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Daily

My last post ended with “time to go relax”, and I think I overdid myself. There was a fair bit of debauchery. I was trying to avoid buying Cyperpunk 2077, so I went and spent sixty dollars on a EA Star Wars trilogy pack with three games on it. So I’m fully refreshed and looking forward to getting back in the swing of things.

Yesterday, Missus made a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. We made the mistake of leaving a tin of them on top of the microwave before we went to bed. I thought for sure that Younger was going to sneak downstairs before she went to bed to grab some. She actually waited until this morning.

She was sleeping with me and got out of bed before dawn. Missus and her regularly play ‘musical beds’ during the night, so I figured she was going back to her room, where her mom was sleeping. I fell back asleep for a moment and she came back in the room.

“Daddy, if Elder tells you that I was sneaking cookies she’s lying.” Yea, sure. I made her let me smell her breath, just as a test, I thought I smelled chocolate. I didn’t react, just rolled back over to see if I could grab another few minutes. It wasn’t to be. I went downstairs to check the cookies, and sure enough, there were only two left. Poor kid, if she hadn’t said anything to me about it I probably never would have noticed.

I didn’t punish her for it, but I did tell her that she couldn’t have any more cookies for the rest of the day, even though her sister could. She didn’t get it, and it set off a tantrum. It’s been one of those days. We’ve been having a lot of them lately. Younger doesn’t get out of the interaction that her older sister does at school, and she feel like she gets the short end of the stick as the little sister. She’s been having a hard time with it. There’s not a lot I can do till the vaccine is more widely available. I’ve been taking the girls out to the playground a lot — making them wear masks, of course — and we spent about four hours out there on Saturday. Beyond that and our Quaranteam family down the street, she doesn’t get much else in the way of social interaction. It drags on her, and us as well. She’ll start kindergarten next year, but it’s a long way to September.

Today’s markets were great though. My brokerage account was up the most it’s ever been in absolute terms. It was about eight percent overall, erasing all of last week’s downside and putting it a new all time high. Voyager ($VYGVF) absolutely killed it, apparently NFL Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk joined as key advisor. $MARA and $ETHE were up as well, all three around eighteen percent.

Not much has been going on with my crypto trades. I got stopped out on my XBT margin trade on Kraken, so I’m done for the month. I still have an ETH trade open, but it’s been ranging since I opened it last Tuesday.

I have been deploying some USD funds that I have on my main exchange. I market bought some more YFI, as well as some AAVE. I still have about three weeks of DCA funds on there right now, so I’m trying to hold some for now until paycheck on Thursday. Twenty percent weekly right now.

I did blow through all of the mined ETH on everything I could get my hands on through Uniswap. I did a table of all the coins mentioned in the Messari 2021 report, and picked up one, $NOIA, that was mentioned several times. Also PowerPool ($CVP), Aragon ($ANT). And also a few that some of my degen PRIA follows mentioned: Unfederal Reserve ($eRSDL) and Reflect.Finance ($RFI).

I also spent some time working on Ether Auction today, although I didn’t get very far. My setup is sub-optimal, and I’m not sure how to go about setting it up more efficiently. I’ve got two repos open in ItelliJ, one for the contract and the Hardhat scripts, the other for the React app itself. So I have one terminal window open for Harhat node, another to run the deploy script. Then I have to delete the data directory for my Graph node, run docker-compose, then I have to create and deploy the subgraph itself. Then, I have to run React tools in another console, and the React app in another. It’s a bit painful.

I kinda hit a dead end trying to pull data from the chain directly through an Ethers provider, since most of the stuff I need is actually in the subgraph. Unfortunately I discovered a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) error that I’m tracking down right now.

Now the kids are in bed, and I’m ready to relax. I should probably go work out and work off some of these cookies…

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Evening pages

It feels like a lot happened today, but not a lot of what I wanted to. I stayed up too late last night and got a late start today, and had quite a bit of work to do for Zombie, LLC. NIST-related stuff. Not fun. Will mean a lot of work for me in the future, and not the kind that I’m going to enjoy doing.

