Blockchain Man

Today I decided to distract myself from getting any real work done on the deck by attacking a trio of large holly bushes that line the south side of our house. They’ve been neglected, and have grown taller than my ability to trim them, so went at them very aggressively with a sawzall and lopped them in half. It’s was a hack job, but it’ll grow back. Apparently holly bushes can withstand having their main trunk cut down to the ground and they will come back. That’s probably what I’ll wind up doing, as the inside branches are all gnarled and bent, twisting in every direction. It looks like shit, basically.

I’m not quite sure why hollies were chosen for this spot, since that side of the house gets the most sun of the entire yard. I imagine that they’re probably contributing to some sort of cooling effect on that wall, but I’d much rather put that area to some more productive use. Apparently hollies, in addition to being used for hedges, can also be used to feed livestock during the winter months, assuming the leaves can be cut and allowed to mellow for a couple of weeks.

I’ve actually been on a bit of a permaculture kick the last day or two. Missus’s little garden is producing cucumbers and tomatoes now, and I’m thinking a lot about how I want to redo the yard. I hate cutting grass, and have been trying to figure out ways to make the yard more natural. I’ve let the back quarter go, near the small drainage ditch in the back. I’ve been keeping the tall grass down, letting natural bushes pop up here and there, letting seedlings grow. I just wish I knew what to do with the front yard. We’ve got a small crepe myrtle, which is a native plant, but we’ve got a row of juniper bushes — another bane of mine — against the front porch, as well as a flowering pear tree in the front. The pear tree is not the fruit producing kind, but is apparently an invasive species that was planted there when the house was built. When it flowers in the spring, it smells like a dead animal is rotting in the front yard. It’s not very pleasant and Missus and I have both decided that it needs to go. We’ve just been having a hard time deciding what to put there, although to day she said she wants a fig tree there.

Otherwise, today was pretty lazy. I did my monthly household accounting, and did my weekly rotation on my Perp.Fi positions. I pulled in over six hundred fifty dollars, which is close to my post-tax take home pay before I quit my job. Once the market takes back off I should be sitting pretty. I may put some more capital to work.

I’m also hoping to meet a friend from Twitter who is in the area for a couple days. We’ve never met in real life, but he quit his job a month before I did, so we’re both full-timers now.

Well I didn’t get out of bed until after eleven this morning, so I must have had a good night last night. I drank half a bottle of Monkey Shoulder and played Neverwinter with Elder till after 11:30, Missus was not happy about that latter part. I still beat her up out of bed this morning – she was sleeping in Younger’s bed. The girls had been up watching TV for several hours.

We watched Black Widow, which was not very good, I must say, and I took Younger out to the park and to the store. Otherwise that’s about all that happened today. I didn’t get anything done.

I just wanted to get my words in today before I go climb into bed, it’s only 9:30 but I’m already tired. I’m going to read until I’m sure the kids are asleep then I’m OUT. I’m hoping I can wake up early, get a run in, and get some yard work done and take next steps on staining the deck.

The girls will be going to church tomorrow. The church bus driver knocked on our door this morning to ask if Younger wanted to come, and Missus didn’t feel good about her going on her own so we’re bribing Elder to go with and keep an eye on her. The neighbors, who they’ve been going with, are out of town for the week, so they’ll be on their own.

It’s also going to be hard with Younger’s playmate gone all next week, but we’ll have to do. They’re so much easier when they have their friends around. I guess I’m going to be getting all the extra attention myself. Joy.

The markets continue their free-fall; I remain convinced that we’ve only got to get through July before things start taking off in the opposite direction. I continue to mull over increasing my Perp.Fi position to make sure that I am generating sufficient income to maintain my current employment status, but protocol risk worries me. I may have to consider Nexus Mutual coverage, but I don’t know that they’ve ever had to pay out on a policy.

I’m up early this morning because Younger came to the bed last night and started doing her signature feet-flop maneuver, so I’ve already been quite productive already and got in my workout that I neglected yesterday. Most of the aches and pains I’ve had for the past few days are completely gone.

