Terminal Tennis Elbow
Despite best efforts this morning, Diana and I got to the train station later than we hoped. All the open tables were gone, and now I’m using the new MacBook in a position that the Surface Pro was really having trouble with. Huge improvement, and this was just the test it needed with a couple of days to go in the return period.
Normally I’m working on websites in the morning. Honestly, the past few train days it was more planning and getting various tools installed, like Laravel Valet. I decided on two projects, one to be worked on at home and one to be worked on while on the train.
The home project I’m calling Rings, after the Aesop Rock song of the same name. It’s a wheel reinvention, but a necessary one. It is meant to reproduce much of the functionality of the CoreManager package, which is a web package used to manage private World of Warcraft servers. CoreManager does work, but it’s pretty ugly, very insecure, and generally in need of a full rewrite, and I’m happy to give it a try. So far I’ve got the ability to register a new account for the server, and you can log in on Rings and be taken to a dashboard that, currently, doesn’t do squat. But that’s fine, the logon was a heck of a thing to figure out since I had to replace Laravel’s authentication stack with a setup that would work with my WoW server.
The project I’m working on while on the train is called Kirby, also after the Aesop Rock song. This is a project that Diana and I discussed months ago, and was sort of tabled without a resolution. Now that she’s on a new career path, and I’ve had a change of heart with regards to web design, I’m happy to take it on. Essentially, it’s a thing to manage Diana’s sewing projects, with pictures, tags, measurements, comments, and so on. I can see a long-term plan with it that’s really social and interesting.
There’s a third project brewing in my head, a second attempt at a site I tried to build in 2007 or 2008 and failed, aimed at the perfume-maker and aromatherapy community. The framework I’m building with seems perfectly suited for this project, and now it can be done in a much safer way too.
I’m having this internal debate on whether or not “going easy on myself†is actually doing myself any good. From a mental standpoint, sure, I should probably not give past me (or present me) so much shit. But physically it’s probably not a good thing.
The walking every day ended abruptly when I had an object thrown at me on the sidewalk from a vehicle doing about 40 miles an hour. Three guys, they threw a little red ball, like a stress ball. Soft, but less soft when traveling at that speed. Knocked my headphone out of my ear. It still pisses me off because it killed my enjoyment of something I was really into. Much as I said I would not let it affect me, I have not walked down that street since. That’s been a couple of months, now. My weight has gone back up slightly, though not a full reversion to where it was. Diana and I have been playing a fair bit of tennis. We both had to get new racquets since the car was broken into. I got to pick up my new one on Saturday and it’s just what I was looking for.
There is, after a long radio silence, progress being made on our house. The pad and plumbing are in, and the slab will be poured his week. Then things are going to start moving rapidly. I was shocked to hear during our construction meeting, that they are still targeting the house to be finished before the end of the calendar year. They’re actually targeting late November, which means about two months end-to-end. That seems aggressive to me, but what do I know? I suspect it will be mid-to-late December.
I think my review on Friday set me up in good shape to get stuff done today. The first half of the day is wide-open, too. I’m envisioning a good day, here. It’s been about three straight weeks of spinning my wheels between outages, long weekends, and being sick. There are about 6 really productive weeks left in the year, and I need to make the most of them.
