Category: General

SAIAdao should have their final, FINAL payout structure. Not that we’re paying out, but after numerous revisions I believe we have the final figures for dao member exit percentages. There’s a meeting on Saturday, that should end a good deal of my involvement. I’m still managing the assets, of course, but hopefully we’ll be able to move forward with the next phase of the venture.

Econ work on POLISdao continues. I’ve been running simulations to figure out what we’re doing on the rewarder system. We have two approaches that we’re hoping to do, a simple one, and a more complicated one that is more accurate.

Cain and I made some good progress with Solana today. We had to hunker down and do some deep work, but we got through it and learned a lot. We’ll continue tomorrow.

The kids and I had a pretty good day. We played Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman and It Takes Two for special time. Missus and I had a good day, in spite of our fight yesterday. She got run ragged by Younger last night, who seemed to think she spent all night in her own bed.

I wound up having a late night scotch with D., who needed some electrical tape and came over after everyone was in bed yesterday. I played Tool videos and talked about Alan Watts. I don’t think there’s much intellectual rigor there on his part. Unexamined is probably the best word for it.

The kids are in their rooms and I’m going to relax with an episode of Ozarks. To bed on time tonight.

Well it was bound to happen because things have been going well for too long apparently. And just as you cannot have the day without night, or the head of a coin without the tails side, so can you not win without losing. And apparently I have been winning lately. And since the money problem has been solved, along with the house repair problems, so must our minds must create new ones to keep ourselves occupied.

I’m not taking the bait.

Outside of our marital situation, I’ve been a bit of a hardass at the office. I’m in a leadership position, and I’m not quite sure of myself. I need people to deliver, but there are things that no one is delivering that I’ve taken upon myself to do. Everyone wants ‘simple’, but simple isn’t a design requirement. Maybe there’s a CHEAP-FAST-GOOD triangle for technical design that I’m not aware of, but we’re talking about unsolved technical problems. Who knows? My imposter syndrome isn’t as bad because I’m realizing there’s not anyone else who knows better anyways. At some point you have to move out of discussion into ideation or implementation or production or whatever you want to call it. People want to talk but I need functionality.

The end, it’s Tuesday night and the hardest part is choosing to go to bed versus not going to bed.

Today was a beautiful day, the weather was warm and the kids played outside for a good deal of it. Missus and I slept in, then I finally kicked the kids outside around eleven or so. I filled in the hole left by the stump grinder and had to haul several wheelbarrow loads of ground wood to the back yard, where I dumped it to fill in some of the low spots.

Our friends the Gs. came by, except for C., who had just deployed for a three month boat tour. Their daughter and Elder are BFFs, and they hadn’t seen each other in a good while, so it was nice to see them. Plus their young son — same age as Younger — was missing his dad so he got some horseplay with me. At one point I had the four of them upstairs singing Let It Go during my horrible piano rendition. It was cute. They did GoNoodle and we watched Mo Willems shorts on the tube.

I downloaded the new Ghostbusters movie and we watched it this evening and ate pizza for dinner. It wasn’t great. I’m not big on this type of nostalgia, especially with the CGI ghost of Harold Ramis, it was a bit cringe.

Getting ready to sit down this late afternoon and play some games. I went to bed on time last night, and everyone got up early this morning. I can’t even remember the last time Missus was up before 9AM on a Sunday. The girls went to church, I sat silently — mostly — then Missus and I got busy with chores. I balanced the house accounts; our net worth is down about 400k since the market top. It wasn’t too painful, but it’s obvious my system needs some work. Also, tax time is coming up and we need to deal with that.

I worked out this morning, listening to AEnima, then I went out and ran errands: the library, Target, even stopped by Goodwill to get rid of four monitors and and old laptop. There’s more to do.

Been listening to Alan Watts; ordered his autobiography from the library. I keep thinking about the lyrics to Pneuma as well.

Stayed up till 4AM playing games, mainly Far Cry arcade levels with my boy Ed. Slept past noon, had a chill day. Got Elder set up with an account in Lost Ark. Watched Tool videos and went down the rabbit hole on their Wikipedia page for a bit. Watched half of Hamilton with the girls. Made dinner of fish and sausage.

The hot tub is broken again. It was reading an error code so I cut the breaker last night to keep it from power cycling every thirty seconds. Now it won’t turn on again. That was about the only downside to the day. Otherwise it was pretty chill.

I’ve been journaling here on this blog, regularly, at least, for two, maybe three years. My hit rate for consecutive posts isn’t that great, I’ve probably missed three days this February alone. I’ve probably got a max streak of less than three months.

