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A good day

Yesterday was as good a day as they come.

I woke up early, rather was woken up, and upped my morning meditation to forty five minutes, which I also did this morning. I’m making an active effort to focus my attention on the breath. This morning I started counting off by five, focusing a hexagon in my mind, or rather around different points on my body, which I counted off over and over again, with relatively little distraction. It was hard, but I think this morning’s session was pretty good.

I managed to get a workout in while the kids were at church. I was supposed to meet a friend for brunch, but when I didn’t get a response to my text, I decided to take Missus out instead. She had been talking about a fancy restaurant downtown, and had been throwing hints about us having a date on Veterans’ Day this Thursday, but this restaurant doesn’t open until 5PM, so I made a couple calls and got us a table.

It was cozy and had a lot of flair. There was a jazz duo playing near the front when we walked in, a bass player and a singer. I got a fight of mimosas, Missus a coffee martini. She ordered a salmon omelet, and I had steak frites, a six ounce tenderloin with two eggs and potatoes. It was delish. Our bill was one-thirty when we were done, but it was worth every penny. We got home, stopping for OJ and a six-pack, then went home and drank a bottle of prosecco before the kids got home. We enjoyed every minute.

One thing I noticed about the restaurant before we even walked in was that none of the wait staff were wearing masks. Only two patrons I saw were either. I guess this means the pandemic is over? I put my mask on when I went into the corner store, the sign still said REQUIRED, but I felt out of place as none of the staff or other customers were wearing them. Yet my daughter still had to put one on when she got on the bus this morning.

I did manage to stay away from doing any programming this weekend. I assume I’ll have enough of it this week. Still nothing from CompanyA, yet, by the way. I’ll just keep grinding. I’ve got to write this week’s update for SAIAdao, then continue working on the Solana migration plan.

ETH is in price discovery, and BTC is nearing ATHs again. My Perp positions are about to break six figures, and we’ve still got a ways to go to hit my price target. It’s like a video game score at this point. I did close out my Curve USDP position. It was the smallest of my three or four remaining stable coin funds, and with gas this high I wanted to close it out while I could still afford it. As it was it cost me over $600 in gas to pull out $3000. The CRV rewards were worth about that much, so I guess it evens out. Still… That should cover bills for the next month or two, then I have two more funds that I can pull from.

Hopefully by then I’ll have a fat new job and won’t have to worry about that. Or closing out my perpetuals.

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Clutter

Yesterday was cleaning day, and I spent most of the time upstair in our FROG, the finished room over garage. When we were first shown the house I immediately claimed it as my man cave, but over the years it’s come to be Missus’s office during her work from home time. I still have my gaming rig up there, an Obutto cockpit with triple screen monitors. Elder has a desktop computer next to it, and I’ve also added a full sized keyboard piano to the other side of the room. It’s also got a small window nook facing the front of the house, which has been my guitar area, with a 100w Marshall amp, BOSS effects pedal, and my guitars: a 2003 Fender Strat and an acoustic Takamine.

To each side of this nook are a pair of closets, and along the back of these closets are smaller doors, which reveal unfinished areas under the eaves of the roof. Right now one of them houses our Christmas tree and ornaments, as well as some clothes that Elder hasn’t grown into yet. The closets themselves hold various items that I’ve been unable to part with. One of them has a number of heirlooms and childhood items: papers and yearbooks from elementary and high school; books that I’ve hung onto; various computer equipment that I have no time for but can’t part with including racing wheels, joysticks, and the first consumer release of the Oculus Rift; boxes for computer equipment including all six boxes for the mining rig GPUs that I can’t seem to part with.

