Life goes on

Sometimes it feels like my life is a never-ending battle against clutter. I’m sure anyone with kids can understand this. Trying to get them to pick up after themselves is a constant battle, all the more so since COVID. I often joke about the Tasmanian Devil, that whoever came up with it must have had kids.

Decluttering and minimizing seems to help. There’s always a relief that comes when we take a bag of donations to the local store, but somehow the kids keep accumulating things. Birthdays and Christmas, gifts from aunts and grandmothers. Most of my detritus is digital, but I still accumulate books, papers, and notebooks. Printouts of musical scores.

Any trying to maintain the house, ah, the joys of home-ownership. Our “dream house” has needed a new roof, new HVAC. The time the upstairs shower leaked and ruined the beautiful decorative dining room ceiling below it. The deck project is coming along but is less than halfway complete. That damn hot tub! We have a moisture problem in the crawlspace that will likely cost us several thousand to repair, and already Missus is dreaming about new windows and fixtures. And all the little things. Just yesterday someone closed the garage door on Younger’s new scooter, and it popped the bolt holding the door opener clean off! Just another card for the backlog.

It’s like playing one of those mostly unwinnable strategy turn based games where everything is falling apart around you, and you can only do so much each turn, watching as your spaceship slowly takes on more and more damage, and you lose one crew member, then another, and another, and before you know it you’ve got just one person left, damage all over the ship, and you know there’s no way for you to get through the next turn. Well, maybe it’s not as bad as that.

In fact, earlier today, I got a text from our quaranteam dad down the street that Elder had brought a bunch of stuff down from our house and was making some sort of mixture: glue, bug spray, fabric freshener, air freshener. I told Missus and she started freaking out, apparently she thought Elder was going to stumble across some sort of chlorine gas or something. I was more mad that she had just taken a bunch of our stuff over there without any regard for what belonged to her and what didn’t. I had to go down and call her back home, and there was a huge row, tantrum and everything.

I actually didn’t get much done today because of work. I configured a router for a client and actually drove out to install it. Four hours of honest work, plus a little more for some admin stuff. That’s comfortable. An hour and a half of it was commuting to the site and waiting on a tech over the phone. But that’s what I got my podcasts for.

I finished listening to one with Robert Breedlove, author of Masters and Slaves of Money. It’s along the lines of The Bitcoin Standard, full of libertarian ideals and Austrian economics. This guy isn’t insufferable like Safedian Ammous, he merely worships Jordan Peterson instead of Nouriel Roubini. (We really need more leftists in the space.)

I also started listening to an Unchained episode about Solana and Project Serum, which is a high throughput layer one blockchain and the DEX built on top of it. It’s a very interesting engineering project, they’re hoping to provide a decentralized platform that can scale and eventually supplant Visa. I wish them luck. They’re designing the system for hardware two years out, and I’ve looked at the requirements for validator nodes. It’s pretty steep, you’re talking hundreds of dollars a month for an AWS instance. (They need GPUs.) And the staking requirements for a validator is in the millions of dollars. They aren’t building for consumers, but for enterprise. Well see how it goes.

For now, I’m going to curl up on the couch and watch Last Week Tonight, then go spend some time on Ethernauts. I spent most of last night messing with my environment. The contracts are for Solidity 0.5.0, and one of the challenges relies on vulnerabilities that were supplanted in Solidity 0.6.0. So I’ve got that working now, as well as Metamask tied into my Truffle/Ganache setup. Now hopefully I can figure out how to test my exploits on my local node, then switch over to Ropsten and deploy it again. Previously I was doing testing in my VM and then trying to deploy code via Remix, which was not a good flow.

At some point I’ll start working through these two Medium articles and figure out how to start querying and interacting with DeFi contracts directly.