Work Log

Note: See Tickler File for auxiliary tasks and other "top-of-mind" items that Sri doesn't want to forget. Project scratchpad for synthesizing ideas are on the ThinkSpace on Whimsical.

Stream of Consciousness Thinkin' Space

Note: I'm deleting old entries that are just checklists or notes. I'm keeping longer entries that capture significant activities or thoughts.

OUTAGE LOG

• august 29, around 1030AM
• august 30, around 230pm, resumed 300pm

Sat Sep 09 - GHDR Report

Writing Topics

• 15m pushes and the benefits thereof:

Stuff I didn't do or did do?

• Revised Goal: Drafting the Mission Statement - for moving forward, this is a matter of just gathering stuff into one place and sharing it (maybe through livestreaming)
• Revised Goal: Creating Reminder Cards and Articles - Dropped because it will be an on-demand thing
• Revised Goal: Exploring the Option of Live-Streaming This is no longer a concrete to-do, because I think I can rely on my natural urge to try stuff out. It can also be an emergent need.

Also offering collaborations...the 15m in the morning push is a collab. I also offering SNHGD input again. Coworking Discord.

PDFMaker Software - progress! That worked well with paying project work.

• maintaining emotional balance, not falling behind with work responsibility, emotional reasons.

CHATGPT review

increasing surface area for contact with me through my useful materials, and just being "seen", because this is the only way that exciting new things and opportunities arise.

• reminder cards -> a way of producing shareable media, as a strategy for creating engagement.
• drafting mission statement for colony -> a way of creating engagement on a personal level
• experimenting with design livestreams -> a way of creating engagements
• writing new articles -> creating new audiences to engage with (TikTok?)

insights

• ideation with other people is one of my great strengths (something to build on)
• Working with my ADHD/ASD traits is essential; production-orientated strategies that are based on "small steps" and "consistent focus".

Revised plan of action:

• shift focus from prodution to ideation - I think this means the idea is the product, and that's fine.
• decoupling planning and action as separate tasks - sharing the planning or having the planning ready is sufficient
• writing and sharing ideas/plans is attractive to like-minded people. Hopefully competent ones who want to contribute.

Stuff to definitely write about

• PDFMaker
• 15M pushes

The "15M Personal Project Push" is something I do first thing in the morning as a commitment to myself so my own special goals. After getting up and making my coffee, I use the first 15 minutes of the day just for me, before I look at email or think about other people's demands. I wrote a blog post about it called Maintaining Momentum 15 Minutes Every Day back in 2013 that explains how it worked back then, but the gist is this:

• The 15 minutes are done "face to face" (virtually is OK) with another person for at least 5 continuous days.
• The start and end time is strict in its commitment to yourself and the other people. Respect the commitment by showing up on-time. Before the week begins, note any days that you will be absent for consideration of the other person's energy. Unexpected emergencies are an exception, but getting up late or forgetting or accidentally scheduling something else over that time is NOT COOL.
• 15 minutes every day, short as that time is, helps keep your project top-of-mind, which makes it easier to continue doing.
• 15 minutes a day is so short that if you can't commit 15 minutes to your own important goals, then who are you kidding? Your work-life balance may be severely out of whack, or the project itself is more of a fantasy that is fun to think of; you can just let go of it.

I also gain several ADHD mitigating benefits from this practice:

• it enforces a set time with another person to get me out of bed
• working on my own project regularly feels like progress because it is!
• talking about it briefly with another person helps energize me and stay engaged
• it tends to regularize my sleep (important as I work from home)

For me, 9AM on the East Coast is about as early as I can do it, but I'm wondering if other people with different time needs might want to give this a try and report back here!

Thinking about Priorities

MOdified proposed priorities:

1. Engaging with People from More Sources - writing, in-person, streaming -> this is how I actually become energized to work and finish things.
2. Idea-Centric Approach -> they're easier to produce at high quality through writing, and serve as ways to attract people from more sources for increased engagement.
3. Separation of Planning and Execution -> this synergizes with idea-centric approach, providing a rationale for not immediately doing the thing that was planned or ideated; in the past, I devalued ideas/plans in favor of finishing things which I found really hard to do. This is an ADHD/ASD mitigation to be kinder to myself, and not expect to do so many things so quickly and feel like I'm failing all the time.
4. Self-Reflection and Strategy Alignment -> Finding synergies between my emotional state and euphoria about life with respect to the handful of "priority tasks" that I've selected that happen to fulfill the greater strategy of "The Colony Sanctuary" and "Great Working Collaborations" and "Financial Security to Pursue Full Time" . Balancing this with work responsibilities that do not have my priorities, and finding those synergies, is also part of the work.
5. Weekly Tracking to ensure that we're hitting all the above.