And so yesterday I spent an hour cleaning out this room. The guitar nook is now empty, everything into one of the closets. We have a bookshelf in the room that has become a dumping area. There were an unread pile of magazines: year old Nation magazines, Dissent, Jacobin, and Wired. The Nations went in the bin. The Jacobins are too beautiful to part with for now, and went with the Dissents to join their read brethren in my downstairs office. I’m telling myself that I’ll read the Wireds at some point; I can’t bear to part with them yet. I was already rent by throwing out remains of the Bernie 2016 campaign; a couple rally signs, yard signs, and a poster that I had made for our state convention. I even threw out some of my own personal mementos from my own campaign. Missus had a ton of stuff that had been laying untouched around the shelf: photo albums, scrapbooks, and old financial paperwork. It went into yet another closet in the room, one which houses various holiday flair: Halloween costumes, Christmastown villages; boxes and bags for gifts.

Et cetera, et cetera.

When I was ten, my parents bought a house that had been abandoned by the previous owners. They had fled, apparently, leaving behind all sorts of personal effects such as baby photos and the like. I remember my mom’s disbelief that someone could just up and leave all that stuff behind. Now I can completely understand. It hard to Marie Kondo individual items one-by-one and decide which ones inspire joy. It took me five years to let go of some of the Bernie paraphernalia, (I still have more,) but I’ve got books and computer equipment that I haven’t touched in even longer.

Shit accumulates.

I had an argument with Elder yesterday. She didn’t want to clean and help the rest of us, and I went into a dad-rant about how she leaves a trail of mess behind her by the act of her very existence: dirty dishes, dirty clothes, shiny things that she discards as soon as it no longer holds her attention. I may have been projecting.

I’m trying hard to minimize the things that I own, to declutter the house and make it easy for us to go on travel. I’ve spent forty years accumulating all this stuff and I should expect to get rid of it in forty minutes, but it’s a bit hard coming to grips that there are things that I used to do that I just don’t have the time for anymore. It’s hard to close the book on those things. It’s like an LCD Soundsystem song where you realize that you’re not as cool as you used to be.

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Confession

Why is it that being a parent means not being able to sleep in? Elder decided to start doing a load of laundry in the wee hours of the morning, then Younger comes in later asking if she can have her candy — a reward for sleeping in her bed all night. I only stayed up till midnight playing Dyson Sphere Program, and I didn’t drink, so I’m not hungover, just groggy.

I went back and read post from November’s past. This blog is mainly a journal for me to go back and see what my past self was up to. It looks like I’ve been blogging daily for over a year now, and the other posts are semi-regularly for another year past that. Some of the older posts are pretty useless, mostly political stuff and some useless tech posts. This one from November 2, 2019 stuck a nerve for me. It was following 100 days of sobriety, after I had started drinking again.

I’m on day three following a period of regular drinking, and I can tell my mood is turning very sour. I found myself losing patience with the girls last night as we were leaving scouts. Usually I’ve had a beer before I drop them off. It’s not that they were doing anything out of the ordinary, I just got triggered easily: Elder took her sandals off and was running around the playground in her socks; they didn’t come when I told them to leave. Also, the Daisy leader wound up getting “stuck in traffic” so I wound up standing in to watch Younger and two other kids. I was not prepared.

These cycles of abstinence always follow this cycle. My mood gets disrupted, then I have trouble sleeping.

I picked up a quarter yesterday. I was sneaky about it, leaving under false pretenses. Old behaviors. I stashed it and haven’t touched it, but I got the vape charged up and my lizard brain keeps thinking about when. I managed to keep it at bay yesterday. I ran three miles in forty degree weather. That wasn’t enough so I went and cut the grass as well. By the time I got back with the girls from Scouts I figured it was too risky. I know Missus will not look kindly on me smoking again. And there’s the rub.

The church where the Scouts meets also hosts an AA meeting the same time we’re there. I haven’t been to one since my state-mandated treatment program following my DUI some fifteen, twenty years ago. I think part of me thinks I’m better than those people. Missus used to call me an addict. To think about it in the context of weed seems silly, but it really goes to pretty much anything I set my mind to. There’s a single-mindedness I have about me that extends from substances to hobbies and anything else that I focus on.

