Dyken Pond

It’s been an awesome week! Finishing the Lord of the Rings trilogy concluded with an epic 3hr movie session with my girlfriend (Wednesday afternoon). I have to say, in the beginning, it felt as though I would not be able to become as attached to the characters as I did in the hobbits. The trilogy’s different style coupled with the lack of Bilbo, the Dwarves, and Gandalf made it difficult. At the end of nearly 10 hours of movie almost solely featuring the Fellowship of the Ring, I am just as attached to the characters as I was in The Hobbit trilogy.

Yesterday night, my sister and I traveled up to dyken pond to see my mother and to enjoy some time in the country. It is always so peaceful out here. The rain on the tin roof is always one of my favorite sounds out here. The new grass has been mowed at the camp and in Center Berlin, there is plenty of yard work to do!

I also finished reading the book I have been working on Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart and I must say, I really enjoyed the read. I learned a lot about internet protcols (http, smtp, sms), filetypes, python’s inner workings, character encodings (I really didn’t know the world needed to be this complicated), windows command line and more from this book. I am currently deciding which book to read next out of 10 that I bought in a bundle about a year ago. Last night, finding something that I could apply my newfound knowledge to, I created a process of copying text from my laptop, to my phone using text. The full source code is on github as a gist feel free to check it out! (It’s really short). I used the smtplib, and Verizon’s email sms gateway service to send data to my phone. I was able to have my python program get text either from command line or clipboard, send it over email to a special address @vtext.com (Verizon’s email to sms gateway) which then got sent to my phone. THis was free, fast, and clean in my opinion. Works like a charm in my opinion! The motivation for this came out of need for a way to send text over to my phone (like copy and paste) from my windows machine. On Mac, it’s quite easy as it would just be a quick iMessage to myself. But there is no iMessage on windows, so here is my alternative!

I also want to note and record that me and my girlfriend’s minecraft world has progressed and we beat the Wither, minecraft’s other boss, on Monday. The fight seemed a little bugged (or maybe I lack expirience) but the Wither was acting strangely and then targeted me, killing me and destroying nearly all of my stuff (not Elytra!). I was not that upset thought, now I have truly moved on to the endgame. Also, the day before, we raided the Woodland Mansion and obtained totems of undying (which I used during wither fight :sad: ).

All for now! Jack

Priorities & Youtube

Youtube uses too much of my time.

And I am very aware of it. About five days ago, I made a promise to myself after my last experiment with quitting youtube failed. I thought that I would be able to curb my Youtube habit by limiting myself to only watching what I came to the site to watch. This way I would not browse and fall victim to their powerful recommendation algorithm.

This failed, and it failed by slow loosening of the rules and gradual slippage back into prior habits. Because of this, I made a decision to stop watching Youtube completely for the time being. This means I cannot go on my laptop, cannot go on the app, cannot watch it on the Tv, and cannot watch a quick video that a friend may have sent me. It is a strict ban for probably forever. If I ever wanted to use the platform again, I am thinking of a couple of ways that I could do so in a completely non-addictive and fully informative matter. One method is that I must download the videos (that I was thinking of watching) first on to my device to seperate myself from the platform. I would not be allowed to let Youtube’s algorithm serve me what to watch but instead I must know it beforehand. This will be far into the future where I can live completely seperate from the need to watch video.

On another note, I have been reading Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart (which I will abbrv. as ABSP) and so far I have really enjoyed it. I am currently on the filesystem chapter and the section that details how to use python to compress (“zip”) files. I am looking forward to later chapters, particularly the ones on webscraping and sending emails and texts 😮 with python. Last night, on a short call with my friend Matt Keating, we discussed python and a few programming things over the phone while I toured the cathedral that he was building on the ski guys minecraft server. He reminded me of a website that I have been fond of but have only now come back to: Project Euler is a collection of programming puzzles on algorithms, data-structures, optimization and more. Solving the problems it presents is a unique challenge (much like Code Abbey or Code Golf) that is rewarding. I have signed back up and hopefully the python that I have learned from this book, I can properly apply for some good problem solving.

