Avalok's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

COVID finally got me, so the past few days have been a write-off. Today I have felt like starting to do routine things again. Glad I managed to avoid it for three years and got a milder variant.

Some broad beans have finally germinated, much slower this year, likely because the house is that much colder. Still waiting to see leek seedlings. Hoping to feel up for doing more sowings this weekend.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Still not back to 100%: very minor cough and tiredness, sense of smell is pretty poor as well. The past week feels like a blur, and I've wasted a lot of time not knowing what to do with myself. I mentioned my motivation had been pretty low and I think COVID tiredness has exacerbated this. Got back to cooking a few days ago, though had to lie down afterwards on the first evening. Plan to cook a Borscht with some scavenged beetroot tonight.

Have some cucumbers I sowed yesterday balanced on the radiator to help them germinate. We are in another cold snap, so the boiler is ticking on regularly again. I plan to start our tomatoes off at the weekend once the snow has (hopefully) melted.

guitarplayer
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by guitarplayer »

Hey @avalok I hope you will feel better soon, a hot soup should do you good!

Oh yes I imagine germination is slow with these temps, nice you have snow though, no snow on the Scottish west coast (they have it in Dundee and Edinburgh I think). We just put up with low temperature, 9.6 C in the living room. But hey, it's been sunny the last few days.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

You are much tougher than I: I worked from home on Monday this week because of COVID. I forgot to change the override on the thermostat, which is set lower when we're both out; the house was at 9.5C and it was very uncomfortable. Perhaps if I was back to normal I'd be more willing to put up with it, but I set the temp back to 12C, which was tolerable even with COVID.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

We have been away for a long weekend to see family and I am now fully recovered from COVID. Plenty of long walks in one of our national parks, feel great again. The weather has warmed, so I hope to take up more sowings when we get back: tomatoes, broad beans, spinach, leeks, lettuce etc.

I spoke with work about the new role. I had already thought for a long time about what I would want a new position to be. I considered both the team's needs, as well as my own desires and next knowledge gaps to fill. It seems, after the discussion, that we are on the same page, and a role will (hopefully) be created that is effectively what I want to be doing next: mainly solution architecture, with continued developer responsibilities. This is really good news, because it means I can keep the benefits I draw from my current workplace (close to home, part-WFH, good culture), but continue to learn, with more emphasis on the areas that interest me most, namely the systems-level, architecture view.

All this made me think more about work and why I am doing it. I worked later a couple of evenings last week, because the solution I am currently working on is so interesting. I admittedly did not want to leave it alone for the next morning; I felt a bit like Fukuoka before his epiphany. I have had this before over the past year, but it always felt wrong. Last week I realised that this was currently what I wanted to do most with my time, and that was extremely liberating. I realised the main reason I am currently working where I am is not for money (for FI, or to simply pay bills), but because of the work I get to do there. Now, I am nowhere near as resilient as many on this forum. Make no mistake, I am still reliant on that payslip, but I am not going to that specific workplace for the payslip, but for something else. Acknowledging this has felt good. I think before I wanted to constrain my work, not allow it to become more than "work", because that is all I am paid for. Now I wonder, if I am enjoying the work, if I am learning in ways I want to learn, and if I know I can tone it down a bit if I want to; why constrain it?

Well, actually, there are good reasons to constrain it; namely that I have other areas of my life I want to attend to. I don't mind these more intense periods if temporary, but I would be betraying core values to neglect other modules. I need to be careful that I still attend to our allotment, continue reading widely, food scavenging + improv cooking etc. It is a difficult balance when something captures your fascination so. I am very fortunate to have this sort of a problem.

I will also add that I do not expect this to always be the case. I realise this enjoyment and drive can, likely will, disappear. I foresee one day waking up and deciding I am "done" with this line. All the more reason to not neglect these other parts of my life.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

I have been off the forum for a few weeks, but made a note to do my end of the month entry at the least, then kept putting it off. I'm procrastinating quite a lot lately... except at work. I guess the balance I wondered about striking in my last post is difficult. I'm still waiting to hear much more about the promotion, so just keeping my head down for now. I think I will chase up after the Easter weekend; I'm conscious it could get side-lined. The work I've been doing lately has been very relevant to this new role, and I've already learnt a lot that will be useful going forward. I also bought a copy of Fundamentals of Software Architecture, partly because of this role, partly because I knew I'd find it interesting regardless. I've been reading that in between tasks and on some evenings.

So that's work covered. In the garden things are still slow, even though the days are much warmer now. We've also had some sun on the polytunnel to get it over 20C in there. I plan to get over the allotment this weekend; hoe out the new weeds and begin planting our broad beans. I hate the feeling that it may be running away from me, so I want to get out there before the weeds take off and I miss the spring planting window.

