Jack's Diary

Here are some good things from yesterday:

1. Didn't eat after dinner - except for one apple, around 9 pm.
2. No junk food or sweets. Wait - ah, I had a pina colada - my niece gave me a mix for Christmas. Well, I can do that every once in a while.
3. Stayed off reddit, for the most part. Didn't comment on anything, although I did take a peek through r/nba
4. Got through 2-3 lessons of Angular.
5. Did Japanese vocab. Entered 20 kanji stories.
6. I spent a lot of time watching a Japanese romantic comedy called "Clover". I've seen it before, but this one had the subtitles in English and Japanese. So I put it on 75% and spend an hour or two on it.
7. Played some guitar, though not much. The "Hey Joe" lick. Tried out some G-tuning. Did some finger-picking.
8. Returned my computer $400 - it was the last day I could do it.
9. Watched some of the Celtics and a bit of the KC / Colts game.
10. Went to the gym, did 1/2 hour of lifting, 1/2 treadmill, mostly fast walk with a little running at the end.

The scale showed 166.5 this morning. I will definitely get another 1/2 hour on the treadmill today.

It feels good to get up without that stretched-out feeling in my stomach from over-eating.
 
Good job Jack, nice to see the 166.5 and the gym AND doing well with the eating. You're definitely on the right track. A pina colada once in a while just reminds us that we can have good things in moderation, when we are being generally mindful and active. Yum.

Will be thinking of you as you are navigating the job situation this week. Hugs.
 
Hi Mols,

I was back to 167 this morning - no more Pina Coladas, for a while. It's sugar, and I gave that up. Just because it's in drink form...maybe I'll allow myself one a week. Or two, tops.

I got the word through my recruiter that I've been granted a brief reprieve - a six-week extension. It makes sense, there's some stuff hanging out there that it wouldn't make sense to cut me out right away. So, that's six more weeks of good money, so there you go.

I really have to start studying the interview questions. Bummer, I was really getting into the Japanese. But Japanse doesn't pay the bills. Neither does guitar. Programming does.

I'm about halfway through my Angular course, lesson 59 of 118. It's a great course, I'm learning a ton. Angular is so much more fun the JavaScript.

I'm thinking of getting Java 8 certification. It would be a good review of the fundamentals. Udemy is offering a course on it for $30, but I'll see if they drop the price to $10. They seem to do that a fair amount of the time.

The thing is, I already have a few courses I haven't gotten all the way through.

I might take the Angular project and turn it into a kind of habit tracker. It's a to-do list as it is. What's the difference?

One thing is, I would say a habit is something you do all the time. A todo list, you finish it and cross it off. So a habit-tracker would actually be more like a calendar. Like, you could have a calendar for each habit, and you would x off each day you did it. Like, 20 kanji or practice licks on guitar. Or do programming questions. Wow, how original.

But I would like something to review daily. My god, there must be a million of these apps out there. Why would I do one? Just for resume purposes.
 
So, I forgot my lunch today and ended up getting a filet-o-fish and 10 chicken nuggets at McDonald's. So, the questions is, is this junk food which I have purportedly given up?

Unfortunately, the answer is clearly yes. Especially, I think the chicken nuggets. They were gross. My stomach actually felt a little queasy after that nasty meal.

What a contrast to dinner - two roasted chicken breasts with a couple of slices of whole-grain bread, sauteed asparagus and mushrooms, salad and a sliced, grape-fruity tasting, sweet 1/2 orange for dessert. There is an upside to marrying a perfectionist.

Ugh, I have a 9 a.m. phone conference tomorrow. Who has phone conferences at 9 a.m? I'd rather have it at say 10 or 11. Break up the day a little bit.
 
Dinner sounds divine. Nice. Lunch...blech. Your description of your queasy stomach matched mine as I read it. :p
Good to hear about the 6 week reprieve. Crazy that they waited this long. Well, at least now you know what to expect and when.
Heh, I feel that way about 8AM conference calls. Or 7....
 
I just finished up an evening with Angular (along with some Kanji thrown in). No guitar, unfortunately. But I'm glad I spent the time on Angular - I got through an initial foray with Authentication. I'm now on lesson 75 of 118 (they are pretty short if you don't get stuck).

I'm still hanging around 166.5 lbs. Not much exercise, but that will improve either when my job is over in 6 weeks or I just make up my mind to get to the gym in the morning or summer. As of now, I'm only exercising weekends.