Priorites

A list of priorities is always important, especially for the person who likes to work on a thousand other problems before solving the big daunting problem that has been hanging over their head for weeks (me). I read an article this morning from Harvard Business Review about self-sabotaging behaviours which is what has inspired this section. So here is my current list of priorities to myself:

1. My Health is most important and I think that focusing on this is one of the most valuable things I can do for myself. (Sleep, excersize, hygiene)
2. Staying away from all the time wasters (Youtube, Snapchat, etc…) and instead replacing them with something else, like reading out of ABSP.
3. Spending quality time with those around me (Family, friends, and my girlfriend)
4. Keeping my room clean and establishing a good routine

And priorities to others:

1. Get BubblesGUI working with a usable GUI for AirCycler (Simulator, Debugger, Testing)
2. Get a roof on the 1623 Trailhead sign (It’s been nearly a year!) (June 21st)
3. Clean up around the property (Duxbury, Berlin)

Thinking about doing a power-hour week sometime soon: One article each day for a week that I just write down my thoughts and day in great detail. Just a thought for now.

Until later this week, Jack

Netlify incoming

9:20am

Two days ago, I was able to get the site to build on netlify. The site displayed correctly and as of right now uses the slick theme. As of writing this, I will be working on migrating all of the old site content over to this new site and hooking it up to my domain (https://jackchampagne.com)

Will be updating this throughout the morning.

4:00pm

So! It’s not quite the morning anymore but a TON of stuff has been changed. As I would like to make changes to this theme in the future, I have forked the theme’s repo and added it as a git submodule in the source. I have also reformatted posts (added categories, tags, and series) and gotten my DNS (hover.com) to use Netlify’s nameservers. This will enable me to use their CMS (Content Managment System) and CI (Continuous Integration). Having my domain point to Netlify was as easy as pie this time. Migrating hosts (previously github pages) to Netlify provides numerous advantages, especially the relaxing of the ‘static’ aspect of the site. Netlify will handle form submissions (providing for email and polling and other fun stuff) and their CI + CMS is really nice. (And it’s free! A big emphasis everywhere for me)

4:08pm

Now trying to do a local build on my machine before I push the repos to be built on the web! Fingers crossed that cats, tags, and series work properly.

4:13pm

First build failed because of a missing space on line 10 of 2020-04-25-galactic-dinosaurs.md in between the - and Science. Second build failed because I didn’t save. Third build succeeded in 5 seconds (Whoa, this is supposed to be a lightweight theme!). Looking at the built site, I noticed a typo that created two tags that were meant to be one: Self-improvment and Self-improvement were merged and then I build again. Now that everything looks good, time to commit these changes and let the magic of CI take over!

Talk soon, Jack

Dyken Pond

Today was my first day back at Dyken pond for real, meaning sleeping at the camp. Last weekend, my mom and Chris ripped up the old setup around the firepit and put down sod and seed. It looks and feels so nice. Instead of stepping on rocks and pine needles every time we go outside this year, we will be laying in a bed of grass, so nice.

My girlfriend’s birthday was yesterday and even though there was a ton of stuff that we did not get to do, it was a jam-packed day. I learned that she has never really done origami before. I planned on possibly building birdhouses, playing Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s on guitar for her (wasn’t practiced enough yet!) building the lego set that Sean Henderson gave to her for her birthday, and doing a puzzle. We ran out of time! We also watched three episodes of spongebob though, starting from the beginning of course. I am surprised that I have seen every episode so far before.

Later, and at the lake! Jack

List of Important things

This post is meant to be a list of important things to remember and apply throughout daily life. It is so easy to get stuck in a hole and preform the same routine day in and day out. I believe that novelty forces people to grow and makes days feel more fulfilling. This list focuses on, at max, 10 core concepts that are worth paying attention to throughout each day of my life.

(5/27/2020)

• Active Learning (doing myself) is far more powerful then passive learning (watching do)
• I don’t have to do it perfect the first time, instead I should just get something down.
• 1% of improvement every day is better than 0% (By the end of the year, that will be 3778% improvement annually)
• Getting enough sleep is essential
• Spending time with those around you

(9/16/2020)

• Don’t get stuck on your bad habits. See where you went wrong, prevent it from happening in the future and grow.

There are more to be added and as the list goes on some may be deleted. A format to describe the dates on the list will be made in the future. *For now, all of the list items were added on the start date of this post. This will almost act like a sticky note / bulletin board for my thoughts on my path towards productivity.

Thanks, Jack

The Hobbit

Last night, after 4.5 hours of watching movies yesterday me and my girlfriend Lillian finished The Hobbit movie trilogy. The precursor to the Lord of the Rings series by J. R. R. Tolkien. I have to say a few things about the series so far. For one, I was surprised to see the middle movie Desolation of Smaug have signifigantly lower (only slightly) ratings than the other two movies overall. After watching the movie it made a lot of sense to my as to why. If I had to watch that movie in movie theaters and the next movie Battle of Five Armies hadn’t come out yet, I would have been deeply frustrated with the ending. The movie finished off on a cliff-hanger that was far too-intense for my liking. I enjoy having movies leave some to be desired so it doesn’t feel too conclusive but having a dragon (Smaug) moments away from descending down on a town and causing death and destruction and then ending the movie was a bit of a cop out in my opinion. Since I was watching these movies after all of them have been released, that frustration wasn’t there and actually was something I found to be a positive. The previous movie, of course, now led in perfectly to the final movie, picking up right where we left off.

