Sat Jun 3 05:44:15 UTC 2017

I'm back.

Last post was almost two weeks ago.

I went back to Tucson for a wedding and ended up not logging anything or being productive in any way.

I feel that that is fine.

Upon getting back I needed a bit of time to fall back into things. I think that time is elapsed.

So, I'm back.

I've been thinking, I want to practice a few things everyday:

• Drawing
• Programming
• Gaming
  • Overwatch
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee
• Dancing
• Japanese
• Some sort of musical instrument

Days off for dancing are important. Perhaps they will be for the other things as well.

I think that whilst not having a job, I can totally put in a decent amount of time towards all these things.

In fact, I may be able to do so even with having a job. Drawing, Japanese, and music can be less than an hour each. Maybe twenty minutes, even. Dancing is about 40 minutes. Gaming can be as little as an hour but will probably end up getting more than its fair share. And then programming can be 4 hours of serious work. This could perhaps work with or without a job.

I have noticed since not having a job that actually doing any of these things provides as much resistance as when I had a job. When I actually do it, it's not nearly as tiring as I anticipate. Oftentimes it's quite energizing.

It seems more that I have bad instincts that I need to learn to overcome, and when I do overcome them, I have to be weary of them coming back.

Like, I often feel like making decisions that don't make me happier nor do they energize me to give me the strength or motivation to make me happier or work on hard things. I want to accomplish things, but this feeling convinces me to make no progress.

I have, several times now, learned to overcome this. And have been very happy for it and gotten good at doing the things I identify as needing doing, either for intrinsic purposes or extrinsic ones. But then, each time, new instincts come into play that revert me to old habits, to listening to my always-wrong feelings on what I should be doing in the given moment.

So, the game has gotten a bit more complicated. How do I not revert to my old self.

Am I on the path now? Has my trip to Tucson made me susceptible to avoiding working on projects and practicing skills which I was building up momentum to before the trip?

Today may be a proper "no". Perhaps I have taken a break without it ruining my momentum.

We will see.

Sat Jun 3 05:56:59 UTC 2017

Let's check out my tickler.

Sat Jun 3 06:48:53 UTC 2017

All right, I want to start writing up a draft of my pygame skeleton draft.

Setting Up Wing Personal IDE Pygame Environment

Hello, I'm SilentKat and let me break down the assumptions and goals of this here thing:

1. You are using a Windows OS (aka Windows 10, 7, 8.1, Vista)
2. You want to program a game
3. You're choosing python to program that game
4. You're willing to use the pygame library to do a lot of the heavy-lifting
5. You want to make an executable of your code that runs on any Windows machine

If any of these assumptions are wrong this probably isn't the thing for you.

Further assumptions:

1. You want to setup your environment without using the command-line
2. You do not have python already installed
3. You want to program

Sat Jun 3 06:58:44 UTC 2017

Need to restart computer, to be continued.

Sat Jun 3 10:33:06 UTC 2017

Ended up applying to various places (notably Mixpanel.

Getting tired, will continue draft tomorrow.

Sun May 21 10:09:20 UTC 2017

Been really good about devoting time to projects. Yesterday I went down the rabbit-hole of why the pygame exe files I created on Windows 10 didn't work on my Windows 7 laptop.

I figured it out.

• Python 3.5 and Python 3.6 is broken for creating single-file executables
• Old python dependencies api-ms-win-crt-* are now all in one library on windows 10
  • Doesn't package right to play on old windows versions

Most of this information is contained in this PyInstaller issue.

I haven't been devoting any time to a project I was working on with a friend, and yesterday I hashed some stuff out with him and I'm going to try to devote some time to it today.

Sun May 21 10:25:31 UTC 2017

Realized I didn't like the formatting of some diary posts here and so I fixed it. Gotta not do line breaks within paragraphs. I'm used to markdown not doing line breaks for a single line break.

Sun May 21 10:28:14 UTC 2017

Okay, now work on project.

Sun May 21 11:43:00 UTC 2017

Ended up hanging with family.

Fri May 19 13:08:21 UTC 2017

Most of the code for the pygame_skeleton is done. I'll be pushing it today, and hopefully start making a post about how to setup the skeleton or something.

I'm really out of it today, but I want to build the habit of discipline, so this is good practice for that.

Thu May 18 07:40:17 UTC 2017

Started the day with meditation, then played a couple hours of Overwatch. Getting ready to work on a tutorial to setup pygame development on Wing.

Thu May 18 08:04:42 UTC 2017

It will be two repos on github, the first one to setup virtualenv stuff and the second to setup pygame with pyinstaller to make the executable.