A question that I have

I keep thinking that I'm jumping around ideas instead of producing something. What would be an exampmle of something produced?

• articles, website, downloads that have engaged people
• active collaborations that are producing results
• software produced

These are all production things on some level. However, the of produced good differ:

• articles can be about ideas...I actually don't have a format for that. This might be a new livestream/video "host persona" that is aspirational in its presentation, rather than factual as I tend to be when producing documents for other people.

I was concerned about people's reasons for wanting to engage with me at all, presuming that something associated with me caught their attention:

• My default thought is that I'm only interesting for what I can do for them, sell to them, or customize for them. It's not personal. It's more of a pleasant transaction at best. This is a legit value. I can deliver that.
• The aspirational thought, which I have difficulty believing in, is that people just like me for how I act and talk about things, my personality, my energy...this might be the hard thing that I need to develop with all the new engagement stuff.
• The leadership thought, which I have been reluctant to take on, which is to take responsibilty for doing the planning and guidance for me and OTHER PEOPLE, rather than hope that everyone can figure it out themselves and are capable of communicating their needs and intentions clearly within a strongly-held model of creating safety. I end up taking on responsibility but not the mantle leadership or authority; can I do this for the sake of guiding the colony? I think I have to...this is related to the Envoy chatter from before.

WHAT ARE MY TAKEAWAYS FOR THE MONTH?

I didn't mindfully do any of the goals I set at the end of the previous reporting period. But I had picked things that were on my mind and aligned overall with the criteria identified at the beginning of GHDR 2023.

• Achieving Creative Independence
• Finding Best Practices for Sri
• Finding Best Habitats for Sri

Sun Sep 10 - Part II of GHDR Reporting

• reread, clarify notes from 9/9 start 215PM
• Structure the presentation
• Write the report
• Proofread, Condense, Polish

I am writing about my Groundhog Day Resolutions...where did I leave off yesterday??? What were the critical takeaways?

Scan for takeaways from notes

• tangible progress: PDFmaker, etp stickypads back in production
• related to self: comfort with being a developer,
• related to connection: positive interactions with new potential development partners, good interactions with tow driver
• challenges of emotional dysregulation
  • narrative-driven design with modular architecture - points to the power of stories in my life...this is important source of alternative energy when there are no people to talk to about my work.
  • resentment with having to clean up after other people, dealing with bad documentation.
  • being more OK with the status quo of development always being messy, though this messes with my ASD trait of hating things that are messy and inconsistent to the point that I get stuck in the emotional response.
  • mitigation: principles, exertoion of will, turning off emotion, identifying signs of dysrgulation - sensory starvataion
• recognizing the need to become to be the kind of leader that I would also to follow, unapologetically represent my principles, values, morals, and metrics.

first 3 weeks were very low on external communication and mental stimulation wk 1: module design, prototype (write stories to myself about the work) wk 2: module design wk 3: peer coding on gemstep script engine wk 4: ton of janitorial cleanup of old code wk 5: fighting with javascript legacy build systems

PICTURES

• made pizza and they were bad
• car wouldn't start, but good interactions with tow driver
• etp stickypads back in production
• backyard edible plant garden seems to be working

Mon Sep 11 - Part II GHDR Report

Mon Aug 21

A new Blood Pact is in effect; my project is the PDF software.

• how do I specify module resolution aliases so long/path/to/lib/athing can be used like 'import * from lib/athing
• github
• where do I store my source files, and keep server files distinct from webapp files? - Use the extensions .cjs .mjs .cts .mtx for node, and .js .ts for webapp

Fri Sep 01

reposted from #BLOOD on Sept 1, 2023

I feel that this two week trial has actually helped A LOT just with getting momentum not just on my PDF project, but getting into the development mindset also. Partly that may be also due to our current overlap regarding Javascript and learning stuff...being around other people who are learning and who care about developing good practices makes a huge emotional difference.

