Month: January 2022

The cold has really settled in, it was in the twenties this morning when I brought the kids to school. It’s going to hit mid-forties today, will probably melt off most of the snow that’s still on the lawn. I’ve been running the gas fireplace in the den pretty much non-stop for the past week or two, only turning it off during midday when the heat becomes a bit unbearable, or when we go to bed at night.

I got a quote for home repairs from my friend A., who is a bit of a real estate pro and has a contractor that he uses for his work. It’s about six grand altogether, to repair the storm and garage doors, and a bunch of interior and exterior painting. The biggest chunk of it is the crawlspace. We need insulation rehung, better moisture barrier and a dehumidifier installed. I’m about ready to pull the trigger but feel it might be a bit steep. I figure A. is taking his 10% or whatever, but I don’t really have a problem with that. I just don’t have a frame of reference for what these thing should cost. As far as my hourly rate goes, I suppose it’s not too bad.

Today is payday, so I’ll make the decision then. I’ve been trying to use YNAB, but it doesn’t really do a good job separating my concerns. I’ve got the house account in there with my personal ones, and I haven’t figured out how to keep things separate without a bunch of manual bullshit. And I need to add my LLC stuff in there as well.

I’ve got so much that needs doing, but I don’t have the energy for half of it. Taxes, and making sure I fund my IRA for 2021 is probably the biggest pain point, and I’m definitely procrastinating on that.

I just realized that I’m now paying more in taxes than I made at my last job. Crazy how life has changed.

Had a pretty good night and a pretty good day today.

Last night we hosted the T.’s over for game night. We got the house cleaned up and I went crazy at the grocery store. Apparently they make their kids stay at the dinner table until they eat their dinner, and two of them fell asleep at the table, so S. came over with her eldest and we all played Uno and Munchkin. Then I stayed up till gawd knows what hour playing games with the LANarchists. Bought a new four-player co-op game called The Ascent.

Younger had told me that she wanted to go ice skating, so I made that happen today. We booked a group lesson, and so the four of us went along with the T.’s as well. It was fun. Thankfully I was able to get some lace-up boots, as the other ones are physically painful for me to wear. The girls had fun. Elder seemed to get the hang of it, Younger needed to hold on to me most of the time. Then we came home and vegged out. The girls are all ready for bed, and I’m going to pass out shortly thereafter.

It was a good day for the most part, although the kids were a bit mouthy. I think everyone needs sleep. I know I do.

Thank gawd I got some sleep last night.

We got three inches of snow overnight. The girls played outside for a bit. I had to order Elder new gear because she didn’t have any decent boots or bibs. Younger wants to go ice skating, so I’m organizing a group trip with the T.’s to go to the local iceplex tomorrow. Tonight we’re going to have a brownie and board game party with them.

First we’ve got to do some cleaning up downstairs, and I want to do a bit of coding this afternoon on the auto-Fleet replenishment system. I’ve been ignoring it lately but my brain is rekt from trying to figure out this Machinations/ECS system that I need to take a break from it.

I started another set of plants. The first two that I planted I almost killed. Twenty-four hours off light apparently isn’t good for sprouts. I thought both were dead, but I see signs of growth. One of them is shooting up, no leaves yet, and the other appears to be turned upside down in the plug. I thought I saw signs of a vibrant green leaf under the stem which is curled up, not yet able to pop out of the plug. I might help it along. Still, I went ahead and started four more seeds in a bowl and moved them to a paper towel yesterday. We should be good, one way or the other.

Missus was feeling better today so she took over ‘parenting’, which basically meant letting the girls watch TV all day. I had several meetings and tried to do some coding. Turns out trying to design an ECS is hard.

It’s supposed to snow again tonight. I was considering going up to the FIL’s house so the girls can take ski lessons, but Missus isn’t terribly interested. Elder doesn’t want to ski at all, apparently she’s got some sort of PTSD from the last time I took her.

The kids found a stray cat outside, very young. They were worried about it being outside during the snow, but I said let it be. They took it to D.’s house instead. He came by for a bit.

The house is a wreck. No one wanted to clean today, so the kitchen is a huge mess. I could care less right now.

Today has been an interesting day. I managed to stick to a pretty good schedule, despite Missus being holed up in the bedroom with a case of the post-booster blues. I actually sat down with the girls this morning and wrote up a schedule of what I expected from them.

Let me back up a bit. I started writing up a new video game engine framework. I’m calling it A.L.A.N – autonoma linking atomic nodes. I actually spent a lot of time yesterday working on it, and when I went to bed I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I even woke up at five this morning running it over in my head.