I’ve extended my meditation practice. I’ve been reading The Mind Illuminated for the past few days, and have decided to make a serious go at it. The first step is setting a practice. It’s funny, in that I’ve been practicing somewhat daily for almost three years now. I’ve been subscribing to the Waking Up app for several years, but lately I’ve just been using it for the timer. I actually just sit there and let my mind wander, or actively think about planning or other problems. It’s silly that I’ve been paying seven or eight dollars a month for a meditation timer, but when I got it, it was the only app I could find that integrated with Apple Health, and I just wanted a record of my activities.

By chance, they updated the app, and I couldn’t find the meditation timer, so I started doing the daily, guided ones. I think that’s what caused me to click on The Mind Illuminated when I needed a new book in my Kindle library. So now I’m up to thirty minute sessions. I need to get up over forty-five. That’s what the book recommends, and I even remember reading a David Lynch interview years and years ago where he said that was the minimum time needed to get the full benefit from meditation.

I don’t know if I want to go back up to the sixty minutes that I was doing before. I’m not sure if I’m willing to commit that much time in my day to doing that. I still much rather sit for two or three hours playing video games, or working on computer science stuff. And I don’t think I want to be straightedge either. Maybe meditation will change that, I don’t know.

Unlike the last time I did the sixty minutes for sixty days challenge that Naval recommended, I’m actually making this more of an active practice. His recommendation was not to put any effort into it, just to sit and let the mind go wherever. This time I’m actually making an effort to focus my attention and awareness, and to bring this focus into my daily life. Whether it’s running, doing chores, or talking to my children. And especially when I’m thinking about getting a drink or a smoke.

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No limits

I listened to a few interesting podcasts the last couple days that I wanted to note.

The first was from Macronotes, an interview with “dollar bear” Luke Gromen. The conversation was mostly about the US government’s debt to income ratio. Basically, the government doesn’t have enough income from taxes right now to pay the interest on the debt. Basically the only way out of this situation at this point is to inflate the debt away. Historically, this is the way, and instead of taking my word for it you should listen to this interview.

Of course, the conversation turned to bitcoin. Despite the host calling people who invested in bitcoin “idiots”, the guest seems like a strong bitcoin bull, and had a very sophisticated take on the game theory likely to play out between central banks and bitcoin. Frankly put, he said that bitcoin is going to challenge the central bank’s “franchise”, and that they’re likely to respond to this the only way they can, by releasing the downward pressure they’ve been applying to gold, which he says might “put a couple zeroes” at the end of its price.

The other interview I thought was worth mentioning was on Peter Attia’s podcast. This interview was with Professor David Nutt, who studies drugs and the brain, and was a research fellow for the British government when they were trying to demonize MDMA. When he discovered that the research didn’t back the government’s anti-drug agenda and tried to push back, he was sacked. Since then he’s been working on a risk assessment framework to classify drugs by their benefits or harms to individuals or society. By far, he says, the most harmful drug is alcohol, followed by heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. Marijuana, LSD and hallucinogens are at the bottom of the list.

Talk about preaching to the choir, I suppose. I told Missus about it and she agrees that we need to do something about our consumption of beer and spirits. She said something telling to me though, that if she was going to stop drinking she was going to have to start smoking weed because she “needs something”. I would much rather smoke — or eat — than drink, to be honest, but rather than giving me a hangover and destroying my liver, I think there are other cognitive issues with smoking weed all the time. I become acclimated to quickly and tend to turn into a heavy pothead.

I hate to even think of being a teetotaler though, I’m so adverse to the thought. I remember fighting with Missus over smoking pot at a couple points during our marriage. She says that we almost got divorced over it. I don’t know whether it was more about the illegality of it or an earlier period where I was out of work and smoking everyday.

So it’s very strange to hear her say that she’d rather risk losing her job than go straightedge. Granted, we’ve been talking about her reFIREment plans for 2024, and she’s never had a test in the decade plus she’s been at her job, nor is likely to.

