Shortform #26 Oh wow, a marathon of posts! Also, mild ranting.

Today was good, but felt very split into three pieces. The morning, the trip into town, and the rest of the day: I did productive things for almost three hours in the morning, then drove into the nearby big city for my doctor's appointment, and several hours passed before I got home. The doctor's appointment was great! All good things, but when you have to drive for so long there and back, that does take quite a chunk out of the day. The rest of the day started around 15:30 and went nicely too :)

1. I continued practising CS fundamentals via coding in Swift, total time: about 5 hours and 45 minutes
2. I used the Notes app on macOS / iOS to track my time today mostly because I broke down the time spent doing each section / lesson in Swift to see what I spent more or less time on, and ended up not logging time on my desktop as a result.
   • I should try to install gtimelog on my laptop, might be possible if I compile it, but that may prove to be a big headache. I'll try it tomorrow and if it works I'll figure out how to sync the log file that app saves to between devices, probably by saving it to my Tresorit (I think all I'd have to do is symlink the file located on the cloud drive to a specific location on my desktop and another specific location on my laptop; ubuntu and macos may place these things in slightly different places /shrug)
   • Tresorit is my cloud provider, it is a reasonably private zero-knowledge and end-to-end encrypted cloud provider. Caveat: the company may be subject to Swiss privacy laws, which is nice...but unless you pony up for a very pricey business plan, if you are located in the US then your data will be stored on servers in Ireland via Microsoft Azure. I'm sure it's still very private and nice, but servers in that jurisdiction on that platform are much more susceptible to US finagling compared to on a FOSS platform located in Switzerland, Sweden, or Iceland. However, all metadata and private encryption keys are stored on your device, as opposed to their servers, so that seems reassuring. Definitely more private than Google Drive or most of the other borg cloud providers. Still...I'd like to find a cloud provider based out of and with servers located in either Sweden or Iceland with similar zero-knowledge and end-to-end encryption strategies. If anyone knows of such a provider, please let me know. You should care about your privacy.
3. I consumed about 1700kcal today.

Unfortunately, I did not exercise today, for the second day in a row...to make up for that I purposely ran a good calorie deficit for the day.

Noticed: I get really really really focused and obsessed with coding when I practise for the day, to the exclusion of a lot of other things. Even with a big interruption to my day, I still did slightly more practice today than yesterday, and can see that trend growing. This is good, since I need the practice and want to skill up as quickly and thoroughly as possible for "I want a job" reasons (plus it's fun, I'm enjoying the practice a lot), but I still need to do other things with my day.

Interventions:

1. Continue adjusting sleep schedule so that I wake up a bit earlier each day, having more morning time gives me more coding time.
2. Either exercise first thing in the morning, or right after finishing coding for the day.
3. Schedule 1 hour of just direct social messaging for every other day to be completed after coding time; I seem to either respond to all my inbox at once in one massive hours long binge, or not at all and continually forget about messages until suddenly realizing a few weeks later that I had a bunch of messages, oops. Using repeating calendar events for this might be a good approach because I currently don't handle this very well. Who knew not noticing the passing of time was an issue? sarcasm

Tech world has been abuzz lately, time to go binge Stratechery, it's been a few months. I did not listen to music while writing this shortform.

Live long and prosper, y'all.
Willa