It’s not much more than a cribbed framework run through an ECS framework, but I hope it might serve as a good basis point for this metaverse that we’re building.

I’m filling into the leadership role. Really filling into it. I got a lot done today.

I think I found a contractor yesterday, I might actually get some work done on this house.

I may have killed my plants. Thought for sure that I read seedlings needed 24h light but I guess I messed that up. Have turned off the lights. One of them may still survive. Started the next set of seeds.

Playing lots of games. It’s research.

I did work out this morning but it was not very productive. For me at least. I did two exercises, shoulder press and step ups. I had to show Younger how to do a deadlift. Tonight though I seem to be on the bender path. 2100 hours, gonna watch Ozark.

I don’t feel like I’ve been doing much right lately. I don’t have the anxiety that I did earlier this week following my liquidations, but I had been feeling a bit aimless. I did finally find a bit of focus time earlier this evening that forced me to think through some things that had been escaping my ability to speak them properly.

Yesterday I went out to lunch with a friend who I hadn’t seen in quite a while. We slurped some oysters and talked about all kinds of things. In a way my friend, A., is a bit of a mentor, someone younger than me that has had more focus and success in life, someone I can look up to, a higher companion, so to speak. We had a lot to discuss.

I had borrowed my MIL’s car as she had a hospital appointment and Missus had our car. I wound up dropping it off around five yesterday, and decided to run back from her house. I wasn’t really up to it, but I did it anyways. I was wearing shorts, and although the temperature had hit the forties yesterday, it was much colder and windy when I decided to go running. I didn’t finish particularly strong, but it was my first run in a week.

I stayed up too late finishing season one of Ozark, and was dragging butt again this morning. I actually went back to bed after Missus left for work to get her booster shot. I spent the day moving files off of my old work laptop and had a couple meetings, then got a fire under my butt that had me converting Machinations framework into a Rust ECS called bevy. I just finished a pretty good pass through the basic components. I actually think I might be able to pull this unified framework off.

Missus went down a few hours after her shot. Her arm hurts, and she’s been in bed except for dinner. Younger and I played a massive game of Uno with our house rules. Elder saw a daddy long legs, more appropriately named a harvestman on her ceiling and didn’t want to go to sleep in her room. She was also complaining about her back. This is what happens when school lets out for two teacher work days and I don’t make the kids stick to schedule.

We’re expecting more snow this weekend, so my mom has cancelled her trip, her very late Christmas trip. So we’ll push that back to next week. I wanted to go to my FIL but his cat died so that’s probably not tactful.

The weather is warming, just into the upper thirties, but that’s enough to melt the snow which has been on the ground for the past few days. I didn’t feel like I needed my snow gear leaving the house this morning, and it might warm up enough for me to actually take a run later. I’m overdue.

Younger crawled in the bed in the middle of the night and woke me up. I actually dreamed, but I was awake and restless around four this morning and I didn’t want to get out of bed when the alarm turned on. Missus was sleeping in because she took leave for an appointment her mom has, so I wound up taking in Elder, and getting in a fight with her.

I don’t know if I got on her because I was cranky from lack of sleep or if there’s some deeper psychological issue at play related to my upbringing. I just don’t want to raise a child who’s spoiled and entitled, and doesn’t know how to overcome adversity. I feel like whenever I tell her that things are going to go the way she wants that I have to deal with a bunch of whining and complaining. I had a similar spat with Younger this morning about her laundry, which has been sitting in a basket, unfolded, for several days now.

I told her that she needed to fold it before she goes out and plays with her friend when she gets home from school. But that’ll take forever! No, it won’t, I bet you can have the whole thing done in ten minutes. But I don’t know how to fold it. Yes you do, you know how to fold underwear and pants and shorts. Why don’t you fold it and put it on my bed and I’ll put it away when I get home? And so on.

I forced myself to meditate, but my mind wandered so much. There’s a lot to do for work, as work now encompasses playing video games, thinking about video games, designing video games, and so on. One of my co-workers said that they want specialization, but my specialization is being overly broad with various systems.

I have been going back to some video game design work, researching various frameworks and ways of designing systems, lots and lots of ECS systems. The more I learn about them the less I think they’re suited for the type of architecture that I’m envisioning. I spend more time thinking about it than actually coding. Looking at existing games and figuring out how I would reverse engineer them; researching various frameworks to see how they operate: Unreal, Unity, various Rust, C++ and Python systems, trying to figure out which one fits our use case best.

I’ve been having lots of discussions at work about a unified framework, a cookbook of design decisions between Unreal, our web3, and Solana programs. Part of it feels like imposter syndrome because I’m talking to developers who are way more knowledgeable than I am.