Still, it says a lot about us that we’re in this situation. I haven’t had a drink since Tuesday, and I guess I credit it to a new focus on mindfulness that I’ve had since I started reading The Mind Illuminated. Recognizing the triggers and the thoughts that my addict brain is having, planning the next drink or the next hit, and just noticing it, without judgment, is helping. Last week or so I decided to make a rule that I wouldn’t drink unless I worked out or ran first. And I needed to work out yesterday. I had some RSI developing in my shoulder and needed to lift some weights to work it out. I almost used it as an excuse to go to the store and buy some beer, but the thought of spending another twenty-five bucks on a couple six packs, and ruining my morning … no thanks.

So I went to bed on time, read my book, and I may have even set an intention to wake up early and increase the amount of time I spend meditating. All I know is that Elder woke me up at four in the morning with a nosebleed, and I was downstairs at five thirty, doing an extended meditation session. And my morning has been very calm. I got Younger ready without making Missus do it, and I’m letting Elder sleep in. I feel good, and I know that if I had gone to the store last night I would probably not be on top of my game this morning.

So the question is if I’m going to go on one of my “diets”. Sixty minute meditations, one or three day fasts, a month without alcohol, I’ve done all of these things in the past, but they’ve never stuck as habits beyond the goals I set for myself. I could do it as they were temporary measures. i guess I first need to figure out what I want, what my rules are. No drinks ever seems too restrictive, but on the other hand, setting limits never worked.

Maybe it’s because I never set them.

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Morning notes

Work continues on the SAIAdao Solana migration. I’m writing some JavaScript scripts and tests in Anchor to make sure I have all the pieces I need before I start writing any program code. I’m still wrapping my head around the Solana programs, going back and forth over the Anchor test programs to see how things are done, figuring out how I’m going to store data for all of the member obligations.

If I can write a vanilla JS script that can simulate what I want to do, then I should have a good starting point for any programs. I mean, sure, I could put things in a cron job and have it run once a week, but it will be better to deploy as much of it as possible as a Solana program. I am trying to be a blockchain engineer, after all.

And speaking of which, I’m just playing the waiting game with CompanyA right now. I hope I hear something later today or tomorrow. Excuse me while I check my mail…. no, nothing.

Missus just took Elder to class, she’s working from home today, and I’ve got a routine eye doctor appointment to get my prescription updated an get my new annual pair of glasses. I’ll be picking Elder back up from school as she’s on the schedule as well. I keep buying her glasses — free ones through our VSP — but the kid hasn’t worn them in two years. Hrmm.

I played Dyson Sphere Program for several hours last night. It’s so addictive. These factory games scratch an itch with me, I’ll say that. I’m not sure if the planning skills translate to anything useful in the real world, but it’s a fun diversion.

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Post-election blues

Yesterday’s post was titled Today is the Day, and boy was I right. I just didn’t realize it how.

I’ll get to the call with CompanyA in a moment. I haven’t talked about politics on this blog in a while. In fact, I’ve been trying to actively avoid it since 2019, after I lost my second race. Granted, it’s probably fair to say it wasn’t until after Trump lost re-election that I stopped caring about it. I’ve basically given up on politics and have released any involvement with the local Democratic party. Still, last night’s election results have disturbed me.

I really can’t talk about it much without doxxing myself somewhat, but here goes anyways. Last night’s Republican sweep presages badly for Dems in 2022 and 2024. This state hasn’t elected an R to a statewide office in almost ten years, and yesterday they took all three seats in the executive branch, and it looks like they have claimed the house as well. The woman that I lost to in 2019’s primary, a “moderate” Dem, who outspent her opponent ten to one, also lost. We’re talking what was supposed to be a safe, lean D district.

It’s unbelievable.

I would hope that party leadership will see this as a wake-up call, but sadly I doubt anything will change. Moderates and progressives will be pointing fingers at each other for weeks and months to come, but it is apparent to me that the population of this country is moving in a different direction. And it does not bode well, either for the US or the planet as a whole.

I made a comment about Hari Seldon this morning, referring to the prescient psychohistorian of the Foundation series who foresaw the death of the galactic Empire and the thirty thousand years of dark ages that were to follow. Seldon’s Foundation was to prepare for this collapse, and provide the seed for an eventual second empire in only a thousand years of collapse.

