So it has been a while, and there are lots of reasons for this that I would like to discuss. First, I’d like to discuss a timeline of everything that has happened in my life within the last couple of weeks.
On July 3rd, me and Lillian headed up to Dyken pond for a little bit of a vacation and to hang out with my mom. We arrived midday on the 3rd and we socially distanced ourselves from most people there (namely my sisters 6 friends that were up (Jul. 2 - 7th)). We spent a lot of time on the water, swimming, waterskiing, relaxing in center Berlin and doing porch coffee.
The 4th of July this year was spectacular, as it got darker, and the camp rowdiness was at peak, me and Lillian went for a paddle on a one person kayak out to the middle of the lake to enjoy the fireworks. It was quite trecherous because of 2 people being in one seat in a small kayak as well as for other unnamed reasons but once we got out to the middle of the lake, we got an awesome show. The brown house by the dam (or near there) did a fireworks show that lasted 13 minutes and probably costed upwards of one thousand dollars. After an awesome finale, and somehow without tipping and taking on water, we slowly made our way to shore.
When we got back, I helped Peggy Carter set up her tent that she had brought and the the cot for inside. An accident down by the dam happened that night. A 91 year old man had an accident by the dam after hitting the ditch on the side of the road and having a heart attack that prompted a ambulance, police department (maybe also fire dept.) response, so the sky went quiet. This added a little bit of chaos to the night but by the time we went to bed around 12ish, all was quiet. Early next morning, there was a lunar eclipse at around 5:30am, I was fast asleep.
The next couple of days consisted mainly of me and Lillian enjoying being away from the hustle bustle of Duxbury. She finally understood what I meant by the feel of Berlin and how I liked it better, away from all the white suburbia and ‘Karens’. It is refreshing being out there and it is something that I sincerely enjoy. I spend a good amount of time that week creating a better system for the rope swing. Cooking and helping prepare for our camping weekend. Helping out with various chores around the house. After Hailey and her friends left, me and Lillian headed up to sleep at the Dyke rather than the guest room in Center Berlin.
Towards the end of that next week, my mom, Lillian, and I went on a camping trip up to Lake Placid to explore the Adirondacks a bit. On the way, we stopped at Ft. Ticonderoga and got to see many beatiful vistas and looming mountains. When we arrived to the campground, I realized that I kind of forgot what camping at a campsite was like. They had all the amenities and we parked our car in our site. We settled in for the day after having a bite to eat from the Dack Shack and unpacked all of our things and set up our tent. I am more of a purist when it comes to camping. I like living off of granola and insta-cook meals on a portable camping stove. Wearing backpacks in and not having any power/cell service. The ‘glamping’ was nice but not what I picture in my head for sure when I thing about camping. The next day we woke up and started heading to Mount Jo for a nice hike with great views. Whiteface would be too difficult of a hike for us to jump into easily and would be strenuous. Mount Jo was the right size and at the top we got a great view of Mt. Algonquin and Mt. Marcy in the distance with the Adirondack Loj below (great history there, worlds largest log cabin before a fire in ~1903.) We headed back down the mountain so that we could find a good spot for my mom to get cell service as it was a friday and she had a conference call to attend.
We drove back towards Lake Placid and took a quick pit stop look at the Olympic ski jumping complex on our way. It was closed unfortunately, so we couldn’t get up and personal with it but it was still massive from the parking lot. We headed back to town for the day to let my mom catch up on work and just walked around the campsite and nearby public swimming area. By now it was dinnertime and we had a camping classic, grilled chicken and rice with tobasco sauce, my favorite. Me and Lillian did most of the cooking and it came out pretty good, nothing burnt and the rice cooked just right. As it came closer to night and after dinner, we all had some of the banana bread Lillian and I had made 2 days before and played some Yahtzee!. We cleaned up site for the night to leave tomorrow morning and were fast asleep by 10:30pm.
We left the next morning at about 8am and zipped on out of there. It had rained the night before but we had packed everything already which made the morning much easier. I drove us on the way back and we passed by some beautiful spots. One spot had a large waterfall that was viewable from the road and was very pretty. When we got back to Dyken Pond. It was a Saturday afternoon and we were leaving the following monday.
