November 4, 2015 10:17 PM
October Review
In the beginning of October I set a budget for myself: $500, excluding rent. How did I do? I was $350 over budget. Terrible. I am still spending way too much. But even though I was way over budget, I think October was a great success. I'm only starting my journey to financial independence, and I made some good changes to my life.- I canceled my Comcast subscription. This brings down my monthly internet bill from $90 to $36. (Of course Verizon decided to charge me insane activation fees but they are one-time only, so I won't have to deal with that again.)
- I stopped machine drying my clothes. (Okay, I still used the dryer when I visited my family for a week)
- I did a lot more cooking.
- I went to more meetups. (Some of which provided free dinner!)
- I managed to move my bed time from 1am to 11pm.
- I made sure to not leave any dishes in the sink before I went to bed.
Clearly I still have a lot of things to improve on. Here are my goals for November:
- Get my bedtime down to 10pm.
- Don't spend more than $500.
- Read all of those books I got from the library.
- Organize my clothes and all my junk in this apartment.
- Arrive at work before 8am.
- Get my productivity at work up to turtle pace. (I feel like I am currently at snail pace)
2021 Commentary: Wow.
October 17, 2015 2:03 PM
Happiness
Use the Continue Reading link to see some 2021 commentary
About a month ago I posted that I was in a funk. I was wasting so much of my time and not doing anything about it. Well, now I am pleased to say I am out of my funk and back to being one of the happiest people I know! How did that happen? I think reading Mr. Money Mustache was the big motivational push I needed to start making some changes in my life. Along with that, I also read some other personal finance blogs, like Early Retirement Extreme, The Mad Fientist, and jlcollinsnh. It turns out the point of these blogs isn't just to teach you how to be frugal and invest your money. It's about finding the joy in the simple things in life and learning to love what you currently have. It's amazing what the world has to offer on such a small price.
I'm slowly getting myself to exercise more, cook more, spend time with others more, and sleep earlier. The sleeping too late thing is still a problem, but I'm working on it. I also stumbled upon Budget Bytes which has some awesome, easy-to-follow recipes. It's actually made me a little excited to cook things each night.
On the technical side of things, I finally was able to add support for viewing issues under multiple tags in my Issue Tracker. It was way more complicated than I expected it to be, but I'm glad I finished it and I think I worked out all the kinks. Lesson learned: remember to explicitly set values to NULL!
October 9, 2015 12:31 AM
Slow[er] Internet
Two weeks ago, I decided that I was fed up with Comcast. My last bill was almost $90. All for fast-ish internet that dropped every day and cable that I didn't even use. First I tried negotiating with some customer service reps to try and get a better deal. The most I could save was $10 if I switched to 25Mbps and cut cable. So I thought, screw it, I'm getting Verizon. However, Fios isn't even available in my apartment. The best they could find was DSL for 7Mbps. This sounded extremely slow. But then I remembered still having dial-up in my high school days, and I figured, I can live with it.
Turns out, I'm not even getting close to the advertised 7Mbps. It's more like 0.5Mbps. Then again, I was only getting about 20Mbps with my "150Mbps" internet from Comcast. When I first got the internet set up, it was noticeably slower. Sites that used to load in about a second were now taking a few seconds. At this point though, I think I'm used to it.
I fired up Spotify today (I have a premium account) and tried to stream one of their playlists. It did take about half a minute of loading before I heard any music, but once it started playing, it was perfectly fine! No need to buffer again. If the quality is any worse, my ears aren't good enough to notice it.
I also just decided to watch a youtube video. It worked. No pausing in the middle. Haven't tried streaming on Netflix yet, but will update this post when I do.
2021 Update: No clue if Netflix ended up working or not, but I must not have been working at home because I know I would have gotten fed up with the slow speeds trying to work. I still don't really understand why watching videos never caused me any issues, but ssh into the dev servers at work, and suddenly my slow internet can't handle it.
September 13, 2015 11:43 AM
Funk
I've been in a funk lately. I have a good job that pays well and isn't too hard or stressful. Plus I get to basically program all day, and I love programming. But something's missing. I'm feeling unfulfilled. I think I've felt this way since a little before going on a cruise in early August. I just got lazy and bored and started wasting so much time playing silly games on my iPad.
I really really really want to go back to school at some point, but I'm not sure how much time and effort I want to devote to it. Should I go for a master's or a PhD? I guess I need to actually want to do research to get a PhD, but I've never even done research so I don't even know if I would enjoy it or not. And what if my lack of research experience makes it harder for me to get into grad school? I also don't know if I want to go back full-time or part-time. On one hand, I have a good job, and I think quitting would be stupid, but on the other hand, if I go back to school I feel like I would do better if I devoted the majority of my time to it. And where would I even want to apply? I need to talk to someone that actually has experience with these things.
I'm going to try getting back into updating this site more, because it really is something that I'm proud of, even though I'm pretty sure no one is reading this.
June 14, 2015 5:18 PM
Text Editor
It's been really hot and humid lately. I feel like I can't think straight. I might just go and buy an air conditioner. It costs $120 extra to be able to use it, but I feel like my comfort is worth it.
I was able to create a new little project this weekend. It's a web text editor, and I just so happen to be typing in it right now. I realized in order to make any sort of text editor all you need to do is make an element contenteditable and it just works! (As long as you're on a modern browser)
I added a little feature that allows me to change colors of the text. And I can even add more colors than the ones already listed on the page. Of course, while making this I thought of a whole bunch of other things that I could add to this editor. I was thinking of having a way to preview color changes. I tried implementing that, but it turned out to be more complicated than I expected.
The editor is also just a static page, and I still haven't gotten my development and production sites using different static pages and templates, so for now, all changes are live.
2021 Update: This project was the precursor to my ascii art color-izer, and I don't think I'll ever publish it again. I used a completely different strategy for generating the html for the colored text which used a lot of crazy html element node manipulation. It sort of worked, but I don't think it generated good html (I had spans inside of spans, which I didn't like). The version I have now that just stores everything in 2d arrays is a lot simpler and works better.
I don't understand how I didn't have a development environment before, but I definitely have one now.
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