My sleep has also started to regularize, and my need for mindless distraction seems to also be dropping. However I haven't been playing any Baldur's Gate, No Man's Sky, or Destiny 2. And Starfield launches today (I'm waiting though, as there is no need to jump right into it)

[I]t has also been interesting to practice how to moderate information exchange; I'm still bad at infodumping but I am starting to develop a better ability to moderate. This moderation is also applying to development speed expectations; the 15-minute a day is reinforcing the way I did my taxes this year, accepting many steps of partial completion and accepting rest as reward daily instead of constantly fretting that IT ISN'T DONE YET and I SHOULD BE FASTER THAN THIS

I think this is because the progress feels meaningful moreso than before, though I'm hard pressed to say exactly why that is. Perhaps in the daily process of logging what I'm doing publicly, and discovering what parts of it are helpful or resonating with others, it assigns a value to the work in a tangible way (e.g. text, pictures that I can copy into my general knowledge base and reuse)

Sun Apr 23

I think the root cause of my anxiety is the constant state of fearful anticipation of being misunderstood by those without the desire and capability to really care or engage. At best I am pitied, or thought ignorant, and therefore are seen as "less". At worst I am mocked, treated as stupid, and excluded. This fear developed possibly due to "otherness" of race, cultural experiences, and mind. My life has constantly been one of being "other" and I could perceive the disconnects but did not know why.

I could not do much about visual appearance with race other than act as American as I could. For cultural experience, I studied other people's experiences and reactions. My mind is more maleable. It appears to possess autistic, adhd, and gifted traits that affect how others perceive and judge me as well as how I perceive myself.

I just learned about this diagram via TikTok: common traits (non-diagnostic)

Fri April 7

Thinking of a list for the CGT for job searching

1 POINT TIER

• you logged a new interesting company to apply to
• you've scanned a job board for listings
• you've found a new term to help with searching
• you researched an industry term that you didn't understand
• you've added a job listing to your job search spreadsheet

2 POINT TIER

• you updated your resume or online profile
• you created a new version of your resume for a specific job
• you talked to someone about your job search
• you wrote a paragraph that describes your skills or roles
• you got in touch with colleagues/past coworkers
• you collected past work that you can show people

5 POINT TIER

• you wrote a cover letter
• you sent a job application
• you discussed strategy with trusted friends/colleagues
• you asked a friend/colleague to keep you in mind for jobs
• you added examples of work/skills to your socials

10 POINT TIER

• you applied for a job you weren't sure about the fit
• you got a response to a job application
• you got an interview

Thu Mar 22

• Doing a hosted pomodoro. was great!
• GOAL Write a Heffernan-level 10K article based on "weaker minds shatter at the first touch of boredom" combining review of GHDR goals and feeling that I want the community. But maybe I need to steel myself to the work like a missionary.

From Virginia Heffernan's Wired Article on TSMC:

The race in semiconductors is to the swift, and to the precise. Because velocity and precision are generally at odds in business—you move fast, you break things—TSMC’s workforce is legendary. If you see the manufacture of semiconductors as nothing but factory work, you might slag the project as monotonous or, more callously, “on the spectrum.” But the nanoscale work of chipmaking is monotone only if your ears aren’t sharp enough to hear the symphony.

Two qualities, Mark Liu tells me, set the TSMC scientists apart: curiosity and stamina. Religion, to my surprise, is also common. “Every scientist must believe in God,” Liu says.

[...]

Is curiosity adaptive? Certainly it’s unique to some nervous systems, and it prompts an eccentric cadre among us—research scientists—to approach the material world as a never-ending onion-skin problem. “With unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places,” said Victor Frankenstein. At Liu’s TSMC, this pursuit can seem like a form of athleticism or even erotics, in which select GOATs penetrate ever deeper into atomic spaces.

Stamina, meanwhile, allows the TSMC scientists to push this game of atoms forward without flagging, without losing patience, through trial and error after error. How one stays interested, curious, consumed with an unrelaxed and breathless craving to know: This emerges as one of the central mysteries of the nano-engineering mind. Weaker minds shatter at the first touch of boredom. Distraction. Some in Taiwan call these American minds.

Tue Feb 28

Looking at PaperJS...

