I’m increasingly noticing Swedish culture, and I am constantly intrigued by it.

Also, everything about this video makes me want to start getting better at building things. I sometimes still feel like I am renting this house rather than living in it. This means I have a list of small, annoying things about my house that I just deal with rather than experiment with and fix them.

(Paul, since you’re just about the only person I know who reads this blog, I’d love to hear what you think 😂)

Fun exploration of why <font color=“chucknorris”> gets converted into <font color=“#c00000”>.

Apparently timbornholdt gets converted into #0b00d0, a lovely shade of blue.

Genius. A list of all the various services that AWS offers, but a basic explanation of what they do.

I’ve implemented OAuth in both directions, and I still learned something new from reading this article about how OAuth works.

Canadian engineers graduating college are all given an iron ring. It's a symbol of professional responsibility to society. It also recognises that every discipline must earn its social license to operate. Lastly, it serves as a reminder of the consequences of shoddy work and corner-cutting.

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred "DX" puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

What we do in the world matters, particularly our vocations, not because of how it affects us, but because our actions improve or degrade life for others. It's hard to imagine that culture while the JavaScript-industrial-complex has seized the commanding heights, but we should try.

And then we should act, one project at a time, to make that culture a reality.

I’m slowly introducing exercise back into my routine.

A few days ago, I unceremoniously added a feature to the front page of this blog which tracks the number of consecutive days that I did 100 sit ups.

It’s been hard, private work. There was a day last week I took the bus downtown, and I found myself needing to brace before we rounded a corner. Otherwise, my core throbbed.

I’m also adding running back to my routine. I’ve done a 4 mile loop every other day for a few weeks now. I’m still slow (9:10 pace?), and I’m still having to ice my knees at night.

But boy, I sure do feel grateful for the ability to get out there and pound the pavement!

A third thing I’ve been working on is my writing. I’ve been experimenting with blogging monthly recaps of my thoughts and whatnot that I collect in my journal, which feels useful to me, but not specifically the end game.

I’d love to turn all this writing into something useful. Like writing lyrics or poems.

I came across this article in my Instapaper queue, and it is helping me work through some of the reasons I like both of those parts of me.

I didn’t get a specific pull quote from this article because it feels like one of those articles you need to enjoy in its entirety.

Matt Might wrote some shell scripts back in 2010 to identify and correct a few bad writing habits.

Simon Willison took these scripts and used Claude to build a tool that does the same, but within a web browser.

I could see taking this concept and baking it into my publish system for this blog. I am very interested in becoming a stronger writer, and having something like my own Rubocop would be annoyingly useful.

It’s easy to let ourselves get overwhelmed by the demands of our everyday lives or sometimes to become a bit obsessed with big, existential questions. But what both extremes can do is rob us of the opportunity to be present. Meaningfully present.

It’s so remarkable, and so improbable, that we’re all here together. We should probably focus on enjoying that.

Got a lot of good quotes from this one, including Kmele Foster (who hosted it) and artists Godfrey Reggio, Steve Albini, and Fred Armisen.

Really great recommendation by my wife via Hank Green.

Everything in here, by the way, is completely true. Most of the technology you use every day is intentionally designed to keep you using it as long as possible.

I like the idea of going a full day without a phone to distract me. I really gotta finish getting my iPod working¹ and keeping up my book habit.

• Is part of my problem with focus due to my brain's constant reevaluation of priorities? Like, if my immediate priority is to fix the foam gravestones that broke last Halloween, then my next step is to go to Menards... which feels like way too much effort compared to the payoff. So I decide it makes more sense to build up a list of things I need from Menards and wait until that list becomes high value enough to execute on it. Meanwhile, the foam gravestones sit in my garage, losing value every day that Halloween approaches. Instead, what if I just finished the task without trying to get the maximal payoff?

• One of our most important evolutionarily significant traits is our ability to recognize patterns. Here's my question: do we overindex on the importance of pattern matching simply because we're good at it?

• One of the coolest parts of mindfulness and awareness is seeing it manifest in everyday occurrences. For example: the other day, I was out on a walk and decided to listen carefully to the noises I heard. As a car drove past me, it felt like I could hear the pistons firing inside the engine.

• My Anxiety Attack Mitigation playlist was assembled as a way to... well, mitigate anxiety attacks.¹ I realized while listening to it this month that the way this works is to induce joy and confidence. Are anxiety and joy two sides of the same coin?

