Weeknotes, 2025-10-05

I spent more days than reasonable stressing over my “weeknotes” being most of a week late, and then it was the next week… at some point I realized the stress around that was entirely counter-productive to the point of these, which is to get myself paying better attention to what I’m doing and writing more regularly. I think better than beating myself up over failing at some arbitrary measure of consistency is to get over the idea of them needing that at all. They don’t need that to serve their purpose, I think. So I’m going to try letting go of that, instead.

Anyway. As I write this I’m sitting around a pool in Hawaii and while it doesn’t feel nearly as stress-free as that sounds, the stress is mostly about making sure the pair of children I’m watching don’t drown or otherwise wreck themselves, and it’s certainly a very different kind of stress.

Hawaii

We’re here for a week for a sort of family reunion. We’re seeing our niece, who lived with us for ~2.5 years, for the first time since she went back to live with her parents, and my partner’s brother and his family, who we haven’t seen in about two years, are coming out, too. Hawaii is always lovely; family is complicated.

Other family bits

We went to a fundraiser for the barn that my partner and 6yo ride at. I spent much of the evening helping 6yo go through a hay maze they' constructed while my partner learned to play craps. And she apparently did okay; we won 5th prize! We also won a night out in the silent auction they were having. Well, babysitter not included, but it’ll be a nice push for us. Our kid is great, but it’s easy to neglect us spending time on just us.

Back when I ran for stat legislature, I bought a button maker. The campaign may not have been successful, but my kid loves the button maker. Her school had a day during their recent “spirit week” where they encouraged everyone to wear their school t-shirt; 6yo decided that instead she wanted to make a button with the school’s logo on it. We worked together on it and it turned out pretty well (at least given that my drawing ability is about on par with hers). And while I imaging she was just being nice, one teacher said she like it so much she asked 6yo if she’d make her one (which tickled 6yo to no end, of course, and we were happy to deliver).

Tech (mostly –)

I spent some time on client work for the first time in too long, which felt nice. In the ~10 years (holy cow, really?!?) I’ve been slowly building and maintaining this Django app, I think I’m about to introduce the first dependency on PostgreSQL. It’s been running on PostgreSQL the whole time, it’s always been my preferred SQL database, and I have no plans of moving it to anything else (certainly at least as long as it remains written in Django), but it still feels like a bit of a loss to give up that portability. I still need to do a few more tests to make sure it’s really worth it, but it’s in a significant performance bottleneck and also makes the code a lot cleaner, so it seems likely.

I turned off automatic software updates on iOS for the first time (and confirmed they’re still off on macOS). I’ve heard people talking about “the last good macOS” since 10.4 (and in another sense, I guess, since 10.0, but that’s a whole other thing), and it’s always seemed a bit silly, with people confusing an aversion to change and personal preference with genuine qualitative problems. This feels different, though. Aside from a particularly buggy .0 release, Liquid Glass seems terribly ill-conceived. Aesthetic preferences aside (personally I was happy when the early OS X got a little less “lickable”, but that’s just me), more than ever it feels like the folks in charge of UI design have lost the plot. UI glitz that obscures content and functionality, to say nothing of legibility and accessibility.

I’ve been worried on macOS for a while (hiding the proxy icon was my canary in the coal mine; it’s such a smart UI element, given the rest of the model), but this is the first time it feels true to me on iOS.

I’m only like 90% sure I’m not projecting my own dissatisfaction with Big Tech generally, and Apple specifically, onto the UI design, though. Aside from the gradual diminishing of the UI quality, it’s hard to ignore the social aspects. The industry-wide embrace of pseudo-AI is downright depressing; I’d held out some hope for Apple to skip the hype cycle, since (a) they have a history of being willing to take a “wait and see” attitude to industry hype like this, usually to good effect, and (b) they’ve been doing the more useful sorts of machine learning in several products, and talking about that publicly, for a long time, which seemed like it could offer some insulation from a marketing (and shareholder) perspective. No dice, though; the 2024 WWDC was very disheartening to me. I’d hoped the core product design teams might be insulated from that internally, but that seems not to have been the case.

I think I might give up macOS for Lent.

I just went to look up when Lent starts in 2026 and the first hit on Duck Duck Go was a sponsored Amazon ad encouraging me to “shop catholic lent guide”. Sigh. Maybe I need to give up more.

Bodies

I’m still in my braces for my wrist. They continue to be irritating. I had my first physical therapy appointment, which I’d hoped might mean I could get out of them, but no such luck. I also got the starting measure for how reduced my range of motion actually is, and it’s… well, significant. The do-at-home exercises from PT do seem to be helping, though, which helps to differentiate how much is from the injury vs. stiffness from the reduced motion from the braces. The PT is going to go into the new year, which is a bit longer than expected. I remain grateful for my weird keyboard.

Kids in 6yo’s school are fascinated by the braces; she wanted to show me off to her class. I got to bond with one kid with a similar brace from a soccer accident; one was very concerned about whether bones were visible inside the braces. I love inquisitive kids.

It occurred to me yesterday that being in braces while in Hawaii is going to result in absurd tan lines.

My partner and I are into week 4 of Couch to 5K. I’m hoping that while we’re in Hawaii we can figure out how to run early in the morning, or the heat might be the end of me. Especially as, if I remember from doing this a decade or so ago, week 5 is really when things get a lot harder.

Farm Life

A few months ago, one of our chickens got broody, and since it was just signing on two eggs we decided to let her give it a shot. We got two chicks out of the deal, and 6yo has been straight obsessed with them. Unfortunately, there are down sides to living on a farm, too, and a few days ago something (a raccoon, probably) got one of them. There was not a lot left, but 6yo really wanted to make sure we properly buried it, so she ended up assisting in her first farm burial. She seems to be doing fine with it, but I was sad for her. She really loved that chick.

I was also reminded at the barn that not every kid has the same education about anatomy that ours gets. She occasionally asks about things like the difference between the “boy and girl” sheep, and, well, there’s only the one obvious way to tell. So it took my by surprise when another girl in her riding class, in response to one of the horses getting, um, particularly excited, loudly wondered: “I don’t know whether that’s dirt or poop!”. Our kid was… not confused.

Media

We did finish Hooky, by Míriam Bonastre Tur. It’s great. The conclusion is a little bit neat and easy, emotionally, but certainly in ways that are entirely appropriate for a kids book, and not in a way that cheapens the emotional development of the characters. Highly recommended.

We finished the week on our second night in Hawaii with the Cirque du Soleil show ʻAuana, which was amazing. I was floored by the physical aspects, of course, especially the early flips and the giant climactic set piece at the end, but just as much with the way Hawaiian culture and themes were integrated. I’ve seen Cirque du Soleil elsewhere, and the physical aspects were amazing there as well, (although I’d suggest they’ve only gotten better at what they do), but it felt like the “culture” of it was entirely fantastical before. This show felt genuinely Hawaiian; I thought it was significant that my 7yo Hawaiian niece recognized dance elements from her hula classes.

Upcoming

Hawaii for the week. Not expecting any significant technical work, other than hopefully finishing up the Django/PostgreSQL thing.