Wed May 17 11:26:54 UTC 2017

Been a while, hasn't it, Stephan?

I've been legit busy, which is a better excuse than me being bad.

First things first, I've had my first ever real freelance gig! Just a small gig, agreed to a payment of $50 and gots paid $75 because he liked the work I did a lot. I consider it a first because it's the first time I worked for a stranger for monies.

I don't know this person personally, and it all worked out pretty well.

I also feel like it's going to lead to some momentum as far as personal productivity goes.

Wed May 17 11:36:28 UTC 2017

Anyways, I've had a bit of an epiphany. As a professional programmer, I think a big part of my job description is to be flexible. Flexible in what tools I use, what languages I program in, the style of my programming, and even the algorithms and data-structures I use.

Part of my gig was helping my client setup his environment how he wanted. He wanted to use Wing IDE, so I looked into it and got familiar with it. Even having avoided IDE land for a long time, I got familiar with it pretty quickly and was capable of telling it to do stuff I wanted it to do within a reasonable timeframe.

Wed May 17 11:45:55 UTC 2017

This is something I take for granted, but it's not something that can really be done that fast. All these tools/editors/languages have similarities or predictable contrasts that one must be aware of to look for.

I see how much more I need to learn and often think I can't do that much, but I am actually at the point where I can do a lot of things competently, and pick up certain things quickly. And that's valuable and something I can probably sell for a livable wage once I build a network or foundation of some sort.

Something worth exploring.

Wed May 17 11:50:07 UTC 2017

Anyways, one part of this thinking is that I'd like to learn how to avoid the command line to help those who don't want to deal with it. To setup my client's environment, I had him use powershell. I think I could've done everything from Wing IDE assuming python and wing were already installed.

I am going to explore this hypothesis now.

Wed May 17 12:00:57 UTC 2017

Yes, it is quite possible. Probably would've been easier to go down this path with client.

Sun May 14 11:30:43 UTC 2017

Haven't meditated yet, started doing things.

Also skipped exercising today for reasons.

Though, maybe I'll still exercise. I didn't eat so much that it'll hurt, I think.

Anyways, been messing with Wing IDE 101 as someone I'll be working with wants to use it.

As I'll be helping this person out, it may be of use to document what I'm doing to set it up to my liking. Thinking this reminded me to start logging here in my diary.

Sun May 14 11:38:33 UTC 2017

So, plan is to log what I've done so far here, and then continue doing things whilst logging them here. Then I can formalize what I've done into a proper post for this person (and whoever else) to read.

Custom key-bindings are available to add via the Wing IDE itself in Wing Pro, but not in the free Wing IDE 101.

However, key-bindings are set via simple key-binding files in the folder where Wing IDE is installed ("C:\Program Files (x86)\Wing IDE 101 6.0" on my computer). This files were editable only by admins, which made editing them in an editor of my choice annoying, so I:

• Changed the keymap file permissions so that I can edit them as me
• Added "'Ctrl-L': 'python-shell-clear'" to the end of keymap.normal

I need to constantly clear the python console, Stephan. I need to! For the person I'm working with, setting custom keybindings might be useful information.

It looks like Wing Pro has versioning support for many versioning tools including git which is the only one I'm interested in. Wing 101 has no such support. I think we'll try using means outside the IDE to do versioning. Though, we'll see.

Edit -> Preferences -> Editor -> Auto-Completion

Knowing about the auto-complete functionality and setting it to one's preferences is always smart. I set it to "Always" instead of "Never". Under "Never", you have to explicitly press Ctrl-Space to invoke the auto-completer in both the editor and the shell. In the editor this is fine, but in the shell pressing tab is so ingrained that it actually inputting white-space is a bit annoying. So, I'll try Always and see if the constant pop-up of auto-complete recommendations annoy me in the editor.

Found a potentially useful link: Using Wing with pygame.

Also, for other projects: Using Wing with Django.

Also, for how I found the command for clearing the python shell: Command Reference. python-shell-clear was in Debugger Commands as the python shell in Wing isn't actually the python shell, but a custom shell using debug stuffs for reasons.

I believe that's everything I did so far. I'm going to read that pygame link now.

Sun May 14 11:58:20 UTC 2017

It doesn't have anything relevant to say, unfortunately.

Sun May 14 12:00:47 UTC 2017

Let's start making a game prototype in Wing and see what I feel like I need to figure out and look up whilst doing that.

I'm using virtualenv for pygame! How do I use the virtualenv I'm using in Wing? Using Wing with virtualenv Python. TL;DR, use the virtualenv's python executable as python path in Wing.