I reiterate Balaji’s comment about how we are unable to reform the current systems from within, that the only solution is to build alternatives that will be so attractive that people will spontaneously flock to them. This is the way. I’m also of the opinion from one RealEstateGod, that our existing institutions are collapsing before our eyes, and have been driving the point home to Missus about her activity with Labor and her government job. It’s also amazing how well The Sovereign Individual and The Fourth Turning, both written over twenty years ago, are playing out in real time. Bitcoin fixes this? Daos will fix this?

Maybe, but I think we’re headed toward the dystopian worlds of Snow Crash or Ready Player One. If we’re lucky, that is.

Anyways, I do want to make brief note regarding CompanyA. The call went very well, the equity situation is what it is and will likely be resolved in the coming weeks or months. There is no conflict of interest with the dao at this point as there are no policies in place to define such a conflict. So I made my counter offer and am waiting to hear back from them before the end of the week. Hopefully I will be able to make a final decision next week.

Metaverse, here I come.

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Today is the day

Woke up to ETH at an ATH. My April perps are as well. I was talking to Missus yesterday and it’s crazy to think how much we’re up this year. I’m so fortunate that the plan is coming to fruition, I just need to make sure that I take profits. We’ve got a long way to go.

I have the very important call in less than ninety minutes. It’s preoccupied my thoughts for the last few days, and I’ve been trying to meditate to clear my mind. There’s so much going on in my head, the anticipation is really building and I don’t know what I’m going to do. Best thing I can do is go take a shower and put on a nice shirt, write some notes down before hand and smile for the camera. Hope for the best.

I think I’ve figured out a critical component for the dynamic DEX features that I’ve been planning. While I can’t figure out how to await the async function only once per browser session, calling it twice doesn’t really make a big difference performance wise. I can pull it once in the index.js file when the app loads, but I can’t figure out how to inject it into a module, so I call it again in the module and I should be able to export the finishished data. So far it doesn’t appear to reload when the React routes change, so I’ve got to finish pulling in my side-effects from my other little library that I’ve been using.

Kids are home today. It’s election day. Will be so glad that I’m not going to get any more annoying GOTV texts and calls. My phone has been blowing up recently.

And I need to get the site prepared for the Star Atlas ship drop. Four new mints have been created, I need to make sure I have my systems in place and ready to go. Time to get to it.

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Quick note

I am sitting in my MIL’s car in a parking garage outside a children’s hospital. She’s in a medical center next door for an appointment, and I am her chaperone. Missus is home today, she took two days off work, and the kids have an early release day due to tomorrow being a voting holiday.

I’m hoping I can get a bit of work done while I’m waiting on her. Today is Monday, which means a weekly update for SAIAdao is first on my agenda. I should be able to do that without much trouble, assuming this Alienware laptop battery holds up. I should be fine.

After that I want to turn my attention to my dynamic token mints module for the DEX. I need to talk to another developer about it since it’s a tricky situation with the React component that I’ve already written to fetch the JSON NFT feed. And in case I get blocked on that, then I’ll probably turn my attention to the tokenomics and emissions of the two SAIA tokens.

Tomorrow I also have another meeting with CompanyA, this time with the HR department to see if we can come to some sort of employment arrangement.

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Halloween

I was lying in bed, my brain running through the the things it does as I’m falling to sleep when BLOG! popped into my head. So here it is, quarter to midnight and I am hunched behind the keyboard once again.

Yesterday was pretty busy, but I overdid it last night, staying up till 2AM playing Dyson Sphere Program. I didn’t get out of bed until 9AM. Missus had gone to bed at a decent hour and was up and about — something that never happens on a Sunday.

I spent most of the morning doing my regular Perp management. Funding brought in about $400 after last week’s decline in margin. I rolled it up aggressively, taking my liquidation price as high as I could to the growth line that I set several weeks ago. I’m still well under it for my main ETH position, and I did compound my IRA positions this time as well. I haven’t done that in quite some time.

