Category: General

Younger was being very challenging this morning. She said she was tired so I was content to let her sleep in. I was tired also. She didn’t stay in her room for long, I caught her trying to slide out of her room on her belly. She was trying to stay below my line of sight — I can see her doorway and the hall as I lay on my side on the edge of the bed. I just had to raise my head a few inches and there she was, with her tablet, trying to sneak downstairs. I tried to coax her back to the bathroom to do her morning chores instead, but she fought me every step of the way. After I finally got her to school I saw that she had thrown sand and mud on the car in the one minute she was outside without me.

So the whole morning was thrown off, although it wasn’t really her fault. I stayed up late last night “doing research” as I call it now, culminating with a thirty dollar purchase on Steam. Today should still be productive though, I have plenty on my to-do list that I’m ready to get to.

So I’m officially an old man now, I kid. I went to get new glasses a few weeks ago and they sold me bifocals, or as they’re called, progressive lenses. Whatever.

Fall is officially here, with weather in the forty to sixty degree range. The first day of fall the temperature plunged from the mid-eighties down into the forties. I joked that the weather looked at it’s calendar, said “it’s fall y’all”, and cranked down the thermostat.

I’ve started meditating first thing in the morning again. I’m not quite sure why I stopped, although if I’m being honest with myself it’s probably due to cannabis. So for the last month, month and a half I’ve just been getting up and getting straight to work. I’m trying to get back to my practice. So here I am.

I finally tore down my mining rig and disposed of it, I gave it to my friend Ed. The equipment is still good but it wasn’t worth my time to try and sell it off. GPU prices crashed — rather returned to normal — because of the ETH merge to PoS. So the rig is gone, and I finally repurposed my Alienware laptop. It never really ran Ubuntu really well, and I moved the last of my scripts off of it, wiped it, and put Win10 back on it. It’s going to replace Missus’s current desktop.

I ordered a new build gaming PC yesterday. The one I have currently is holding up well, but I’ve got a 3070 in it and the CPU and memory are the bottleneck now, so I built a modest rig (sans GPU) for under $1100. It should be here tomorrow. So I’ll be shuffling them all down the line. My current one will go to the girls, and that one will get donated or something. I don’t even know how old that last one is. I think I’ve had it at least ten years or more.

The family and I are in a really good spot right now, I’m making more money than I know what to do with. I’m buying about three grand of crypto a month, doubled my rent payments into the house fund, am tucking another four grand a month for auto and home, and still paying off the CC bill every month. And then this weekend I found that I had an extra $500 in my paycheck. Apparently I hit some Social Security maximum, so I’ll be getting an extra three grand before the end of the year.

So yea, money has been burning a hole in my pocket. So far I’ve been able to keep myself from doing anything quite so stupid with my cash, like buying a sport car or motorcycle. I have gone kind of crazy with groceries and some small subscriptions for things, but besides windows for the house, I haven’t made any large purchases.

We are going to Costa Rica for Christmas. We had flight vouchers for the Hawaii trip that we needed to use, so we went ahead and booked a trip. We’ll be staying at an all-inclusive, and even that isn’t costing us that much because of travel miles.

So yesterday’s “flood” was anticlimactic. Ian, or what was left of it, turned, sparing us from any threat. This was after I went into full fledged daddy-bear mode, and wound up trying to prepare for the worst while my wife looked on bemusedly. D. wound up buying sandbags and a load of sand, so I helped him, even though he lives several houses further away from the river than us. I figured if he was going to need them then we were going to be hit very bad, but I gave him a hand anyways, filling bags to put in front of his garage doors. He even went back out and got a second load of sand so that we could put them down in front of mine. They were totally unnecessary.

So now I’m the proud owner of about thirty-odd sandbags, still laying in front of the garage. I’ll probably stack them up inside the garage somewhere — I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I’ll need them again.

I wasn’t able to do any work yesterday with the girls and D.’s kids stuck in the house all day. They weren’t too bad, but even on their best days I’m unable to concentrate on anything important, so I had to cancel my meetings for the start of the sprint. So that’s first on today’s agenda.

