Random things

I’ve not written much lately, which isn’t unusual. I used to blame lack of time for that, but in terms of available time, I have time to write. But I choose to spend most of that time elsewhere these days and don’t feel much like blogging. It feels like, at this point in my life, not much is happening that is worth reporting on publicly.

I’d write about public events or general content, but those posts tend to require a bit more time and preparation, especially in this day and age where the internet is getting more and more locked down and you can get “cancelled” for saying one wrong word. Blogging has become an ever increasing risk with lower and lower returns. I’d like to keep doing it, but things like the UK Online Safety Bill really make me wonder if it’s still worth it. Running a blog on your own domain with all kinds of cool features has never been easier from a technical point of view, but it’s just increasingly not worth it.

Callback to my post about Firefox vs Chrome: I’m still using both. On the desktop, behind the safety of a Pi Hole and several ad blocking extensions, I’ve completely switched back to Chrome and I love it. The UX just feels that tad bit sharper than Firefox. But on mobile, especially when I’m out of the house, Firefox is still my go-to browser. The lack of ad blockers in Chrome means that I frequently end up with three quarters of my tiny phone screen being filled with video ads and banner ads. That’s just terrible. Youtube has begun to disallow ad blockers on desktop, which is quite worrying in terms of setting a precedent. Enshittification is definitely a thing, and the internet we used to know is gone. If there is a place that preserves the freedom of the old internet I would love to know about it. Now’s the time to switch.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , UK

Change is in the air

When you’ve kept your head down for a long time you might be surprised at where you are when you finally look up again. That’s what it feels like right now.

It’s been an odd day. My life in general is pretty normal lately. As a fairly boring middle-aged person I sometimes have month after month where nothing of significance happens. Those days just fly by. But then, suddenly, something happens that jolts me from normality, and I realize fully where and when I am. Today was such a day.

First, my wife finally received her British passport. It has been a long wait for her since she first applied for citizenship, but today the last remaining worry was finally dispelled and she can travel freely again. This is amazing. One less thing to worry about.

Second, I met an old friend for dinner in London. It might be the last time I see him in a while because he’s leaving the UK, as a lot of my (software developer) friends have done in the last couple of years. Increasing costs of living in the UK make London an increasingly hard sell for a lot of people I know, so inevitably many of them are returning to their home country. The general concensus among people in my circle seems to be that London is fine for a couple of years – you earn some decent money, live the life, meet the people – but then it’s time to move on and go somewhere else so that you can have a better quality of life.

Most of my friends have left London now, either to move to places just outside of London, or further away. I’m not quite the last holdout but on days like today it certainly feels like it. It reminds me of the time when I left Japan and I was the last foreigner in my group of friends to leave. Being the last to leave is an interesting feeling. I certainly felt that same melancholy today, and it made me remember my past self.

Third, this happened:

The queen died. As I was walking to the tube station I passed by Piccadilly Circus, which was full of tourists and other random people, just standing there in a daze, staring at and taking photos of the giant billboard that was showing the queen. They all seemed a bit bewildered, wondering about what was going to happen next.

So I look up at the billboard and I realize that the world has changed so much recently. Ukraine happened. Covid happened. My life in the UK happened. And the queen is dead. Who knows what will happen next.

This is the new world
This is your time
Down in the basement
Dancing again
Everybody get ready to sing
When the lights go out
When the lights go out

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts , UK

Twenty twenty one

Time goes by very quickly lately. I suspect it's a combination of growing older and the pandemic lifestyle of hardly ever going out. New things are less and less new, and there are less and less new things. At the beginning of last week I wanted to do a little 'end of year review' kind of post, but found it difficult to get into the mindset of writing again, so I ended up putting it off over and over again, and now it's 2022. That said, I've not felt this write-y for years, and I'd like to write a little bit about why.

Let's start with a question: why even bother writing on a public blog at all? I've been wondering this for about five years now. This blog doesn't get a lot of hits. I googled for 'colorfulwolf' the other day and found that my site had been removed from the search results entirely. Couldn't even find it on page 10. It seems to be back now though. Side note: DuckDuckGo is a lot better, I started using this more and more lately. Google search results have been terrible for a long time, but I digress.