I spent last weekend repainting our front room and bedroom to remove/hide the damp stains on the walls. The front room walls have been dry to the touch since we got the dehumidifier last November; in the bedroom the wall didn't feel wet, but cold, and the stain was much darker than downstairs. Covering over the front room was a piece of cake, but after 4 coats in the bedroom, the stains remain. I've got the dehumidifier up here to attempt to draw moisture out of the wall so I can try another coat again, perhaps in a couple of months. I don't like covering over problems, but we are not willing to fork out the time and money to address the root cause of the damp issues in this house; paint and a roller it is.

After I finished painting, DW returned from a weekend away and decided to rearrange the upstairs, swapping our bedroom and office. We'd discussed this before, several times in fact, but had decided to wait until we had the time to do it. Well, it hadn't happened and I think she was caught in a rush of inspiration. She also went through a lot of her things during the swap and decided whether to keep or get rid of them. She'd also been wanting to do this for a while; I think she had feared it would create a lot of stress were we to move, it's also much nicer not having unnecessary things lying around, or even just hiding in drawers. The rooms feel much more homely; I'm really glad she did this on a whim, it was a great idea.

Spring is on its way, I may not need to swing a kettlebell to keep warm for much longer :D. Have a great Easter!

----------
Total capital: £115,243.66
Average savings rate: 58.61%
Average savings rate TTM: 66.57%

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

I picked a massive leek from the allotment about as wide as my palm; washed it in the sink and watched a load of soil from the roots go down the drain and clog the waste up. I have only myself to blame: I could have washed it at the water butt about five feet away from the sink. Thus began a series of fumblings as I tried removing the p-trap under the sink to clear the blockage:
  • I started tightening the fastenings before realising the threads were upside down, so leftie is not loosie.
  • In doing so I ruptured the silicone seal around the waste, causing a leak into the under-sink cupboard.
  • This also meant I had no resistance when trying to loosen the p-trap, making it very difficult to undo the fastenings I had tightened. I ended up shredding most of the fastenings, making them un-reusable.
  • On finally releasing the p-trap, I found all the silicone injections I own have completely oxidized because someone (maybe me) didn't cap them after use.
All I wanted was leek and potato soup :D. I have re-sealed the waste this morning, and now must wait 24 hours before fitting a new p-trap. Every thing coming off that allotment is being washed at the water butt from now on.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

I felt on a roll for the first couple of month of the year, but have been struggling with motivation after recovering from COVID. I'm still not quite sure why this is, but I'm in a loop of wasting time, feeling bad that I have done so, followed by a rush to get back to where I want to be. At times there's an unease throughout the day that I'm squandering it. For the past couple of weeks this has eased somewhat, correlated with me doing more of the things I want to be doing, but I'm still nowhere near how I felt through January-February.

Decluttering
I mentioned we had rearranged the upstairs, and now we have sold the spare bed we bought for guests we never have, replaced with an air mattress that is more comfortable than our own. DW is loving the extra floor space for her sewing; I'm loving the reduced "noise" in the room. I've also been through a load of old cycling gear from my racing days and sold that. It has made me realise I could do with sorting through my clothes again; every time I do this, I realise I'm hanging onto stuff I don't wear.

Work
I had a difficult conversation when I was informed the promotion would be postponed until next year. In short there had been a miscommunication, with both myself and the boss to blame. I'm not that bothered by this: I can understand their reasoning, I've been given a pay increase this month anyway, and can expect a promotion in a years time. I did go through a day or so of mulling over what I wanted to do, but I think it'd be daft to move with the setup I have overall. I'm still enjoying work overall and have been finding it easier to keep it out of mind during the evenings.

Allotment
With the warmer weather (finally), I have been planting at the allotment this past week: broad beans, potatoes and lettuces are in the ground, with spinach to follow over the weekend. I have mostly caught up on the weeding and am continuing to mulch areas as I clear old crops off them. There have been some beautiful mornings over there; I had forgotten how good for the soul time on the plot is.

I have sown courgettes this week, with winter squash and sweetcorn to follow soon. Slowly, things are starting to pick up.

Reading
I'm pretty scattered with reading currently. I have begun a re-read of In Over Our Heads this past week, and I'm also listening to a history audiobook, but that is very much a what happened, not why; it's light entertainment for me. I also read through Plotkin's Soulcraft this month, and will start listening to Wild Mind after becoming unsure about his work's relevance to me currently, and with the MMG being organised.

----------
Our savings rate this month was over 70%. This is higher than we normally achieve, yet it was also the final month including the Government energy bill payment; our direct debit will revert to £99/month in May. Looking at my forecasts, considering our pay increases and continued lower expenditure, I'm hoping we'll be able to achieve around 65% in normal months going forward, but let's see. We're just shy of 120k now.