I was in a foul mood when I woke up this morning. I really did a number on myself this weekend. Saturday the neighbor kids were over, I wound up playing City of Iron with Elder and the older T. kid. Didn’t finish the game because I made an early mistake that changed the direction of the game so much that we called it a day. Missus and I spent some time together, then I stayed up till the wee hours binge watching Ozark. I slept on the couch so as not to disturb anyone.

Sunday was a do-nothing day. We still had several inches of snow on the ground, but I left my snow boots over at my FIL’s house, and had already gotten my fill with the girls on Saturday. I watched a couple more episodes of Ozark before lunch. I was really tired by mid-afternoon. About all I did was watch Bluey with younger, horseplay a bit. Missus made dinner, I watched Eternals before putting them to bed.

I was exhausted. I watched a video on my iPad then passed out. I’d say I slept like a dead man, but I woke up several times. Elder had another accident, which woke me up, and Younger was in the bed, but we didn’t fight too much, thankfully. I guess she was attached to Missus.

I got them both to school, but I wasn’t very patient while I was getting them ready. The whole house is a wreck, snow gear and socks — my god, the socks — everywhere. On the way out from Younger’s school we passed a homeless person pushing a shopping cart full of their belongings down the main boulevard. The cart was full, the guy had a backpack on and another bag in their hand that they were hold while trying to clear some obstacle from under one of the wheels. It was twenty-eight degrees out. “There but for the grace of God”…

BTC and ETH took another elevator down today. That’s another reason why I was foul. I haven’t looked at my Perp positions two weeks in a row. I needed to meditate, then I took a look. The ETH positions are mostly gone, about $30k liquidated. My BTC ones are mostly underwater, but we’d have to go sub-thirties to liquidate them.

I thought I was so clever, but I got too aggressive, too greedy, and Mr. Market has punished me for it.

I’m not so foul a mood now. Meditation helped, and turning toward the problem instead of away helped as well. Or it might be the coffee.

I’ve got my priorities for this morning, so it’s time to get to work.

The price of crypto continues to plummet with the temperatures here. I woke up to a good three inches of snow on the ground, and the kids rustling to get ready to go outside. I pulled myself out of bed to make sure they were properly attired, and sent them out. I made the mistake of trying to meditate. I was interrupted several times, and lost my temper at the kids for not following my instructions to keep the doors closed and not come in covered in snow.

I just shoveled the drive and sidewalk, gave my shovel to D., who did not have one.

I’m scared to sit down at the upstairs computer. Not really, though. I’m assuming that the cash I put in Perp.fi is lost. A tax write off. It’s not though, the BTC should be safe; I still don’t think we’ll see sub-thirty BTC. I was obviously too aggressive with my ETH longs, and am pretty sure the overnight wick down took me out, at least partially.

I’m in the mood for some more Entity-Component-System work. I was reading on my iPad last night and looking at Rust-based gaming frameworks. I think it would be interesting if the Star Atlas team could come up with a component framework for Solana. It’s going to be interesting to see if we can come up with something that interact with the FLEET program. I might even try mocking up some of the mining and crafting systems as an exercise.

Today’s been a bit of a difficult day. Most of it stems from not getting good sleep last night. I was up playing video games and woke up with the girls enjoying their morning home from school. They both had Zoom class this morning, and I had to do tech support for Younger several times during the day.

I went straight into coding. I actually managed to get my tests done and finished the OpenSea Python script that I was working on. I managed to do about an hour of demo with a couple guys on the team, showing them how I do TDD. It was interesting. I wound up skipping an early meeting to finish it, but it had to be done.

Later in the day the PMs met and went over our projects and roster. It was very difficult for me because the neighbors were over, and I wound up kicking all the kids out at one point for being too loud and arguing.

I also talked to our Solana devs about this framework idea that’s been floating around in my head. I’ve been looking at the Machinations framework, and that got me looking at Decentraland’s SDK, even the Unreal Engine docs. Yesterday I asked if we were still doing object oriented programming, and someone mentioned data-driven design, which I’d never really read up on, so I actually spent some time watching some videos on it earlier today, and that led me to the idea of entity-component systems, which is basically the term for what I’ve been trying to describe.

And the real kicker today was the complete dump in the crypto markets. To think that I was up $100k three months ago, and now I’m down almost 40. I got partially liquidated, and I don’t think the worst is over. The Fed is unable to save the markets, Netflix sold off 20% and most of the S&P looks down about 5%. BTC and ETH just completely dumped, and it almost led to a massive liquidation cascade. My BTC positions should be safe, but I might lose the rest of my ETH positions. And yesterday I just BTFD.

I told Missus it’s a good thing that I’m back at work.