The last 426 event was a smash success. Our DAO update went off without much trouble, the team had prepped things well and we ran into a few wet paint issues that we quickly took care of. In all, we had almost one million dollars of ATLAS locked up within twenty-four hours of launch. I spent the last week working on some data analysis; the team knew what they had to do so I didn’t have to spent much time with my PM hat on, but I did want to have some basic metrics in place. I used Flipside Crypto’s SQL index of Solana transactions to pull data into a Colab notebook where I could manipulate it with Pandas. It was fun, and I’d like to do more with it, but I think I’ll be tied up with other tasks this week.

So the remnants of Hurricane Ian have stalled off the coast, causing Nor’easter conditions. We’re expecting an afternoon storm surge five foot above sea level, which may be enough to flood the entire foundation of the house. I expect the backyard shed and front garage to flood, so I’ve got some work to do the next six hours.

D. has already picked up some sand and bags and is trying to protect his garage. He’s much further down the street that we are, so if he’s flooding we are definitely fucked. I think we stand a much better chance of moving our stuff around, his garage is packed full of stuff. I’m going to go help him load up his bags, then I’ll try to front run the flooding to keep any chemicals or tools from getting ruined.

Missus seems somewhat nonchalant about the situation, which is surprising as she’s usually the anxious one. Who knows, maybe it’ll all be for naught, but it does go to some higher-level anxiety that I’ve had since we bought this house. It’s going to flood at some point, the question is when. I’ve been a bit crazed lately over the global macroeconomic situation, mainly with interest rates in the US. Who knew that the baller thing to do in 2021 was lock in a two percent mortgage?

Part of me has long been anxious that we would never be able to sell this house. It already had minor flood damage before we bought it, and I just anticipate having a hard time trying to sell it after we’ve scored a direct hit from a real storm. That unease has been further exacerbated by the fact that the housing market has cooled down now that rates are at seven percent or whatever.

I’m going to try and clean up the garage and get a couple more things out of the shed. If the garage floods I will have a big mess to clean up, so I’m going to try and get things off the floor as much as possible.

I’m not concerned with personal health, we’re not in danger. We’ve got plenty of emergency supplies and non-perishable food. We’ll be fine. I just don’t want to have to spend days or weeks cleaning up the mess and throwing out ruined construction materials or whatever junk I’ve got laying around. And the last thing I want is to have to deal with FEMA flood insurance. That would be the real disaster.

I’ve been playing with my new hobby: generative AI art.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks; I’m going to be doing a deep dive into the machine learning models and applications over the next week or so. I don’t think most people really understand these natural language prompt systems are going to have on us over the next months and years. Artists understand, yes, some of them, but tools like DALL-e, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and GPT have gotten much better over the last year or two, and they’re quality — but not tooling — have reached commercial and production quality.

Some of these models have already been put into use for video upscaling. Think VHS to 4k conversions, for example. And some of the things being done with virtual humans… zoinks.

There’s a lot of music generation going on that’s just scary. There are many companies out there offering song generation on demand. I’ve got several bookmarked that allow you varying levels of customization parameters to prompt your own house music track, for example. I’ll be combining one of those with the SD video I rendered last night.

The use of these models for brainstorming is immense, and overwhelming. I was working on a new song last week when I started messing around with these audio platforms.

It almost makes artistry obsolete. Coming up with ideas is trivial now, just push the button and you’ve got something unique. Using it as a starting point and mixing in various prompted results in manual and automated ways is going to be an artform of its own in a decade, maybe next year.

Today’s Friday, and I’m feeling better today. I forced myself to bed last night even though I wasn’t feeling drowsy, and tossed and turned until after one, brain giving me todos and thinking about work. One very critical thing did pop to my mind that warranted a reminder for this morning: funds in an untouched IRA wallet that should be awaiting me, salvage from the Perpetual Protocol v1 crash. Could be tens of thousands of USDC that I should have put into BTC as I did with the salvage from my regular account.

I’ve been attempting to buy an entire bitcoin the past few weeks, since the bottom dropped out of the market I’ve been aggressively throwing setting stinkbid limit orders up on FTX. I still have them, all the way down to 18k, but I doubt we’ll be seeing that price action anytime soon. Every time we run up I set more orders, 22050, 23050, and so on, trying to catch any dips. I’ve still got cash orders, and am more than halfway to my goal.

I find I don’t have the energy to keep up with everything as I did before. I’m sure not as active as I was during the last bull, aping into anything and everything. I’m not even interested in what’s going on outside of the ETH merge and SOL development. There’s just too much to worry about, and Star Atlas has enough going on there to keep me busy.

