TrickJarrett.com

Vintage computer ads that show how far we’ve progressed, 1970-1990

A very touching speech by Clint Dempsey during his Hall of Fame induction

I spent a while this morning rummaging through and seeing if I could find any .dev domains which interested me. Trick.dev is taken (though not in use, as expected), every other interesting short word I checked was taken. I have on potential domain I might get but I didn't impulse buy it.

Found on my Facebook memories from eight years ago, it's an excerpt from an AMA Neil deGrasse Tyson did on Reddit at the time. These days I find him more and more annoying, but what he says here is still good advice:

Q: What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?

A: The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

Backups: You're doing 'em wrong!

I regularly will make social posts urging friends and family to back up important data. I've been familiar with the 3-2-1 principle for a while, but I found this video to be an excellent explainer and discussion of how to determine the best process for you.

Which reminds me, I should really do a backup of my site soon. I pay the host for that functionality, but that doesn't mean they should be my only option.

Common NFT scams and how to avoid them

A look at very early computer games for business simulation

A fascinating look at some of the very early (1950s) mainframe computer games used for execs and college students to study business models.

Any three digit multiple of 37 is still divisible by 37 when the digits are rotated. Is this just a coincidence or is there a mathematical explanation for this? : askscience

From top commenter MycoNot:

Because 37 is a prime divisor of 999, and rotating a three digit number is a cyclic modulation. Same thing happens with 4 digit multiples of 101 or 11 - although it's a little less impressive rotating multiples of 101 like 4545 to 5454, etc, rotating multiples of 11 is neat like: 11x123=1353, 11x321=3531, 11x483=5313, 11x285=3135.

Five digit multiples of 41 or 271 will work too

George Carlin on the Bill of Rights

To whom it may concern:

Unfortunately, the above document will be obsolete within one hundred years. It will be considered a quaint artifact. Americans simply don't care enough to protect it. They'd rather have a blender. Sorry, I cannot lie to you.

• George Carlin

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Upcoming Glowbug Work

Now that I hit the main milestones for Pick'em, I have spent much of the past week or so working on stuff for Glowbug. It's really a tool for me. I've talked about the work I've already done. I'm listing these in no particular order:

Add ability to set custom URL path rather than use the hash - Some entries on this blog get their own page, which have a direct link to them. The vast majority of posts here don't and are only accessible through the day archives. But, up to now, if a page gets its own URL, it's a generated hash. When I started this blog engine, I didn't care about the URLs and just wanted it to be quick and easy. I've reached the point now where I'm ready to be able to add a bit more curation and want to be able to manually define a page's URL path.

Add Chapters for posts - This is an old old idea I've had for blogs. Especially blogs which are life journals. Having posts organized into chronological groupings automatically. More than just a day or week archive. But you would basically say "Chapter 1" or "Seattle" or whatever title makes sense at the time you start the chapter. And then posts would be added to it cumulatively until something occurs in your life and you turn to a new chapter. So, I want to finally implement that idea here for the life update and current event posts.

Combine multi line quotes - This is a bit of a smaller bug, but right now, if I input a multiparagraph quote, Glowbug renders each paragraph as their own quote block. Annoying. Also, not huge, and I might put it off as I plan on doing a larger rewrite of the post creation system. Moving away from the Rich HTML structure and reverting to a more simple Markdown based content entry basis. We'll see.

Add pages for tags - When I first added tagging to the blog, my intent was to go back and add logic for creating pages based on tags. I still want to do this. Though, I'll need to figure out how to handle the tags with a bunch of posts. I don't particularly want to paginate, but I might have to.

Make publishing smart by identifying all the pages which need to be updated - Another thing I've been putting off. Right now, when I post a single link, the backend rebuilds the entire site. That's silly and wasteful. I want to go through and figure out how to best identify the pages which are affected by this post and update them.

Fix Suggested Tags - The suggested tag functionality I currently have gets the job done, but it's crappy. I can do better. There are some bugs with it and I just need to sit down and take on fixing it.

The Value of Mentorship

I got turned onto Van's YouTube channel through his brother Casey, as I'm sure the vast majority of his audience did. Van's videos are hit or miss for me, but this one was super interesting. He discusses working for Tom Sachs. I particularly liked this insight from Tom to Van:

And probably the most valuable technique that Tom taught me was that that is where your best work is going to come from. This unintentional subconscious like utility to solve a problem, a series of problems. It's not intellectually driven the way that the art historians would have you believe.

Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness

Shuvomoy Das Gupta went and distilled and collected a lot of advice from Donald Knuth, noted mathematician and computer scientist. I don't agree with everything Knuth puts forward, but a great deal of it resonated with me.

On scheduling daily activities. "I schedule my activities in a somewhat peculiar way. Every day I look at the things that I'm ready to do, and choose the one that I like the least, the one that's least fun — the task that I would most like to procrastinate from doing, but for which I have no good reason for procrastination. This scheduling rule is paradoxical because you might think that I'm never enjoying my work at all; but precisely the opposite is the case, because I like to finish a project. It feels good to know that I've gotten through the hurdles."

Excellent thread about why the Chinese yuan is car from relaxing the US Dollar as the de facto currency of trade