Sat Sep 9 15:42:57 UTC 2017

Up at 0800 PDT! Woo.

Need to be at a friend's by 0930 PDT. Going to a BLM event today. And then we're going to the Seattle Indies meetup to discuss IGDA stuff.

Acronyms everywhere!

Sat Sep 9 15:44:54 UTC 2017

Ooh, speaking of acronyms, YNAB apparently has a really good mobile app now and is extending me another 34-day free trial.

I'm just now starting budgeting stuff proper, so I may actually use YNAB during the trial. Could be a good idea.

I'll start it up tomorrow morning.

Sat Sep 9 16:39:27 UTC 2017

Made a tickler item recently that says "Review Email Action Items". I've been storing TODOs and TOREADs in my email for a while now (bookmarks were annoying to me because I switched browsers a lot at the time of me developing this habit).

I've stored plenty of actions... and then never actually review or do any of them.

Time to fix that.

Fri Sep 08 17:38:19 UTC 2017

Woke up and went back to sleep today. Had leftovers for breakfast instead of cooking so I could get to work at a reasonable hour again (been at work now for about 40 minutes).

Sat Sep 9 03:29:47 UTC 2017

Back home. Good day of work. I have tackled the tickler and inbox.

Sat Sep 9 05:37:43 UTC 2017

Forgot to medititate at the designated time, so I'm gonna do it now.

Sat Sep 9 05:52:41 UTC 2017

Glad I did that.

Every single time I've meditated I've noticed a slight pressure in my head. Not quite a headache but in that direction of feeling. Is it really always there? Maybe something to mention in my doctor's appointment at the end of the month.

Sat Sep 9 07:20:56 UTC 2017

Made a YouTube comment about Bernie Sanders that I'll put here:

""" I understand this is not a significant point of your video, but I keep seeing the sentiment in various content from you, Hbomberguy, and various others whom I've found through Hbomberguy. I'm not a huge fan of a rich, white, old, straight, cis-gendered male becoming the face of "the desire for a more left-leaning platform from the Democrats". I'm incredibly suspect of any non-representative ally of a cause taking leadership in that cause. I think Malcolm X put it best when talking of Herbert Hill:

"Herbert Hill is the labor secretary of the NAACP. If he was interested in black people, he would prepare a black man with the type of knowledge and understanding of the labor troubles involving black people that would enable a black man to sit in the same position as Secretary of Labor or Labor Secretary in the NAACP. I'm suspicious of whites who join Negroes and always have to be in the lead. Who always have to be the head. Who always have to be the top. In Negro organizations. Those whites who really have the interests of blacks at heart, let them give some advice to Negroes and stand on the sidelines. But don't join the organization and get at the head of it, and pose as a friend of Negroes."

https://youtu.be/bHzNFQXTUOQ?t=3m8s

Now, full transparency, I'm white. Also, as far as everyone can tell, I'm a straight, cis-gendered male (I'm mostly ace and/or bi but in a monogamous marriage to a woman and I don't care about gender at all). I'm also privileged enough to have a high-income job (hopefully the programming market isn't a bubble that's about to pop) and don't spend much money relative to that income so I'm hoping to gain wealth.

I would like to be a proper ally. I plan on becoming politically active and hope that once I hit my savings goal to work on various projects that properly solidify my status as an ally. I would like to use my privilege to spread it to others (when it's a privilege everyone should have) or exterminate it. But I will not go for leadership roles. That's not my place as an ally. It is antithetical to being an ally. My job is to listen, understand as best I can, and aide the people who have the lived experience solve the problems that affect them way more than me. Their understanding is second-nature, and my understanding is second-hand and constantly clouded by a real lack of experience.

Now, I will admit that Bernie Sanders actually has experience on the topic of class. He was not always rich. But he's rich now and it seems like he should defer leadership of the cause to the next generation who are currently living the reality he was once a part of.

I like what Bernie Sanders says, and he seems like a good person, but he doesn't seem like a good fit for leadership of the cause he supports. I apologize if I've missed something incredibly important that invalidates this perspective. If you end up reading this comment, I promise to read whatever it is you send my way. I've only watched a few of your videos, but you (and Hbomberguy) really take proper time to research what you're talking about, and it's something I strive to do but am still far from perfect at. """

It was a video by a YouTuber named Shuan, who makes some good deep dives into the poorly constructed philosophy of white nationalists (aka the alt-right).

Video here.

Sat Sep 9 07:23:33 UTC 2017

Bed time.

