evolves over its three chapters from giving a "slasher horror movie" vibe to something more fantastic and leaning into occultism. At no point in the game I felt that I was playing something novel, but Dusk does evoke a feel of uniqueness. Like, you have seen all this before, but not presented in this way. By presented I don't mean only the graphics, but the overall "feel": graphics, level design, music, movement, etc.

While the graphics themselves are simple, there are some cool lightning effects, and the maps are quite varied. Some of the ones that stuck with me were a level where you reach a rooftop and it is snowing, one that is red-tinted and you move through giant set pieces, and a few sections where you have to move in the dark (and boy do those get tense).

In a difficulty scale of 1 to 5, I am playing in 3, "I can take it". The game defaulted to 2, for reference, which is called "Go easy". I died a few times, mostly from unexpected surprise attacks or because of my own recklessness. The game's AI is also a callback to simpler times, which I see in a good light, each enemy type has clearly identifiable behaviours and attack patterns. That doesn't mean there aren't some truly cool enemies, which I won't spoil here, because discovering them on your own is worth it.
The game makes up for the AI simplicity by upping the number of enemies you fight at a time, which I also think is great. Instead of having combat with say, 7 enemies, with cover and complex mechanics, you fight 15 or more at a time, and your only resource is shooting and moving. And indirectly, cover, but because you abuse the AI limitations.

There are bosses, they are simple, and most of them can be also be sort of skipped: by backtracking a bit, or seeking a hiding spot, and shooting them from afar. I never felt I couldn't take on them (we'll see if that holds after the final boss), I just took the easy way out, out of laziness.
There were two particularly cool things that happened during boss fights: in one of them, two bosses started fighting between them, so I just let them beat down each other from a distance. And in another, which felt very much a callback to Quake's final level, I ended telefragging the boss. By accident, but I got an achievement for it, so clearly it was planned as a possibility.

The music and sounds effects are great. The jumping "hump" is so reminiscent of Quake's, it might as well be the same sound clip. Some enemies make very distinct noises, so you have a clue that they are around, which also helps build anticipation.

Image gallery

Unlike last time, I was smart and picked up images directly from Steam 😁

Conclusion

The only criticism I have for the game, is that it was starting to feel a bit long. Some of the later levels are just too big for my tastes.
But that might be a compound effect of me not having much time to play, and the fact that the game's three chapters were released over time, while I am playing it all in one go. So I didn't have a one year pause to "rest" from the gameplay.

Other than that, the game is just fun. Simple enough, but never boring. And with some very imaginative level design, satisfying shooting, good music and lots of explosions, I think Dusk is a must for everyone who likes first person shooters.

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Maria and Juan return from Denver tomorrow. Since I came back, Suzie has been extra needy.
A combination of "you better don't go away again" and "where's everybody else? I need people".

It is funny because she usually keeps to herself, she isn't the most social of cats.
But as she grows older, she gets more and more intense. 🐱

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Many many years ago[1] I traveled for work to Colombia and Brasil. I remember Bogotá as a "small city", spent a month there. Lovely place.
But then I had to go to São Paulo, a city bigger than my native Buenos Aires. And despite not understanding the language, I felt right at home immediately.

I was on my own, and I visited everything I could: the most touristy places but also the most random stuff. Never once felt uncomfortable, threatened, out of place.
It was then that I postulated a theory, since I had so much time to be in my head[2]:
All big cities have a lot in common. As you spend time in them, you also pick up on a lot of quirks that make them unique. Both things are true at the same time.

I didn't get to test that theory for a while. In 2012 I visited New York, and I felt the same ease and familiarity as if I was in Buenos Aires or São Paulo, despite their (very) obvious differences: the comfort of the noise, the architecture, history, tons of people rushing for no reason...just...perfect 😌

(I will make a note before continuing, that I know the sample of these anecdotes is not good enough to confirm or deny the theory. Would need observations of cities from more continents and cultures, etc.)

El portero y la manguera (The doorman and the hose)

I have shared this commentary about "big cities" in the past in conversations with friends. What prompted dumping it in a post is that, a couple days ago, on my way to work, I saw something that I immediately associated the past:
A doorman[3], using a hose to clean the sidewalk. No broom, or extra water pressure attachment, or any other tool. Just a colossal waste of water to (try to) clean the sidewalk in the most inefficient way possible.
I recall there was a conversation about banning this practice in Buenos Aires, some time ago.

Anyway, seeing the guy pushing on the side of the hose to get barely more water pressure, aiming at litter here and there... stopping every time someone was walking close by (which means, very often) while letting tons of water run...starting again in a completely different spot than the one he was cleaning - such a porteño image, in my head.
I even had a second look after walking by, just to confirm he was really doing what I thought he was doing.

I found the scene funny, and nostalgic. Also out of place, and somewhat natural, both at the same time.

People: the same, and different

I think the same observation about big cities applies to people: a lot in common, and a lot of differences. A spectrum of everything, in each one of us.
There's a set of commonalities that form the "standard stuff": the most universal works of art usually speak to these.

Even in that common portion, there are slight differences - which is why even the most praised painting, book, movie, etc has people who are maybe not quite detractors, but at least indifferent to them.

And when you zoom in and focus in a smaller group, the uniqueness of each individual pops out more than the shared things.

I think this duality of having "a lot of the same" and "a lot that is different" at the same time, makes the world interesting. It gives us enough of a common set of experiences and understanding for each other, while allowing for uniqueness and...texture?.
I think that is also why there's a sense of surprise when you find, for example a friend, that shares many sensibilities with you. Or a partner. Or coworker.

I hope I articulated that in a way that made sense, I feel even if I wrote 7 more paragraphs I wouldn't be closer to making it more clear.
I actually deleted a lot of redundancy in that text, because it was not getting better the more I explained >_>

The moral of the post is that writing about code is easier than trying to explain my thoughts. 😅

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The order of the tags match each of the items in the title.

A need to post, or maybe even just write

I was away for a few days, with no access to a keyboard, and a couple times I felt a bit of a pull to write down my thoughts.
There are some (a lot, really) of habits that I mean to pick up. But writing seems to be the only one sticking right now. I can't say I don't like it.

For starters, I simply enjoy writing. Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed that I don't ever write in Spanish, but I know it will come, eventually.
The sound of the keyboard, the thoughts that used to just vanish but now are "hey I should write about that", all wonderful things.

And in the last few weeks, I got a couple hints of online acknowledgment. Including an email from a person I never heard of, commenting that my feed was broken.[1]
This helped me overcome some sense of...insecurity? or maybe shame? So I shared a couple links with friends that didn't know yet that I had a site, which in turn led positive comments.

And that felt good, and of course it is extra motivation to keep writing. I guess we all are susceptible to a little vanity. Or at least, feeling seen, maybe even understood.
How those feelings relate, probably a topic for another day.

Social network drama

I don't have all the details on what happened in Fosstodon, a Mastodon instance.
I had just started following a blog[2], when the guy suddenly closed it. And it took me a couple more days to realize this event was related to stuff I kept seeing mentioned in semi-cryptic posts here and there.

Drama? In a social network?

Eventually I did find some more information. But the way these posts were written, paragraph after paragraph of accusations and righteousness, just reading them was exhausting.

And then, the same realization I get sometimes when I catch myself wasting time on reddit or instagram hit me: "I don't need to read all this...what am I doing with my time and attention???".
Curiosity and nosiness got the best of me. (AKA "ser chusma" 🇦🇷), but really, there's a reason I created a Mastodon account and deleted it a couple weeks later without using: I am having a hard time quitting whatever social crap I still use, why add more?