I knocked out a couple podcasts this morning and did some reading. Every time I hear Balaji Srinivasan do an interview I feel like I should be taking notes. This guy is so far ahead of everyone in the long game that it’s completely amazing. I don’t know how he does it.

I’ve got a few household things to do this morning before I get down to work. I want to focus on Rust today. The Exercism track is pretty challenging. A lot of it comes down to the actual algorithms themselves, I’m working on one now where I’m supposed to implement the Sieve of Eratosthenes. I’ve been keeping myself from peeking ahead at submitted solutions to strengthen my resolve, but this one was kicking my butt the other day. I can usually come up with a solution that is test complete, but it’s usually in some horrible imperative style that is completely un-axiomatic. I’m trying to do more using Rust’s functional style, but I’m having a hard time chaining functions in these elegant, concise programs. I spend a few hours coding out these cludgy things that are test complete, and once I’ve completed it I’ll take a look at the solutions. Usually it’s someone who managed to do what I accomplished in a couple dozen lines of if clauses in one map( ).filter( ) line. And the borrow system is… a bit difficult. But I keep pounding at the keyboard and moving forward. I think by the time September gets here I’ll be pretty far into it, and will have a good base in case I do need to go back to work.

Well, I hate to tell myself I told me so, but…

One of these days I’ll learn. I pulled a grand out of my margin and put it into a 1x long. It only moved my liquidation price by thirty dollars, but still. No further moves at this time.

Today was a pretty good day. Elder and I have been having a pretty good run the last couple days. She did her chores and helped out around the house without too much fuss, or yelling. She did her check in with Galileo and did an art class today, we played Roblox and Neverwinter, and she even finished a piano lesson that I’ve been working with her on for a week or two. And we just finished doing a couple Spanish lessons on Duolingo.

There was a saying that I once heard that stuck with me: happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember. I hope I can look back on these past few days as some of the happiest I’ve had.

I spent most of my deep work time banging my head trying to get a GraphQL query working in React. I’m not sure if I’m going to plow ahead with it tomorrow or switch back over to Rust. I’m running into some obstacles in both of them and really need to plow through. This is where the rubber hits the road.

Today has actually been a welcome contrast to yesterday. Elder woke up this morning and told me that she was going to do everything I say so that she could “reap the rewards”. So far she’s been living up to it. She’s played the piano several times — she’s working on the hook for I’ll Be There as part of her Playground Sessions bootcamp, she washed some dishes that I left out this morning, and she’s been fairly enthusiastic about her Galileo clubs. Parenting on days like this is pretty easy.

The London network upgrade (which includes EIP-1559) has been merged and will go live on the Ethereum mainnet on August 4th, 2021 at block number 12,965,000.

Ethereum's scarcity engine is about to be unlocked.

— sassal.eth/acc 🦇🔊 (@sassal0x) July 7, 2021

Meanwhile, my Perp.Fi positions are holding up, and I’m getting really tempted to pull some margin and add to my longs here. Probably just a weeks worth of funding at 1x, that should allow me to build my nominal position without raising my liquidation price too much. ETH is going to be the cake here. My ETH long has one third the capital at one half the nominal position; the funding is higher, APY-wise, but I’m still making better gains off of the BTC position because of the nominal size. I’m just watching this potential rising wedge for a potential pullback before I act.

I’m trying to be careful to not do too much with this, I’m still wary of a bit pullback that might put me at liquidation risk. I’m at 2.6x for ETH and only 1.6x for BTC, which isn’t too bad right now, but it was only two weeks ago that I was losing sleep because I feared I was about to get wiped out. I suppose I should sit back and wait for a clear trend confirmation before I go crazy. A close above $2600 should do it, but I don’t think I’m going to wait. I added to my margin three times to avoid liquidation, I think I’m going to pull one of those and add it back at 1x to see how that affects my position. The reward should be about an extra $5/day, while the change to my overall leverage and liquidation price shouldn’t move much at all.

