Weekly report 20-33

I finally got annoyed enough to start returning some sense of order into my life. One has to distinguish what matters from that which does not, or he’ll be swimming in TODO items with nothing to look forward to for eternity. If adding stuff doesn’t work, try removing some!

Contents

Job

At last we’ve had a rather crawling project I helped on deployed. And shortly thereafter I learnt that a small part of it that I hastily and optimistically implemented without testing doesn’t work at all. Well, at least it’s not crashing. We’re agile!

Though now ‘the man’ wants me to do some system integrations of questionable value where we replace our mediocre but steadily chugging warehouse management system with a blast from the past running on IBM System i, and then, in a few years, ditch the rest of our software as well in favor of a pan-European ‘solution’ based on Oracle.

I’ll apply stoicism here and won’t worry about that which I can’t change, even if it spoils my motivation. We’ll see if something nice doesn’t lie in the ominous shadows.

Haven

I’ve restarted my rebuild-everything project, mostly just taking stock of what I have so far and writing some text to go along with it. I’ve put together a basic static website generator to help me avoid having to deal with HTML by hand, and that was a wonderful idea—​looking back, I don’t understand how I could put up with the unreadable tag soup.

The original motivation for the restart was to make a neat CSV viewer application for work so that I wouldn’t have to deal with bloated LibreOffice. But I can’t do that quite yet.

Infrastructure

Just as I logged in to my Gitea instance to change one thing or another, I noticed I had (a few new spammer accounts and) a 6 months old issue from some French guy trying to sign his documents. And it went downhill from there. As I was trying to set up e-mail notifications to prevent such delays from happening again in the future, I first discovered that OpenSMTPd had screwed-up privileges, then following a system upgrade that the configuration format had changed incompatibly, and after that I noticed that my Gitea was just randomly broken because of the way I hacked around issue 5031, which is what caused my humble Frenchy’s problems creating a pull request. Fixed by another upgrade.

In the end I quickly got fed up with the way C++ does libraries and linking, and rejected the issue, as the author had decided to go with PGP instead anyway. I at least mailed him some feedback on his patch, thanking him for forcing me to get my stuff together, if for nothing else.

Productivity

YouCompleteMe, a VIM code completion plugin, stopped working with Go. After a few attempts at trying to fix it, I’d had just about enough of dealing with that Python monstrosity, and angrily nuked it from the orbit.

Which is the best thing I could have done. After looking around a bit, I found vim-lsp and related plugins, which seemed to be at just about the level of complexity that I was looking for, being written in Vim script. And they are awesome! (Despite some bugs.)

clangd needs little configuration, just make sure to put a link to compile_commands.json in the parent directory if you’re doing out-of-tree builds. gopls works out of the box, although sadly it can’t help you with packages that import Cgo. Both offer features that I was desperately longing for from Qt Creator: finding usages, and symbol renaming. And it’s all so fast and comfortable. I’m truly amazed.

Drugs

What’s nice about most drugs is how much they make you appreciate being sober. At least if you’re me. Not that it prevents me from getting intoxicated.

  • Wednesday: weed, no more than 200mg of ‘sativa’

    Last week I overdosed on it and had a very bad time being sick and unable to do anything meaningful for the following ~10 hours. This time I managed to get at the right dosage and not puke, but ultimately it just sucked—​I was feeling uncomfortably warm in my stomach, unable to stay focused, yet experiencing time dilation…​ and it took too long to wear off. I used to have a higher opinion of cannabis, somehow. No mood enhancement to speak of, at most some barely interesting internal hallucinations.

    This was not my first time with it, as some years ago I overdosed on it as well, suddenly going from a guest to a liability. Drugs where you can’t measure the dosage with any reasonable accuracy suck. Still, it was available, and I felt like retrying.

  • Thursday: alcohol, 330ml 4.5%

    I get drunk from a single can of beer, so that was easy. Ethanol is much more tolerable as it doesn’t fuck with your head, though it’s still awful and hard to work on. All sedatives appear to be annoying.

  • Friday: armodafinil, 150mg + caffeine from various sources

    That was too much to take at once. Very dry mouth, a slight rash that I decided to preemptively regulate with antihistaminics, a kind of high perhaps comparable to nicotine at the beginning (?!), hands shaking. Removed a lot of my anxiety, impaired my judgement, made me careless and even made it hard to work. Luckily it mostly subsided in about four hours, leaving me just alert and motivated. (Which has lead to me to do this write-up.)

    I had never taken this much before and I’m not willing to repeat this exercise.

  • Saturday: nicotine, steady cigarette supply for many hours

    Nicotine is again sickness-inducing but somehow it’s not too hard for me to regulate that at parties, especially if I avoid being too hungry while taking it. According to my own observations it works wonders to suppress sleep. And so I managed to clock about 36 hours of quality uptime. Then I hit a rather hard second ‘wall’.

Camera upgrade

I was barely using my DSLR, partly because of the distortion of my Nikkor 18-140 ‘kit lens’, which was the only general-purpose lens I had. The time had come to buy a decent replacement, and I went for the Sigma 17-50, based on a recommendation.

I actually had no idea the distortion is a function of the focal length, and that people have made measurements of this property for almost any lens you can find. Luckily the Sigma is a major improvement in this area, and I can barely perceive it at roughly 21mm and upwards.

Overall I’m rather satisfied with how well it performs.

Trivia

Hole
  • I drove to flat A, only to discover that there would be no warm water for the following five days, and I could have had stayed where I was.

  • I tried to sleep during the day, but was kept up by a drill for two hours.

  • Eventually I discovered that the hallway now included a new fist-sized hole straight through my neighbor’s wall, made of reinforced concrete.

  • I drove back to flat B to treat myself with a warm shower, and a part of the highway was entirely closed off.

Sometimes you can’t win. Life won’t let you. It’s triple-insured, you can’t.

Comments

Use e-mail, webchat, or the form below. I'll also pick up on new HN, Lobsters, and Reddit posts.