And more important, what makes anyone think these new networks won't degenerate in the same type of toxic places the others turned into? Some time ago I said the same about Bluesky.
There is something dehumanizing about having a gigantic public forum, that eventually makes it regress to the lowest common denominator: the loudest people take over.
Unless you have strict rules. But that has the potential to kill the community/discourse...it is a difficult problem, as I ruminated recently.

In contrast, the small web offers a more personal, paused contact. I can take time to reply to an email, take the time to edit my posts (I honestly don't do that much, so I end up correcting grammar mistakes after publishing 🙃). Where there's time to reflect, there's also time to consider that differing opinions exist, that not everyone agrees with you. Celebrate the differences, rather than expect everyone to think as we do.

Am I romanticizing having a blog and an email address? Maybe. But I have had those small conversations here and there since I started blogging. I find them stimulating, and more fulfilling than quick exchanges in social media. Yes, I can't reply "on the go", I need to sit down and have my keyboard handy, with more intent...and that is a good thing.

Why didn't I ask this before?

Speaking of socials, here is a story...the first weekend of May, the kiddo and I went to the DC United-Colorado Rapids match.[3]

We had a blast! It was nice to visit another MLS stadium, see live football, and DC is a fun place.
While driving back, I asked Juan "hey, do you mind if I post some of our pictures on my site?". He said that not at all, he was OK. (same when I asked about publishing photos for the about page I never wrote).

Interestingly, I never once asked him if he was OK with sharing pics on Instagram or Facebook. I know some people cover their kids faces, or only get pictures from their backs. I honestly always found this a bit exaggerated.
But going back to our exchange... why now I had to ask him if he was OK? I thought a bit about this since then.

My conclusion so far, is that sharing pictures on Instagram feels less personal than posting them here.
My instagram account has my real name, and it is followed by a bunch of people[4]. This site has my real name, and I have no idea how many people read it.
So, logically, the """reach""" of this thing is less than that of my Instagram. So that's not what makes it more personal. But still, that's how it feels.

The acute reader will notice that I still haven't posted more about the trip. In part this is because I was away this last weekend, too.
But also, I still don't know if I want to 🤷, since I haven't completely solved the why I have that feeling of exposure about doing it...

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If you are a relatively new Emacs user, you might have heard of narrowing and think is a niche feature, and I am here to tell you: it is awesome, and you have to try it.[1]
For the non-converts: it is a feature that allows you to see and operate on only a portion of a file at a time. And, fair warning: the rest of this post will use Emacs lingo willy-nilly.

Some commands will act on the active region. If you want to replace text in a function, you would select it with C-M-h mark-defun and invoke M-% query-replace.
But if a command you want to use always acts in the entire buffer, then narrowing is the mechanism to limit its effects. No need to write a new variation, narrow and use it as-is.

Outside of commands, it is a great way to...well, narrow...your focus. You are editing a 8403982498 lines Python module, and working in a particular function. Activate the region in that portion, C-x n n, and scrolling up and down will not take you further than your are of interest. Seems like a minor thing, but it helps a lot.[2]

Enough intro! What about the "toggle" thing?

OK OK!
But first, context! =P

I am working on a 8403982498 lines Python module, my focus is on a particular class, and creating a new variant of it. So I have one (indirect) buffer narrowed to my new code, and another buffer narrowed to the original class.
The catch is that the original class references code outside the class itself. And I searched (and maybe after I share this, someone will point me to it) a built-in way to undoing and re-doing the narrowing quickly, and didn't find it. Usually I would just re-mark the region and C-x n n, but this class is (not) formatted in a way that marking the region is easy - indentation is off, and the code itself is large-ish.
So I wrote this command:

  (defvar-local hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers nil
  "A cons cell (beginning . end) that is updated when using `hoagie-narrow-toggle'.")

  (defun hoagie-narrow-toggle ()
    "Toggle widening/narrowing of the current buffer.
If the buffer is narrowed, store the boundaries in
`hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers' and widen.
If the buffer is widened, then narrow to region if
`hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers' is non nil (and then discard those
markers, resetting the state)."
    (interactive)
    (if (buffer-narrowed-p)
        (progn
          (setf hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers (cons (point-min)
                                                   (point-max)))
          (widen))
      ;; check for toggle markers
      (if (not hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers)
          (message "No narrow toggle markers.")
        ;; do the thing
        (narrow-to-region (car hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers)
                          (cdr hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers))
        (setf hoagie-narrow-toggle-markers nil))))
    

Since I assume people who made it this far in the post are Emacsers, I won't break down the code in detail, it is pretty self-explanatory.
I've been using this for the last couple days, example: I am reading the original code, when I need to jump to a definition somewhere else in the file. I use C-x n t, jump to definition, take notes, etc. Then press C-x n t again and I am back to focus only on the relevant class.

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This weekend Juan and I traveled to DC, as Colorado Rapids visited DC United.
We lost 2-1, and I have some comments about the game. Which might be worthless, as a complete football newbie...but hey, I write about so many things without any other qualification than "I had a thought".

Vélez also lost, but I didn't get to watch the game as we were still driving back - so I have less to say.
If the intersection of potential readers that care about the Pids and this blog is small, and maybe nonexistent, the one that will read my comments on an argentinian team, in English, is definitely nonexistent.

Which takes me to the next point: "why don't I promote the site?". I don't mean, promote like going on Twitter or Instagram sharing links. I mean promote like, send more links to friends.
I haven't shared links except with two people, and only a couple times each. Self promotion feels gross, and I am not sure why.
That is only one of the list of topics I amassed this weekend, which also includes thoughts on driving, teapots, the DC metro, posting pictures and privacy, and answering questions about myself.

But rather than get into any of those topics in full swing, I want to work a little extra to finish something that I've been too slow to complete, before taking a couple days off to travel again.
The biggest reason I am doing that "extra", is because I """know""" (or feel guilty about?) that I could have completed this earlier, got distracted by valid and not so valid reasons, and now I want to make sure I deliver the feature before the due date.

Which doesn't explain why I am here writing, since no one asked for an update, instead of working.
Which is why I then feel guilty, as described above :)
But still...I am here.
Was here?
Bye.

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Today I am working from home. Was about to make some afternoon tea, opened the cabinet and when reaching for one of the tea tins, some stuff at the front of the shelf fell.
And with such luck that the mate straw (metal) flew down and hit the "lip" of the teapot :(

This was a gift from Maria from like, our second year in the US. It spent some time stored away, lightly used here and there. But as blogged recently, I traded coffee for tea to get my daily dose of caffeine (and my little rituals). So the last month or two I used this thing every other day, twice a day.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭[1]
I was pretty attached to the teapot, because of being a gift and from long ago. And happy that I was using it a lot, too. Breaking it made me genuinely sad. :(
Can't say that it surprised me though because I am known to be clumsy. And it was made of glass, after all.........but still.

I considered buying a smaller teapot recently. The least amount of water I could brew in the one I have had was 750ml, about 3 coffee mugs. And sometimes I just wanted a cup, maybe two.
Yes, a very first world problem. Which combined with my inclination to try to own less stuff, made me decide against having two teapots.

Juts this weekend we were in a store in Montclair, and they had Japanese ceramic teapots from the brand "ZERO", and they looked cute. Vibrant colors, too.
What is nice about glass teapots is that you can judge the brew's color more easily. My wife found online a smaller version of the one I broke. For some reason the smaller version is priced like three of the 1 liter ones, so I am hesitant to get it.

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"Experiences" sounds pretentious, but saying "reviews" is even worse, I have zero qualifications to review anything. 🤣
Future similar posts will be titled mmmmmmm "tea happenings", maybe?