Markets were a bit crazy today, BTC was down quite a bit for most of the day but turned around before the end of the day with news that Mass Mutual Insurance Company had bought $200 million in BTC for their general ledger balance sheet. Nuts. Things are happening.

I decided to sell some Stellar that I’ve been holding onto for several years. It was a giveaway from 2017, I think I got it listening to a podcast. I sold it into my margin account for about $75. I’ll probably put it toward BTC, or maybe as a long-term play in YFI. I’m feeling very bullish on it after reading what Messari has been publishing.

I took a look at my IDEX holdings today. I hadn’t seen a payout since September, so I figured that my node had stopped. It hadn’t. The rewards have just been so lousy, even with the supposed fee doubling. I’ve seen maybe a 5x upside in price over the past year, but I’ve actually been losing in with the AWS charges for the node. It stinks. I was actually going to sell, but they have some other staking rewards going on in anticipation of their forks for Polkadot and Binance chain. It might be worth holding on for a few more months. We’ll see. IDEX has actually been on of the worst performing tokens since the DeFi “winter” these past few months. Out of two dozent tokens, IDEX is one of three or four with a negative return, around twenty percent.

I get better returns mining ETH on my rig at home.

I have the sense that my attention is getting split in too many directions right now. I haven’t gotten anything substantial done in the past week or so, and I feel like I’m slacking. I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, I am watching two kids all day long, cooking and cleaning up after them, helping them with school. How much should I be getting. I might need to sit down and recalibrate my expectations. Just getting through the day should feel like an accomplishment. So what if my output isn’t what it should be? Just who am I measuring up to? My bills are paid, my kids are clothed and fed. Who cares?

I do. I want to be done with this day job crap, having to take care of stuff I don’t care about that clients I don’t care about either. Family comes first from now on. Spending time with my kids is the most important thing. That and capitalizing on the financial edge I have. Ten years from now my kids will be teenagers, and as long as I don’t do anything stupid I’ll probably be one of the one million richest bitcoiners on earth. It’s practically guaranteed at this point.

I still want more though, while it’s still cheap during this cycle. Indications are that we’ll have a slight correction over the next few months, maybe a dip down to 15k between now an May. I don’t know how likely that is, but I need to start planning to convert some of my USD funds into crypto.

It’s time to convert some positions and buy the dip. This will likely be the last one below $20K.

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Everybody wants a fan

I managed to climb out of bed a bit early this morning and get in a short workout while I listened to a bit of this Knowledge Project episode with Randall Stutman on the essence of leadership. There’s a really powerful moment in there that that talks about the one thing that everyone wants: a fan. He tells the story of Tiger Woods’ famous shot on the 16th hole in the final round of the 2005 Masters, and says that the crowd was yelling so loud and that the earth was shaking, and that the reason that the ball finally fell over the lip of the cup after sitting there for 2.2 seconds was that the three thousand people that were there watching wanted it to go in.

Everybody wants a fan.

It stuck with me the rest of the day, and I tried to keep it in mind when I was dealing with my kids and my coworkers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fg4sZLrjwA

I spent most of the day re-reading the Messari Crypto Theses for 2021, taking notes so I could share some thoughts on Twitter and possibly in a longer form here. I actually canceled my LinkedIn membership today and signed up for Messari’s Pro service, I know their analysis is the best in the industry, but this report really sealed the deal for me. I think I’ve been spamming everyone with it, I think it should be widely read.

Ongoing thread with notes on the Messari report

I’m taking notes in RemNote, my poor man’s version of RoamResearch. I’ve got a feeling like I’m missing out on something without Roam, but I’m going to stick RemNote for now. I need to save all the cash I can right now — it’s Christmas, and those credit card bills are going to be due next month. Just kidding! I purchased everything using points I saved up over the past year, and haven’t paid out of pocket for anything

I also touched base with Dr. Mantis from the PRIA project, he’s working on a new one, and I got him to share the smart contract code for it. Haven’t looked at it much yet, but we’ll see if I can decipher it. More to come on that.