Thu Sep 7 15:57:56 UTC 2017

Starting the day off mostly right, Stephan. Woke up at 0800 PDT and managed to not go back to bed. I finally convinced groggy me that I would gain anything going back to sleep, but lose time and possibly--ironically enough--energy.

This is a lesson I learned a long time ago, but I still develop the bad habit of sleeping in if I don't stay vigilant.

Thu Sep 7 16:14:45 UTC 2017

Time to go to work.

Thu Sep 07 17:22:51 UTC 2017

Been at work for a bit. Organized work email (want to stay on top of it from the beginning).

About to deploy thing!

Thu Sep 07 19:54:22 UTC 2017

Mixpanel's iOS 11 Adoption Trend Page.

I have picked this date range because the iOS 11 beta started June 5th (and the proper release hasn't occurred yet), and it's quite cool to see 0% become non-zero on the day of the first beta release.

I am continuing to work on this trend and others.

Thu Sep 07 21:03:09 UTC 2017

Starting headspace over from the beginning. This time I'll do the 10 meditations in 10 days instead of 6 months or so.

Thu Sep 07 21:15:07 UTC 2017

Feeling pretty good.

Thu Sep 07 23:01:51 UTC 2017

Getting pretty tired. Need to do some stuff before I leave. Tried going to nearby supermarket to get some bananas to wake me up and give me some nourishment. Don't think it's working.

Fri Sep 08 01:35:21 UTC 2017

Good day at work, time to head home.

Fri Sep 8 02:34:02 UTC 2017

Home now. Cooking with wife. Got some down time to scan some receipts and tackle inbox and tickler items of the day.

Fri Sep 8 05:04:35 UTC 2017

I was just super pissed over an avalanche of stuff. My receipt scanner was refusing to work, figured it out, but it took way too long. Then the lasagna we made overflowed, and we forgot to put a pan underneath even though we've learned this lesson, so now I've got an oven to clean. And during the oven crisis I lost three competitive games of Overwatch, two of which were super close, and so I'm salty.

I complained about the oven bit way too much and my wife rightly pointed out that it was not a valuable thing to be spending energy on. I'm still pissed, but I'm keeping aware of how I feel and channeling it without repressing or ignoring the feeling.

I feel much better even though I still feel very angry.

I also managed to use this anger energy to write in this diary which furthers my diary-writing goals.

Woo.

Fri Sep 8 05:12:37 UTC 2017

Thinking on it, I may also be a bit hangry. I need some food.

Though the longer I wait here the better the lasagna will be.

Fri Sep 8 05:24:00 UTC 2017

I waited and am now finally eating the lasagna. It is with tomato basil chao vegan cheese, homemade cashew ricotta, gluten-free pasta, and home-made marinara. It is amazing.

Bed time.

Wed Sep 06 21:30:32 UTC 2017

Public-facing thing I'm working on at Mixpanel will be deployed soon. Will link it here when it is.

Wed Sep 06 22:02:15 UTC 2017

I'll actually keep tweaking it after it's live, something I haven't done in a work environment before.

Thu Sep 7 04:45:58 UTC 2017

Today was a good day.

Work thing not pushed to main Mixpanel site, yet. Will definitely be pushed tomorrow.

I didn't throw anything in my tickler to the future. And have a good setup for tomorrow's folder so that I tackle it before leaving for work. I also have some alarms tomorrow to remind me to do some things to setup work stuff for my home computer (ssh keys woo).

Yesterday I got a standing desk from a guy who made it himself but couldn't keep it because he moved into a boat (I already think he's a super cool guy, Stephan).

The desk is amazing and I love it and it is causing a probably-temporary-but-wouldn't-it-be-awesome-if-permanent spike in productivity.

I lurve it.

Thu Sep 7 04:54:21 UTC 2017

Anyways, now that I have a receipt scanner (that thing on top of my filing cabinet....

You know, now that I think about it, that's a perfect place for it, as I may just digitize a lot of the stuff that's old and in there so that I still have it if necessary. It's pretty good at scanning all kinds of documents.

....

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.)

Anyways, now that I have a receipt scanner, I've taken all the receipts I've saved (basically everything since I started the move here) and have divided them up and thrown them into future days into my tickler. At the same time, I'm thinking about the next step in this data crunching process. What form do I want this data to take?

Thu Sep 7 04:59:24 UTC 2017

It is at that question that I started pacing around the room fantasizing about building a site that let users upload receipts, try to scan them, and correct errors in that scan to improve/train the machine learning engine reading the receipts and....