After that I did my routine for SAIAdao. I didn’t DCA anything since our cash is reserved for the C11, and since ATLAS was so high I sold our ORCA emissions and recompounded the POLIS. That got me thinking…

I’ve been really confused about the availability of Serum market AMMs. There’s a pool program in the monorepo, which I had thought was an AMM. It’s not. It’s a basket of tokens, like a TokenSet or what have you. I had conflated it with the Solana Foundation token-swap program, which is an AMM program, but has been deprecated. I believe that Raydium and Orca may be using their own versions of it, but I haven’t verified that yet.

Point is I went ahead and made an POLIS/ATLAS Serum market today. I went through the DEX code and had to add the ref code for ATLAS pairs, created the market and got the update pushed out. I had originally done it as a prerequisite for making a Atrix pool, but their program locks 50% of the LP when you start it, not to mention 4 SOL to fund the crank, so no sir. I found out about the 50% lock after I had created the market. Whoops.

I hope the whole exercise doesn’t turn out a waste of the 2.8 SOL I used to create the market, but who knows, maybe we can do something with it.

Today is Halloween, and the day the Bitcoin whitepaper was released thirteen years ago. The kids didn’t really have costumes this year. Younger just wore a Minnie Mouse hoodie, and Elder had a green riding hood. She was supposed to be a wood elf, but kept losing her ears. We went to two Trunk or Treats, one last week at Younger’s school, and another yesterday by the Girl Scouts. We walked the neighborhood tonight, someone down the street did a really good haunted house. It was creepy as hell, I think I was more freaked out than the kids were.

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Burning daylight

I went for a three mile run this morning. Missus and I went to bed at 10PM last night like a bunch of old farts. I was too worn out to do anything productive last night, so I watched an episode of Foundation and Y The Last Man and then read some more of the third Foundation book on my iPad while Missus dozed off.

I have to say I’m not impressed with the show. I mean, it’s well produced, but as an adaptation to the novels, I think it misses the mark. And Y, I didn’t read many of the comics, so I don’t have much to go on, but the whole production feels like The Walking Dead, and I’m just waiting for some sort of cringe moment that so far hasn’t come. And it’s funny, as I’ve been watching Squid Games that I’ve been less bothered by the body count in that show. I don’t know.

Yesterday I let myself get roped into an Ethereum development project for someone that I met via Twitter. It’s just a “simple” NFT staking contract and front end, but I should have said no. It’s probably something that I’m capable of doing, but it’s going to distract me from getting stuff done on Solana, and that’s not what I need right now. I have a call on Tuesday regarding a dev position, and this just seems like this was a mistake that I let myself get sucked into. Still, it’s not an insignificant sum of money for what should be a quick job, assuming that I can outsource the front end work to someone who knows what they’re doing better than I.

I want to get some coding done this morning. Younger woke up early and has been watching TV, but Missus and Elder are still in bed. I’m not sure how much time I have. It’s Saturday, so we need to clean the house, take care of any final Halloween prep, and deal with any other housework that needs doing. I may try to work in some landscaping work and dig up the stumps of three juniper bushes that I cut down last week. I also have a tree in the front yard that I plan on cutting down, but I’m probably going to wait until after Halloween to do that.

Star Atlas mentioned that they’re going to drop two new ships this week. I can’t imagine that one of them is going to be the C11, but still it reminds me that I need to finish prepping my update scripts for the DEX. The menu generator is working, but I still need to fix the tokens and mints for the DEX, as well as prepare some sort of update script for the backend.

Just got pulled off by a Discord DM. A founder who’s working on indexing Serum markets and data. Showed me the GraphQL API. There’s some good stuff there. So many opportunities in this space. It’s hard for me to focus right now. The Solana Ignition winners were released yesterday, and I spent some time looking over those. There’s a program called Bulldozer that is a UI built on top of Anchor, was playing around with it yesterday and talking to the developers. So much interesting stuff going on.

Here I am, it’s past nine now. I should get some work done.