I'm getting to bed earlier these days. I'm just relaxing with my hot cup of hot water and Wal-Flu severe, which helps me sleep. I've also started stretching - easy stuff from a CD I got years ago called "7 minutes of magic". I don't have the CD anymore, but I kind of remember most of the routines. It's really great for sleeping - I usually fall asleep on the floor at the end, then wake up and go to bed. I've just started doing the a.m. part the last couple of days.

So, that's another couple of good habits I'm working on - stretching before going to bed and stretching in the morning.

Here's a list of good habits I'm working on:
- Don't eat food at night
- Don't eat sweets/junk food
- Don't fidget
- Don't clench the jaw
- Stretch before bed
- Stretch in the morning
- Learn Angular
- Learn Kanji "sisters" - Kanji with the same elements that have the same pronunciations (Anki).
- Don't give up on guitar

Not bad. Good, in fact. Way better than the typical ways I typically waste away the evenings. I wonder how long this will last?

C gave me a call tonight, wants to jam. We're shooting for next weekend, as this weekend is a little busy.
 
Ok, got the snow blowers ready, mine and my mom's I'm going to her 90th birthday party, lots of relatives.

The thing at work I thought I was ahead in just totally crashed and burned - it won't even run on my PC. I'm going to buy another one on a trial just to see if it works on that.

I was at 165 this morning - first time in a while. All from just not snacking and staying away from junk. Good job on me :)
 
Well, didn't start too great today. I went to fix the minor bug in the install program, then suddenly nothing worked. I was kind of panicking, so I just went back to bed. Got up at 9, got the snowblowers ready, and headed to the party. That was done at 4, so I went to micro-center to pick up another cheapo system. So, at least the install worked, so I know it's an issue with my work PC. Although I only have 6 weeks left at this place, I may have to keep the PC, just to make my life easy - it was like $320 plus tax, the cheapest I could find. This time the return period is only two weeks. I need the PC to keep my sanity - the anti-virus on the work PC is so strong that it's just hard to get stuff done, and then you have stuff like today where nothing works. Sigh.

Anyway, I didn't get any guitar in today, but I got some kanji and 4 chapters of Angular. The Angular seems a little complicated. I know it was very popular in its first iteration, but this one feels complicated. That's what usually happens. You get a nice, simple idea, then they start building on it and refining it, and suddenly its a lot harder to figure out. He actually had us subclassing a spring security class so we could tailor the authentication to our preferences. Oh, well, I guess complexity comes with flexibility and functionality.

I was good at the party - I didn't have the cake, stuck with the fruit, and just had one roll. I had a couple of like crackers, not sweet. My wife said they weren't junk, but, who's kidding who?

Snow tonight, so there will be some snow-blowing tomorrow. Then watch the Pats and decide if I'm going to do more work, or just wait till Monday.
 
So, took care of the snow at my house and mom's. It was wet, but not deep. But I've been having a rough time testing the mysql upgrade. I got my work PC run the product install, so that was good. And, got rid of the issue with my.ini not being found. But, running the jar from the batch didn't successfully install mysql. The service was stuck in a "starting" state. So I went back to the running from debug mode, but same problem. So I tried re-installing the product, which had been working, but it doesn't work now - same problem with mysql being stuck.

So I'm deleting and trying the product install right now. But this thing is a gi-normous pita. It's running the install, but I haven't seen the msyql insert stuff yet. It doesn't look good - it has been stuck for a while now. Ok, I guess it worked, just didn't terminate normally. Sheesh.

The worst case scenario is we can't do anything. I mean, it would be better if we knew that now instead of later. It would seem straightforward enough - backup up the old version of the db, delete it, install the new version, and restore the data. But...for one thing, there's only one way to do it that you don't have to run a mysql_update, but that means you have to restore the users. But, more of the problem is every time I run the update from a batch file (instead of the debugger), something goes wrong. First is was the my.in file was in the wrong place. Then mysql didn't fully start. Why? I have no idea. I'm going to try it again...
 
Hope you held out. :) Right about the time you posted that you were jonesing for junk food, I was jonesing for chocolate cake. Fortunately I don't have any in the house and I was too lazy / unmotivated to actually go out and buy some. Good job holding out at the party the other night. :)

Have a great week - hope you get your computer PITA resolved...
 
Well, I broke and went out and bought 2 packs of 880 cal. bags of combos (on sale 2/4$). At least I only ate one.