A few days ago we visited the Edgewater area of NJ, and found an Asian market not unlike the one closer to our house. But fancier. I got three teas there.
I also got a new green tea mixed with spices, that my wife got with a larger "argentinian stuff" order she made (mostly yerba, for our matecitos).
I have a lot of tea to go through, and I am trying to open them one by one, with the intent to keep them fresh while they are in the shelf.

So far I only tried one of the green teas I got at the market, it is called "Genmai-cha": a mix of green tea and roasted rice. Right as I was looking for a picture for this post I found some info about it in Wikipedia, it seems to be common. The particular one I got is this one:

I expected it to taste better than just green tea. And it does, but mostly because I cannot taste the tea - it's just the roasted rice overpowering any other flavor. Is this brand badly balanced, and it has too much rice in the mix? Did I prepare it wrong? Do I just not like it?
Time will tell. For starters, I used the lower water temperatures recommended for green tea, but the bag suggests a temp range going up to boiling. Which I understand is bad for green tea, in my experience[1] it won't taste good when water is that hot. But, this is a different blend I guess.

Speaking of blends, I am regularly drinking the "very plain black tea" I mentioned before. But I add to the mix like, a quarter spoon[2] of the green tea from that same post. I prepare it with boiling water, and it certainly improves both teas.
First, it doesn't matter that the green tea is more bitter (or is it burned?) as it is just a small quantity - not enough to overpower the rest of the flavors. And the black tea, bland it is, is a good base for the green tea flavor to sort of "push through" it.
The green tea is noticeable in the mix's aftertaste: the aroma in the cup is pretty much all black tea. But in your mouth, and the exhale after a sip, the green tea is definitely there.

I am happy about this mix, although I am not sure a tea purist would think it is a good idea or an aberration. In any case, this is enticing me to finish those two teas, they would otherwise go to waste.

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This is a follow up to yesterday's (hate-filled) rant about SAP downloads and the Sybase ODBC driver.

Today I had to connect to MSSQL, and the Linux server users FreeTDS.
Rather than change the connection to test locally (so it uses the MSSQL native driver), I decided that this was a fateful sign that I should get FreeTDS installed in Windows, and then I could use it for Sybase too.

I am comfortable compiling whatever in Windows, but I figured there had to be a readily available driver already...and there was, but it took me a while to find one that worked.
Actually, I wasted enough time finding it, that I wonder if compiling wouldn't had been easier. Anyway, I don't know how many people read this site, or if this post will get indexed, but if anything, writing this is good documentation for myself[1].

Installing the driver

Credit goes to this post by Nick Vasile. Since I couldn't find his email (a sin, I know), I couldn't send him a thank you note.

If you don't compile the driver yourself, a good alternative is using the drivers linked in Nick's post, they are right here (and the person that set that up will get a thank you email ☺️). I got the latest version for x64, unzipped, move to a suitable location and then, in an Administrator Terminal:

C:\Users\MyUserName\home\freetds>cd bin

C:\Users\MyUserName\home\freetds\bin>dir

 Directory of C:\Users\MyUserName\home\freetds\bin

04/22/2025  10:54 AM              .
04/22/2025  10:54 AM              ..
04/22/2025  02:08 AM            30,208 bsqldb.exe
04/22/2025  02:08 AM            24,576 bsqlodbc.exe
04/22/2025  02:07 AM           346,112 ct.dll
04/22/2025  02:08 AM            24,064 datacopy.exe
04/22/2025  02:08 AM            27,648 defncopy.exe
04/22/2025  02:08 AM            22,528 freebcp.exe
09/03/2024  09:13 AM         5,170,176 libcrypto-3-x64.dll
09/03/2024  09:13 AM           778,240 libssl-3-x64.dll
04/22/2025  02:07 AM           398,848 sybdb.dll
04/22/2025  02:07 AM           457,728 tdsodbc.dll
04/22/2025  02:08 AM           235,520 tdspool.exe
04/22/2025  02:08 AM           257,536 tsql.exe
              12 File(s)      7,773,184 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  1,740,541,038,592 bytes free

C:\Users\MyUserName\home\freetds\bin>regsvr32 tdsodbc.dll
    

Don't tell me regsvr32 isn't a blast from the past! Hadn't seen that old friend in a long time. You can confirm it worked when you open "ODBC Data Sources" (which bitness depends on whether you installed the 32bit or 64bit driver), and in the "Drivers" tab you see FreeTDS:

I use my own database CLI tool (long story)[2], and I added a --list-drivers flag to test this kind of thing. Funnily, this flag was more about Linux than Windows: if you add a driver to odbcinst.ini but mess up a parameter, the driver is not "installed", and this helps diagnose those issues:

C:\Users\MyUserName\home\freetds\bin>datum --list-drivers
Drivers available:
"SQL Server"
"ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server"
"ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server"
"MySQL ODBC 8.4 ANSI Driver"
"MySQL ODBC 8.4 Unicode Driver"
"SnowflakeDSIIDriver"
"Oracle in oracle"
"Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb)"
"Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls, *.xlsx, *.xlsm, *.xlsb)"
"Microsoft Access Text Driver (*.txt, *.csv)"
"Microsoft Access dBASE Driver (*.dbf, *.ndx, *.mdx)"
"FreeTDS"

C:\Users\MyUserName\home\freetds\bin>
    

Yay! FreeTDS is there! I ran the tests against MSSQL, and then...

Connecting to Sybase

While these notes are specific to using Datum (yes, more shameless plugs!), the information for the connection string is the same in all contexts. Pretty standard stuff:

datum --driver FreeTDS --user le_username --pass very-secret --server 100.100.100.100,5000 --database northwind
    

Biggest thing to note is that I still haven't added support for --port (or documented that it won't be ever supported). But FreeTDS, just like the MSSQL drivers, conveniently allows specifiying the port with a comma after the server address/name.

Now I just hope a sales person from SAP contacts me so I tell them how much I don't need them. That will show them! (????????????????????????)

Epilogue

Years later, SAP was still printing money, and Hoagie still naively believed that companies should care about the developer experience and building good products - despite Sharepoint-sized mountains of evidence that all that matters is selling your product to the right audience.
Usually people that pay for it, and not people that use it.
Then he filled a time sheet in Peoplesoft, logged a vacation request in Workday, and left for the day.

The (sad) end.

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Today I needed to connect to Sybase, from Windows, using ODBC.
Turns out to download the ODBC drivers for Sybase, you need to download an SDK from SAP's website.
To download something from SAP's website, you need to use a "business email address" to create an account.
After I created the account, the download failed with an error. I wish I was making this up...

In 2025, with so many options for...everything, you would think companies would make using their product as easy as possible.
But, here's the catch: you are using Sybase because someone else in your company already made the decision for you, or because a third party forced it on you (my case now is the latter). So you are not a "potential client", by the time you head to the download page, they know chances are you are a prisoner[1].

I have a vague recollection of Oracle also forcing registration to download drivers, although last time I downloaded the client files it didn't ask for anything. So I guess now SAP is even worse than Oracle, somehow.

This crap is "how to get developers to hate your products" 101. Forcing you to register is like punishing you for showing any interest in their tools.
I guess this produces a reinforcing cycle: no one with technical inclinations will choose your stuff, so you cater more to the audience that can be sold on a product via PPT. Forcing extra steps to work on your garbage makes people that actually want/need to use it hate you...but won't impact sales, so you keep neglecting your developer experience in favor of nicer PowerPoints.

