reflection

September Update

Factually, I kept myself busy in September. This was not a conscious choice, and was probably a form of needed distraction. It seems to have worked: the flashbacks and waves of sadness keeping me up on evenings are less intense now. There is still a lot of practical stuff to arrange, which I chose to postpone for a bit more.

Chronologically, the entire month would be a mess to recall; I was all over the place. Metaphorically and literally: metaphorically, as I padded my free time with dozens of different hobbies, and literally, because I also spent a week in NY and used the opportunity to try out new activities and places (more on this below).

One important thing that took a hit from all this busyness is my dating life. Currently, I don’t feel that I would be easily interested, let alone able to connect with someone new. This topic is no less important today than it was two months ago, but sadly circumstances are forcing me to postpone this a bit more as well.

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As mentioned already, one of my highlights for this month is the trip to New York. This was a bit of a last minute initiative, which I arranged when I realized (at the end of August) how much I missed my friends there. Incidentally, two of my friends were celebrating their birthdays that week, and I also had a backlog of people to see and things to do for my work there. And so everything lined up pretty well.

This was a success. I felt much better after just a few days. Through the week, I got a lot of things done for my work project, and I felt a new influx of energy which I used to invest into trying out new stuff in NYC.

view over Brooklyn rooftops under a cloudy sky

This view is breathtaking. Every time I see this, I feel so privileged to be there and very mindfully file this memory for the days I will not be able to travel anymore.

selfie on the beach wrapped in a red towel

Went to the beach for the first time in more than a year; and also for the first time overall in NY. View from the Rockaways.

beam of light rising into the night sky above trees

During a lovely walk and talk with a friend at night, we enjoyed this pillar of light rising in commemoration from the One World Center.

dwarf hinoki cypress 'Little Markey' at the botanical garden

This was also my first time at the Botanical Garden in the Bronx. This park is amazing. In the picture, a dwarf cypress I would like to see in my yard some day. Not in the picture: walking through the only remaining old growth forest in New York City

black squirrel eating on the pavement

I also saw a black squirrel for the first time.

Not pictured: I also went to see my first musical on stage (Heathers). It was fun! I was impressed by the performers, even though this particular story had a dark twist that made me slightly uncomfortable. Now I know that I will probably say yes next time someone offers to go see a musical together.

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Another main thing that happened is that the city council work started again after the summer break. We have a couple beefy projects to look at, which makes the conversations with the other councilmembers lively and interesting. We also had a couple of team building events, and I guess it worked because I feel more socially connected to the entire team than I was before summer.

wheel loader next to heaps of organic waste in a processing hall

One thing we did “for the job” was to visit a garbage processing center in a town nearby. Despite what some cynics think, separated garbage does indeed get recycled with separate pipelines.

Meerlanden diagram of the organic waste processing chain

The part that this particular plant is interested to optimize further is their organic waste processing chain. They produce compost as well as water for cleaning streets, natural gas for energy use and CO₂ for greenhouses.

ABB generator housing with its specification plate

We also visited a heating plant in my town (a place that delivers hot water for use in the city). I cannot say it filled me with joy to visit a place where we burn 5,000 cubic meters of natural gas per hour in winter. However, I was appreciative to learn about their sustainability program: both government mandates and economical imperatives are going to force them to shift their energy sources from gas to other things throughout the next 20 years. I also really liked to see (and hear!) the heavy machinery.

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  • we also went canvassing in a neighborhood not far from my home. For context, canvassing is when we walk door to door to ask people what they think about the functioning of the city government; something we do a couple times per year. This time was surprisingly joyful. The people had a lot of important things to share, and I took the responsibility to report on that afterwards. Our findings are on the party web site.
  • I’m working to set up a program to inform folk in my town on how to evaluate air quality in their home. We’re going to set up a lending program for air quality sensors, with an information booklet which I prototyped here.

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Another thread to which I allocated extra attention this month is my home. (Ironically, perhaps not enough! I had forgotten to water my plants before my travel to New York and they were very sad when I came back.)

brown mushroom among grass and white pebbles

For the very first time I saw a mushroom grow in my grass. I’m still unsure which type it is. I hope there will be more later in the fall.

pampas grass plumes against a wooden fence

My pampas grass also bloomed, for the second time ever. The first time it only produced two plumes, and this time there’s enough to place them in a vase later this year.

roof gutter filled with water and fallen leaves

Full with renewal energy, I also decided to finally fix my leaking gutter (with some hired help). I’m hopeful this is going to be at least good enough for this winter. Although, after the work was done I saw that a piece of lead covering had come loose between the roof tiles and the gutter, and now I’m not exactly sure if I should be worried about it.