Writing on the internet is a risk. More so than ever. Opinions are saturated and extreme, and even if you write something that you think is perfectly nuanced the internet mob could still come after you and 'cancel' you. I consider myself a pretty 'uncancellable' personality since I'm not in politics and I'm not showing my face on Youtube, but what I write here does reflect on companies that employ me or might potentially employ me, and that has kept me from writing here in the stream-of-consciousness style I used to write in back when I was living in Japan. I consider myself very moderate in everything, but you never know what could be misinterpreted in the future, "so why take the risk". The pros of writing in public need to outweigh the cons.

Though I don't write in public much any more, I do write in a private 'log book' of sorts. The same thoughts I used to shout out publicly I still write for myself, so I don't censor myself internally, though as you can see from this blog it does mean there's less content here. I don't feel particularly bad about that because that is in line with my life goals. It is not my life goal to be a contraversial opinion on anything on the internet. I just want to write about my life. But as a result I think my writing quality has gone down. It's the difference between programming something quick and dirty for internal use versus publishing something for all the world to see. It's just different quality standards. I would like to come back to all those private writings at some point and publish them here. That's definitely not going to happen any time soon though.

I write for myself and for those who know me in person, but not for strangers. I believe walled gardens like Facebook are fine for casual thought-sharing, but one should assume that all the information will eventually just disappear. Platforms like Wordpress or Medium are not bad, but I'd rather abstract away that layer and own my own domain. Walled gardens require maintenance and presence, which is why I prefer this content to be available to anyone. Certainly some people in my family would be annoyed if they had to log in to something in order to read this. Open data is good.

"Why bother writing anywhere at all, even in private"? For me there are two reasons. One: I obtain value from reading back things that I wrote years ago. My memory is far from perfect, and those log books help me remember what kind of person I was in years past, and how I used to think about things. It gives me a sense of continuity and identity. Two: it's therapeutic. Processing life events by writing about them has great value for me. Whenever I write something I feel like I'm offloading it from my brain so I don't have to think about it any more. The reverse also holds true: if I don't write about something it feels like it's something I have to remember, and it weighs me down.

The last thing I wanted to write about is: why have I not felt like writing in the past few years? There's an easy answer to that, but one that's difficult for me to write down here in public: I was burned out. I will not go into details here, but I consciously chose to be in a situation where I felt stressed out and miserable for a long time in order to gain in other areas of my life. It was a situation I rationally felt I should not escape from, because the pros outweighed the cons. When that situation finally came to an end this year I thought that my life would be better instantly; that I could just wake up the next day and feel good about myself again. Instead I continued to feel miserable for two weeks until I finally started to feel a little bit like myself again for the first time in years. I do not regret where I was or where it took me, and I do not blame anyone but myself for any negative feelings, but I sure am glad that's over. Issendai has a gripping article about Sick Systems that resonated very strongly with me.

I don't want to dwell on those experiences too deeply, but one thing I did find interesting was that I repeatedly thought "X is the cause of my feeling bad", and "if I do Y I will suddenly feel good again", and I repeatedly proved myself wrong. One example of this was suddenly being able to work from home when the pandemic hit. I suddenly had way more time on my hands, and I thought "life will be better now", but it quickly became the new normal again and I felt how I usually felt. It's easy to blame external causes for this, but I had made a habit out of not looking within myself for the cause. If there's one 'lesson' I learned this year, it would be to look within more. The Dokkōdō continues to be a source of inspiration for me.

This may sound weird after writing all that, but 2021 has been an amazing year for me. I am getting closer to where I want to be in life, and things are looking up for the future. My (very middle-aged) highlights of the year were:

  • We got a cat! He requires a lot of attention but he is absolutely awesome.
  • I bought a smart exercise bike. It was crazy expensive but I use it a lot.
  • Finally did a '1.0' of Legobot. It's fully functional and about the size I wanted it to be. My stretch goal was to clean up and publish all the code on GitHub, but I continue to procrastinate on that. That's probably a good thing because the code is several years old by now..
  • Built and published a UK Retirement Calculator (and unlike Legobot the code for this is on GitHub).
  • Finally had the utility room of our apartment re-tiled. For introverts like us this is a major accomplishment.
  • Enjoyed some excellent holidays: we went driving in Scotland, hiking in Wales and did scuba diving in Bonaire.
  • Bought and sold a VR headset. I previously owned the Oculus dev kit back in 2013 but was not happy with it. I thought that a higher resolution would make VR everything I ever wanted and that I would use it all the time, but instead it turned out to be just the occasional gimmick and I quickly lost interest. Beat Saber and Google Earth VR were cool though.

The new year has already begun. Let's make the most of it.