I wish I knew enough about Sybase to write my own ODBC driver, out of spite.
It seems my best alternative is FreeTDS, which works on Windows too. But if that doesn't work, I would totally put a link right here to the SDK download (probably violating a few agreements in the process).[2]

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I am sure some philosopher or thinker already considered what I am about to comment on. And there's a chance I read a book or blog post or news article referencing the idea, and then it all hit my brain at the right time just now for me to write about it.

In any case, having three different situations touching on the same topic was enough to convince me to write this.

The trigger: loitering

On our way to the store yesterday, we drove by a busy intersection, and my wife commented that a group of people in a sidewalk were blocking others and wondered if that wouldn't be considered loitering.
I mentioned that I dislike the idea of loitering being illegal because sometimes people just gather for social reasons, and building community is nice.
And she countered, that she doesn't walk the kid to school on that side of the street anymore: people hang around there because there is a liquor store, and every morning the street is littered with bottles and food wrappings.

This all derived in an longer conversation, but the relevant point to this post was that even if the idea of people hanging around in a place shouldn't be bad, the restrictions against loitering exist because of these, say, "bad actors".
As a city or town, you can't say "people can gather anywhere, it's ok" unless you know every citizen will behave. If not, you have to account for the worst case scenario.
But this causes other problems. Because now you either have a law so lax that everyone can still do whatever they want, or so strict that you kill any sense of community. And if your regulation/law is somewhere in the middle, then you open the door to having disparity in how it is applied.

School unfairness

During the part of the conversation where we touched on this topic, I recalled how my son gets mad when his classroom misses recess because of bad behaviour from his classmates.

I acknowledged to him that yes, it is as unfair as he says (and I doubt how effective it is). I also explained that this is part of life, sometimes things are decided in a group setting, and you might lose privileges only because others don't behave, and it never stops being unfair but it is part of how things work in society etc. (not exactly those words but not far off).

Pull Requests and code reviews

If you know me, you know I will find a way to tie everything to either software or organization dynamics :) so here we are.
This week we had a big conversation in my team on the topic of adopting code standards, reviewing their application, and making our pull request process more than just "please check this so I can merge" and more of a proper review.

I've been thinking about what would be a good set of "first rules" to start down this path...quite a bit since Friday. And I realized that I am having a hard time coming up with these rules or guidelines because I am trying to consider too many possible scenarios.

If you are in a perfect, idealized team, where everyone has enough ego to be proud of their work but not too much that they aren't open to changes, and everyone has the exact same preferences in style...then maybe you could get away with some guidelines that are loosely applied.

But in all places I've worked, there's been some people more prone to nitpick on A or B (and for the record, I am 100% positive I was that guy, probably more than once 🙃).
Or, for example, a friend of mine suffers of a serial bikeshedder: equating number of review comments with "doing a good review", every other line will have some note, and they all better be addressed before merging. I have seen people stall review processes as a way of protest that the reviews are being implemented. I've seen people get hung up on a minor stylistic choice until a manager two levels above intervened.

At heart, I am still an optimistic guy, and eventually I will propose some loose rules and bet on everyone to behave.
Part of "everyone should behave" includes me being patient in the application of these reviews, and open to admit that maybe a preference I have is not beneficial for our use cases (which is as easy to write, as it is easy to miss when others bring it up...and you become that guy. Again.).

Similar dynamics

The common thread here is how people behave not only in groups, but in front of a group: will they try to be agreeable? or stand out in negative ways (talk back to the teacher, defy a cop, stall a merge). Will they be flexible (I understand this is just style, I notice how my classmates are punished, I can see I am blocking the sidewalk) or stand their position so as to not appear weak?

And this is before considering that we all play different roles at different times: today I am the affable guy, mediating in a conflict; tomorrow the monster that doesn't want to cede a centimeter on an petty argument.
(Not ceding a centimenter makes you even more stubborn than not ceding an inch, BTW).

One of the conclusions that my wife and I reached in our conversation, was that writing good laws is really difficult. Luckily code standards and reviews are not as critical to society 🤣 so I should chill a bit.

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A while ago I read this great article in The Jolly Teapot, and I am trying to do better at sharing the things that I read, then think "I should share this" (or comment on it)...and then leave lingering forever either in a tab to the far left of the browser, or a rarely-revisited bookmark.
Anyway, the article is: The nice feeling of trusting tools

Some quotes with light commentary:

This little anecdote makes me smile thinking about it, and I think it is a testament to both how we kind of expect the worst in technology — I know I do — and to how we take reliable tools for granted, to the point of not noticing how great they actually are.

I know this is certainly the case for me, as Nicolas explains in his post, there are complexity reasons why technology sometimes is less reliable than every day objects. And I would add that I think it is time we people working in technology (in my case software, but hardware too) take a hard look around daily stuff for inspiration.
This is a bit related to the previous post on friction, because I think a lot of the pain is self inflicted when we try to minimize friction to the point that every single action in most software feels Rube Goldberg-esque.

For example, something at work is moving from mass-transfer of data to an API endpoint. This change is being bestowed upon us by a third party.
Are APIs the more modern approach? Sure. Does this data change often enough that we need some sort of real time update? No. Will anyone benefit from the "modern" approach of having a subscriber/publisher, events, etc? Well, not really. None of the things we will build to support this will be rocket science, but they do increase complexity, more moving parts.
A younger, or more optimistic, developer would argue that these are well trodden patterns and this can be built to be very reliable. And it is true. But more moving parts always implies more things that can break down, that need maintenance...the good old querying and flat file transfer we have today, while arcane, serves our needs so well.

I have the same feeling towards everything labelled “smart home.” Sure, controlling the lights and the blinds with an app is cool and automating their actions is useful, but I think I’ll stick to the good old reliable light switches and cords for now. They sure can break too, they sure can fail, but if they do, the source of the issue will be easily identified, and long minutes won’t be needed to figure out if this is the app failing, or the Wi-Fi, or the battery of the hub device, or the light or blind itself.

I think this passage is similar to my observations about adding moving parts that are not really needed. With the smart home example - yes it is cool to dim your light from your phone[1]. But, will it kill you to stand up and flick the switch? Isn't it actually better? That little (again) friction?

I jokingly mentioned Emacs in a footnote - all these points relate to my choice to use the same editor for everything. And to the reduction of my configuration to the fewest amount of external dependencies, in favor of "as little as it is enough".

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I think I should have included the "useless facts" tag. The next best thing I can do is say up front that there's no good reason. I got curious enough to give it a try.
Well, actually...there is a reason. I don't know if it's a good one, and at the end of the day, it's more of an excuse than a "reason".

Curiosity

Quite some time ago (a few years, even?)[1] I was looking for a new Emacs theme either in the now defunct peach-melpa.org, or Emacs Themes. There aren't that many light background themes, and at some point I landed on Plain Theme, in its README has a link to this article:

A case against syntax highlighting

My initial reaction was that this was silly, and reading the comments most people reacted the same way. But the idea was planted like a seed and over time I came back to it.
What if there is no highlighting? How would that help anything? But...we didn't always have coloring and people wrote code anyway, it is REALLY necessary? Isn't that a slippery slope of "eschew all nice things"?

"Not quite my tempo"

With my quest to simplify my configuration[2], I started being a bit more mindful about how each package and command added affected my use of the editor.
I noticed that when I work in a remote shell, a lot of times I don't have syntax highlighting and I can do things just fine, watering that old seed some more.
Also once again, (as it happened for completion) I took inspiration from some people at work, using a more stripped down setup, while being very efficient in their workflows.

I wanted to give the experiment a try, so over a few days I tried about 10 themes, for example Almost Mono, Plain, and the one that came closest to what I wanted, Tok Theme.