Looking at it more deeply:

• it's like it's own operating environment using older Javascript conventions to create its own scope. The author has created their own operating system-like loaders and scope managers, installing a custom scripting language called PaperScript which is Javascript with new global classes like Point and operator overloading for them for mathematical operators. It appears to do this by incorporating an actual Javascript interpreter (Acorn).

• This grew out of Scriptographer. Here's a History of PaperJS. In short, Scriptographer was a plugin for Adobe Illustrator CS (before Creative Cloud) to create a scriptable plugin. PaperJS is the "open web" subset of the useful parts of Scriptographer. I gather that Scriptographer used Adobe Illustrator just as a drawing environment before the web was mature enough to support such things.

• On a side note, Adobe does provide scripting support in Javascript, but it is terribly underdocumented. Here's a reference of all the elements in the scripting language (InDesign and Illustrator seem to share the same scripting language). Here's an old tutorial on how to get started with it, referring to the ExtendScript Tookit IDE (in Creative Cloud Apps). Apparently it's a 32-bit app only available on Windows and only supports ES3 Javascript; Mac has deprecated 32-bit apps so it's no longer available. There's a new hotness called UXP Developer Tool which is a new packaging system that works with Visual Studio Code. However, it's not yet available for Illustrator. There's also something called CEP which is a Chromium-based solution but it's older (and also uses ES3).

Looking at PDF packages for Javascript

• React-PDF claims to render PDF in a React App, and is built on Mozilla's pdf.js open source renderer. It also mentions another package also called react-pdf which generates PDFs using a set of exported React components. It references node-canvas that implements a canvas-compatible object through C libraries Cairo and Pango.

  ASIDE: The Cairo 2D graphics library which can output to PostScript, PDF, and SVG. However, that means you need to compose your page using C/C++. That said, the library is implemented in C and seems to be very mature. It can be used with Pango, a text layout engine, since the text support of Cairo is apparently not great.

• pdf-lib can create/modify PDF. It's written in TypeScript and i dependency-free. This seems to the the pure Javascript library to use.

• An alternative is using Puppeteer, which is a NodeJS library that controls Chromium (headless or not) and can generate PDF. So, you could style a page using HTML+CSS with placed SVG graphics into it. This article describes three approaches to generating PDF and it settles on Puppeteer.

Javascript PDF Generation Notes

• PaperJS is very cool but too "pre-ES6" in its paradigms for me. Has its own mini interpreter for JS-like language! Deal breaker: no PDF export.

• SVG looks like the common vector tech that works with all PDF generation solutions

For programmatic generation:

• PDF-LIB is the dependency-free pure JS lib; other libs like react-pdf use it under the hood.

• Adobe's new scripting solution is called UXP and works with VSCODE, but isn't available for Illustrator (yet?) The existing tools (ExtendKit, CEP) are 32-bit so are Windows-only, and also are ES3 (!) NO THANK YOU.

• For server-side, C++ libraries Cairo and Pango will produce PDF and SVG (and more) documents. Node integration available through node-cairo.

• Puppeteer will output PDF in headless mode, allowing you to style pages using HTML+CSS+SVG. This might be a good hybrid approach.

Mon Feb 27

I awoke again feeling I'd "lost the thread" of what I'm doing. It's the second time this month, and I wondered what it meant; I've classified it as a "rational panic attack" (e.g. Egon Spangler: "I'm sorry, Venkman. I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought."

I've theorized that my #ASD traits are the pattern-analytical-rightness side of me. Perhaps the #ADHD traits are the emotional excitement-seeking side that wants to live an entirely heartfelt existence. Both of these can give me energy, but there's a gap in coverage for days like this when NEITHER set of traits is firing.

I think this is one of those days, feeling a bit lost because neither trait set has purchase on the unutilized megabits of time that are rushing past me.

The mitigation? Remember that I can trust myself to be captivated and optimistic in the long run, swept up in the sense of adventure and discovery with like-minded explorers. When these lapses occur, it's entirely fine to just coast until I catch the next wave. What I think I'm missing is a framing of the "adulting traits" that helps me get to the next wave, operating independently and cheerfully. Until now, I've thought of it instead as a horrible chore to suffer through.

No more! I need to give this a new name and expand the metaphor. The TL;DR is that there's a form of "adulting" that can help manage the #ADHD and #ASD trait sets without GETTING IN THE WAY.