Sun May 14 12:15:59 UTC 2017

Is there any good reason to use Wing 101 over also-free Wing Personal? Let's find out by downloading it and poking at it.

Well, there's a lot more stuff on startup. Maybe overwhelming to a beginning programmer.

However, it has key mappings in the IDE. Not something you have to pay for afterall!

Sun May 14 12:33:51 UTC 2017

I will discuss with person over whether he's committed to 101 over Personal.

Neither has the versioning support, though. That's Pro only.

Sun May 14 13:09:43 UTC 2017

Something is causing the virtualenv version of python.exe to open a link to ipython, which happens whenever the shell is restarted in Wing, and it is very annoying. I can't stop it from happening, either.

Sun May 14 13:23:05 UTC 2017

It took me about 15 minutes to realize it was my pythonrc doing it, because pyreadline wasn't installed in that virtualenv.

I may have sworn at past me for using copy-pasta there.

Sun May 14 14:04:41 UTC 2017

Am using this example of setting up the python shell now. This doesn't affect Wing IDE stuff, I don't think, it just won't open up a web browser when it can't import the things.

Also, some other annoyances popped up that aren't worth investigating but I wasted time doing that anyways.

Sun May 14 14:53:03 UTC 2017

Let's start making a pygame prototype!

Sun May 14 18:14:01 UTC 2017

I had an excuse to take a picture of my standing "desk" and figured I'd post it here.

Sat May 13 04:22:54 EDT 2017

Didn't meditate until after a lengthy gaming session, so May 12th has no post.

Sat May 13 08:25:16 UTC 2017

Also, decided to timestamp in UTC because I'm a believer in switching to one time.

Sat May 13 08:25:56 UTC 2017

Anyways, need to work on project I'm working on with friend today.

Thu May 11 22:19:38 EDT 2017

Woke up today and stretched right away. The wife remembered to remind me that I wanted to meditate first thing after waking up. I was appreciative, but decided stretching and exercise had a similar effect and wanted to focus on that. After stretching, dancing 11 songs in 40 minutes, running 2 miles in 18 minutes 30 seconds, and showering, I then meditated.

As per usual, the mind wandering phase reminded me to start logging the day, and also to tackle my tickler.

I will tackle inbox and timeblock day after cooking.

Wed May 10 22:38:26 EDT 2017

Yesterday was a lazy day, and I think that was a good thing.

Also, pretty cool that lazy days can have me spend hours on HackerRank and me still think it was a lazy day.

Didn't think to meditate, though.

I have today, though.

Meditation may need to be the first thing I do when I wake up. It helps me find all the little kinks I didn't notice in myself, and then also near the end of the meditation where I can think about whatever I want, I think about being productive, which reminds me to start logging for the day and also do my tickler and stuff.

And here I am.

I woke up with a pinched nerve yesterday that's still bothering me today. Some stretching and pressure helped but it just needs time.

Wed May 10 22:45:50 EDT 2017

Just checked my tickler. Someone's birthday is coming up, Stephan! Fun.

Wed May 10 22:50:48 EDT 2017

Just time-blocked the day.

Tue May 9 00:18:55 EDT 2017

Didn't log anything in my diary "yesterday" after it became May 8th, and didn't log anything "today" before it became May 9th, so May 8th isn't getting an entry.

That's fine.

Having noted my lack of focus lately, and having heard about Headspace from multiple sources, I decided to just now do my first day of the 10-day thingy.

I may or may not subscribe after the ten days have ended.

After having done that, I wanted to come to my diary to think about what I want to do.

I have been inconsistent with pull ups. I realize now that I made my clock stop beeping at the hour mark. Possibly related.

I have decided to add wrist exercises to my daily routine. On days where I am typing a lot, I am getting some arm argravation. I want to see if simple exercises and increase in strength and flexibility will help overcome the repetivie motion irritation.

Tue May 9 00:35:07 EDT 2017

Grippers fit naturally into my normal pacing habit.

Tue May 9 00:38:00 EDT 2017

Catching up on tickler. There are various errands that require calling people at normal business hours. My sleep schedule makes that difficult, so I'm throwing them a week to the future.

I will now tackle the items I do have.

Another item's best next action is asking someone if they have something I need.

Tue May 9 01:01:50 EDT 2017

I will now work on project that I am doing with friend for one hour.

Tue May 9 01:08:43 EDT 2017

Got distracted by the YouTubes.

Tue May 9 01:57:36 EDT 2017

Made some local environment (aka desktop computer) changes that'll make local development better/possible.

Next time I'll focus on something that'll actually get pushed to the repo.

Now it's time to stretch and dance!

Danced 4 songs (not feeling it today), and did a quick stretch routine.