Bit of a long day today, made longer by the fact that Elder has been arguing with me all day. It’s my fault for letting her stay up last night, and she’s been really emotional and defiant. I also didn’t get much done because I am still watching Younger’s best friend while her dad and older brother are off at camp for the week. And I just volunteered to watch her the three year old younger brother to give the mom some help. I think I’m going to lose my mind.

I did have a bit of fun with them today though. We played Go Fish and finally busted up the pinata that we had never gotten around to for Younger’s party.

And the main good news is that the funding rate on Perp.Fi has been very good to me today. The markets can go sideways for a couple more days as far as I’m concerned. Still, I think a break out is imminent. The price has been very compressed lately and the pressure is building up. It’s just a matter of time.

I don’t feel like I got enough deep work done today. I did some work on an Exercism, but didn’t get very far. Same thing with the SAIADao multisig; there was an update to the spl-token program that broke my script, so I have to deal with that later. Also, I lost some time today dealing with what appears to be a bit of an implosion with Lift.Kitchen. If it had been fully DeFi I think it might have failed already, but because the pegs are manually maintained it’s just been a slow bleed. The community is trying to decide what to do about it, but there’s no consensus yet. It’s mainly bleeding off because of the APY, so they’re trying to figure out how to save the protocol. Tokenomics are hard.

I’m trying to figure out whether I can go for a run tomorrow morning. My knee is better, I must have hit it, as the pain is on the kneecap, not under it. Still, I’ve got some pain in my feet that may cause me some problems. My upper body workout this morning was less than ideal — again, the kids — but at least I’m keeping the habit up.

I’ve just been watching too much TV lately. Hopefully I can squeeze an hour in here before lights out tonight.

I feel like I’m overdue for something profound or significant, but today was just more hanging out with the family. Younger’s BFF came over early this morning and we took her to the pool with the rest of the girls. Came home, napped a bit, played video games, watched TV. Not a lot going on today, just watching the crypto prices go up and down and keeping an eye on the Perp.Fi funding rates to make sure I’m still making bank.

Now that the holiday weekend is over it’s time to get back to work. Elder has Galileo, but it’s she actually hasn’t done anything yet, so I hope she can actually get into some of these courses or clubs. Missus is reiterating that she wants her to go to back to school — and college — but I’m not going to be the one to argue with her on it. I’ll let Elder do it if that’s what she wants.

I did have a pretty good day. It was productive, but not quite in the way that I wanted. I was actually a bit bored today. I got Gloomhaven for PC yesterday. It’s a good game, but not really my thing, so it feels like twenty bucks wasted. I bought Sims 4 for Elder, but she got frustrated after a few minutes and went back to Roblox. Considering the amount of BS I had to go through to set the account up — thanks, EA — I was kind of disappointed, but it’s probably for the best. Missus was actually hooked on one of the other Sims games and asked me to set it up for her on her machine. I did, and she spent a few hours on it today.

Back to work tomorrow though. Coding and building, if I can get some time to myself. There’s a lot of cleaning to be done around here. I also didn’t make much progress finishing the deck, just put down that last board but didn’t screw it down because my drill battery was dead. I also need to buy a dryer, or figure out how to keep the one we have from eating our clothes. And another $800 to buy a hot tub cover. Blerg.

I managed to get a bit of a workout in today at the pool, swam laps for twenty minutes. Man, swimming is hard. Hopefully my knee will be better tomorrow. It’s mostly ok; my back if fine. What’s weird though is that the pain point is on the front of the kneecap. I probably won’t go running tomorrow though, I’ll make it an arm day.

It’s been a month since I quit my job.