Total Capital: £119,471.34
Average Savings Rate: 59.06%
Average Savings Rate TTM: 67.48%

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Investments Studying
Finally spent time this week studying Bodie again. I've moved onto the fixed income section now and am currently noting the various yield measures and translating them in R functions. Thought it gave me an excuse to check R out; seems quite a nice language so far, though I'm not using it in any way yet that I couldn't just employ Python for. It gets out of your way syntactically and seems to have a lot out of the box for working with data sets; spend five minutes reading how to do this sort of stuff with Python and you're being told to install numpy and matplotlib.

I'm finding the bonds theory much more intuitive than anything covered yet. I don't know if this is because it is more mechanistic, or because I'm getting better at understanding this stuff, or both. It's much more motivating to be working through sections much faster and being able to replicate formulae in program code easily; hoping I can keep this momentum up.

.........
DW and I went to collect a load of food last night; 8 bags of mozzarella, 2l goats milk, 5 pots of hummus, lettuce and yoghurt. I don't normally go for the use-by listings on Olio, mainly because I can't be bothered going out as late as they are listed, but with the warmer, longer days I plan to take advantage of them more. Massively impressed with the goats milk. I drink a lot of breakfast tea and it goes really well; I'll be keeping a better look out for more.

Our little freezer is crammed; I keep talking myself out of getting a chest one. We don't really have anywhere suitable for it, but it'd be mighty useful for when freezable, use-by stuff gets put on Olio, and for allotment gluts.

Reading
Bodie has taken up much of my reading time this week, but I've also been reading through the first two chapters of Wild Mind for the Plotkin MMG. It's nice to be reading something alongside others, I haven't really done a book club before.

candide talking about the gemini protocol piqued my interest and I spent some time last weekend browsing capsules. The space is clearly nascent, with many capsules down or dormant. I think it is smart that the protocol delegates styling of the document to the client. One can't blame Berners Lee for this, but it is a real issue with HTTP that styling is provided by the server and is difficult to override. As the web becomes ever more mobile-first, I find myself fighting against it more and more. I saw the current Gmail UI recently and could not believe the size of the compose button, also whitespace galore.

Looking at some of the gemini capsules, and also browsing https://wiby.me made me realise how much of the old web is effectively dead and buried now, because it won't be highly indexed by search engines. The quality of information on some of these earlier websites must be very high, especially in respect to their footprint, but they'll be lost, inaccessible but through provided links because the gatekeepers have deemed them unworthy. Sheldon Brown comes to mind.

candide
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by candide »

avalok wrote:
Fri May 05, 2023 3:55 pm
Looking at some of the gemini capsules, and also browsing https://wiby.me made me realise how much of the old web is effectively dead and buried now, because it won't be highly indexed by search engines. The quality of information on some of these earlier websites must be very high, especially in respect to their footprint, but they'll be lost, inaccessible but through provided links because the gatekeepers have deemed them unworthy. Sheldon Brown comes to mind.
That dynamic, plus the proliferation of bots (I will snarkily add both purely algo and organic, but trained by algos) willing to confidently bullshit means we are entering a real internet Dark Age.

This is why I'm not very sympathetic to the attitude some people on the forum express of "but projects are soooooo boooooring" because I think the attitude implies that the knowledge to do them, or even the example of their existence, is readily available on the normie net and will continue to be so.

The day may come, and maybe soon, that the only place to look for this stuff is the underground (with a stop-over first to reddit? YouTube vid).

If we want to have an underground for information, we might actually have to contribute to it. Stated another way: we might have to be the resilient information source we want to see in the world.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

candide wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 2:46 pm
This is why I'm not very sympathetic to the attitude some people on the forum express of "but projects are soooooo boooooring"
Huh, I didn't realise there was such an attitude here; "projects" are an integral part of the lifestyle to me. I don't work on particularly big ones currently, but there's always somethings I am working on.
candide wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 2:46 pm
If we want to have an underground for information, we might actually have to contribute to it. Stated another way: we might have to be the resilient information source we want to see in the world.
This really hit home. There's already a tonne of useful information on this forum, with links to other useful sites as well, but my contribution to that is meagre. I could probably do more to log on my journal not merely what I'm doing and why, but how.

candide
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by candide »

Well, no intent to call you out, or anyone for past journal writing. I just think that if google rot continues, we should strongly consider going that direction. It is as much a call to arms to myself as well.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Yeah, I should clarify that I took it as a call to arms, rather than a calling out.