(maybe I'll finally get around to re-implementing commenting functionality on this blog... YOU NEVER KNOW)

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts , UK | Tagged ,

A little update

Hello blog, you're still here. I have lots of topics and ideas I want to write about here, but life always seems to keep getting in the way. Somewhere along the line writing on this blog has gone from one of the first things I do with my free time to somewhere near the end of my priority list. I write down short notes on thoughts in private but I don't really take the time to refine them into coherent posts any more. It's a sign of the times, I think. The generation that grew up with blogging, my generation, has gotten older. My "I'm only adulting ironically" stance on life has definitely become unironic in what seemed like an instant. Suddenly I'm old. That's what it feels like.

In my mind I always imagined myself eventually getting back to this blog many, many years later, once I am retired, to go through the list of things I wanted to write about, and actually start writing and publishing them. I still intend to do this, but I also need to recognize that this is a dream of me-in-my-thirties, much like cycling around Japan was the dream of me-in-my-twenties. It doesn't mean that I won't get around to it, but it does mean that I keep finding other interesting things to do in life, which I might consider more important. Life never stops, and that's a great thing.

I am in the middle of a journey right now. What will happen to this blog is something I will decide at the end of my current journey. For now I'll leave it as-is. From a technical point of view it's definitely a pain to maintain in its current state - I'm aware that I've still not added back commenting functionality yet since switching from Wordpress, but given how little I write here these days, I think it can wait.

My friends, here is where I am: I have recently quit one job and am about to start another. In the meantime I've had a lucky few weeks where I am in-between jobs without the job anxiety, and the wife and I took full advantage of that by going on a holiday abroad for the first time in almost two years. I feel thoroughly refreshed and ready for a new challenge. Let's see what the next few years will bring.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged

Life in the UK: Quarantine and Cycling

It's been a month now since I came back to the UK after my holiday in Egypt. As soon as I got home I received a phone call from my boss emphatically telling me, in case I hadn't checked my work email yet, not to come to work. I've been working from home for a month now, and it has been utterly fantastic. I'm definitely lucky and privileged here. Others will prefer more face-to-face human interaction, or have jobs or even lives that are at risk because of this. On a societal level this crisis is a terrible thing. But if I'm being perfectly honest: my quality of life has only improved since we went into quarantine.

The main thing I have gained is time. No more 1.5-hour commutes. That's 3 hours of my time back every day. Being able to spend that freely on things that I enjoy doing has made me feel so much better about myself. No more becoming frustrated at train delays or overcrowded and overheated train carriages. I just get to relax and enjoy the things I would do anyway even if there wasn't any lockdown. I'm actually getting a decent amount of sleep lately, and I feel like a different person because of it.

The lockdown in the UK means that everyone is supposed to only go out a maximum of one time a day, and only for buying essentials or for daily exercise. Based on what I've seen, that lockdown is only mildly enforced at the moment. Public places like parks are being locked down for cars, but there's still people who can walk or cycle there. I've seen footage of beaches being quiet as well, though I've not been there myself because lockdown. There's definitely more police patrols on the streets than usual, but I haven't seen any blatant disregard for the social distancing rules in my area (yet).

The most change in behavior I've seen is in supermarkets. There are now long queueing areas in front of the entrance, with a security guard waving people through one by one so as not to ever get too many people inside at the same time. And because of the social distancing the space between people in queues is massive, so the queues go on forever. People have been very civilized in respecting those rules, so far. I guess if the alternative is that you have to elbow your way in and risk getting too close to someone who might have 'the disease' (omg), that kind of helps in getting people to have. It's been a most civilized crisis so far.

About two weeks ago I went to the local (smaller) supermarket to pick up some things and happened to see a pack of toilet paper, which I took. My wife and I joked about the whole 'toilet paper shortage' meme after we got it, but I've not seen any toilet paper since. Though apparently it's available for ordering for online delivery. It's incredibly hard to get a delivery slot though. I managed to get one for a date two weeks from now, but online delivery opportunties are definitely scarce.

So there is that: a mild anxiety about availability of daily life products. Not having toilet paper I can live with, but I do feel that it's good to have some small supply of food. You never know if an event will occur that will cause society's infrastructure to have a hickup. Depending on the length of that hickup it might be nice to be able to bridge that gap by having a few weeks worth of food at home. It's very far from being an existential risk though, since there's still plenty of food in the shops. There is absolutely no reason to panic-buy.