I continue to do some small “explorations” on Kraken with leveraged trades, feeling out how things work. My first couple BTC orders have been slightly off, playing with my entry before crashing straight through to my stop loss. I may need to recalibrate things. I have ETH and XRP (I’m so ashamed) positions that are still in play, so I’m going to see how things go so I can ge a sense of the fees while I’m dealing with a small position size. I’m tempted to go in on BTC for a third time, but I’ve already struck out twice this week and can’t enter any more positions until I close or protect the two that I have open now. Those are the rules.

The one thing I didn’t do today was work on Ether Auction. I think I’m probably experiencing a sense of overwhelm with the project — the dip — as Seth Godin calls it. So I just need to take some time and plow through and make a little bit of progress on it. I was actually reading over the Yearn.Finance repositories to see how they have their website setup, and I took away some patterns from there that I may be able to put to use without having to pull another framework into the project. I just need it to work well enough. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say.

And one more note that has me pleased. Elder has finally seemed to embrace playing the piano. I she’s been practicing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town for a week or two now, and was bragging to her teacher that she can play it, and is going to perform it for her class over Zoom next Thursday. I’m so proud, and glad that she is sticking with it.

I myself am sloooowly making my way through Claire De Lune, and after a bit of stagnation over the past week, have been working my way through two of the hardest measures in the piece. I’ve been practicing it daily for less than three months right now, and have been drilling these long, flowing runs over and over. Just doing it day after day after day, until it becomes subconscious. Automatic. I know I can do it, cause I did it with guitar after so many years.

I suppose programming is the same. I keep at it, and I should get to the point where these languages and frameworks become invisible to me, and I can focus more on the program flow and the bigger architectural pieces.

Maybe then it won’t seem so overwhelming. I just got to keep grinding.

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Knowledge and specialization

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I’m trying to get back in the swing of things and stick to my habits. I’ve been terribly bad lately, staying up too late, not getting enough exercise, and spending too much money on beer. I’m sure a lot of it was exuberance with the bitcoin price action; I was way too excited about my prospects. This Thanksgiving pullback seems to have deflated my mania. I also deleted TradingView and my cointracking apps off of my phone.

I spent a lot of time playing Elite: Dangerous the past week after it was offered for free on Epic Games. It’s a massive timesuck. I played six hours after dinner on Thursday, trying to complete a mission that may have been bugged. It’s a great game, but I feel like I need to delete it from my PC. Otherwise I may wind up pulling out the Saitek flightstick and Oculus out of the closet. May as well buy some adult diapers while I’m at it.

Last night I spent the evening working on a bug fix pull request for a Hardhat issue that no one’s been working on. I ran into it while working on my Ether Auction unit tests, two other people seem to have discovered it as well, so I decided to take a look at it. It was actually pretty easy to fix. The Hardhat library explicitly imports many of the matchers in the Waffle library, these balance change functions were just left out. I tested one of them within my actual repo and it worked fine, but I’m not sure the most efficient way to design a unit test around every one of these functions. I may take another crack at it later.

I still get a kick contributing to projects, knowing that my contributions are forever going to be associated with the project history. Even if I’m just doing minor stuff like fixing a typo or adding a couple of imports to a file. It’s like every commit or PR gives me dev points, and each one still gives me a little dopamine hit.

There was a quote that’s had my attention recently: “the more knowledgeable you become, the more you tend to specialize.” I can’t recall the exact wording, but the gist is that as one gains knowledge in a field, the more one tends toward specialization in a particular niche. One the one hand, my professional knowledge has tended to spike toward a topic for a period of time before moving on in a different direction, Jack of all trades, Master of none, if you will. I might be overly harsh on myself. On the other hand there is a bit of immense freedom in this, that I’m not trapped into a particular niche. Still, it may be too much freedom, and has prevented me from truly mastering particular domains. I usually focus on what I need to get things done, then it’s on to the next thing.