Woah, step back. What's a nice simple step forward that I can do in a five-hour chunk at one of the Saturday Indie Meetups I go to?

Thu Sep 7 05:03:04 UTC 2017

Just got a reminder to meditate. Which reminds me I want to start doing that every workday at least (if not everyday), and that I want to do it around 1400 PDT. I'll go ahead and do my 10^th session (finally) right now, though, as I don't want "poor timing" to be an excuse to skip my meditation. More important to consistently meditate each day than consistently meditate at a particular time of day.

Thu Sep 7 05:19:19 UTC 2017

Glad I did that.

I will seriously consider signing up after I get superfluous spending (alpha version) thought out. If I don't have 25-times the yearly spending of something in an index-fund, then each spending requires spending 25-times that amount into an index fund so that I have that item paid for within a year. This limits my spending on new superfluous things greatly, but allows me to add new things as I finish paying off old things. Also, if I want to cancel a monthly expense that is "paid off", I can apply that to a new thing.

Regular spending that occurs less often than yearly can be considered in a different way. For example, I'd like to build a new computer every 3-5 years or so. I'd like to devote $3000 (that number will surely slowly grow, which is the whole point of factoring inflation) to the new computer. So, that's $1000 per year (at worst), or $600 per year (least frequent buying). I want at least $15000 saved for the 5-year window. Probably $18000 so that I have $15000 after buying the first computer.

Further, I'd like to at least "match" my required spending per month, so that I have a proper stash in case things go horribly wrong. I'd maybe want to keep 6 months of spending in proper savings just in case economy tanks and I lose job, which given the nature of my work it's possible that me having a hard time finding a job will line up with a short stock-market fall.

This is where analysis of spending will become important.

Thu Sep 7 05:31:15 UTC 2017

So, I keep coming back to this, but I haven't wrote anything down here yet.

My uncle Tom died today.

He wasn't a super close uncle, but his death was sudden. From what I hear, yesterday he was having a good day, doing chores and working on projects, and this morning he was gone.

And as I start thinking about it I cry, and it's good to cry.

I had thought about visiting during my six-month sabbitical, but I put it off and eventually forgot. They were family I simply didn't visit with as much as other extended family. And as I didn't pay attention to time, and as my time ran out faster than expected, I ended up prioritizing other things.

It is a regret, for sure. And hopefully something I can internalize so that I can prioritize the right things in the future.

Uncle Tom scared me as a little kid. I don't know if he was actually scary, it's just that he was quiet, and I had internalized quiet to being scary (as my family was either loud happy, loud angry, or scary silent). Another uncle, Uncle Larry, gave me the same vibes but he's the least scary person that I've ever met. I got to visit with him a little bit a couple years ago when they hosted the family reunion at their house. He wasn't scary anymore then.

That was the last interaction I had with him. I can't really remembering ever saying I loved him. Not even the times when it's used to say goodbye. Which I feel now does in fact have its merits.

I love you, Uncle Tom. I'm happy you had a good last day, I'm sorry it was so soon.

Thu Sep 7 05:50:21 UTC 2017

Just told a bunch of people I loved them.

I'll probably add some more people to that list tomorrow.

Tue Sep 05 22:02:14 UTC 2017

I now have a fancy motorized sitting-or-standing desk at home. It was built by a friend of a friend and sold to me at the incredibly decent price of $500. No more hacked together standing desk.

At home, at least. I may just bring my foldable table to work and put it atop my normal desk to make a new hacked-together standing desk.

Something to ask boss and work-area mates.

Tue Sep 05 22:04:21 UTC 2017

Anyways, right now I'm at work and I need to get some work done. I'll actually link to what I finish today, because it's kinda the point that it's easily publishable.

Mon Sep 4 05:43:01 UTC 2017

I have bought and have setup an Epson ES-200 for receipt scanning purposes.

This page convinced me of the value of this particular scanner.

I have test scanned one receipt. The PDF result looks good, though the text-detecting capabilities of the Epson's bundled software isn't great.

I put the PDF result into an online OCR and have had the following results (minus some idenitfying digitry):

"""

STARBUCKS Store #14393 462 Powell Street San Francisco, CA (415) 956-2321

CHK 709784 08/27/2017 11:55 AM 2264490 Drawer: 2 Reg: 1

Reload Card Visa XXXXXXXXXXXX1234 [numbers edited out]

20.00

20.00

Subtotal $20.00 Total $20.00 Change Due $0 . 00

Check Closed-

08/27/2017 11:55 AM

SBUX Card x1234 [also edited] New Balance: 22.88 Registration: Unavailable Join our loyalty program Starbucks Rewards Sign up for promotional emails Visit Starbucks.com/rewards Or download our app At participating stores Some restrictions apply

"""

It's pretty perfect.