Right now I'm just struggling through this upgrade thing. Yesterday was like two steps backward. The uninstall, which is the critical piece, isn't working reliably on my pos work system. It probably will work fine on the HP that I bought this weekend. I'm going to order a cheapo Windows 7 PC with 8 gig for $200 with 30-day return policy (15% restocking fee, though). Although I like this HP I just got. But, it's like $320, this other one is cheaper and has the same OS as the target system.
 
Hallelujah. The upgrade started working today. As I suspected, my plagued, over-anti-virused work PC was the issue. When I (finally) started running stuff on the HP I bought over the weekend, it worked. I have two good runs under my belt.

The boss finally asked me for an update today. His main concern on the mysql update was how much time it would take. I told him I should have a better idea by the end of the week, but that I had the basic pieces in place. So I guess he's ok for now. I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to extend me any further if he doesn't have to. That works for me - I'm not really happy with him long term as a boss. He's actually pretty smart and hands-off, but he's just kind of aggressive at times. Plus, I prefer more of a development role than maintenance, which can be pretty tricky.

Ugh, I already ate the other bag of combos. If it's there, I'm eating. Hopefully, I can regain my footing on no-junk-food pledge. It lasted for a good 20 days or so. I need to get back on that train.

Erg, the Chinese aren't going to give up any ground in the IP stealing verification negotiations, so now the market's tanking again. It had got back to where it was before everything went south last year. Bummer, but you knew it was fools' gold.

I've been thinking - why do I have to watch every single Celtics game? It's too time-consuming. I really need to limit it to just the big games.
 
Hi Trusylver, you are indeed lucky to be out of it. But for me, it's all I know, so I'm kind of stuck. Just a couple of more, years, though, and I can retire.

Thanks for the encouraging words. I am back on track on the no junk food - I passed on cake in the office yesterday and pizza today. I have been have more apples and bananas after dinner then I should, but it's not junk at least. I was back up to 166.5 this morning, though, so I really have to do some exercise, which I haven't done for almost two weeks.

My wife has slightly high blood pressure, so we've been taking our blood pressure recently. The first time I was 130 over 75 pulse 61, tonight I was 115 over 65, pulse 65. I don't know why it varies so widely. I think the first time I had just gotten back from work, which definitely increases my blood pressure.

Tonight I did kanji - got caught up on Anki, did a couple of chapter on Japanese in Udemy, and moved onto the next chapter in Angular. I spent some time the last couple of nights trying to make it work - there was some kind of issue where the interceptor class wasn't working. For some reason the check for null in the basic auth service was maxing out the stack. Then suddenly, it started working, when I took out the check for null. I don't get it, but I'm moving on.

But, now he's going to get into the using JWT in the authentication. Half this course turned out to be dedicated to authentication, which is really boring, but important I guess. During one of my interviews last year, they weren't too happy that I just used basic authentication on a service I developed, but I was simply using the same authentication that the system already had in place. I'm sure it would've been stronger if it was, say, a financial app, but this was basically nutrition info that you can get off the label of a package. And the instructor doesn't do Oauth, which is what they really want you to do. So, I dunno. I guess I'll go through with it, since I got this far. Anyway, after I finally get through the authentication piece, he's going to do persistence with Hibernate, so that will be good. I might consider adding that app to my resume, but I really don't know enough Angular yet.

My problem is I can't decide what to focus on. I don't want to give up on Japanese or guitar, but software pays the bills, and there's a lot I want to do there:

Java Certification (Java 8 is like a whole new language)
Practicing Interview questions
Angular
Spring - understand it better
Spring Boot - understand it better
Data Structures and Algorithms

Guitar is so fun though. Last night I was fooling around with "Wanted Dead Or Alive" and there are some pretty slick riffs in it, easy to play, some of them.

I have a minor issue that cropped up on the MySql upgrade. For logging purposes, I'm calling the whole thing as a subroutine in a dos script. But the problem is, if you run into an error code, the exit no longer exits you out of the program, just out of the routine, where it then says completed sucessfully.

Ah, I know what to do. I will just put the "success" message in the routine. So if there's an error, it will exit the routine and won't say success. And there will be nothing to execute after the call to the routine, so it will exit the script.