When I was younger, I used to ready entire documentation manuals from front to back. I remember the large Windows 2000 Server Administrator guides, large 1700 page monstrosities that I would flip through with great curiosity. It got me pretty far in my career, and still serves me well as far as Windows server administration goes. I’m just trying hard to get away from that career.

Now that I’m in my forties, there’s a part of me that wonders whether I still have the capability to absorb information or pick up new skills like I used to. My brain is a sponge, but is it’s absorption rate still what it used to be? I don’t know whether it’s just doubt, impostor syndrome, or just too much time to think, but part of me is wondering whether I have what it takes to succeed in these endeavors that I’m undertaking.

As far as my day job goes, it seems that I’ve already made a semi-conscious effort to stop keeping up with the changes. There’s so much consolidation in the managed services space, with remote management and process service vendors merging left and right. New offerings are popping up all the time. Every few days Bossmang will send me an email about some online conference for this or that, Sonicwall’s new OS offering, say, and ask me if I’ve registered for it.

“Nope”. Aint gonna.

I’m simply focused on maintaining our existing customer networks. We haven’t had a new client in eighteen months. Right now I’m just focused on completing the Ether Auction, then I’ll have my first Ethereum project under my belt, and then I’ll feel comfortable calling myself an Ethereum developer, which will open a lot of doors. I know I can get the version done before a COVID vaccine is widely available, and then I should be able to go anywhere.

I’ve always loved casting a wide net, and going wherever my fancy took me. Unfortunately, this results in a bit of decision paralysis. I must get this from my mom. My dad called it “flightiness”, as she always had a new hobby, whether it be woodcrafts, painting, stained glass, or hiking. I tend to take after her in that respect, in what Missus calls my six-month projects.

I’m more focused on seeing things through to the end these days, but I’ve always lived by the maxim that works of art are never completed, merely abandoned. Maybe it’s a matter of specification, the difference between building to requirements versus a creative project based more on exploration.

Focusing on the process, rather than the outcome seem to help. Sit down, code, make progress toward the next thing. Resist the urge to start something new. Say “no”. Have constraints. Reduce the possible futures to the set of those where success (or at least completion) is inevitable. Collapse the superposition to a finite state, hit that commit button, deploy that contract, so you can say it.

“I’m done.”

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Professional excellence

Today was pretty chill. I had my annual physical today, the girls were off school, and neither Missus or I were in the mood for much work, so we all took it easy today.

Public schools decided to take an early break today so I let the girls watch some TV this morning. I gave them a list of chores to do for more TV, but they decided not to do any of them, which was fine with me. I took them to the park for an hour this afternoon to run off some steam. I’m making them wear their masks while they play, but it’s probably not doing any good since they keep pulling them down. I’m trying.

My physical was uneventful, we mostly talked about our kids, fishing, and bitcoin, of course. Doc seems like someone I would hang out with, if I had friends of course. It would be a huge violation of ethics though. Que sera.

I didn’t have any messages or tickets in my inbox at work this morning, so I was planning on slacking off, but I surprised myself by answering a call for help on the national team tech help channel. There was an Exchange server error that was caused by a broken Active Directory/DNS issue. I spent an hour and a half troubleshooting and checking things, and finally got to what I thought was the fix. I still needed more information from the client, so I called them, waited an hour for them to call back. I ran the command, rebooted the server, and things were up and running.

The client asked me, “all you did was run that one command?”

“Yes,” I told them. He thanked me and I did my picture perfect support rep impression before signing off. I recalled a story that I had read some time ago that I often refer to after incidents like this, sometimes called The Handyman’s Invoice or The Boilermaker’s Story:

“There is an old story of a boilermaker who was hired to fix a huge steamship boiler system that was not working well.

