Entries this day: good-day-at-work ktru-doing-well-on-soundtap-commadness tips-when-writing-a-diary

good day at work

##21:45 Wednesday 10 April 2013

8:57pm Wednesday 10 April 2013

Pretty good day; our new server on AWS had been barfing hourly errors like, "the MySQL server has gone away" or "could not connect to mySQL server" even though 99.n% of the connections were fine. We had been using MySQL 5.6, and certainly I may not have had it set up right. Once I instantiated a server with 5.5 (and reverted the DB to MyISAM tables for those with FULLTEXT indices), it has worked perfectly fine.

Today Jonas started tweaking the front page of AB new frontend; it was fun for me to hit reload on the test server throughout the day and see it taking shape. All that CSS and design shit still eludes me. Or maybe I just have no interest.

I wrote a new class that will just be some static functions that do custom queries of the DB. I might look into writing functions that live in the DB, but I'm not sure if it will really make a big difference. I was seeing 0.0003 seconds per (cached) query in my class; that should be enough for now.

9:41pm Wednesday 10 April 2013

I looked into STORED FUNCTIONS and was like no way ferget that, and then I remembered oh MySQL VIEWs are what I want. Nice. Compiled queries so they're even faster. 0.0002 seconds nice.

ktru doing well on soundtap commadness

##21:49 Wednesday 10 April 2013

9:45pm Wednesday 10 April 2013

Well https://soundtap.com/madness isn't responding correctly, but you can log in and listen to KTRU at https://soundtap.com/ktru and help us win. After 13 April 2013, the contest will be over so listen to whatever you want however you like.

tips when writing a diary

##20:56 Wednesday 10 April 2013

8:29pm Wednesday 10 April 2013

Lin and I were both feeling kinda sick last week. I've not meditated in a while, though I might start soon. We're feeling mostly better now, but I've still got some congestion.

But that's not why I'm writing. Lin is talking about starting a diary. I'm fully supportive of such things, and hope she gets a lot lot lot and tons of benefit from it. Online or offline is fine; I can give her some tips and encouragement.

My main tip for any kind of diary writing, especially if you wanna do it for a while:

write the full date at the top of every entry. Or the bottom. Or both. But the point is do NOT just write 4/10 cause I promise, even if you can be sure you meant April 10th and not the 4th of October, you may be hard pressed to remember the year. And even if you can remember the year, someone who finds the diary after you will not remember the year. I use 4 digits for the year (how shortsighted of me!!!), always write the month out as a word, and almost always write the time as well, including am or pm.

The next most important tip might be the most important:

start writing again if you have a lapse. And don't try to catch up. In my handwritten journals, I remember having stopped writing because I got all busy. I wanted to write again, but I was like "ah crap; how will I write everything that's happened in 4 months?" That thought blocked me from writing for a month. Then I was like, "oh crap; how will I write everything that's happened in 5 months?" _That_ thought blocked me for a month until I realized the futility and just wrote what happened that day. I released the need to write about the prior 6 months and just started writing as if nothing had happened.

Other tips that are not as important, but may be useful

• In a handwritten diary, leave a couple pages in front blank to be an index.  Fill it in with highlights once the book is full

• Every month or year or so, write an overview of your situation. I got the idea from the State of The Union Addresses in the US; I call them State of My Life Addresses.

• Only read old entries if it's been a year since you wrote them.  Otherwise, don't read; just write.