So, that's good. I didn't really test the errors, I just did that by accident by running it in the wrong place. Maybe I should test each of the error conditions. Ugh. I hate testing.
 
jackbenimble said:
Tonight I did kanji - got caught up on Anki, did a couple of chapter on Japanese in Udemy
Click to expand...

are you self taught or do you have a tutor ? when my daughter is old enough, I will be looking to get her a tutor, I only understand enough spoken Japanese for martial arts however as Australia is part of Asia I would like her to be fluent in at least one Asian language, it will be more useful than the French I had to learn.
 
H Trusylver - as far as Japanese, I'm self-taught/teaching. Not that I'm any good at it, though. I've never put the work into it that I should. And it needs a *lot* of that.

Btw, I also learned French, and that came very easily to me. Japanese is a completely different animal and a much steeper climb. It's probably just as bad for Korean, Mandarin, etc. I guess if you limit it to spoken only, it's more do-able, but that still lives you illiterate in that language. You could probably learn 5 European languages in the time it takes to learn one Asian. But, kanji is cool, no doubt about that. Plus, kids love manga and anime, and that's mostly from Japan. Being closer to Japan, do you get some cultural influence from there? They seem like two pretty different cultures.
 
Ok, so I finished the mysql upgrade (for now) and sent out a notification. So YAY I have the weekend free, nothing hanging over my head. I'm going to my wife's concert tonight (I might peek at the Celtics game on my iPhone, I'm way in back). Tomorrow, I get a haircut, then have the day free. Sunday, I'm due for a jam with C.
 
I feel pretty good today. I delivered that mysql thing yesterday, which was kind of trolling me last weekend, so I feel free. I'm getting a haircut at 10:30. I'm going to get some cash because she likes to get paid in cash.

It's also a good excuse to my wife, who watches the finances. One regret I have about turning over the books to her is that I can't just spend whatever. Ultimately, it was a smart move, though, because it's really gotten her conscious of how much she has an impact on what we can save. As it is, we've gone from being completely broke and in debt when I couldn't find work in 2001 to having a respectable nest egg built up.

My weight was 165.5 yesterday, despite no exercise over the last couple of weeks. Cutting out junk food clearly helps. It's not that tough - e.g. last night after the concert, there was a table full of all sorts of snakes (edit, snacks, although I kind of like the snake characterization), and I just had the grapes and a little wine. My next step is to cut down on the quantity - e.g. I usually have a few bananas and apples after dinner, I could limit that to say two or three, depending on how much I had for dinner. Also, I could leave a little on the plate.

As far as the Angular course, I'm on 81 of 118. It's building a to-do app. After it's done, I may add another page for habit-tracking. At least, list the habits. It would be cool if it could show a pop-up chart of each day you completed your activity for that habit, and/or each day you didn't indulge in a bad habit. And maybe another page for goals - but that's very similar to todos, but not quite - goals are longer term, sort of.

I did a bit on guitar last night, just practicing the intro to "Wanted Dead of Alive" by Bon Jovi. I did finish the Sound Sisters kanji review, at least the part where I have to add kanji. Now, it's just review, and I can get back to entering the 1200 stories I have left into the website, then that will be into the review stage as well.

I'm still debating whether to purchase that $50 app which is effectively a streaming video DVR. I hate to spend that kind of money, but it could be a real time-saver, since I'm addicted to watching the Celtics. I could even miss some games, thinking in the back of my mind I could rewatch them later, which I probably won't.

Maybe I'll do it in February, which is (wow!) just next week. That way, the budget will be good for January.

Just for review, I should check my goals for this year (which is why I need a separate section on the app)

1. Play in at least one open mic
2. Do an app in angular/spring boot. It will probably just be the todo app.
3. Pass a Japanese proficiency test - either level 3 of 5, or level 4 of 5 - level 4 is easier. Level 3 is a real jump up.
4. Get a new job? I could wait till next year, it wouldn't crush us. But I will probably get the job within the next 5 or 6 months.
5. Java 8 certification
6. Get good at answering all those interview / coding questions.
 
jackbenimble said:
Being closer to Japan, do you get some cultural influence from there? They seem like two pretty different cultures.
Click to expand...

In many areas Australia has a high Asian population, Indonesian is often taught in schools, others will teach Mandarin, Japanese or a European language. My sons are heavily into anime and manga. and our whole family are martial artist of one type or another so Japanese is a logical choice and languages are easier to learn when young.

Also of the 2 primary schools closest to us, one (Kia Ora) teaches Japanese, the other teaches German.
 
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