So, next I'll find some OCR I like and read the receipts proper. Most receipts should be from the same places, so I should be able to remove the tedious work of digitizing my spending without having to pay some random app $5 a month for the priviledge.

Mon Sep 4 05:50:27 UTC 2017

I'm hopeful that today is the beginning of diarying everyday for a long, long time.

We'll see.

Mon Sep 4 23:07:36 UTC 2017

IGDA talk with Livio.

IGDA is basically the IEEE or ACM of video game development. Except not as driven by academia (yet). Most-recent paper Livio can think of is a paper against crunch. Also do a bunch of lobbying to countries around world (against censorship and such). Philantropic arm, as well, IGDA foundation(?). Grants and stuff for projects and such.

IGDA community divided into chapters. Difference between local professional chapters and school chapters. School ones need to be recognized by department and have faculty members. Local chapters are main way to interact with IGDA. Many game chapters have no incentive to be a part of the IGDA. Often don't want to change brand and names to become part of IGDA.

SIGs are "special interest groups". Games education SIG (very popular). Teachers using games to teach stuff, and also teaching how to make games. Unity Users SIG, taken over by Unity's own efforts (not an IGDA thing much anymore).

Analog gaming SIG. Game accessibility. Game editing (what's game editing?). Game preservation. User research. Game writing. Indy SIG. Jewish community SIG. Women in games. LGBTQ.

Many of the SIGs are dead in IGDA. Groups and stuff just die off, can be frustrating.

Livio's been treating the student SIG as focusing on student chapters.

IGDA is really spread out and not using same tools to communicate.

Executive director of IGDA was Kate Edwards. She was great. Stepped down recently (good time to step down). New director is Jen MacLean. She's in the collecting information and advice from users stage.

Academic affliate program. If you are a school or teacher or faculty member, you can have that department become officially a part of the IGDA. In practice, it's more of a discount. Studio affiliates are the corporate version of it.

Membership is an issue. "How will joining IGDA help me?" (I need to join IGDA.) Compare to ACLU, where becoming a member is marketted as donating. Maybe should represent it that way? IGDA may have legal reasons for not doing that.

IGDA is all volunteers.

Student SIG needs to be a student SIG (represent their needs). Just focusing on chapter leaders isn't properly representative.

Right now we're in the yearly renewal phase of student SIG stuff. Later we have mid-semester renewal stuff. Renewal form was attached to a survey.

Constantly rethink: what is the Student SIG doing? what should it be doing? what do students need?

IGDA has a "mentorship cafe". In-person only. One quick event and hopefully they keep in touch after that. Livio wants to figure out a longer-term, Internet-driven approach.

Feel free to help people with technical expertise.

Wed Aug 30 22:50:45 UTC 2017

Lots of stuff going on. Made forgetting diary really easy.

Had a good time qt QuakeCON and am now spending a week in SF to get to know the main Mixpanel office.

I'll try to write here more often before and after I get back to Seattle.

For the two people who read this, feel free to remind me to write in here. Habits are easier to form with outside intervention.

Sat Aug 19 19:47:37 UTC 2017

It's time for Seattle Indies Meetup again. I came about an hour late and have actually been here for about an hour doing some vim setup.

That's right, back to vim, Stephan. Though, my mentor at work uses VSCode, so I will continue using it as well. I don't see much harm in doing both, and at work I can adopt my mentor's methodology before paving my owh path as far as editor usage goes.

Sat Aug 19 19:52:15 UTC 2017

In any case, today I'm at the meetup with my work laptop to start working on my idea for a Japanese study helper. I'll be shoving it somewhere on this site, so expect a url sooner or later.

Today's goal is to take Japanese text input and split that text into sentences, words, and characters to learn. The general goal is that the user can decide what parts of Japanese to learn based on what they want to consume, and once they have learned/memorized the right things, they can try to consume that very thing.

Unique words within a given piece of media isn't usually that high, so it's much less daunting to work towards consuming a piece of media then being generally able to consume all media within a language, and far less daunting than being creative in that media (aka being able to speak/write unique thoughts in a communicative manner)..

The reason I want to do this is that I have studied Japanese on and off for a while now and have never gotten properly to the point where it has paid off. The means by which language is taught and studied means a lot of work before any real extrinsic payoff. Sure, there's little bits of awesome, but I'd like intermediate rewards.