Since the quarantine began I've been cycling almost every other day. It's starting to feel good again. I've been very out of shape. I just have trouble motivating myself to do any form of exercise after I finally make it home after a long working day. I'm not the type to go a gym either, so I've been very happy with the great weather we've been having lately, which has allowed me to cycle outside a lot. I'm starting to remember that feeling of not constantly feeling like you're dying at every hill. I think in time I'll be able to enjoy it again.

Cycling in the UK, or rather, in Hertfordshire has honestly not been good, comparing it to the other two countries I have cycled a lot in: Japan and the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a hard standard to beat given how much it caters to cyclists, but Japan also felt a lot nicer and safer. That probably has something to do with the area I lived in as well: in Japan I lived in a very flat area near the seaside and next to mountains, whereas Hertfordshire in the UK is just hilly everywhere. I've seen plenty of areas in Japan where they just blasted a hill to make a relatively flat road, and there were lots of tunnels, but that's not really a thing that Hertfordshire does. It's just up and down and up and down. Fine if you're fit, not fine if you're me.

People here are not used to cyclists. Pedestrians will happily cross a road without looking if they don't hear a car coming. And on paths that are supposedly cycling paths, like this path called Ebury Way near where I live, it's just uncomfortable. It's a dirt road with lots of bumps and ups and downs, with pedestrians everywhere, often walking side-by-side, oblivious to cyclists until you're right on top of them. There's a lot of people who walk their dog without a leash. The dogs don't quite get that it might not be the smartest thing to stand still in the middle of the path when they hear a bicycle approaching. I've had a bunch of near-misses with dogs on that path throughout the years, so all of that kind of means that I prefer the regular roads for cycling (at least when I'm back to my before-level of fitness). The only disadvantage about the regular roads is that they can get narrow and tend to be even more of a constant uphill/downhill. I definitely miss cycling in Japan and the Netherlands. It's just not the same in the UK.

Anyway, rant over, and it's a minor one. It's still great to be able to go out on my bicycle (while avoiding other people and not stopping at parks of course - respect the social isolation!) and be able to go wherever I want. Nature is beautiful this time of year, and there's hardly any cars on the road because of the quarantine, which makes this a perfect time to cycle. Time to get fit again!

There are certain aspects of life that are obviously better during this quarantine. I hope we can keep some of those aspects once this is all over.

Posted in Cycling , Daily Life , UK | Tagged ,

Grown-up life and blogs don't mix

In the recent years I've begun to think very differently about the 'free' time I have available to me. Back in my mid-twenties my free time was truly free. My commute was short, my responsibilities were little, my social life was not very active, so I ended up having more than enough time to spend on all the things that interested me at the time. Now, ten years later, my social life is still not very active, but everything else has gotten a lot more busy. I lose two to three hours every day in my commute. I am fortunate enough to be able to worry about what the most efficient way is to mortgage our apartment, how to invest our savings, and so on. Once those things enter your life you have to prioritize them accordingly. Just keeping up with this took some adjusting for me. And I don't even have kids! I can only imagine how busy people are when they have kids to take care of. The free time in my life has gone from 'mostly unplanned' to 'fully planned', with almost no exception. I probably first had this thought years ago. I just didn't have time to blog about it.

What does "I don't have time" even mean? In this context it doesn't mean that I am so busy 24/7 with things that utterly vital to my life that I don't have time for anything else. I still spend lots of time playing games, watching movies, cycling, editing photos, and so on. What it means is that, after I'm done with the things that are vital to my life (social obligations, researching decisions that will affect me for the next decades, daily-life churn like laundry, dishes, commutes) I end up with very little time and 'active brain time' left, that I choose to spend it on other (less creative) activities.

Today is an exception, though. Today is the first day in months in which my to-do list has finally shrunk enough for me to feel like devoting some time to blogging. In retrospect I think it was probably a mistake to switch away from Wordpress those few years ago. Yes, my blog is now statically hosted, way faster, and fully managed by me, but the scope creep in getting the little features that I need in means it ends up taking literally years before I have something that even does the bare-minimum that Wordpress does. If I had to make this decision again, I probably would've stayed with Wordpress and moved to more expensive hosting. It's a wonderfully hands-off ecosystem. The reason I wrote my own static blog system and did not use an off-the-shelf solution is because I believe I would be locked in to someone else's solution if I used an off-the-shelf library or framework. My own system minimizes dependencies and lines of code. The actual meat of the system (template rendering, page generation, publishing) is less than 600 lines of code. Sadly, the Django app that I'm writing this in is proof that I still have dependencies and need to write hundreds more lines of code before I actually have something I can use from any random device or location. I think this solution is the right solution for someone who has the time to work on it. What I should have done is just buy more expensive Wordpress hosting, which would've gotten me a lot more happiness, time-savings and features.

