Rainy Saturday

Today is a rainy day, my wife is out of town and I just dropped the girls off at their grandmother’s for a few hours, so I’ve got a bit of time to write.

Bitcoin has had a nice little pump over the last three days. The latest happened late last night. I was in the TD trollbox and everyone was really excited.

People think we’re at the start of a new bull run. I’m starting to feel a bit of FOMO myself, as if I wasn’t all-in already. I spent a good deal of time yesterday talking about bitcoin with a couple of friends, trying to explain what’s going on with QE and why bitcoin is going to succeed. I think I’m just drunk on my gains the last couple days. My IRA was up around four percent on Thursday and Friday thanks to $GBTC, $ETHE, $GDLC and some of the mining companies that I’m holding, like $RIOT. I also picked up a Canadian crypto broker called Voyager had a nice bounce as well.

It’s all thanks to Square picking up $50 million in BTC for their treasury. Now it’s all but certain that others are going to be following right behind them. Gradually, then all of a sudden, as they say.

I’m still managing to get some development time in. Trying to figure out how to use Truffle and working through the Ethernauts challenges. I’ve figured out how to exploit the contracts on my local Garanche node using a Javascript file, but now I have to figure out how to do that on Ropsten testnet. I can’t use the same scripts, since I have to hard code Ethernaut’s Ropsten addresses directly into the scripts.

I may still be able to use Metamask as my provider, but they’re going to stop injecting Web3 into the browser come early November, so now is probably a good time to learn how to use one of the other libraries via Infura orAlchemy.

There are a couple relevant developer conferences going on this month that I’m checking out. The first is ETHOnline’s hackathon. There are hours of talks to go through and catch up on. The other is the Substrate Developer conference, starting next week. Substrate is a blockchain development framework that has some integration with PolkaDot, which I’m very interested in. I’m also hoping to take a look at Solana at some point as well, but baby steps.

Other than that I’ve just been enjoying myself, playing video games. I’m still working through Detroit: Become Human, and have started playing through the original Baldur’s Gate. I also put Path of Exile back on my machine and have been playing through that.

And I keep continuing to learn Clair de Lune. I think I’m about a month into it right now, and have memorized the first intro section and have started working my way through a more challenging part. It’s beyond my playing ability, so I just keep drilling the parts through, hand separate, over and over and over. It’s crowding out the other songs I’ve learned in my brain. I tried to play through the repository of Bach pieces that I learned, and several parts just escaped my brain, just after a few days. I’m really having to drill them into my head.

I think it’ll pay off though, I know if I just keep practicing, I’ll be able to have it down in several month. I’ve only been playing seriously for about a year now, and this piece is really for someone with several years of playing under their hat. So I’m in no rush to get it done.