After listening to the engineer’s description of the problems and asking a few questions, he went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the boiler and the hiss of the escaping steam for a few minutes, and felt some pipes with his hands. Then he hummed softly to himself, reached into his overalls and took out a small hammer, and tapped a bright red valve one time. Immediately, the entire system began working perfectly, and the boilermaker went home.

When the steamship owner received a bill for one thousand dollars, he became outraged and complained that the boilermaker had only been in the engine room for fifteen minutes and requested an itemized bill. So the boilermaker sent him a bill that reads as follows:
For tapping the valve: $.50
For knowing where to tap: $999.50
TOTAL: $1,000.00”

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FIRE

The whiteboard on our fridge a white dry erase magnet, slightly bigger than a sheet of paper. On the top of it is written “FIRE by 2024”, along with the amount of student and mortgage debt that we currently have, along with the interest rates we’re paying on them. (The auto loan was erased last month.) Below that is the current price of BTC, along with an arrow pointing to the price it needs to be erase that debt completely, about $60,000.

Yesterday I decided to put a new number on that board, and calculated the value of my BTC in my cold wallet plus the Ethereum wallets I’m tracking in Zapper.fi

I don’t know if such a visible reminder is good for my mental health or not. I’m already obsessed with price action beyond what’s healthy, and I’m not sure if this is a good aspirational exercise I’m indulging in or compulsion.

Zombie, LLC, the walking dead that I call a day job, lost another client yesterday. This one was due to the client firm shuttering. It’s a small account, one that was more of a pain to deal with, but it had been steady recurring revenue lately, and didn’t require too much from me. When I got the call from the business manager, asking to cancel services, I could hear the depression in her voice. I’m sure she had been making several of those calls to other vendors and I managed to muster some sympathy in response. It was a small, family-run operation, and I didn’t ask for details. I assume it was a mixture of loss of business or the patriarch’s age, or desire to retire.

Side note, this guy actually wrote a book about how modern science is wrong about carbon dating and evolution, and how man co-existed with dinosaurs. He spent $15,000 to publish and market the book, but was always hard to convince when it came to capital outlays for the business. So it goes.

We seem to have reached some sort of equilibrium here at the house, with certain rooms falling into a sort of stable chaos between clutter and cleanliness. Missus made me bring out our Christmas tree last weekend as she wanted some cheer in the house. What we got instead is a leaning tree with one strand of lights thrown on it, and half the ornaments strewn around the living room floor for the past several days. The cats have taken to either chewing on the metal branches, or trying to climb or hunt from within them.

The kids have been somewhat more behaved lately. We seem to have reached a bit of understanding, they won’t do half of the things I ask them to do, and they won’t get to watch TV at all. We’ve settled into a sort of rhythm: we do our own things in the morning, chores (to an extent), breakfast, I have calls for work, they have their project du jour, lunch, and then schoolwork from noon till three.

I’ve been letting them use their laptops or tablets for Khans Academy in the AM if they want, but they don’t get any of their shows until after school. Elder is doing her third grade Zoom sessions, and I’ve got Younger doing IXL math and language arts. I’ll have her reading in no time. I’ve also bribed Elder with an ice cream party when she finishes the Khan Academy third grade math course.

Thanksgiving is next week, and Missus and I are still trying to figure out what to do about it. The girls go to her mother’s every Friday, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to avoid Thanksgiving at her house, even though the rest of the in-laws are there. I’ve got a lot of anxiety about it though. COVID cases seem to be spiking through the roof, and we’ve been lucky so far, the headlines about large Thanskgiving dinners and small Christmas funerals” seems to be stuck in my head. I think part of it is that I haven’t seen my mom since pre-COVID, and had been looking forward to seeing her during the season.

Missus’s father bought a tract of land a few weeks ago and has been steadily working to make it into a homestead. There’s a fully-stocked lake there, they caught over thirty fish in a couple of hours, so we’re going to take a day trip up there this weekend to check it out. It’s a three hour drive from here. My father and law has been busy putting some sheds up there for people to stay in, and making the path in more traversable with some gravel. I’m looking forward to it.