Speaking of work, I’m trying to step up my PM game. The ATLAS locker is almost out of my hands at this point, so I’m turning my attention to the proposals system and everything that encompases. Since we’re not under any pressure to deliver that, I’ve got a bit of room to sit back and think about the overall product pipeline, and flesh out my process. We mainly work out of two apps, Notion and ClickUp. Rather, I should say that the engineers work out of Clickup, but it seems that RevOps and most of the game development planning goes into Notion. Sometimes it feels like my job is literally copying and pasting from one to the other, but that’s not quite the full story.

I had lots of ideas last night that I need to add to my various backlogs. Plus I plan on cooking hibachi for the neighbors, since they fed the girls earlier this week. I got pounds of chicken, shrimp, and steak, and bought everything to make yum yum sauce and fried rice. Thankfully I only have one meeting today.

It’s been a while since I’ve sat in this chair, but I’ve been going slightly crazy and I guess I need to talk to somebody, even if it’s only myself.

Missus has been out of town since Sunday, on one of her Union-related activities. She’s been 100% for the last week, and I’m feeling 100% certifiable. I kid. I can’t count how many times I’ve yelled or lost my temper at the kids. They are doing their damndest to drive me insane, with what seems like constant bickering. Younger especially seems intent on testing boundaries. I vaguely remember Elder going through this and it driving me over the edge. I’m trying to handle it.

Working with them in the house has always been particularly tough, I remember COVID vividly. And work has taken a particularly serious tone lately, with some overdue airing of grievances and growth pains related to scaling. So I’m doubly stressed. I’ve turned into Eeyore.

It’s incredibly difficult to leave them (the children) to their own devices. Both of them gravitate toward the lowest common denominator of media, Elder to YouTube videos of Lord knows what idiot, and Elder tends to gravitate to sitcoms full of idiots. They’re already up half an hour or more before I wake up and they’re already at it, and there’s hell to pay when I ask them to put it down and find something else to do for a few hours. I’ve stuffed this house full of books, games, toys, musical instruments, and tons of activity books, crafts and so on.

We have had our moments though. Usually Younger gives me a very hard time at bedtime, she always reaches a point where she’s done with me reading her books and runs out of the room to get her mother, who lays with her in the dark until she falls asleep. I’ve managed to put her to sleep by reading An Incredible Journey, the classic book about two dogs and a cat, and I only need to read a page or two to her before she falls right out. It’s nice, and it feels good to be able to read the words and have my voice calm her, instead of the refereeing or mediation that I have to do.

I have not been taking good care of myself — obviously, it’s been over a week since I’ve sat here. The only exercise I’ve had the last week was cutting the grass, so I decided to go to the rock gym today. Of course the tunnel was backed up, and what should have been a twenty-five minute trip across was extended by an hour, mostly bumper to bumper as we tried to traverse the quarter mile to the on-ramp. Curse me.

We got there, eventually, and I had a somewhat middling session, since I was having to run back and forth every attempt or two to keep an eye on the girls. But I’m impressed. Elder is giving it a try, and is doing well, but she seems to be do a mostly head-on, centered approach to it, compared to her sister who seems to have picked up something of climbing’s natural hip-shifting, fluid movements.

The main source of frustration I seem to be having is the lack of flow. Now, with them in bed it’s not a problem, but every minute they’re awake that I’m trying to work I’m either getting interrupted every five minutes or feeling guilty because I’ve been letting them watch too much TV.

The good news is that they’ll be back in school in three weeks or so. The bad news is that Missus comes home late Saturday, then leaves again on Wednesday for another four days out of town. She’ll only be forty minutes away this time, and we’ll be able to visit her, but still, I may need to disappear completely when she gets back.

I’ve been dealing with a knee injury for the last week, a bouldering accident. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, it was near the beginning of my session and I walked it off pretty quickly. I knocked my right kneecap on a volume or something, I don’t remember. I do remember having a really good session though. I did several V4s that I was surprised I was able to complete, including one that involved a high step on my right foot, hip to the wall. It was a lot of torque, almost like a one-legged squat, but I was able to apply some counter pressure with my hands. I felt strong as shit.

I finished the session on a 5.10 on the top rope. I really pushed myself, it was really hard and my forearms were absolutely crushed, but I sent it. I got home late and hopped into the shower and came out to find a golf-ball sized swollen lump on my right kneecap. I iced it and took some ibuprofen and it came down, but it’s been bothering me for the last week.