But in all of them I found little touches of accent color that I disliked, or heavy use of bold and italic to replace colors. Tok was by far the closest to my ideal, and the code for it was very easy to read, no macros or funky constructs, just some color declarations and that was it.
So of course I thought "hey I can do my own variation".

Pics or it didn't happen

As you can see, there's very little use of color. White background, black letters. Bold and underline used as little as possible. No italics.
There's a palette of greys, inherited from Tok, with one "even milder" grey added. Two accent colors, dark violet and dark green. A light "lavender" for hl-line.
For font-lock, the only colors used are light grey for comments, and dark green for strings. Everything else is plain.

Why violet and green? No particular reason, but it is clear I like this combination:

That's my Dygma Raise. I would say 10% of why I didn't get a Raise 2 is because they don't come in purple (the other 90% is the price 🤡). Other layers use different colors as "base", but the default one is green alpha & num keys, with green underglow.
I got a DualSense game pad couple weeks ago. Of course I picked a color I liked, they have quite the variety. Then I found an option in Steam to change the LED color, I played a bit with it. A few nights later, I turned the pad on and realized...

...that I had absent-mindedly replicated the Raise color scheme.
While "dark green for strings" was an early feature of the theme, the second accent color was a subtler blue at first. I used green for directories in Dired in v1, but that made them highlight too much (given the rest of the "palette"). That's when I settled on light blue as "subtler accent color", and from there I moved to something darker...and here we are. Now dired's look is more mmmmm uniform?

Back to the hypothesis - does it work?

Yes and no.
No, because nothing magical happened. It didn't increase my "code awareness", or made me slower to read code, or faster, or...anything.
Yes because of the same things I said above. It really makes little to no difference. Which in a way helps the cause of the article that started this experiment. But at the same time, I could have not created a new theme and there would be no difference, so it contradicts the article too???
As it stands now, I see syntax highlighting as a non-feature.

Still, now I am attached to the theme, I won't go back to modus-operandi, at least for a long while. And it's nice that I understand Emacs faces a lot better now.
On that note, I started thinking I didn't need to define a lot of faces, but the theme keeps getting bigger. Just writing this article, I checked a word in the dictionary and the faces needed adjustment.

In case you are curious, the theme is in Source Hut, with the rest of my dotfiles.

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When I was setting up my Gemini capsule I noticed a lot of people in Geminispace[1] were publishing their GPG keys.
I had seen at least a couple authors in the regular web also publishing theirs, and I figured it would be nice to have my own set.

So before the capsule went online, I followed a bunch of tutorials, published the keys, and I received encrypted email from a grand total of ONE (1) person since then (almost two years? a bit over two years?).
I only remember the command I bound in Gnus to encrypt outgoing email because a couple days ago I was cleaning up my init.el.

What prompted this post is that, earlier today, I made a joking comment about gpg in a group chat. And that reminded me that my keys were set to expire some time in 2025.
After renewing the primary key (following a tutorial) I realized I completely forgot I also had a signing subkey...which of course I never used.
While searching for tutorials for how to extend the subkeys's expiration too, I had this realization that we have no hope of non-tech people using this correctly. I am no genius, but for sure I feel comfortable in the command line, and the magic incantations where long-ish.

Of course, much smarter people than me have said it before, for example, Moxie Marlinspike in this 2015 post. Back when I read that, I saw it as a curiosity, since I never had bothered with GPG. I don't think I was even paying for my email back then (around 2020).
But now I can see his point(s) better.

Anyway, I guess that if by the time the keys expire again, I still don't use them, I'll just let them be.
It was a fun experiment and I learned a bit more about how to use gpg. And at least that makes it worth it.

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It is kinda cold today. And that made me think of snow. And then that reminded me of this photo I snapped a couple months ago.

I present this "Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a snow kipá" image with no social or political commentary, and aware that is an extremely basic (you could say, even childish) form of humor.

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It is clear I was not in a good place when I wrote this. I was extremely annoyed at the tool for something (90% odds) I did wrong. And that happened while I was dealing with a bunch of other things at work, and the last thing I needed was for Git to "misbehave" or be inconsistent.
The problem with rants like that is, that while helpful to get something out of your system, they dilute your message. I went into weird tangents to explain things very poorly.

With that out of the way: I still think git is pretty terrible. It's foundations are rock solid, but the interface is a convoluted Hydra with a gazillion ways to blow off your leg[1]. I still think there's a simpler way, and I am probably not the only one: people keep trying to come up with simpler alternatives - latest I know about is Jujutsu, but it's not the only one.

There's also some sort of irony in an Emacs user asking for more simplicity in its tools :) although in that front, I keep finding ways to simplify my setup too. Maybe topic of a future post.

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Git is mysterious - not in good ways.

We intuitively know that sometimes the best tool (yes, I know "best" is extremely nebulous) isn't necessarily the most popular. There are other factors that make something into a standard, like availability, price (where applies), complexity, etc.

I think Git is proof that people would take anything as long as it is free. Then again, Mercurial was right there...[1]

We all have "that friend", who is a really smart person, and unfortunately fell for some fake news/some conspiracy theory/scam. And the lesson there is one of humility: "it can happen to me, too".

Well, "10x developers" and "tech bros" will never admit it, but the fact that we keep using git, to me, is proof that they too can fall for cargo culting.

For the record, I am not saying Git is bad. It is impressively good. But it really should be one of those "it gets out of the way" tools, and it definitely isn't.
There's a reason pages like this one exist.
Git's ergonomics are terrible. There's 3984209389 commands, and sometimes the same command does completely different things by changing one flag.

This rant was brought to you by: "today I learned about git rebase --onto, and I used it and things went horribly wrong. So I discarded my local branch, started fresh, and the same command just worked. Obviously I did something different without realizing, but what, how...oh, remember that xkcd about git? I should totally vent about Git in my own site".

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I posted a couple days ago that I was trying to use my kettle more. And I am!

The new rituals

I make a conscious effort to leave my phone behind while the water heats. I put some hot tap water in the kettle, to warm it. Then add leaves in the strainer, and briefly rinse them with cold water.
This last step is something I read a long time ago, and I haven't seen it recommended again, but it does help remove the smaller leaves and dust. So I keep doing it.
Then I pour the water, boiling for black tea, and 80ish degrees for green tea.

On the latter, using less hot (what I did once a few months ago) made a world of difference in the taste. Also being more mindful of brewing times for each tea (5 mins vs 3 mins).

What I've tried so far

That's some green tea we got from a store in Grand Central a few months ago.
Yes, now I prepare it better, flavor is less bitter, more delicate. And...I don't quite like it. So I guess green teas aren't my thing. Or at least this one isn't.
The taste is a strange combination of being too subtle, and the same time invasive. Really hard to explain. At least I am happy that I managed to get a more delicate brew out of it.

The black box is the second one I opened from the two I got in the Asian market. It is a pretty vanilla black tea. I like it, but nothing special. I had high expectations for this box, because...

The first one I opened was the red box, which is also black tea. And boy does is taste great.
I used the phone's translate app to try to understand the difference between the two, apparently the black box is "black tea" and this one is "wild black tea". I don't even know if that's real (web search didn't help much).
The aroma in this tea is..."fuller" than in the other one, in a way that I am obviously at a loss of words on how to explain.[1][2]
And the flavor is more rich than in regular black tea, too, it has more body. Or something.
OK, I don't want to sound like people who do wine tastings. But the tea does have more body 🤣 it is what it is.