The rest of the house is awake, and I’ve got an hour until I need to be “at work”. I’m signed on and taking calls, but I really have no taste for it anymore. I’m fully immersed in smart contract development when I’m not looking at charts or on Twitter. There’s a lot to do.

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I can feel it.

I’m a bit overcome with the feeling that I haven’t been doing enough.

And it’s just silly.

I’m raising two kids, working a job on top of everything else. I’ve got a wife and a mortgage and got seventy thousand in student loan debt coming due next year. So what if I didn’t write a substack last month?

I do feel a bit guilty about it. More guilty that I spent most of my time today consuming content on Twitter and various news feeds than I do making my own. I spend more time learning than I do on acting on that knowledge. At what point will the pieces come together, I wonder, and will I be happy and relax for a day? When the kids are grown and I got FU money.

Saw a quote today: “invest your time, don’t spend it”. Well I definitely spent a lot of time this past week on stuff I didn’t need to.

I am so ready for a career change, but can’t imagine really getting the job I want, one that will give me the extra income I want and still allow me the time I need to keep the kids home and take care of them. Cause as hard as this is right now, I can’t imagine going back to the way it was. Younger is such a joy to behold, and Elder, she’s much more of a challenge, but she needs my help, and I still find it hard to imagine that we shipped them off to daycare for eight hours a day so that I could work.

I just can’t imagine going back to that.

So I’ll just have to create the job I want, and just keep learning everything I can. I just need to remember to find time to create. And I just need to keep honing the knife. I really believe that the next four years are going to be incredibly successful for crypto, and right now I’m trying to get everything as tight as can be for what’s about to happen.

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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.

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Evening page.

Today was pretty chill.

I had a couple task to do today for work, nothing that took too much of my time. I spent most of the day in front of my computer reading and doing research. I managed to spend some time poking around with the Alchemy.IO API, trying to explore contract events in anticipation of building some kind of monitoring or arbitrage bots.

Right now I’m mainly focused on trying to get some transparency with my own holdings. Zapper and the other DeFi dashboards don’t really support a lot of the meme-farms, so trying to keep an eye on things is a bit difficult.

I’m waiting on some large fiat deposits to come through the onramp so I can stake some USD stablecoins. Fulcrum has actually been near the top of the list; I’ve never dealt with them before. I’m actually considering converting to Dai, even with the slippage, just for the extra points. Harvest is actually getting about twice as much, although I don’t trust them as much. I have a small test stake on there right now, so I may put a larger stake on there. I’ve got multiple deposits coming through, so I’ll probably spread them out depending on what’s highest that day. We’ll see.

I had a productive session last night working on Ethernauts. It seems Ethereum development relies a lot on Javascript, so I’m delving into that for the first time in a while. I’m using a script to run my exploits, and involves manipulating the Web3 library. JS has a bit of a strange syntax with the callbacks and the way that things chain together, but I’m getting it without too much Googling. They’re more alike than they are different. At least on the surface anyways.

I made a good discovery today. Coingecko has an excellent API that I can now use to get my mining calculator back up and running. It’s a Google Sheet, and relied on the Cryptofinance module and a bunch of custom API functions that I had written for various exchanges, but the CryptoFinance module stopped working because of its reliance on CoinMarketCap. I’ve been unable to use the sheet for several weeks, but I was able to get it back up and running in about an hour today. Now I just need to get payments from my mining pool, but they only go back thirty days, so that’s another challenge. I have a hack for it using my minimum payout and the numbers of payments, which I can get off the API, so that’ll work as a crutch.

The Vice Presidential debates are tonight. I don’t know if I can stand to watch them, but I’m already drinking, so it’s either that or video games tonight. I’m not sure.

I can’t believe tomorrow is Thursday already. The days are flying by.

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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.