The closing for selling our last house was on Thursday, and I haven’t been able to do the paperwork because work has kept me nonstop busy. So I was determined today to get the paperwork completed and mailed out. I was going to go to the UPS store and get a notary there, but they had no appointments. I called the library and they said they would have a notary there at 3, but when I went they were not.

My wife and I have been talking about homeschooling our kids for a while. I think we talked about it before we even had kids. School is a drag. Many teachers do amazing work in schools, but the cards are stacked against success from the start. Large classes give little one on one time to students, which is only exacerbated by the fact that the students may have dramatically different learning abilities.

In class today my instructor said something that I thought was pretty profound. We were discussing aircraft emergencies and the importance of reading emergency checklists. He said that it’s important to read the checklists because while the steps may seem like common sense, “common sense is easy on the white board at ground speed 0.” My wife and I have that problem too when it comes to dealing with bipolar (also arguments and pretty much everything else) where we think that we’ve figured out the solution so it will be obvious when we actually need to apply them.

A while ago one of my brothers told me about these socks from a company called Darn Tough. He said they were the most comfortable socks he had owned and had this great lifetime warranty. Unfortunately they were also very expensive (around $30 a pair). A few weeks ago I got really sick of wearing cheap, uncomfortable socks for work and sprang for a few pairs of Darn Tough socks, as well as a pair for my wife.

You know what is exhausting? Admin days. Yesterday’s “time block” focus was administrative things, mostly related to selling our house. I want to say it’s just because it was home selling and insurance claims (hail damage to the roof) that it was so painful, stressful, and exhausting, but I’m not sure it is. Administrative things tend to deal with bureaucracy, which are complicated for their own sake. After all, the only way to ensure job security for bureaucracy is to make it complex.

I18n, l10n, a11y, k8s. Do any of those mean anything to you? Unless you’ve already had them explained to you, they do not. They’re numeronyms, where numbers are used to abbreviate the word. The words being abbreviated are internationalization, localization, accessibility, and kubernetes, respectively. These kind of abbreviations have become very popular in tech writing. I have no problem with numeronyms, especially since all of those words are long, hard to type, and even harder to spell.

I just watched this video about Saddleback Leather Company (I also bought my first item from them yesterday) and I really feel the sentiment they share. I particularly liked Suzette’s comment “I really don’t understand why your faith has to be separate.” I hear people talk about this idea at church sometimes, referencing Alma chapter 34 with verses like “Cry over the flocks of your fields, that they may increase.” Clearly this is a call to pray for help in your business pursuits.

Building to scale is a popular term in the software development world, especially in tech startups. The normal usage is the idea that you should build your software, computer infrastructure, and business in such a way that you can grow to be the size of Facebook. Usually this means extremely complex architectures, “planet-scale” infrastructure, extremely complex build and deployment systems. All processes much be automated and zero touch. Yesterday I was having a conversation with a colleague about Quill and he brought up very valid concerns about future problems we will run into.

Apparently nuking your node package because you’re underpaid was just the start. Now developers are using their open source packages to sabotage computers of developers because of their country of origin. Remember when racism was bad? Apparently that’s not a thing now. I’ve already written extensively about this, so I won’t harp on it much more. But the problem is that people who are doing this are not just making political stances.

If you read Gray Keller’s The One Thing, you’ll learn a different way of thinking about balance. Instead of trying to do all the things at the same time, you focus on one at a time. To do this, he advocates time blocking. In his book, he describes time blocking as setting aside blocks of time in the day, usually measured in hours, to work on a specific subject. For example I will work on my business for 2 hours and then spend an hour with my family, then another 3 hours on my business and so on.