One thought keeps popping back into my head over the past few months: "Efficiency/Productivity is the enemy of Creativity". That's one way to phrase it. Another way would be "Efficiency and Creativity are two sides of the same coin". The more efficient I work, the less creative I am. The most efficient people I know are people I would not rank very highly on creativity, and the opposite seems to hold true as well. I find the consequences of this interesting for someone (like me) whose professional role is "web developer". The 'developer' part is something you can improve by being more efficient/productive, but the 'web' part has a very strong element of creativity in it that is sometimes overlooked. Trying to satisfy both elements is an interesting challenge. Building my own blog is something I thought would be helpful for creativity, but in my attempts to keep the amount of work to a minimum I think it ended up being an exercise in productivity rather than creativity. Building things is not fun if you don't enjoy doing it. And (at least in the case of hobbies) if you don't have joy in what you do, why are you doing it?

Use it or lose it.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged

A modern-day Dokkōdō

Prioritize mental, physical and financial health.

Use all of the day. Don't spend all your time in virtual worlds.

Accept inconvenience. Don't complain.

Think about what, ten years from now, you will wish you had gotten out of life now.

Spend some time in the sun every day.

Eat in moderation. Don't eat bad things.

Throw away things you don't need.

Meditate every day.

(Inspired by the original Dokkōdō).

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged

Moving the goalposts

This blog is finally on https! It's been a while in the making. I first tried this over a year ago but couldn't get AWS from generating an infinite redirect loop. In the end I think it was a combination of the Cloudfront distribution doing redirects and the S3 bucket that this blog is now served from also doing redirects. I think I may have actually solved it at the time, because I did the same thing again this week and it worked, but it turns out the changes take quite a while (over a day from what I've seen) to propagate, so I never knew that my fix worked the last time I tried it.

So, 2019 now. Middle age has definitely struck. I've found myself very busy last year. Busy enough to not have enough mental energy for side projects or hobbies. My major peave of the year is definitely my commute. My commute to work is, by my own standards, way too long. It's one of the things I'd like to improve on this year, if at all possible. Currently I've got perhaps 3-4 hours of free time after work, which, after dealing with all the adulting (house chores, mortgages, that sort of thing) leaves me with no time during the week where my brain is actually functioning. While I'm unhappy about that, it's also a path I've chosen for myself, and the benefits (which I won't go into here) outweigh the costs. And there's things I can do to optimize that.

One thing I definitely should reflect on when thinking about last year is the concept of moving the goalposts. I keep perceiving my life in a way that makes it seem that I haven't accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, but I forget that I had very different goals a few years ago. While I was kind-of-sort-of aware that I had been doing this over the past year, lack of free time and preoccupation with other things left me until the December holidays to really realize how much my life has changed in the past few years. Whilst all of the world around me was going to shit in 2018, for me things have improved massively in terms of knowledge, financials, living quality, and all kinds of other things. When I'm busy living the daily life it's easy to overlook that and just focus on optimizing the next thing that's not quite perfect yet, without realizing that I've already dealt with 99.9% of the biggest worries I could be having. I think it's ridiculous to value the remaining .1% of quality of life as high as the 99.9%, but that's naturally what my brain does, and it needs conscious effort for me to stop thinking that way. My goal is to try and be more aware of that in 2019.

Here's to a good 2019. May your goalposts be moved ever further.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , Thoughts

Hello blog!

Hello, blog. It's been a while.

Last year, after the previous blogpost, I felt a good sense of closure for the blog, so I decided to take the plunge and turn the entire site into a static site. No more wordpress, no more new comments, no more new posts. This turned out to be pretty easy to do: all I had to do was scrape all the pages on the domain and upload them to S3. I had been meaning to get an https certificate set up, but ran into some snags that I couldn't be bothered to work out. It's still on my to-do list, but at the time it was just yet another thing that prevented me from continuing the blog.

Continuing? But why? Didn't I say that I was done blogging? Well, yeess.. but..