Perhaps each trait set can be embodied as a Spotify playlist? I've been putting together a ridiculous "Sri Mood" playlist and I wonder if it would cleave cleanly into ADHD, ASD, and [adulting trait] songs?

Thu Feb 23

Yesterday I made the printer-friendly card thing. The next step is probably to figure out the webpack setup to enable "mini webapps with shared coredata operations", because I want to be able to code modularly using Typescript. Eleventy Template WebApps.

• adding custom templates to Eleventy can kick-off the build process
• This eleventy-react repository uses custom templates, using the jsx extension to kick-off a webpack build process. I think it's assumed there's a single entry point per jsx file.

I need a piece of paper to think on, so deferring the design until I can return home. But let me force myself to outline some approaches

webapps need

• a script tag that loads a bundle, possibly multiple bundles on a web page
• a build process that can recognize a web page template that has a bundle loaded. This can be JSX or HTML I think.
• a build process that compiles a root bundle that can talk to servers and manage data

Q. Where does this root bundle live? It can be something like URSYS? A. It's another entry point javascript code that a webpack build will watch and recompile

Q. Can this root bundle have its own dynamic data that it writes to? A. No, not at this time. However, we can store data we want to generate. And we want to design some kind of API that can be converted to use some kind of data store.

Q. How would the build process work from the command line?

npm run dev would

• use webpack to build a bundle of the root library from src-garten
• (for v2) run the garten processor, which would include file processing of src files into derived data documents (e.g. automatic cross referencing, hybrid docs)

npm run dev

Wed Feb 22

I have a short expedition list defined, and some pre-expedition preparations:

• make a printer-friendly 4x6 card framework
• Make expedition printer-friendly page

A general issue I'm hitting is that I can't import modules like I might for a webapp, so maybe I need to make that webapp compile pass sooner than later.

But for now, let me monkey-prototype a print friendly stylesheet inline for expedition-context...

• add inline print styling to expedition context
• add clickable button to print a handy reference

Next, want to add the card for the expedition list.

Thu Feb 09

The starter expeditions that are bread-and-butter to enable PDF generation and data entry into some kind of system are:

• text file processor that recognizes simple section dividers
• directory file filterer that globs directories and feeds them into the text file processor
• data structure that represents The Colony and all its elements

Reminder: My main goal is to have a representation of an Expedition, so I can start creating them and recruiting for them to see how that works. This is all new, so I have to maintain regular progress and tag the stuff I discover until I deem this a good place to set up base camp for launching the next Expedition.

0730 - adderall seems to have kicked in
0745 - distraction with Amazon Prime, Brain Spa
0800 - distractability is not being helped with adderall
       maybe need to dump out all thoughts

Enforce focus mode...pick a two minute starter task into /dev/ideas/null

• read expedition card (fail)
• make sri insights log?

0915 - fixing formatting of code in site.js
     - distracted by missing comment highlighting
     - readded afterglow remastered (my modded one)
     - looked into `yo code` 
     - packaging instructions with @vscode/vsce

Ok, it's 0915 now so let me try to focus on the expedition card instead of being annoyance driven in my actions. This lasted, due to social media griping, until 1030!!! I lost over an hour to this, and I have at most 90 minutes left before brain shutdown.

Again...

• sidetrack into fixing INDEX collections on main site.
• sidetrack into fixing repo workpace annoyance, clean repo
• 1145 read expedition card

I now have a bunch of data objects that could use further definition. But I'm not sure if this is actually necessary at this point.

• 1215 did some cleanup of content...but am losing focus
• 1230 finish editing the about text screen

I'm starting to feel tired around 1345 so wrapping things up...what the hell did I do today?

WRAPPING UP

--- random stuff ---
worked around lightroom export issue
pkms: regroup related categories, about page
      remove .code-workspace from repo
      refactored site.js to match order of menu, easier cut/paste
signed up amazon prime again
created Sri Afterglow theme project for vscode
talked to sid about new clan owned by meee
posted about #adhd and #asd engaged people on mastodon
(is mastodon my microblogging platform?)
monitored ADHD Adderall
monitored biphasic sleep
--- purposeful stuff ---
spent 30 minutes on Expedition Card

NEXT

• data structure that represents The Colony and all its elements GOOD ENOUGH
• text file processor that recognizes simple section dividers
• directory file filterer that globs directories and feeds them into the text file processor

mm