Well I paid the price for the fun last night. Today was a bit of a mess, I think I was dehydrated this morning and drank way too much coffee, which caused me to feel like ass for most of the day. We watched The Tomorrow War — verdict, not great — while Missus slept in past 11AM. We went out of for ice cream before we hit the road and managed to make it home without stopping. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

I managed to do some cooking and the fam spent the rest of the afternoon and evening on screens. It’s 10PM and Younger is just going down for bed, and me along with her as I’m pretty well exhausted. My back is better but my knees are a wreck. I think it’s from wearing my Vibrams while trekking up and down the mountain from the beer tent to the kids area. I’ll need to give them a few days before I do any running.

Tomorrow we’re supposed to head back over to the SIL’s house for a Fifth of July pool party and cookout, but Missus and I are so tired right now that we’re not even looking forward to it.

Not sure how I’m going to sleep with the neighbors firing off fireworks, but I think I’ll probably fall right asleep. Paying the price, I suppose.

I have a limited time. The fam took a road trip to my father in law’s house out at the mountain resort, and they had a Forth of July festival. We had a good time. But it’s really late and I don’t have time to write a detailed post tonight about how awesome it was. C’est la vie.

There’s really not much for me to chat about. We enjoyed ourselves. It didn’t start out that way though. This morning was really cumbersome. I did all the yard work: edged the yard, cut the grass, used the blower, then sprayed he weeds. Then I drove three and a half hours to this resort. So super fun.

Tomorrow I get to drive another four hours back to the house, so what we do between here and there is just gravy for the kids.

But now, it’s time for bed.

The main reason that I write here is as a journal. Back in the day I was reading a lot of Boing Boing and Metafilter, and I suppose I still had visions of turning daHIFI into something big. Now I’m content to leave it here as a record for myself. Most people would just journal in a book, but this is working for me now. It’s been over two years since I really started writing as a discipline, so now I’ve got a good two years worth of posts to go back through and look at to see what I was doing and what was important to me at the time.

Still, writing in a public blog such as this, I tend to hold many things back. This isn’t quite my private diary. People do know me and read this, so there are things that I keep from you, dear reader. Sorry. I don’t worry about it too much. Most visitors are coming here because they found some obscure article I wrote about a technical problem that I wrote once. I sure don’t have any illusions about monetizing this through advertising, that’s for sure.

It’s more important to me that I exercise this writing muscle. I do have things that I want to say from time to time, not writing cause I have to, as I am now, and keeping the writing muscle in shape is important to me. I know I have a book in me, just as soon as I figure out what the hell it’s about. Till then, I’ll just sit down and write about whatever comes to mind. Morning pages. Evening pages.

I should be running right now, but we seem to have a tropical storm sitting on top of us. It’s been coming down pretty hard this morning, making me acutely aware of the places where this house’s gutters are failing. There should be a break around 1PM today, so I’ve already pencilled in a run there. No rest for me today.

Yesterday Missus and I went to church, together probably for the first time ever, to see the kids’ presentation for the finale of vacation bible school. The performances were as one might expect for the situation, nothing spectacular, but it was the first time that we’ve seen the kids do something collective since COVID lockdown cancelled school and we pulled them out of daycare and Girl Scouts. The preaching was cringe, a special guest, an older man, did magic tricks interspersed with what I found to be awkward appeals. If you died today, would you go to Heaven? The kids ate it up though with laughter and oohs and aahs, but the whole thing reminded me of why I don’t go to church anymore. I already wrote about religion once this week, so I’m not going to get into it again. Still, Missus and I wrote a check as a tithe for the babysitting which is apparently going to go to missionary activities in Africa somewhere. It wasn’t all bad.

Elder had her first day with Galileo yesterday. We had a bit of a long meeting with her facilitator early in the morning, hashing out her schedule and clubs: arts and crafts, reading, Spanish, something called Changemakers, and something else to fill out the week. The facilitator had her setup goals, the first of which were TV and Roblox, but hopefully we’ll see if anything else comes of it. I paid for two months, and despite being wholly enthusiastic about it while school was in session, she’s been very difficult about it in the days leading up to it. We shall see.

Well, it’s after 8AM and I don’t hear Missus up, and there’s a break in the rain. So let me get the day started.