• A growth mindset is easy to achieve when I'm surrounded by people who give me energy, and a scarcity mindset is easy to achieve when I'm left alone with my thoughts for too long.

• There's something magical about watching grown men play a game of football in the misty rain. We're meant to be outside on a rainy day. It's rejuvenating.

• When I make statements like "I want to solve problems that are worth solving," I think what I actually mean is "I want to contribute to solving problems which are only solvable through collective action."

• There's so much to be afraid of. There's so much to celebrate. All you can do is keep your chin up and keep pushing forward.

• I have a simple litmus test for the efficacy of Siri: "Hey Siri, shuffle playlist 'pump up'." In the initial launch of Voice Control on iOS 4, this started the music app and began playback within a second or two. Anecdotally, over the last 15 years, it feels like this test has gotten progressively slower. This latest Apple Intelligence-powered release of Siri is roughly 1.5x slower than the previous iteration of Siri.²

• I came home from an early chilly walk to write this post and saw my son awake in the living room chair watching his tablet. I told him he shouldn't be on screens so much today (we've been on screens a lot this Thanksgiving weekend), and he responds by turning on the TV, starting a YouTube video, and dancing along with it. I love this little guy.

• I had a Czech lager the other day that was incredible, and it made me wonder if my Czech relatives would have enjoyed it as well. I bet they'd be proud of me right now. I think I'll be pretty proud of my descendants, too.

• The common theme of my journal entries from November are issues with confidence and focus. If anyone has any tips on improving either of those general areas of my life, I'm all ears.

• A major roadblock to fully enjoying life is a vague fear that I'm constantly being taken advantage of. I'll spend $40 less on a concert ticket because it feels like I'm rebelling against Ticketmaster, but all that act of rebellion gets me is a subpar artistic experience. I should start factoring in that $40 as the cost of maximizing joy and being more fully present.³

• A video I watched about blindfolded speed runs of Super Mario 64 introduced me to the concept of "beat counting." Basically, you listen along to the beat of the song in the level, and then you time out your movements according to the beat. Wild!⁴

• Another video I watched explained the point of poetry, which is to drop you into a certain experience made for you to contemplate and reflect. It's a simple concept and immediately transferable to any art form... but again, it's my predilection for trying to understand the rules of any given system which hamstrings me from fully appreciating art.

• This Marcus Aurelius quote resonated with me this month: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it. And this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Maybe this quote can help me with confidence?

• I spend too much time stressing about whether I'd be able to survive in any era prior to the one I'm living in. Like, would I have survived in the colonial era? Or in the pharaoh times? Or in the Paleolithic era?⁵

• I know I'm only able to focus on one thing at a time, but it's rare that I'm able to choose what that one thing is. If my wife asks me to bring the Christmas decorations out from under the house, I'll come across my box of cables that's on the opposite side of the crawl space from the Christmas decorations. 45 minutes later, I'm sitting buried in a bunch of piles of cables, none of which are any more "sorted through", and I still haven't gotten the Christmas decorations out.

• When I was a younger, I remember learning about the concept of a golden birthday and wondering what I would do for mine (which was 30). I thought maybe a grown-up gift to get was a new car. I can't believe that at age 37, I bought myself a new car for my birthday. As much as "adulting" and "growing up" sucks, it also unequivocally rules.⁶

• I've been playing around with a new mantra this past week: "win this moment." Whenever it's popped into my head, it's worked for me. Struggling at mile 3 of a cold jog? Win this moment. The boy wants to explain something to you about Rainbow Friends? Win this moment. A unit test keeps failing with an inscrutable error message? Win this moment. Walking through the kitchen and tempted by a cookie? Win this moment.

• I've decided I'm going to watch through all of the movies in my movie collection. I did this with my music collection and it took me 5 years to complete it, so I'm not sure how long this is gonna take lol. My rating system consists of two binary questions: "am I glad I watched this?" and "will I ever watch this again?". I'm thinking I might build a sub webpage here to track the movies I'm watching with this system.

• I never understood the concept of expressing love through cooking until I watched my mother-in-law make an entire Thanksgiving dinner this year. I've always viewed cooking as a utilitarian pursuit with a goal of filling bellies. I get now that you can put in an insane amount of effort into something simply for the satisfaction of smiling faces, as well as the joy you get from providing a space to assemble your loved ones in a single room in the midst of our chaotic lives.