Apparently I have knee bursitis, and inflammation of one of the fluid-filled sacs that protects the kneecap. It’s a huge mess. My knee has multiple bruises on it, in addition to the blistery spot on the kneecap, I’ve seemingly got a bruise that runs through my knee, starting on the front outside left and ending on the back outside right. It’s almost like I got shot through with an arrow. I’ve got most of my functionality back at this point, but the bursa is still tender and I’m hesitant to go back to the gym and risk fucking it up worse. It looks like these things can take two to six weeks to heal, so I’m going to wait another day and assess whether I should go back.

I did some research, and it seems that bouldering causes more knee injuries that top rope or trad climbing. ACL tears are common in bouldering from unexpected falls, but the high step, heel hooks and drop knee moves also cause problems. In my case, I know I had direct trauma to the knee cap, but I don’t think that explains the extent of the bruising, but who knows.

I really enjoy bouldering and I love pushing myself, but I’ve got to acknowledge that I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I’ve gotten other scratches, scrapes, bruises and pulled muscles while climbing, and the best thing I can do if I want to keep up with my new hobby is wait and give my body time to heal. I’ve been getting lots of sleep, and haven’t been active other than mowing the yard. I did some squats this morning, and I’ve been doing some stretching exercises to try and work my bum leg. Hopefully I’ll be healed up and ready to get back on the wall tomorrow.

Doing my best to get back on track with my Atomic Habits. Now that the Star Atlas Dao launch is over the team has a little bit of breathing room, which means I have no excuse for anything.

Step one of course in my plan is sleep, and making sure I get to bed at a decent hour. So I picked up some CBD gummies while I was out shopping for the girls yesterday and popped one last night. They’ve got melatonin in them, so turned out the lights at 10:30 and was asleep seven minutes later. Best quality sleep I’ve gotten in weeks probably.

So I managed to get up at seven and meditated for the first time in a while. And now I’m here journaling. So far so good.

I have to take Elder to sleep-away camp in an hour, so it’ll be lunch time before I’m back at the house and able to focus on work. I might have enough time to plan the rest of my day before I leave, but I doubt I’ll have time to do a pomodoro.

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with Younger this week. Left to herself, she’d probably just watch TV all day, so I need to find activities for her to do, to give her alternatives. I wouldn’t mind sending her to the neighbors, but I don’t want to impose. Speaking of the neighbors, we let the girls have a sleepover Saturday night. It did not go well. Younger has been begging us to let her friend sleep over, and we did, but it seems her friend was more interested in playing with Elder than Younger, so she was feeling a bit left out and sensitive. Sunday was rough, I don’t think either of the girls got enough sleep the night before, but I took them to their auntie’s house for a couple hours at the pool.

I spent most of the weekend playing Tarkov and failing miserably at PVP. I also spent a notable amount of time playing piano. I re-subscribed to Playground Sessions — it actually uses notation and has popular songs, as opposed to Melodics which uses the player piano style and has original music for the lessons. I’d rather build up my sight-reading capabilities, so I wanted to give it a shot. I never really used it when I was trying to get Elder interested in the instrument, so I’m using it for myself and learning to play All of Me on it now. I’m making good progress.

Younger seems to have a genuine interest in playing music, so I’m trying to encourage that. She’s been making her own songs up, freestyling acapella, so I spent some time with her yesterday while Elder was packing. She wants to play the piano and do the lessons, but when I try to talk to her about fingering she gets frustrated and then we start fighting. We did have a pretty good jam session, I broke out a couple of guitars that I had in storage, and the three of us had a nice little jam session. I had Amplify Studio running on the girl’s computer and my Mac, the latter of which was hooked up to the digital piano. Elder was messing around with one of the guitars, and Younger had the microphone. It was great fun.

I told Missus I didn’t want to drink this week. I’ve spent a lot of money on beer, going through a six pack or more of high-dollar IPAs. Some of them are twelve or fourteen dollars a pack, and it’s a bit much, both for my pocket book and my liver. So I’m going to see if I can get a permit for the local cannabis dispensary. Enough dealing with people on the street, I’ll just get the medical grade stuff from the dispensary and be done with it. I’ve known about it for over a year, but never went through with the process because I assumed that they wouldn’t give me one, but I’ve made up my mind. If I had to choose between alcohol and cannabis, I would easily choose cannabis.