This thinking has also made me realize that I'm more interested in understanding the language than talking in it. I want to be able to understanding spoken and written Japanese so I can more thoroughly enjoy Japanese media. If I can go further and then speak/write it and make Japanese friends, cool, but that's not really the goal.

Sat Aug 19 20:29:03 UTC 2017

In any case, let's start up a page to enter some text and do some stuff in javascript.

Sat Aug 19 23:47:18 UTC 2017

All I got is splitting via "。" for sentences and spaces for words (won't work for any blog that isn't devoted to teaching Japanese to English speakers. It just console.logs the stuff.

Site will live here. I copied text from Rosa's blog. Which will be a useful site for testing purposes up until I'm good enough at Japanese to find just reguarly Japanese blogs.

Fri Aug 18 11:54:25 UTC 2017

I just had a crazy dream/nightmare and want to log it before it's gone.

Everyone was randomly excited for this weird Twilight Show-esque episode to premiere. It was two different TV shows each going to have an episode called, "The Latches" about something.

There was a party full of people presumeably waiting for one of these episodes to premiere. All of them are whispering about this creepy, kinda chubby kid. The kid keeps looking at where his shadow is. Suddenly he screams. "Wilson's back." A shadow--his shadow?--now has physical form and is wearing some sort of trench coat. The shadow starts floating through the house and anything human it comes into contact with gets distorted and... gory.

Someone was narrating something during this process. I don't remember what, exactly. "No one lasts long surrounded by their shadow."

This felt like a scene directed in a movie. Like, a close-up on the kid looking around. He's backing up. He backs up into a shelf and is a bit startled. His hand brushes a potato chip and there's a false scare, but he realizes it was just a snack. Then he just realizes that "Wilson's back" before even seeing the thing.

Right now it's super dark in my apartment and I'm actually a little creeped out for the first time in a long time.

Fri Aug 18 11:59:49 UTC 2017

Anyways, I'm still falling into a rhythm, and keeping this here diary hasn't hasn't been added to the priority queue, so to speak. I'd super like to proper blog every day (like have a little thing written each day like my dream above).

Mixpanel has been super cool, Stephan. It's going to be significantly different from my last job. Which is basically exactly what I wanted. Though, I don't think "significantly better". The last place was still super cool in my mind so far. I have already pushed code at Mixpanel. "Push code your first day," is an explicit goal there. I didn't quite make that. First week is pretty good, though.

There was some miscommunication about how my first week should go, as they're trying a different order of operations with me. I'm working at their Seattle office, but their main office is in San Francisco. Typically, the first week is still in SF, but they're trying setup in Seattle first, and then having my week in SF, so that my week in SF can be about why I'm in SF and not also about getting an introduction to working at Mixpanel.

Nothing major lost, just some meetings that I dialed into that they then decided I should do when I'm physically in SF so that I can physically attend them.

Fri Aug 18 12:14:07 UTC 2017

I have been sleeping on a traditional futon the last few days. Before that, I was just sleeping on a matt with some bed cushioning on top whilst the wife slept on the futon. She decided a real bed was in order and I ordered a Tuft & Needle twin bed. I have quite liked sleeping on the floor, but decided to upgrade to the futon as the matt was probably going too far (kept worrying I was losing circulation to my legs).

I'm not sure if the week or so of sleeping on the matt has skewed my judgement, but sleeping on the futon has been pretty great. It's properly comfortable and when I wake up I roll it up and have that much more room in the apartment (though room isn't exactly an issue even in this small studio).

Ever since switching to it, I have woken up each day around 5 a.m. for no discernable reason. Today, I guess the "nightmare" woke me up, but it didn't really register that much as a nightmare until I started thinking of it. In fact, the dream slowly came back to me in the minutes I took to wake up. My first though waking up was "why 5 a.m. again?".

Uusally I go back to bed, but last night I explicitly made the plan to try to stay awake upon waking up at this time and see how I feel.

Which was an excellent excuse to make a post in my diary, anyways.

It's been a half-hour and I feel like I could sleep more so I may just lay back down after all.

Fri Aug 18 15:35:25 UTC 2017

I logic'ed myself into going back to bed, but waking up was way more a chore and I feel no more awake. Over the weekend, if I'm waking up at 5 a.m., I'm staying up to see how tired I'll be throughout the day.

Mon Aug 14 14:24:09 UTC 2017

First day of work today, woo! Going to leave in about 50 minutes.

I'm a real adult again.