Everything I said in the Goodbye post holds true, and I stand by what I said. The internet is not the same place it was when I first started blogging. Compared to 10 years ago I still feel quite strongly that it's way less appealing now to to put content online. The second argument, about my own life, also still holds true. I really do have way less things I want to blog about, and way less time to write blogposts. It compounds, of course: because the internet feels less inviting to me now, I feel the need to structure new blogposts better, more coherently. That costs more time. It all compounds.

But despite all that, during the past year I did find myself occasionally having the desire, the inspiration and the time to blog. Even if the amount of things I write is cut down ten-fold, there will still be the occasional blogpost. So, while the desire to blog was occasionally there, I was blocked by having made the site static: with no wordpress interface it's just a major pain to manually write something: I'd have to manually edit HTML files, update the index page, update the category pages, tag, pages, archive pages.. It's simply a non-starter. I had to make this easier.

There's a bunch of static blog generators out there. Some of them look nice. I'm willing to bet that there's a very large change that whichever one I pick won't be maintained any more ten years from now, and if there's one thing I hate it's dealing with someone else's codebase in my free time. Big nope. Since I'm a web developer anyway, I decided to build something myself. That was in January..

I got pretty stuck on doing something simple. If there's ever a second thing I hate, it's dealing with my own codebase in my free time, so I wanted to make things as simple as possible. This often meant that, as soon as I wrote something, I immediately discarded it for being too complicated. Perfect is the enemy of good, and nothing got done for months. I had decided that I wanted a flat file format consisting of a yaml section for each post's metadata, and markdown(+HTML) for the post content. But I really didn't get further than that, because I desperately tried to pretend that it was just a small project and could be contained in one simple file. I finally found myself with a lot of free time this week and decided to tackle the problems head on.

The result-for-now is that I ended up with more code than I wanted, but nothing too crazy. Since I'm the most familiar with Python, I ended up writing a template renderer using jinja2, a generator which gathers all the pages that need to be updated for each article, and a publisher that uploads to Amazon S3 using boto3. No other dependencies, although I did write a little preview site in Django just so I could get instant gratification as I was doing all the template and CSS tweaks.

I ran into major issues with transforming my original blogposts from Wordpress to the new yaml+markdown format. At first I was working on a scraper-like tool that would read my old blog's static HTML files and do some parsing. Then I found out that for some reason my old static blog was missing all posts before 2007. So I had to deal with the Wordpress SQL backup. I wasted an hour trying to import the bloody thing into SQLite, but ran into countless SQL dialect errors. Eventually I gave up and installed MySQL and ended up wasting another hour getting all the settings right and connecting to it from Python. In the end I did manage to extract all the posts from the database and into happy little human-readable flat files.

Then I hit another snag: turns out a lot of posts on this blog use special [block] tags for extra functionality, and that of course wouldn't work as-is. So I had to convert those to HTML. Since I was doing some search-replaces anyway I decided to do some anonymization as well: my goal for this blog is for it to be a one-way street: if you already know me it should be easy for you to discover this blog, but if you don't know me already, searching my name should not bring up this blog as the topmost hit. I realize I am completely failing at this at the moment by having a Github link in the header. That'll probably go away at some point.

Another snag was the post count: since each page shows the number of posts in each category, I'd have to update very single page every time I add a post for a category, just so the counts are updated. What a pain. I decided to remove the counts from the HTML entirely, and I added a separate stats.json file that adds the counts in through javascript. No javascript required for this blog, but it does do enhancements.

It was at this point that I realized that I was getting very carried away with everything and that I had to put a stop to this: I ended up spending the better part of five days rather than the two or three mornings I had estimated. But finally I am in a state where I can relatively easily write a new post and publish it. I need to have the python code and the raw blog contents on the machine that I'm writing from, and it currently only works via a command line one-liner, but it works. I intend to make a very basic front-end for it at some later point in time so I can publish from any machine using a Django app. Another thing I'd like to add back is the comments section. Who knows, perhaps I'll get around to that before 2020..

There's a lot of things I want to do, both in terms of adding features as well as things to write about. I still want to write down in detail what the Lego Raspberry Pi project ended up becoming, and I also want to publish the static blog generator on github after I'm done cleaning up the code. Who knows, I might even be tempted to write about my personal life again at some point. In any case, stay tuned for more exciting content.

More to come!

