Young Hands Club

> 1. Continue health insurance search: 3h.

2h so far, wherein I learned a bit more about the types of plans that might be available for my situation, and gathered some phone numbers: one for a specific local broker, one for a brokerage firm that seems oriented toward unconventional cases like mine (international or temporary), and one directly for an insurance company believed to offer such plans. I seem to be dragging my feet on actually making contact.

One (unsurprising) development that makes things at least a little clearer is that Panama extended its suspension of flights by another month. Thus I don’t expect to return to residing there any time soon, if at all.

> 2. Continue conversation with prospective JWRD client in Vermont: 3h.

1.35h for prep, call and debrief. This is an investment advisory firm with around 20 members, one of whom is the Vermont connection. We’ve now spoken with the CTO, who seems positive about working with us long term but has a larger board to consult with, and we’ll need to figure out a good smaller starting project.

> 3. Follow up with Robinson to work out his priorities and what more is needed from me, and do that (eg. sales article review, proposal for client): 4h.

I’m seeing 2.2h overall on JWRD chat. We established that the current prospect and Robinson’s sales article are priorities for this week. Currently we’re waiting to hear back from the investment advisory and I don’t know where the article stands. We haven’t moved much on a larger priorities discussion.

> 4. Investigate TRB sync logic, towards the goal of figuring out why it frequently stops getting connectable blocks. (Leaving aside for now how/when it connects to peers, which I was also curious about upon observing very slow recovery after network outage, but that looks like a separate matter.) 4h.

I spent 5.2h getting into a serious reading of the code, in which I repeatedly got worked up about what a damned mess it remains, all these years in. At the same time, my own node has been much steadier getting blocks lately, so it might be time to set this down until there’s a clearer business need and outreach strategy.

> 5. Refine new time tracking tool as needed. 2h.

There’s just been a bit of display format tweaking so far; otherwise it’s been more refining how I categorize things.

> 6. Blog: main priorities are my existing unsung stuff namely trb patches, gbw, gscm. Also there’s the router setup and where I’m heading with the differential backups work. I’ll go for three articles, since that’s the pace that seems manageable lately. 10h.

This is running behind with one article and 4.9h.

> 7. Unexpected tasks: 4h.

1.2h testing / exploring Zoom with dad. (He’ll be training some lower-tech colleagues on it, and I’m seeing it as a good option for JWRD for remote training, with some hardware investment.)

5.7h on JWRD related reading, topics including video conferencing, the new prospect, and strange heathen beliefs about “e-signatures” and related rituals.

0.75h on mod6 comments (the main one caught in spam queue again).

> 8. Chat in #ossasepia, or otherwise engage blogs: 5h.

I’m seeing 5.7h on chat plus YH comments. My output doesn’t seem to reflect efficient use of this time. I think there was some amount of “don’t feel like doing anything else, so I’ll just stand by and see if anything happens.” Maybe I just need more/better breaks otherwise.

> 9. Weekly review: 2h at 17:00 UTC Friday (13:00 local).

2.3h; I got started late again.

> 10. Next week’s plan: 1h.
> 11. Keep in touch with past students + remote friends and family: 1h. (Didn’t end up doing this Sunday so perhaps I’d better make it a part of the work week.)

Planning both of these for Saturday.

> 12. Continue work toward a human-sized differential backup tool.

5.1h on Monday. This has reached the point of a serviceable, even improved replacement for “diff -qr”: catalog two trees and produce a create/modify/change-metadata/delete listing, either by full content hash or metadata only for fast runs on large sets. Or check integrity by comparing to a previously saved catalog. Next up is a piece to apply the discovered changes between local directories at which point it’ll serve for backups.

Total is 36.4h. Takeaways:

T1. Plan more unexpected time.

T2. Maintain momentum on the filesystem sync project. It’s a much smaller problem with more tangible short-term value than fixing bitcoin.

T3. Take more responsibility for moving JWRD forward.

T4. Focus on 6, 10 and 11 for the remainder of the week.

T5. Tackle the insurance problem one bite at a time: do at least something to move it forward every day.