Who is Nick?

Asking all my life.

Weeknotes

  • Weeknotes 2025-03-22

    Correction: Monthnotes 2025-03-22.

    All that energy last month to mix it up, took me down. I was doing ok but then snap – damn you ADHD!

    I, of course haven’t done nothing, just different things:

    • Convert a newer/older laptop to Ubuntu
    • Remembered Drupal; saw they were trying to make a shift to simplify ( no doubt from all the “wordpress hi jinks” ) and started to remember how powerful it was when I replaced my college radio station’s site with it… that was a fun couple years.
    • Lot’s of work, and internal work weeknotes, with the hopes that someone, oh someone, will go on the ride with me. But, it’s just me sitting alone in the park.
    • Oh ya, and fighting f*!#’n mice! The scourge of Langley!

    It’s insanity! My house is a mix of towels under door jams, everything is in a box. At first you’re like, wow it’s organized, and then you’re like, which box was that in, and then your like, F!*#’n boxes!

    I’m not really much of an handy man, so the idea of figuring out what to do, is kind of super monumental at the moment.

    Then you think you’ve done enough, and then after the kids go to bed 4 of them come out of nowhere and run around like crazy teens, while your wife looses her mind, and the rest of the night, your trying to figure out not only how to get these guys out, but also do it in a way that your partner, who is now curled up in a ball mumbling “make them go away”, doesn’t fully break.

    Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

    So, monthnotes it may have to be while all the energy I have left is trying to deal with that.

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  • Weeknotes 2025-02-22

    Now with Shit Goggles!

    I’m usually a happy-go-lucky look-on-the-bright-side-of-life kinda guy, but seems like not been so much.

    My wife had to have a hard talk with me.

    And now, boy oh boy do I hear it. The back handed comments, the “sure this is good, but….” amendments to every sentence.

    So, what do I do? These things feel a little glued on right now. So I’m going to focus on the small things. The things I can change. I’m going to break a pattern or two, ever so slightly.

    Breaking patterns, even the smallest pattern, by the fewest of moments, means you can change the big things.

    It’s a twist on the classic making your bed speech.

    Hold off on picking up your phone for 20seconds once in the morning, then tomorrow you can wait 22; then 30; then a minute; then 5; then 15; then 30; then an hour; then longer.

    Go to bed 1 minute earlier.

    Get up 10 minutes earlier

    Sit on the opposite side of the couch.

    Instead of doing X – try doing Y, just once a day.

    And when my patterns can change, hopefully the shit can crack a little, and a little more until it rolls away, and I can get to that happy-go-lucky look-on-the-bright-side-of-life kinda guy.

    Oh ya – and I was inspired by Derek Sivers’s now page so, I have one too now.

  • Weeknotes 2025-02-07

    Way things are going, it’s been more bi-weekly updates. But the thing with weeknotes, remind myself, that’s ok. Keep Calm and Post on.

    Laravel & Statamic

    I’ve really been reading more and digging into Laravel, specifically Statamic.

    I’ve been looking for a foundation to do my own ActivityPub “thing”. I have my own ideas on what it can do, should do, and with a plugin.. maybe… 🤔

    Other ActivityPub thoughts

    I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, there’s a lot of really good foundational apps already in the wild. WP’s ActivityPub plugin is fine. I also really like what’s going on with Ghost. But, Statamic and Known have caught my eye from an infrastructure perspective.

    • Statamic being having more jazz hands, flare, and a very vocal and fun loving community
    • Known having a really portable and rock solid underbelly and foundation.

    Reading through the ActivityPub specs, there’s a lot of really interesting possibilities, however right now, it feels like projects are mostly staying in their own lanes. Taking a smaller lane approaches, which makes total sense. However, I really want to “play” with the whole specification; more extreme possibilities, like IntransitiveActivity:

    • Replace Last.fm scrobble with something in ActivityPub
    • If we’re going old school, Fouresquare check-in’s.
    • The Quantified Self all via ActivityPub

    But more than that – I’m imagining a more monolithic app rather than micro-service approach to it all. One that doesn’t need fancy cloud hosts or only a hand full of hosts offer support for crazy languages ( not that I can’t set those thing up… ). I just want to sftp it on a classic host and go from there.

    But as always no time

    Yet as always, I am bound by a 3 years old and 6 year old that rule my world ( btw: I love that they do ). I’m still struggling to find a balance to get some “me” time. And when I do, being at a computer is not always what I want – I’m on it all day after all.

    So hey, if you you ever want to chat more with me, ask away on the socials. Want to take it on yourself and beat me to it? Who’s got two thumbs and can beta test. Have at it.

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  • Weeknotes 2025-01-24

    Noticed I missed last week did you?

    “the void in your mind when you forget to do something because you’re so overwhelmed”

    It’s been that kinda few weeks where one gets sucked into the suck of the web. I’m Canadian, I have a lot of hope, but man… that hope is being tested for sure. I think we need to come up with some other name for doom scrolling… it’s not so much doom as WTF.

    I’ve been trying to pick the pieces up from my last weeknotes. I had a nice hiatus celebrating my Wife’s Birth Week ( yup a whole week here, full of zany 3yr & 6yr old ideas for how to celebrate ). Topping off with a great no-kids bday party which opened a window just a little bit in my immune system for me to then be smote down by some good awful bug. One that taunts you be being healthy just enough during the day to try and work or feel really guilty for not, and then when the sun sets, the beast is released in a rage of heat and chills.

    So, in the end, those pieces I’ve been trying to pick up off the ground, pieces of my ego, hope, drive… ya, those are mostly still on the ground being gently shuffled over by a dirty slipper to make a path to my bed.

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  • Weeknotes 2025-01-10

    I’ll keep if brief.

    How I feel at work

    How I feel at home

    Update: Haha! it’s 2025, not 2024. Let’s change that title shall we. I’ve since typed 2024 10,000 more times by accident.