Young Hands Club

To prevent my reviews from becoming a monotonous set of bullet points, for this week I’ll give a more casual retelling of the flow of events and how I changed.

I was rather melancholy during my saltmine time (Monday+Tuesday+half of Wednesday) given The State of Sadness. ((Enough on this has been said, I won’t weigh in.)) The work I had to do ((Designing and implementing the behavior for when users quit out / resume an app session with the ‘home’ button)) was tedious and while I completed my 20 hours I did not work with the same energy as I had the previous week. I want to try to be more productive during my saltmine work, as it can be used as a training ground where I get paid to improve my organizational skills, work ethic, ability to comb through spaghetti code, etc.

I was brightened up on Wednesday by a surf session in the evening. The lineup was crowded but I was able to find my way onto a few beautiful waves. Lui, my friend who I was almost going to be neighbors with, spent our 5 minute car ride to the surf spot explaining to me and the other person in the car that getting bitcoin right now is like trading rice for its weight in gold. He then stated he is liquidating his assets into btc and going to be living in a tent / on another friend’s couch in Nicaragua. He sold a lot of land he held title to near where I live for 2btc. This made me wonder how much local bitcoin commerce there is here. Lui said he is also selling his ’98 Toyota Pathfinder (recently put through the shop, but with 135,000 miles) for .5btc. The offer is tempting, but I believe what he said in the car ride.

The core of my week (Wednesday-Saturday) was spent fixing and contemplating my fuckup with the new selection links. This took a chunk of time, but it was valuable on many fronts. The first gain I had was getting a good grasp of how matching works for the selection tool, allowing me to quickly make links that select the text I want. The second gain was getting an experience that allowed me to better understand a valuable monologue diana_coman had posted when I first joined younghands. My fix to what I thought was a problem ((HTML tags being broken by poorly crafted query params)) was an example of how “my self-perceived needs [were] conflict with my betters’ design”. I will be extra careful now to consider whether my problems are worth fixing or if they are downstream from a larger problem. The third gain was I discovered a small issue with “pingback linkbacks.” The fourth gain was I perhaps uncovered a serious problem with my thinking process that caused me to create the broken links in the first place.

The tasks that didn’t get completed ((at least not as of Saturday night)) were my V post, my post on The Odyssey, and my 50 pages of reading my next book. I feel that I need to get my thoughts on The Odyssey down while the book is at least somewhat fresh in my mind. But seeing as I read the first half of the translated poem many months ago, I do not have high hopes for this review.

Also, I fumbled with practicing Spanish this week. Being busy with other work, I didn’t study and hoped to get whatever practice in through real interactions. But even though I am surrounded by Spanish speakers, I have been a recluse in my apartment apart from when I get an hour of exercise surfing. I now have some physical books in Spanish though, and I believe I should start spending a little time each day reading.

As for guitar, I made more out of the time I played. I practiced with a metronome, and worked on my scales as well as a new technique – the abanico. It would do me well to get a music stand and print out some sheet music.