Today, I am getting some work done for AirCycler and am taking the day for myself. So far it has been quite slow and my recent Youtube ban has been a little bit of a failure. I am learning though! From my failures that is. I defeated Reddit two years ago now and am looking at implementing a better system for myself. I believe that less of the time-sucker apps and content in my life will contribute to a bigger feeling of fulfillment, better sleep, better mental health, and better motivation. Overall this will free up my time for other activities that I also enjoy but will be more informative, interesting, and fulfilling. I would like to read the book Automate the Boring stuff by Al Sweigart. I find it could be very useful in the future for me, getting rid of the monotonous tasks that I will envitably have to do. I would also like to read the textbook Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz which so far has been very interesting and enlightening. (Those challenge problems are pretty hard!)

Till next time, Jack

The most eaten meat is...

the most eaten meat in the world is chicken? Seems reasonable. Poultry is everywhere… There is a lot of misinformationa about what is really the most eaten meat (goat, beef, pork) from reputable sources and what you here from word of mouth. I had a good friend tell me today that his dad always says that ‘Goat is the most eaten meat in the world’. I really wanted to add this to tidbits because it sounded so interesting. So, I did a little fact checking first before I wrote this article. It turns out, from what I have found this is a common misconception as people like Gordon Ramsey and commenters on the meat articles have said this repeatedly. This is not true though, poultry is the most eaten meat in the world as claimed by this Quora article

Today was a social distancing outside hangout with Henry, Russell, Luke, Lillian, and Sam outside tossing the disc and playing sports. I have finally on this day cleaned my room and sorted all of my college dorm room stuff back into my room in Duxbury. I had my moveout day this past monday (5/18/2020) and now at the end of the week everything is in order. So clean!

An update about this site

Hi! This is Jack. Just writing a short update on the site itself and what’s going on behind the scenes =]

I have been working hard at getting this website viewable to the public and was originally planning on using Github pages with Jekyll. Jekyll is awesome and has a lot of uses for building static sites and blogs just like this. Unfortunately, properly installing a ruby development environment was not a trivial task! I tried many guides but alas there was no success. (Jekyll’s guide, Mike Dane’s guide on Youtube, a few others that fleet my memory as of right now)

There are lots of ways of installing and managing your installs of Ruby and each one I tried came with its own set of difficulties. (Rbenv, base install) and there are a lot of tools and ‘gems’ that ruby uses for jekyll and github pages. Between bundler, rbenv, and my setup (Windows subsystem for linux running Ubuntu 20.04) I decided that I should re-evaluate my options.

In the past I have researched static site generators for a short stint at a company called Novice Games (Summer 2019) with my high school classmates of Jack Roche and Nate Romanelli. The two most popular ones that I found were Jeykll and Hugo. When I came to revaluate this site’s future in development, Hugo became what is now my main focus to get this published.

I intend on publishing this site using Hugo (written in the go programming language) and have CI taken care of through Github actions (if possible)

I do not know much CI at the moment but the CI setup on the UMass-Makerspace’s blog was something that I saw real power in and will attempt to apply it to many problems in the future.

Anywho, the makerspace wrapped up activities for the semester and we ended on a good note as a team. I am looking forward to the summer, getting to spend a little time with my girlfriend, working at AirCycler© (which I will be doing remotely, woohoo!), doing some manual labor in Berlin, NY for my family (Dyken Pond & Center Berlin), and taking care of stuff at home in Duxbury.

Hope this was a good read if you were curious! Talk soon, Jack

America signed a metric treaty

Yes, you read that right. The bulwark of the dated and confusing Imperial system actually signed the treaty in ~1880 which metric countries signed to agree on the metric system. The United States intended on converting to the metric system. Instead we have a beautiful system where all of our units are metric units and a conversion factor.

If you haven’t seen the complexity of the Imperial system in all of its glory yet, check out this wikipedia image.

By 42CrMo4, Christoph Päper - English length units graph (PNG), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

I found this by stumbling on an old youtube video by Veratasium which is linked here Pretty neat!