My point is that I’m awestruck by people like Beepl or Johnathan man who have gone thirteen or five years, respectively, working on their craft. It just seems insane to me.

We’ve got a guy on the team whose job is grass. That’s it. He’s apparently the best Unreal Engine grass designer in the world, and he’s only twenty-four or whatever. Insane. Granted, I’d wager he’s not planning on hanging onto that niche for his entire life.

Younger is still “sick”. All she has to say is that her throat hurts and Missus is willing to keep her home. I wish I had a thermometer in this house I could trust. I just told her that I think she wants to be sick so she can stay home, watch Spongebob, and play games. I don’t know, she does feel a bit warm on her forehead, but I don’t know I can take another day of not getting work done. I feel guilty letting her sit in front of a screen for two hours so I can get some work done. We did have a fun day. I tried to play a card game with her, but we spent the time just explaining the card deck and getting her comfortable with holding them. I did a couple card tricks and fooled her with some obvious cheats, which she eventually caught on to. Watching her try to do her own tricks was pretty funny because she didn’t know any and was resorting to some pretty blatant tactics to do them.

I did manage to take her out for some exercise as well. She rode her bike while I ran, probably a bit over two and a half miles. The neighbors weren’t around, so she didn’t get to play with anyone else.

We did have Girl Scout cookie pickups yesterday, which precipitated a whole fight between Elder and I. I told her that I wanted her to go with me and she started questioning me, and I’m not trying to have a goddamn debate with her every time I ask her to do something. She told me that she wanted to quit Scouts, which I told her that she could do after the school year is out. She’s already been going to meetings and her troop leader just literally got me their vests and badges sewn on. No way. I told her that she wants all the rewards without any of the hard work, and Missus say truer words have never been spoken. It’s like with any activity or hobby that she does, she gets to the valley of despair and wants to quit. She doesn’t yet understand that she’s got to push through that to get to the other side.

So yea, we’ve got several hundred dollars worth of cookies here in the house. Even if we sell them all, I’m not sure that it’s enough to cover their membership, which the troop has waived. I’ll make it work.

Work on the house is progressing. The porch and garage door have been painted, and the inside is next up on the list. It looks like we might actually get the work done before the second quarter of this year. Then we can start worrying about the windows.

I am not doing a very good job keeping up with my journals. I appreciate the discipline that someone like Jonathan Mann or Beeple have with their daily task. I can’t even imagine keeping it up for five or thirteen years. Unimaginable. I guess ultimately I’m not doing it for other people. It’s not like I’m going to sell my blog as NFTs. I don’t even have a plan for this anymore, if I did I would have it somewhere that it would survive me … Github pages, perhaps?

Anyways, we are making some progress around the house. The contractor has started work on the front of the house, and has been out several times over the last week to fix the storm door and light fixtures. Yesterday the painter was out and started on the porch. The rotting wood around the garage doors has been replaced and will get painted as well.

I also managed to get someone to grind out the tree stump in the front yard. My neighbor, whom I’ll call OCD from here, had hired a tree crew to trim some trees behind his property, and I’d gone out to see if they would grind it. The first crew wanted me to call their office for a quote. Nope. The second crew said they didn’t grind, but told me to look out for the guy when he came. So he came by yesterday morning, so I walked out and quickly made a deal. Seventy five bucks and he had the stump gone in twenty minutes. After he was done with OCD’s yard, he came back and offered to dig a hole so that we would be ready to plant our replacement tree. Noice. So now we’re ready to get started with our landscaping project. I think I’ll outsource that as well.

Younger got sent home from school. They said she had a fever of 101, but I checked when she got home and couldn’t detect one. Maybe my thermometer is broken. The girl literally ran around the kitchen yelling today is the best day ever! when she got home. She had missed Valentines day on Monday so she came home with a bag of candy.

Missus made General Tso’s chicken for dinner, I ordered two hundred and thirty dollars worth of groceries. I think we’ll be set for a while.

I’m working on Rust Exercism’s. They’re getting very difficult and require a lot of thinking and planning. I don’t even know what to do with this Alphametic one, and am doing another that has to do with sublists of raw arrays. They’re difficult, to say the least. I’m sticking to my discipline of not looking ahead at the answers. I’ve got to figure out a solution, as ugly as it may be, on my own before I look at the idiomatic way of doing things.

I’ve also been playing Lost Ark, against my better judgement. For one, I’ve got enough going on without trying to pick up an MMO, but the team seems to be interested in it so I’ll give it a shot. I don’t think I’ll stick with it though, it seems to be targeting pubescent boys. All of the female figures have huge breasts and sway their hips in this hugely exaggerated gait. It has some interesting gameplay elements, but I don’t think it’s worth my time. I’ll probably stick with it in spite of myself.