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , Thoughts

Goodbye blog

It's time for me to acknowledge that this blog is becoming less and less of a priority in my life. I've tried to re-motivate myself for blogging by attempting to open a Patreon account last year, but that hasn't been very successful. For good reasons, I should add, because if you're going to spend money on Patreon there's a lot better places to spend money on than this silly place. I'm not intending to wipe this blog off the internet or completely stop posting, but the content of this blog has definitely changed from "I am posting at least weekly about important experiences in my life that have affected me deeply" to "I am posting once every few months about stuff that I have trouble motivating myself for". So I guess some closing words are in order.

There have been some major changes in my life lately. I got married. Bought an apartment. Bought and sold a car. Changed jobs. But I think the one major change that is a constant throughout everything is: I got older. I continue to get older. And as I get older, the amount of importance I place on my own life only decreases with time. I believe this is strongly correlated with intensity of experience. Ten years ago I experienced everything for the first time and was amazed at what life could be like. It was something that I felt I had to record, not even necessarily for others, but at least for myself. Formative experiences. The internet was a more innocent thing at the time, and a blog seemed like the right place. The internet was full of friends, not of crackers.

On all these fronts the zeitgeist has moved on. I am at a point in my life where I don't have many truly 'new' experiences any more. There's still loads of stuff I've never done, but I've done enough similar things often enough to be able to relate and use my experience in new areas. For example, my experience in touring cycling gives me a broader knowledge that can be applied to backpacking. It also gives me a starting point if I ever wanted to venture into speed cycling. My experiences in traveling to various countries means I've learned how to get started on exploring other new countries. My experiences in learning several programming languages and countless frameworks-du-jour means that it's pretty easy for me to pick up other new software technologies. It's a kind of meta-experience: it's the experience you need to be good at experiencing new things.

Having meta-experience is nice, but also not nice. It definitely seems easier for me to start any random new thing at this point in my life compared to ten years ago, but also, I could not possibly derive the same kind of enjoyment, the same kind of 'new-ness', from it. Less intense experience means less desire to blog about it.

Another thing that's changed since I started this blog is 1) social media, and 2) my relationship with my friends. When I started this blog Facebook was only just becoming popular. Video calls existed but kind of sucked, especially if you had to explain to non-tech-savvy people (my parents) how to do them. This blog was a great means of staying close to the friends that I made in Japan after we all went our separate ways. That was ten years ago though, and the amount that I communicate with my friends today seems to be a better fit for Facebook than for blogging. Even my un-tech-savvy parents figured out how to use Facetime, so there's no shortage of communication methods.

It's definitely worth mentioning here that the internet has changed. If you're applying for a job, companies you apply for will without fail find out everything about you that's publicly available. That's only rational. I've had a negative experience once where a potential contact called me out on something I wrote on my blog. That's fair game, but if, like me, sometimes you write things that could be taken negatively out of context, then you need to consider that your online presence can only have negative consequences for you in real life.

There's also the hacker angle. The more you put up online about yourself for anyone to find, the easier it is for someone to impersonate you, or to find out starting points that they can use to find out more about you. This was something that you only vaguely had to be aware of ten years ago, but is becoming way more important lately. There's probably already web crawlers out there whose sole purpose is to crawl information on the internet and group it by person.

I'm sad to write this, but I'm even worried about what governments can find out about me. Imagine you're on a plane to some country, go to passport control and get taken aside for a 'random' check. Then you're confronted with some silly blogpost that you wrote ten years ago that casually mentions "but country X is a shit country anyway and president Y is an asshole". This is not a far-fetched scenario. I have read reports of this happening to other people online. All it takes is for one person to jump on one silly thing that you wrote years ago and you're in for a terrible experience. You could argue "but then you should think a bit more about what you write on the internet", which is a totally valid argument, but also that's kind of what makes blogging fun for me and (hopefully) for the few people in the world who are actually reading my blog, so if given that choice I'd rather just quit blogging.

I am coming to terms with all of these things. The meta-experience/getting older thing in particular has caused me to review parts of my life that I always took for granted, that I am now starting to feel that I could live without. Cycling is one of those areas. It fitted my bohemian persona from ten years ago, but nowadays I find that I've got some direction in life. With that direction, my cycling hobby has been reduced to 'staying fit', which is something I can actually do indoors. It doesn't help that the UK is a lot less cyclograph-friendly that Japan either. Blogging is on the list of things that used to matter a lot to me but are just not having any effect on my life lately. So it's time to cut them out. Spring cleanup. I have gained (meta-)experience from all of these activites, but now it's time to let it go.

See you later, perhaps.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts