When I was in 8th grade, a kid at the high school I would later attend committed suicide. He was a gay student who felt completely ostracized and hated and figured the only solution was to end his life. It was tragic. When I was a Junior in high school I had this habit of writing essays to think through things, much like I am doing here on this blog. One time I wrote an essay about how stupid committing suicide is.

A month ago I decided to try time blocking by day and I promised to report back. I think overall it worked really well. The only challenge was that I wasn’t very organized so I didn’t always get enough time to work on things. I think the only real challenge was that sometimes I was frustrated that I couldn’t get more done, but that has more to do with a lack of time than it does with the with the time blocking itself.

So it turns out caffeine can show up in breast milk and that babies can be intolerant to it (which makes total sense). And if that’s what’s causing a baby’s severe acid reflux, it can be resolved as simply as cutting out caffeine from the mother’s diet. We saw almost instantaneous relief. Tip of the day, I guess.

Later promotions as a military officer can be very competitive. Right now every promotion up to captain is all but guaranteed, and I believe even major has a 100% selection rate for the time being. One of the things the selection board considers for promotion is the level of personal development an officer does, and for some reason they think that a master’s degree is a good metric of that. Most likely it started when someone on the board thought it was important and then everyone on the board had a master’s degree.

I’ve been looking for alternative investment opportunities for years. I am not a fan of the stock market, and my timing does not seem to ever line up with real estate possibilities for me. This morning I remembered watching a thing years ago about microloans. It sounded like a great idea: support small businesses, help people in developing countries, and make a small profit in the process. When I searched online, the only opportunity I found (easily) was Kiva.

“Children are remarkably capable human beings. They can do more than we think they can. They can understand more than we think they can. The reason they sometimes don’t understand, the actual cause of the effect, is that we don’t think they can.” Richard Eyre, Simplified Husbandship, Simplified Fathership This is something I’ve struggled to convince people of since I had a child. Since I first started tutoring children, if we’re being honest.

I know I said somewhat recently on this blog that I wasn’t going to write a book because I didn’t have time. I guess technically I didn’t write a book, but I did write a short story. I’m intending to submit it to an anthology. I don’t personally know J L Curtis, but my brother tells me he is very good people, and I am all for giving what I have to serve others.

I’ve heard too many people I know recently saying something along the lines of “I’m having this problem with my partner but I haven’t talked to them about it.” Just talk. It won’t be comfortable, talking about conflicts never is. But you know what’s worse? Festering. Because it will fester. Don’t think you’re good at communicating? Talk about it? Don’t think those conversations are going well? Talk about it. My tentative term for this is hyper-communicating.

My wife had a rough time this weekend. Those are, of course, rough. But the one positive is that they bring to the forefront big problems and emotions that she and/or I otherwise ignore. For one we realized that she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since having a baby 3 months ago (no wonder she’s been doing so poorly). For another thing, she was feeling very overwhelmed and stuck with house work.

I am currently working on a little project setting up a pair of Raspberry Pis to try out Docker Swarm to replace my current huge Intel server. I installed Ubuntu server to keep my servers the same and keep the management overhead, but the initial load on the server was very high. I managed to reduce it a fair bit by the following: Removing the lxd snap and uninstalling snapd Removing modemmanager, which runs constantly in case I hook up a 4G modem.