I have been reading some books on game design. Since I’m going to be working more and more with the Unreal Engine devs, I figure it’s good to pick up some of the formal knowledge on the subject. I was reading a few days ago and remarked to Missus that I’m surprised that it’s take me till now to really study games as a discipline. It would have been such an obvious track for me coming out of high school. I wonder why I never considered it.

Last thought: I need to move my wake up time. There’s just not enough time for me to get the kids ready, write, and meditate before nine AM. And no room for exercise. I haven’t lifted in days. Granted, I did go skiing, and ran, so maybe I should be so hard on myself. But I would do better to get up earlier. It’s the going to bed part that gets me.

I’m rushing to write this as my laptop battery is almost dead. I have less than fifteen minutes.

We woke up and decided to do another day of skiing. I was originally going to go by myself, but somehow got the whole family involved. I bought a four-hour pass for Elder, we figured out that Younger was free. Missus only wore her snow boots and would provide support while her father and I dealt with the kids.

It was a bit of a disaster. Younger didn’t want to follow my direction and wound up going pretty much straight down the green slope until she got fast enough that she was scared, then she’d just fall over. Rinse, repeat. Elder was on her own for a while, doing the kiddie slopes, till it was time to walk back to meet up with Missus. Then she threw the whine-card. Walking up the mountain in her boots was the hardest thing ever, and she fell down at one point and basically refused to move.

I lost my temper, and embarrassed myself as the asshole yelling at his kid. I dumped them off with their mother and went back out for another two hours by myself. I did a run with FIL, but he was worn out from yesterday and I felt the need for speed.

I did pretty good, and managed to stay on my feet the entire day except for the beginning of my second run up on the blue slope. It was icy and I busted my finger when I fell, but it was right at the top, and I got back up and flew down without any further problems. My quads though… oh my gawd they burned.

I’ve really pushed my legs this week. Leg day on Thursday, a three mile run on Friday, then skiing on Saturday and Sunday. They are super tight. And not to mention the three hours of driving I did each way. I feel like I need a massage or a soak with some Epsom salts or something.

We put the girls down early. They took a nap on the ride down but I don’t want any issues in the morning.

Today was a pretty good day. It’s nice not having to worry about the money. I bought breakfast, the tickets, goggles for me and the kids, ski wax, a couple drinks at base camp, dinner at the truck stop, and gas both ways. I don’t think I’ve ever travelled or taken a vacation like that with such a lack of care for spending money.

I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

So the girls had their first skiing session today. It was a bit painful to start with since we went a bit too fast with them, but they got the hang of it and we had a nice evening.

We were going to drive up last night, but it was seventy degrees at home yesterday, and it’s supposed to snow overnight tonight so I figured our chances would be better for a Sunday session. So we drove up this afternoon, had a quick dinner, and headed out for a two hour session. It’s pretty hard trying to lug all the gear around to where the girls could get started. I felt like a sherpa.

I had to fight with Elder because she wanted to use poles and I told her to start without them. We miscalculated and went to the top of one of the green runs and the kids almost lost control — well they did, actually. I had to step in front of Younger at one point to save her and wound up knocking the breath out of her. Elder fell down and was ready to quit after five minutes. Thank goodness my FIL was there to take her off my hands.

We found the actual kids starter slope and half an hour later they were both zooming down it no problem. Well, except for Younger, she kept having problems with her skis releasing on her, but she was a good sport. We got back and everyone was all laid up with sore feet. Me, oh my, tomorrow is going to hurt.

I did a leg day on Thursday, and my Whoop told me that I was recovered on Friday, so I went for a run. The weather was super nice. Since I’m still breaking in my new running shoes I went for a short loop, just under three miles. These shoes though, I don’t know. They are not as comfortable as my worn-down Adidas, and they forced me into a front strike on the balls of my feet, which meant I was really putting my calves to work. I was super sore this morning. The three hours in the car didn’t help either.

To make matters worse, I wore short socks with my ski boots, which means I have some pretty sore areas on the front of my shins. Hopefully it won’t be too bad tomorrow, because I really want to get back out there tomorrow — sans kids for a half day. I managed to get a couple of runs on the green slopes, but only one on the blue, and I want more.

Missus is completely out of shape. She said the girls can ski better than her now. She just hung back the entire time her dad and I were with the girls. I think they had fun though. I know they want to go tubing, but if it comes down between them tubing or me skiing, I’m going skiing.