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  • I learned about Music Assistant from a friend, and now I can make my music follow me when I move from one floor to another, play my favorite radio when I jump in the shower, and turn off my night playlist automatically when I fall asleep. My mind is still blown away at how powerful this stuff is.
  • After considering throwing away the cheap Android tablet that I was using as a kitchen dashboard because it kept crashing (it was bloated with malware and running an operating system from ten years ago), I reconsidered when I realized there’s no other product currently on the market that would be just as good as a dashboard. Instead, I went spelunking on user forums and finally found a bootleg system upgrade firmware that fixed pretty much everything.
  • Another thing that I should have done way earlier: automatically switching my laptop to grayscale at night (which I was already doing with my phone). I had to learn about color transformation matrices! This is a very hacky solution that I really didn’t try to generalize for anything else than my own laptop, but nevertheless the source code can be found on github. I’m noticing this has already improved my sleep quality a bit.

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sunset over a meadow beside a brick path

A sweet moment from earlier this week, as I was driving back from the gym: I caught a shot of a farmer with some sheep under the sunset.

selfie on a sailboat deck below the mast

Another sweet moment and also an experience I would not have agreed to until recently: a friend asked me if I wanted to join on his boat today. We spent a couple of hours doing approximately nothing. This felt good.

Not pictured: for the first time in more than twenty years, I was invited to an old school LAN party yesterday. I drove my gear to the other side of town and then spent too many hours playing testosterone-fueled FPS and RTS games, my keyboard and mouse at the edge of a barely standing camping table in the middle of a living room, with a bunch of folk my age whom I had never met before (save for the one inviting me). We also ate pizza together and they drank Red Bull.

This was an incongruous experience! It does not fit my idea of my current lifestyle at all, and doing this brought back a bunch of complicated feelings from my previous experiences doing this as a young adult. But then also the other attending folk revealed they also have a regular life next to this hobby, and use this as a way to honor and keep touch with who they once were. I can get behind this. Also I discovered that I now want to really learn how to play Call of Duty.

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The last but not least thread that got a lot of attention this month is my work project. Back in August I had felt unsatisfied with working mostly on backend technology so far this year. Of course it’s important and necessary for my project as a whole, but I also felt an urge to connect with end-users somehow.

This was the impulse that led me to learn how to publish a mobile app. So, throughout the last part of August as well as most of my working hours in September, I worked to extract one component from the larger app into a smaller app that I would then publish for both iOS and Android.

My reasoning was that it would help me reach three goals at once: I would become able to start gathering feedback from end-users; it would force me to prepare a continuous integration pipeline; and it would motivate me to actually learn the details of mobile app publishing (I knew about the technology in the abstract, but was also cognizant that theory only turns into actual knowledge through practice).

As of earlier last week, I am now approved for publishing on the Google Play Store, and I think I will be able to register on the Apple App Store in the coming days as well. I hadn’t realized how much paperwork and ceremony was needed to get a first build online. Thankfully technology helps well with that nowadays. (But not completely: Google and Apple are both extraordinarily good at preventing LLMs from fully automating the process. I guess they have huge incentives to avoid a proliferation of junk slop mobile apps.)

Here are some examples of very annoying busywork things I’ve discovered / had to learn on the way:

  • how a mobile app is registered as the “standard app” to open certain web URLs (it needs a special file stored on the target web site as “proof” that the web site owner is OK with it).
  • the monster Jenga tower of Java code that Gradle is (to build Android APKs).
  • the monster Jenga tower of Ruby code that fastlane is (to automate concurrent publishing and artifact signing on iOS+Android).
  • how to create a headless keychain to automate test debugging via SSH on macOS.
  • idb to automate sending gestures and taps to the iOS simulator (needed during integration testing; not needed for Android because Android devices already have this via adb).
  • iOS WebKit forces-zoom the app on focus if a text input widget is smaller than 16px high.

I’m still in the internal testing phase, currently processing feedback from early users, so there’s no link for you today. Sorry for that! I hope to have something to show before the end of the year.

I also published my latest notes about agent tooling on my web site because a friend asked.

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There’s also a bunch of stuff I’ve read last month that I’d like to share, but this post is already big enough for one reading session. So I’ll split the rest into a second post. Have a great week everyone.

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