I don't see the situation improving: in addition to the bots, information gathering is degraded by search engines siphoning you to a relatively small set of sites, so information is coming from a limited and familiar set of sources. The "Top 10 things" articles as mentioned in the linked video are frustrating, but so is the fact that when I search for how to make a household cleaning item, links are exclusively for The Spruce et al, or when investigating an issue with my laptop It's Foss is always near the top. If you look something up, you're hearing from fewer viewpoints about that topic, so more people are hearing the same (low quality) things, which is a shame on a philosophical and practical level.

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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by jacob »

I have noticed how it's getting harder and harder to search the ERE forums using the google trick.

I don't know what the solution to the problem is. Knowledge is both a process of people teaching others and a result of distilling information. Both require [a lot of] effort. Ditto translating between the two. There are currently 259,000 posts on the forum that are mostly in the forum of a process. Translating that into a result in the form of lessons learned is a big job. Ditto is taking such as "results learned" and using it to propagate the learning process on the forum.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Yeah, a tradeoff with the forum is that any information within is necessarily disorganized. However, at least if the information is posted, it can be found.

An organized knowledge repository would really require a heavily maintained and curated Wiki, which is a lot of work. I would not want or expect anyone to take on such a burden.

mathiverse
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by mathiverse »

jacob wrote:
Sun May 07, 2023 10:13 am
I have noticed how it's getting harder and harder to search the ERE forums using the google trick.
Now that you say this, I realized I've been having the same issue. I thought I must not have remembered the search terms for the post incorrectly since Google didn't bring it up. (Wow, I didn't realize I trusted Google search that much...) Since I had that realization this morning, I tried the forum search box and found the topic right away.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Spent some time this weekend cleaning and adjusting the cantilever brakes on my bike, in an attempt to get them to stop squealing in the slightest wet*. The Park Tool video explains that "shoeing" the brake pads so that the front of the pad hits the rim before the rear helps prevent squealing. I wonder how long this is going to last, because of course the front of the pads will wear more, until the effect is nullified. Still, it was worthwhile because it gave me the opportunity to inspect the workings of the cantilever style (I've worked only with caliper and disc before). I was super impressed with the design of the concave-convex washers, and how they allow for auto-adjustment. Easy to clean, easy to adjust, just a shame about the squealing.

(*) I've noticed it doesn't need to even be raining, just sufficiently humid.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Rear brake doesn't squeal; front one still does, will take another look at shoeing the front some time.

Investment Curriculum
I've spent the majority of my free time this week reading and making notes Bodie Ch. 15, The Term Structure of Interest Rates. I am finding the fixed income chapters really interesting, so it has been easy to make good progress on this chapter. Moved onto Ch 16, Managing Bond Portfolios this afternoon, but have read only the introductory part at the time of writing.

I'm finding I have more patience for learning in this way than in the past; even just a year ago. I think this is a combination of me being older and more mature, and that I understand better why I want to spend my time doing this, namely stewardship of capital.

Running
Started training for the local half marathon this week. I've never competed in more than a 10K, and that was with an injury, but I'm confident in my ability to run the distance. I'm mainly doing this because it is a physical challenge I can do cheaply, locally and integrate easily into the rest of my life (e.g. run to work, Olio collections, etc.). I'll be following the Hansons method where the focus is to put in a lot of mileage at between 55-75% VO2 max, using pace as a proxy.

I'm going to try this without any "smart" devices; no watch or phone. I'll map routes in advance so I know where the mile markers are, and learn the appropriate pace by experience. This week I took the kitchen timer out with me to check my pace was correct and felt fine leaving it at home this morning. Interval sessions will be a bit more complicated, but I'll figure it out; my Dad did it this way fine just a few decades ago.

I'm hoping it'll be a bit of fun, and to prove to myself I can do stuff like this without any bells and whistles, at minimal cost.

Wild Yeasts
As I write this I'm waiting for my first attempt at wild ferment homebrew to come to the boil. I'm following a modified version of this recipe. I managed to find all the foraged ingredients either in the garden or at the allotment.

Will update the journal with how it is progressing.

Jim
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by Jim »

I can't wait to hear how the wild fermentation goes. I brewed a nettle ale a carlo rossi jug about 17 year ago. It was remarkably simple and came out amazingly well, according to my roommate who drank all of it before I had a chance to try it! Brewing with wormwood wounds neat too, will your brew have any of the psychotropic properties of something like absinthe?

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Nettle ale looks like a good starter brew. I enjoy nettle tea, and the plants are currently putting on plenty of growth. Might try that once I bottle (or discard) this first attempt. I left out the wormwood, as I don't know that it is naturalised here (the UK). I added ribwort plantain in its place; not that plantain is a substitute, but because I knew where to find some.

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