Young Hands Club

Daily template

Morning (5h):

• 1h warmup & breakfast
• 2h write for blog + break
• 2h recent log + article reading + responses, or errands.

Afternoon (6h):

• 0.5h lunch
• 1h reading: leisure on Mon/Wed/Fri, work related on Tue/Thu/Sat.
• 1.5h focused project work time
• 3pm – 5pm (UTC-4) project work + #o chat window
• 0.5h walk or exercise
• 0.5h flex

Evening (5h):

• 2h dinner
• 0.5h blog prep
• 1.5h flex
• 0.5h journal
• 0.5h winding down

This indicates 4-5.5 hours for project work on typical days. Subtracting 4 for weekly review and planning and 4-6 for social time gives 18-30 in the week.

Specific tasks

1. Continue office setup (router OS install + config; SSD upgrade for TRB machine): 5h.

2. Continue researching and apply for temporary local health insurance: 4h.

3. Sign and release v.pl patch and starter.

4. Press and test mod6’s TRB Keccak tree: 1h.

5. Update and test TRB patches (rawtx, Gales build): 6h.

6. Continue v.sh study: 2h.

7. Keep in touch with remote friends and family.

8. Assist Robinson as necessary with chasing deals, editing sales content or choosing boundaries to break the lesson plans into modules.

9. Next week’s review: due Friday (at least as it stands now).

Time permitting

10. Make a list of applications I use, for later genesis.

Other

Advance bedtime by 3 hours through the week. (I have no clue why I’m doing this plan at this hour… it just wouldn’t feel like a Sunday if I weren’t up doing some late thing apparently?)

Having arrived at my parents’ place on Sunday after a scramble to evacuate the Isthmus, I found myself with an office to provision and an ample pile of sleep debt to pay. I shopped online and in town in a climate of increasing unavailabilities on both fronts, securing items including ethernet switch, ownable router, headset for VOIP calls, prepaid cell plan refill, surge protector, and SSD. ((My home TRB node was on a desktop that stayed behind.)) The family supplied space, a table, and a temporary exemption from the ban on draping network cables over the mantelpiece. ((“Are you sure you can’t just use the WiFi?” – “Yes.”

What, is it my fault the place wasn’t properly cabled – or at least conduited – at construction? Though to their credit they had sufficient length of cable on hand.))

I did some approximation of the deferred reviews, though with considerable cost in spinning-time. This added a fresh contribution to what seems to be a growing pile of grumpiness and resistance underlying a layer of lip service to the practice. I talked about the matter with my parents, in the context of a larger question of why I keep myself under such constant pressure. We concluded that at least the way I go about it now the reviewing isn’t worthwhile, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done much quicker; maybe less perfectionism, or less self-flagellation, or giving recorded conversations a try. While the TMSR shutdown may have added to the brain-mess, it can’t be the primary cause since this has been ongoing.

The work involved in getting a reliable and dependency-light V on Gales turned out to be much more than I’d anticipated, but I’ve now advanced it to a useful milestone — and gained all the more material to write about, though I didn’t at first see this as an upside.

In more front-line JWRD activities, I read and gave some feedback on Robinson’s sales article drafts, and got our first training session outline dusted off as a sample for prospective client Daniel Godwin the cross-shaped.

Items in the incomplete bin are testing the Keccakized TRB V-tree and local health insurance (though relatedly, we found that my parents’ doctor is not seeing new patients even for emergency). I’m thinking to leave them there and take an actual Sunday off.

Looking closer at the TMSR situation might be what got me hung up on the review before, and perhaps I’ll set it aside again in the interests of keeping the rest moving, though this leaves a debt that will surely come due soon enough.

Another point from the wallet episode was that I could have asked more assertively or widely for help on testing.

In between wallet work days I prepared and delivered my relational databases presentation for the Junto. Having done a lengthy search for introductory texts online and come up short of anything satisfactory, I decided to go to the source with Codd’s 1970 “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”. This certainly deepened my own grasp of the concepts and their historical context. I used selections to guide the lecture, with some questions to maintain engagement, then covered some SQL basics, and finished with a guided exercise in designing a schema with a few relations, inserting rows and running queries from the shell. There isn’t a strong programming background in the group and I don’t expect anyone went home able to put it all in practice, but I’d say it gave a glimpse of a world beyond the spreadsheet and whet the appetite for more, which is the main idea of these presentations.

Not so great was doing the prep in last-minute emergency mode, not having substantiated prior plans of getting ahead on it.

In day-to-day Bitcoin adventures, the price crashed against fiat, in a time marked both by MP’s closure and escalating coronavirus mayhem. I used GBW to recover the last of my wayward coin from PRB change addresses and an ancient phone wallet backup. On Tuesday the 17th I decided to sell a good chunk of what I had left; unfortunate to be doing so under the conditions, but I figured it safer than risking being forced to liquidate even lower. In a first OTC sale attempt, the counterparty “was buying” and “had cash” but turned out to be brokering and didn’t. As lockdowns in the city were getting ever more pronounced, I pushed to get it done the next day with a more reliable local broker.

This proved good timing indeed, as Panama’s virus response reached a breaking point for Robinson and me with the announcement of upcoming halt of passenger flights. I guess it can’t really be called a Berlin Wall since they don’t give advance notice when those go up; still, the prospect of being locked into a small and import-dependent country for an indefinite time, having a bunch of contacts but just a handful of friends and no family, did not appeal in the least.

I moved quickly, booking a flight, getting packed, renting a vehicle, and hauling stuff out to assorted storage locations, both for security and the possibility of discontinuing the apartment contract. Local friends proved solid in this process, and we got in a farewell celebration – just marred by a takeout pizza run that barely finished in time to get home by curfew.

It’s been a momentous two weeks since my last review.

I started Monday the 9th behind schedule, having overrun on review and planning the night before. Over the next three days I poured considerable time and effort into polishing off the various parts of my wallet. One aspect of this was simplifying some of the code and configuration process by eliminating unnecessary optionality, and documenting the choices that remained – or so I thought. Another was getting my Scheme interpreter into shape for a genesis, such as getting the tabs and newlines a good deal closer to TMSR style, and backporting some simple improvements from an experimental branch. I let slide the sendrawtransaction TRB patch regrind, in part because I had little idea what sort of bitcoind MP was running or if he even wanted to use the online part (gbw-node) at all. I didn’t note this explicitly though, possibly until now.

Upon entering the field with MP on Thursday though, the attempt sunk before any of these points even came up, because of assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d been making. I walked straight into a trap, by answering that I was indeed trying to state dependencies explicitly, yet left the download and V press steps to the imagination because “obviously he’ll know how to do that”. The upside of the preparation was that I was at least well set up to be surprised; that is, rather than missing things I knew I should have done, I learned a new standard of what preparedness means.

This intersected the larger story of the closure of TMSR announced the day before, and I remain grateful for being given my moment to struggle there, right at the end of it.

To be continued.