Weeknotes, 2025-09-14

Me, last week:

It’s not great that only the second one of these I’m trying to do weekly is half a week late.

Hahahahahahah… :-/

I’m trying to focus on the fact that done is best, and that habits take a while to form, but also: c'mon, Anthony.

Some stuff is going well, though! And it was actually a pretty good week for other habits, even if slowly. So let’s start there.

Habits

Baking! Now that 6yo is back in school, I’m back to baking regularly. I make the bread for her sandwiches, which makes for a nice routine. I mostly use the same recipe over and over, only really playing around with mixing in different flours and tweaking their ratios a bit, but it’s a nice to have something that gets used daily like that. It took a little bit to figure out a recipe that’d work for the kids' sandwiches after so much time focused on “traditional” sourdough recipes, but this Pain de Mie from The Perfect Loaf works wonderfully. My main note if you’re going to try: use all-purpose flour rather than bread flour. If you’re going to be spreading something like sunflower butter on it, the normally lovely open crumb that bread flour encourages is your enemy here' This regular routine also encourages me to keep my sourdough starter a little more vigorous, which in turn encourages more baking.

Spending time with some creative coding is starting to feel like a good habit again, too. I’m still not great at actually protecting the time for it, but there’s a lot more of the time available now, so that’s helping. My main problem here now is getting 2/3 of the way through something before moving on to some other interesting project (and there are so many interesting projects).

Still with the body

On Monday I had a visit with orthopedics about my wrists; it was a mixed bag. On the one hand, my partner was worried I’d walk out of there with bilateral casts, which would have been pretty awful, and that didn’t happen. And generally, the orthopedist was less worked up about the injury than either the immediate care doc or the radiologist, which is good. Of course, that’s all relative. I’m stuck in these braces full time except for showering for a month, with two months of physical therapy after that. Which would all be fine, except for the “and then we’ll see” at the end of that. He thinks probably that’ll get things sorted, but not with a lot of confidence, and if not we’re back to looking at casts… or possibly surgery. Good times.

Overall, the braces have been mostly fine, although the restricted movement gets irritating and it’s easy to get down about that going on for a month.

Unrelated to all that, my partner and I have started doing a couch-to-5k program again. I did this 10 years ago or so, and it was very successful, especially at, somehow, turning me into a runner for a few years (until I rolled my ankle and then, unrelatedly, moved to where the same sorts of runs weren’t as practical or enjoyable). I was a little apprehensive about doing this again with my partner; I haven’t really enjoyed running with other people in the past. Turns out I enjoy doing most things with her (because she’s the best). :-)

Tech bits

The week’s technical highlight was getting another system set up with physical ethernet for testing and seeing data make it across the wire. More of the details of the shape of this thing keep crystallizing in satisfying ways, which mostly offsets the fact that the braces slow down the actual implementation (I type slower and have to take more frequent breaks). I had previously bought a Ugreen Nexode power bank to power this thing so I could treat it as a portable, but that hasn’t worked out, mostly. I’d thought this power bank wouldn’t have the annoying behavior mostdo of momentarily disconnecting the battery when you plug/unplug the power bank itself from power, but no such luck. Thankfully, at least at the moment, the main use case for that was using it while on the couch, so having to keep it plugged in isn’t too big a deal.

Oh, I also realized I’d forgotten a bit about how to get Plan 9 set up on a Raspberry Pi in a way I’m happy with, so I’m adding a project to document that a bit better. (The thing that tripped me up longest: make sure you add both the wired and wireless ethernet addresses to your ndb database (typically /lib/ndb/local), even if you’re just using wireless, since ndb/cs will try to set sysname from the wired address unless you make other arrangements.)

A few years ago, I got into “weird” keyboards: mechanical, sure, but also things like minimal ortholinear and row-staggered layouts. A little bit of this was a mental project to examine and re-evaluate some of the assumptions we make about how computers are… but much more than that, I just think they’re fun. I’ve been using an Atreus from keyboard.io as my main keyboard at my workstation for a while now, and really liking it (I also have a couple pre-keyboardio Atreus models and like them quite a bit, too, but they tend to end up moving between other projects). As luck would have it, that sort of minimal, row-staggered, split, and angled layout works out just about perfectly for the restricted movement the braces impose (with the “split” and “angled” parts being the most important). A genuine chording layout would be even better, from that perspective, but I’ve never been able to use one of those effectively. It feels like “tenting” would help, too, but I don’t have a keyboard that does that.

Family

6yo had her first horseback riding lesson of the season this week. She’s getting better skill-wise, but also more comfortable with the horses (not to mention the barn cats and dogs). My partner, who rides after 6yo’s lesson, is especially getting a kick out of watching her learn.

6yo also had her first play date of the school year. With her cousin no longer living with us and the school year having started, we’re going to have to make a more conscious effort than we’re used to about these. The kids really enjoyed this one, and I got to spend time talking with one of the parents I didn’t know particularly well, which ended up being lovely.

Social

In addition to having a nice time at 6yo’s play date, I got a little social time for actual adult groups, which was nice. We had two social functions for my partner’s work, which were both nice but not entirely my scene, but also: the first #PDXFedi meetup! Greater-Portland-area users of the Fediverse. It was nice to put faces to people. I’m bad at mapping online personas to actual people (it’s worst on IRC), and this really helps make people feel more like people.

We also went out for ice cream this weak an unusual number of times for us, including our first time at the new-ish Miss Oz Ice Cream & Dessert, which was very tasty.

Upcoming

I’m going into the coming week with concrete, measurable technical goals, which has been unusual for a few months. I like that.

And I’m hoping not to be even further out with these next week.