What's next

Open to recommendations. I would like to try oolong, a different green tea, and order boldo leaves (I have the highest expectations for that).
Also, in Argentina we make "mate cocido": tea made out of yerba mate leaves.[3] It is quite common to use tea bags, but many people (including my mother in law) make it using loose leaves. And of course it tastes better. So I should try to do that using the tea pot, too. I can't believe I haven't tried that yet.

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Someone at Adidas, and the Rapids org, must hate money. That's the only explanation I have as to why this jersey cannot be found in any stores:

But I am sure that once this shaming post goes live, and probably viral, the situation will be reversed (?)

I guess while I am here, I might as well drop a few comments about the Pids. Funny, I always thought my first post in Spanish would be about football, and about Vélez. I might have something to say later, as they play tonight. Still with an interim coach too.

Going back to the Rapids, the year started strong. First time in club history to go four matches unbeaten to start the season, which says a lot about our "small club" vibe. And two of those were draws. I guess it is good news that the draws came while Colorado was still playing in CONCACAF Champions Cup. As soon as were out of the competition, our performance in league play improved.
Which makes me worry about playing Leagues Cup again this summer. It was our deep run last year in said tournament that derailed the regular season.[1]

Another positive is that last two matches were ugly wins, although in different ways.
At Austin, we did play nice, flowing football. Yet we only scored once, we earned the three points by being defensively very solid and neutering The Verdes' attack.
In comparison, against the Quakes, we were severely outplayed. I haven't seen enough of them when Hernán López plays, but I assume their attack is even more dangerous. Without him, we "only" had to worry about Espinoza, and we barely held it together. Zach Steffen had an amazing performance and kept us in play. And despite things not clicking at all during most of the first half, we still managed to score.
I much prefer to play like we did against Austin, but I think the win last night sends a more important message about how resilient the team is.[2]

A team cannot dominate every single match they play, and being able to "win ugly" can make a difference by the time the playoffs start. I still see us as missing a few pieces to achieve greatness (ie, a trophy), but I am optimistic as this is Armas second year coaching the Rapids. You can tell players "get" his system better, and also he's been a bit more adaptable in just four games than all of 2024, switching formations and adjusting tactics more.

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Day is kinda grey and I opted for "my" Coldplay playlist.
I have this thing where I like to listen to an artist's discography and create my own playlist with the songs I like. In some cases it is quite the undertaking, which I guess that's why I still haven't tried with Elton John 🤣 despite liking his music, generally.

Anyway, I settled for Coldplay, except that my version of their music is the first three records. And leaning heavily on the first two. Spies just came up and it was the perfect track for a gloomy Friday morning.

I was somewhat anticipating the release of "Viva la vida"[1], their fourth album. And when I finally listened to it a couple weeks after it came out, didn't really get into it. And I tried a couple more times over the years, and it does nothing for me.

Which is fine, except that I have this silly thing where I still haven't listened to their later releases. Because when I think of doing it, I figure I should give "Viva la vida" one more try, and then I get bored with it, and then I just listen to something else.

Since lately I've been a bit more aware of some frankly dumb compulsions I have, this "completionist, all or nothing" is one that I should probably change.

For example, I did the same thing with the Devil May Cry video games.
After I played (and loved) Bayonetta, I looked for similar games, and the same designer created the DMC series before leaving Capcom[2] so I got the DMC Collection. But the first game was not much like Bayonetta...and then I dropped the whole series.
I know that the third game is lauded as the best one, and I don't particularly care for the story (I skipped about half the cutscenes in Bayonetta...), so I am missing out just because I "have to" play the first two games.

I've done this with movies, other music artists and probably other video game series too, and it is silly. I guess I'll give the latter Coldplay records a listen in the coming days...

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I just made a "merge and squash" commit, as per the wishes of the team that owns that repository, and that reminded how much I dislike the idea that your Git history is supposed to look "clean" and linear.
Why? I find the reasons justifying this banal, usually rooted in aesthetic benefits. And while squashing is not the same as rebasing, they both come from the same place of "keeping a tidy history". Why? History is messy, it's meant to be.

I know I am in the minority here, but I also know I am not the only one. And I don't have that much to say in this topic that hasn't been said before, so I will quote other people.

Rebase Considered Harmful

Arguably the most famous post on this, and while I don't agree with every single point in Rebase Considered Harmful (some things are overblown minor annoyances even by my standards!) there are a few great points in there:

One of the oft-cited advantages of rebasing in Git is that it lets you collapse multiple check-ins down to a single check-in to make the development history "clean." The intent is that development appear as though every feature were created in a single step: no multi-step evolution, no back-tracking, no false starts, no mistakes. This ignores actual developer psychology: ideas rarely spring forth from fingers to files in faultless finished form. A wish for collapsed, finalized check-ins is a wish for a counterfactual situation.

The common counterargument is that collapsed check-ins represent a better world, the ideal we're striving for. What that argument overlooks is that we must throw away valuable information to get there.

And that's what I consider bad about squashing and rebasing (again, yes they are very different operations). Every little change, false start, misdirection present in your "messy" commit history, informs the final design of the feature.
Often, the remnants of those false starts are a source of bugs. Or help explain and give context to, for example, why certain code is duplicated but slightly different in two locations. Or why a certain function has an unused parameter, or some unreachable code.
This is valuable information, that is discarded when it is all collapsed in a single commit, or a series of (allegedly) cleaner commits after a rebase.

Why you should stop using Git rebase

A bit less inflammatory, maybe because it isn't pushing an agenda, is Why you should stop using Git rebase. It is the article I tend to share when this topic comes up.

[...] Git merge. It's a simple, one-step process, where all conflicts are resolved in a single commit. The resulting merge commit clearly marks the integration point between our branches, and our history depicts what actually happened, and when it happened.
[...]
The importance of keeping your history true should not be underestimated. By rebasing, you are lying to yourself and to your team. You pretend that the commits were written today, when they were in fact written yesterday, based on another commit. You've taken the commits out of their original context, disguising what actually happened. Can you be sure that the code builds? Can you be sure that the commit messages still make sense? You may believe that you are cleaning up and clarifying your history, but the result may very well be the opposite.

Most comments in the highlights argue that proper testing and continuous integration can help you avoid a lot of the situations described. Well, even if you have perfect tests and CI, there will still be bugs present, that is just the nature of building software. So sooner or later you will need to look at the project's history.
And even for unit tests, seeing the tests history can also help you identify when and why a test stopped making sense :)

Contradiction

What I find weird about the interest in keeping a "clean and tidy" history, is that it is counter to the value of openness.
Git and related tools enabled us to do development in the open, publicly. And then people are going to great lengths to hide "the ugly parts" of that development work, as if it was something to be ashamed of.
I need you to know my initial design was off, that I missed a corner case and how I modified the code to make that work. I need you to know that I misspelled a variable, so when 6 months later you catch the same mistake in another file, the history lets you know what's the correct spelling and that I missed that one instance. And so on.

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Of course, as most Argentinians, I drink a lot of mate.[1]
But I also enjoy other types of infusions (hence the new tag. I knew you would notice!). That is a fancy way of saying that I also drink tea and coffee.

Rituals

I think that what I enjoy the most about these drinks, just like with mate, is the little rituals that come with preparing something in a specific way: How I setup the yerba for the mate, or the steps in coffee making. Having a little forced paused while water heats or the beverage brews is also something I've come to appreciate.

Annoyed with coffee brewing

When I lived in Denver, I got a ceramic coffee pour over and mug combo for my birthday. And then a couple months later, a friend[2] got me a grinder, so I could use whole bean coffee!
Still, my brewing process wasn't too extreme. For example, I weighted the beans just once, and made a marking in the grinder for next time, instead of buying a coffee scale. I also didn't get a special gooseneck kettle.
And honestly, the coffee I got was pretty good! Not right away, but with couple weeks of practice and learning. Going to the store, picking a coffee, grinding while heating water etc. became this really enjoyable process.[3]

After I moved, I stopped brewing coffee for a while, and it was like going back to square one: my initial attempts were just bad.
For some reason, this time I felt lazy to get back into the whole process? I tried, but my heart wasn't into it, I just felt annoyed rather than motivated to try again. I only got two bags of beans in over a year. And I found the drive to finish the second one because I made that my finish line as a """barista""".

The forgotten kettle

As mentioned, I also enjoy tea. Quite a few years ago my wife got me a very nice coppery Bodum glass kettle, that I mostly used to brew Earl Grey, but I didn't use it as much after getting more into coffee. I was using tea bags instead. I know, the horror :)

But now that I have more room in the cabinet, without the coffee equipment, the kettle is more prominent, and it got me thinking, "what if brewed more loose leaf tea?".
Preparing it tickles my "little ritual" bone, but it is less involved than coffee (compared to grinding fresh and all that, not to a drip maker).

Last Friday I went to the Asian market by NJ440 and brought a nice little box with some black tea. Didn't want to start with something too exotic.
So far it's been great, the flavor and aroma is of course very different than the one from a tea bag. I found out that you can brew the leaves more than once, although so far I only did two brewings each time. I've read claims you can do up to 4. Time will tell.

Closing

When looking for information about tea, I didn't find a lot of small blogs dedicated to it, mostly promotional sites from stores. Some of them did have good info, being fair.
My hope is that someone finds this post[4] and shares with me their site full of tips (or at least at some point I get an email with advice).

In the meantime I will keep writing about the teas I try and other things related in the new shiny tag. I am hesitant to call it a series as I have no idea if I will have to say more on the topic than whatever you can call what I just typed. Doesn't have a moral, so it's not a fable. It's not a story...it's just...whatever.
Now, I wonder if I can find boldo leaves somewhere near by...

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tag(s): #random-thoughts #emacs

I tweaked the original, shorter, post title. Don't tell me it doesn't look like the title for an anime episode right now! 🤡 I love it.

I wrote quite a few times about how I like to keep my Emacs configuration small (most recently here). The idea is that then I have less dependencies, and also less code of my own to maintain.
The added benefit is that I learn more about built-in packages. While the editor is infinitely configurable, there is a wisdom to the defaults.

I know that this is argued quite a bit in the Emacs subreddit: that out of the box Emacs is outdated, that the bindings are not ergonomic, or that without XYZ package the editor is unusable.
The topic of defaults also comes up once in a while in the Emacs dev mailing list.

As time goes by, I find that more and more things make sense. To be fair, some others don't...and I am sure the whole thing is highly subjective, what works for some people, doesn't work for others. This is a tale of the latter.

I am using a custom mode line configuration, and started to wonder if it wasn't better to use the default. You can see below a comparison between them, with my customized mode line on top.

It started with: Coding conversion

One consequence of using a mix of Windows and Linux at work, is that sometimes files have different coding systems (UTF-8 vs ISO-Latin-1) and different end of line conventions. Emacs auto-detects a lot of these things, and they are reported in the mode line. It can be a bit cryptic, but it is concise, it's the first section in the screenshot above.[1]

For the longest time, though, I didn't need this information often (or, at all), because I was using exclusively Linux. And also I couldn't find a good way to include it in my custom setup, other than the same ultra-condensed default.
But now sometimes I need to deal with special characters or line endings directly, so it could be handy to have that information available.

Then auto-revert-mode happened

When using Datum to query databases, I sometimes output queries to a file, and after I edit it, I send more output. So I enable auto-revert-mode in the buffer for this file.

Sometimes I forget that I enabled the mode, and since my mode line dropped the list of enabled minor modes (they only show in the echo area, on mouse hover) - I end up toggling auto-revert unnecessarily.

It ended with the default mode line

I used the default mode line for a couple days, since it shows the coding info and list of minor modes enabled, solving my two "problems".
But I found a number of other problems that I couldn't get around to, except with more configuration, which then defeated the purpose of not using my own version.

First of all, the default line is busy. Once you split your frame, it is very likely it will get truncated.
There's some duplication of information, for example, since I use git for all my VC needs, reporting either the project name or the repo name is good enough, I don't need both.
Also it doesn't include the size of the active region. You can still get this information with M-=, but it is something I use often enough that I noticed it was missing.
And having the encoding and EOL at a glance wasn't handy at all. Like, it would have been useful a couple times in the past months, but not something I need as much as I thought.

Epilogue, back to my own config

After trying telephone-line, doom-modeline, smart-mode-line, powerline, mood-line...I see now why these packages tend to grow so much. It is tempting to add the option to have X or Y information available. And if your mode line is a package that other people use, you will end up getting those requests sooner or later.

Bottom line, I will keep my custom, minimal setup. And I found good alternatives to my problems.
As mentioned, hovering the text of the major mode shows the lists of the minor ones active in that buffer.
And for the coding system, the command describe-coding-system (bound to C-h C by default) shows the information. Is it calling it less convenient than having it in the mode line? Yes. Isn't it more annoying to have that text in the mode line taking valuable space when I need it once every three months? Also yes. So.

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A few weeks ago I completely overhauled the configuration of my keyboard[1]. I keep notes of my setup, with screenshots and text snippets explaining why one thing or the other.

It all started because I figured it would be nice to keep screenshots for when I don't have installed Bazecor, the software to configure the Dygma Raise. I ended up installing that in the work computers anyway.
But I was still referring to the screenshots when I over-modified a layer (in the early days) and needed to go back to previous state. So I added some notes on each change, and that point I figured it was better to just put it in a nicely formatted file with the rest of the dotfiles, in a repository.

And even just now, as I updated the notes to reflect the current state, the process of capturing the screens and explaining the changes helped me find inconsistencies and little improvements that I hadn't noticed before. Which in turn prompted me to write this post.

I credit the attitude about documenting my own config to, of course, Emacs. And Lisps in general.[2]
Since I started programming Elisp (and then CL) having detailed documentation became second nature, and so many times said documentation was critical when figuring out an issue in the code. In particular, but not exclusively, when said issue is found long after writing the offending code.

Of course, I am not discovering anything new here. Actually, referencing a habit from Lisps dates this idea as something ancient 🤣 but that doesn't mean it is not relevant or worth celebrating. Or that we don't need to reinforce the habit, and try to spread it.

Documenting your own configuration is not an act of self-importance, but of self-care. And the same applies to the code you put out there. The act of writing docs will help you revisit your initial assumptions and shed a light in your thought process. And reading those docs even after just a few weeks can be quite a revelation...

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Earlier today I read this very interesting article about how we all are being location tracked: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads.
(Got there via a post in https://localghost.dev/, which is in my bookmarks).

A major driver in my jump from Android to iPhone was privacy concerns. As I decided to finally make a change in my internet habits, ditching services and platforms left and right, using an Android phone was kind of a big red flag.
Initially I didn't want an iPhone, and considered other options seriously (like, going dumb phone, or using a Linux phone). Eventually I relented, and figured an iPhone was the best compromise between "usability" and "better at privacy". Like I mentioned in the past, when reviewing other Apple products, I don't believe for second they are that much nicer than other companies. If they do better in the privacy department, is not out of moral superiority, but simply because they can use it as a selling point.

But as seen in the article above, through the ad ecosystem, even when we "Ask App Not To Track", tons of our information is collected. All to micro-target each one of us to keep us consuming...
I remember how I used to read in the newspaper[1], when I was 11~13, these translated articles from Nicholas Negroponte, about how great the "information superhighway" was going to be and we were in the verge of a new era of knowledge sharing and...here we are. All of us spied on, just to get an ad in front of us that we might click/tap, while the same information can, and probably will be (or already is) used for nefarious purposes...anyway, back to the topic at hand =/

The first thought I had after finishing the article was, "was it all for naught?". Apple is notoriously anti-consumer, not particularly friendly towards open source...honestly all they had going to them was the privacy angle, I don't even find iOS attractive or nice to use.

The second thing I did was verify if any app I use was on the list linked in the article. I try to install as few things as possible, so it was fast. And actually there was only one: FotMob. I had toyed with the idea of paying the 15 dollars a year subscription before, and this was the final push. This removes ads, and my intention has been to pay for services I use, so...it was about time.

About the post title...I learned about this phrase in the distant past, when I was a lurker in the GameFAQs message boards.[2]. Lately I've been remembering a lot of lingo and inside jokes from those old times. Side effect of getting old, I guess?

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I am working with an Oasis playlist in the background, and "Live Forever" just came up. It's a fucking great song.
I have nothing to add to the topic...I don't know anything about music, and the lyrics aren't anything too deep that I feel I should add commentary.

This is the kind of content that could have been a tweet, yet I am off Twitter[1], and I can say it here - that's what I am doing...and that's the reason I have a website I guess? To put out there whatever I feel like saying?[2]

I started this post because my first thought was "this is the kind of thing I would use twtxt for!!!", but now while writing it, I realize a few things:

• It would dilute the little content I have between two places.
• If ease of posting is the objective, then I might as well make writing a regular post easier. Within reason, a little friction is always good.
• Adding "twtxts" to the homepage, like I was planning to do to mitigate the first point, would increase the website complexity.

I guess there's another, deeper and maybe less rambling, post to write about why so many of us have this need to express ourselves, put our thoughts out there for others to (maybe) read.
Narcissism? Attention-seeking? Enjoy the exercise of writing? Some creative aspect? I am not a big fan of the "blog about blogging" thing (this post is meta enough as it is) nor do I think I am the kind of thinker that will arrive to a novel answer about any of these.

All I know is that "A Bell Will Ring" just started, and that if Oasis doesn't split again by the time they come to NYC, I should take the chance to see them live.
I bet tickets will be super expensive... 😬

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Via the Planet Emacs, I found a post about HispaConf, which in turn led me to another post, in Spanish, about Twtxt, a decentralized plain-text alternative to Twitter.

I am surprised I didn't hear about this before! It seems the kind of thing I would enjoy. There's even an Emacs client, twtxt-el. Who knows, maybe in the coming days I setup a "feed", meaning, just a plain text file in my server.

The one thing I find disappointing about this thing, is that it uses some sort of API and hosted server approach for so called "registries". It would have been nice for registries to be just a bunch of text files with URLs to the Twtxt feeds, and have all the hashtag search logic in the clients (maybe I will find other registry features that required a server, and haven't seen yet).

The official spec for twtxt is located here.

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I don't think I want to make politics or social issues or anything like that the focus of my blog. Or a recurring theme. I don't even think I want this to have a focus.

But as I have stated in previous posts, having a site can be a way to vent out, so why not have the occasional post that touches on some current event or general feeling about the state of...things.
I also recognize some of what I outline below is my fault because I keep using reddit, when I should know better. It's been a while since that site had insightful conversations in any of the major subreddits.
Anyway, here we go...

Constant outrage is exhausting

The Trump term has barely started I am already over the attitude people have about it.

Yes, I am disappointed too. From the fact that "the price of eggs" was such a major a deciding factor, to the way Democrats handled their campaign, to the cheering at hateful rhetoric etc etc etc.
But that is in the past now. This is what we are stuck with for the next 4 years, and having extremely dramatic reactions to every single news piece that comes out of the government is just unsustainable.

On top of being unhealthy, it doesn't allow for rational discourse about the consequences of each decision. And it also makes it much harder to tell apart the really bad things from the I don't agree with this, but no surprise here. You know, the things you would expect a conservative, Republican administration to do.

The danger: apathy

I know someone reading this might argue "I get what you say, but if we don't stop X, then they'll do Y and Z and then change the Constitution to destroy the country. We can't let anything slide!".
And I think that is valid danger. Citizens have to remain vigilant. Apathy in the past (and even the last election?) is what led us to the current predicament.

But I also have to point out, that being constantly mad about everything also runs the risk of generating apathy, but by exhaustion.
My point is, and it is a bit obvious but still true, that you have to aim for a middle ground. Stay vigilant but also pick your battles. Can't fight every single decision.

Groundhog day post I guess

I realized it is Groundhog Day. That makes the closing section even more fitting.

I feel like I have seen all this before, when I lived in Argentina. The government would make truly backwards decisions, or make the most outrageous declarations, and tons of people would be constantly mad about it.
And then when the time to vote came, the same party would win. In part because after 4 long years of the BS, there was a sort of resignation about the state of affairs. This wasn't close to being the only factor, but still.

Honestly, I see so many parallels between the way Republicans and Kirchneristas handle themselves, despite being ideological opposites. Er, allegedly. Anyway, I see so many parallels, that I have a bit of a fear that this will be the state of things in the USA for a longish time...

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I was checking my emails, and meaning to then get to fix a patch that has (at least) two bugs, but then there was an alert for something at work. And now here I am, waiting for someone to reply, and I don't feel like the time is right to do a "dive" into some code.[1]

I do have a few minor things to write about, which could potentially become a post. Or maybe not. But instead of waiting to find out, I will throw them here as they come (and have time to write) and see what's the end result :)

Parallels between TDD and my "think before you act" ramblings

I was chatting with a dev friend on Saturday and sharing how I went a bit extreme into removing all "distractions" from my programming setup (AKA my Emacs config), first with "Intellisense"[2], then any UI aids for completing names (as described first here and in the follow up post.

He made an interesting point, that the description of my process of "thinking about what I want before invoking a command", can be compared to the TDD mindset of "write the tests first, so you know what you need to achieve, then code".
I thought it was an interesting comparison. It is said that if you are working in TDD you have to change your habits and mindset for it to stick, which mirrors my own change of attitudes when switching my completion setup.

Dead Cells board game progress

In a completely different topic, I made a few more runs of the Dead Cells board game, unlocking more permanent upgrade. I completely love how the game is designed to mirror the rogue-lite experience of the original platformer.

Back to Common Lisp books

One of my birthday presents was the book Common Lisp Recipes, which I had but was among the many victims of a burst pipe and subsequent flood a couple years ago. I think I will find it useful as a reference for a few things I need to do for my barely-started project of writing a (basic) cross platform dict server in CL.
I want this because the only local dict alternative on Windows is running WSL to then run an existing server in it. And regular dict connections are blocked at work.

Checking out my bookshelf, I also realized I hadn't finished Let Over Lambda, another CL book, this one a bit more esoteric. Although being fair, I didn't get far enough into it to hit those meaty parts, I was at the "using let and local functions" first chapters. And that technique reminded me a lot of old-timey (mid 00s) JavaScript idioms to encapsulate things.
Yes, I am aware that it is likely the JS eminences spreading those patterns brought them over from Scheme/Lisp :)

Anyway, those are books that should last me for quite a bit...on top of trying to finish the second Bridgerton novel >_>

Closing

I guess I will re-read this post later and (maybe) do some minor edits to fix grammar and spelling mistakes. I wrote it over so many little periods of idleness, that I am sure some parts at least will read disconnected.

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