Sunday - After a great weekend we did a little bit of work on the front step to get it more stable and safe before we left the next day. Me and Lillian enjoyed a relaxing night next to another one of my fires (which I got roaring every night I made one, the coals would last until the morning).
On monday, we left after lunch ~4ish so that we could enjoy route 2 all the way home. I was a great drive with some funny moments closer to home, especially when we tried stopping in Lexington. It was back to the grind though when we got back, I wanted to get to work and get back to the office.
This is where the personal development part of this story comes in. I temporarily lift the youtube ban from the 13th till today. I watched many creators and videos and honestly do not want to know how much time I spent on the platform. This behaviour of bingeing after I had missed out on over a month’s worth of content was not what I should have been doing, hence why I am reinstating the ban. Youtube, and its ability to easily eat up my free time and boredom quickly impacted my work, sleep, and even this journal of mine in ways that I dislike deeply. I am making a commitment to myself that for me to continue using that platform as it contains many creators that I am interested by, love, and enjoy, I have decided that I must program an automatic video downloader and only choose my favorite creators. Using this method, I circumvent the most difficult part of youtube to me, the recommended videos sidebar (this, I have determined, is what sucks me in the most). When I run out of downloaded videos, I will have to move on to something else instead of clicking on the Youtube video in the top left corner and starting again with a whole new set of recommended videos. So far I have determined a few people that consistently deliver content I am interested in. Here is my short list of youtubers and reasons why I have decided them.
The List:
Hopefully this will limit how I interact with the platform in a beneficial way while also maintaining interaction with subject I am interested in. My idea is to have a program that checks at around 9 every day to see if there are any new videos from these creators, download these videos on to my PC, and send me a text notification if this is the case. Youtubes subscription and notification systems are terrible in my opinions and play to the ‘recommendation’ algorithm instead of being what they advertise.
These past 2 weeks has been a little disapointing to me as I have slipped back into old habits that I am trying to get rid of. Last week, I was extremely unproductive trying to work and failed on multiple occasions to hit my hour goal for the day while not being efficient with my programming. I procrastinated the free time I had and depressed my mood. I have accepted this now and have accepted the damage is done with me coming back to the youtube algorithm. I want to change this for the future so I avoid my bad habits, grow more as a person, elevate my mood, and grow my productivity.
This week has been exciting to me for other reasons though, and I am in much better spirits now then last week. I have come back to the office space finally at AirCycler (on Monday Jul. 20th). I forgot how much I enjoyed it here with the dogs, my co-workers, and my boss. It is a great environment to work in and I am grateful I have it. My productivity has been much higher here than at home and I am prouder of the work I have generated.
All in all, this has been a wild two weeks and in the next span of time, there will probably be more frequent and much less lengthy posts on what I have been doing.
Signing off, Jack
I hate writing. The one thing that I can procrastinate to oblivion is writing to the max. Even if it is a short 200-word snippet that is mostly easy to write, starting is always the hardest part. I have found very few ways that help me overcome these feelings, most of which do not work when I am not under pressure. My writing is like a diamond in the rough: Formed under pressure, and unspectacular to the eye until polished. It has always felt that way, through many of the friend groups I’ve been in, from what teachers have said, to what I have felt, it has always felt the same.
It feels almost like I am better at reading and interpreting poetry. Which is something that I find liberating to write or read, breaking all the norms and rules of prose. I find I can comprehend it better, connect with the symbolish, metaphors, short span, all better. Does not matter the scope or intensity of focus.
That being said, this writing I am doing for myself is the first journaling/writing project that I have actually enjoyed and done for my own personal enjoyment/benefit. My memory is terrible and this makes it feel like all the little details that slip through the cracks can be caught and archived and indexed. Being able to put a date or a number to the things that happen very occasionally in my life gives me a feeling of documentation and record of my story.
I fixed the DNS problems plauging my last night. Now it looks just how I want it. www.jackchampagne.com for the webpage, automatic redirect from jackchampagne.com. Also started strike-thruing my items from the “list” to mark off what I have completed and adding a few things.
I guess that all I got for now, toodleloo!
- Jack
Working from home has been a big challenge during Coronavirus. Mainly because the lack of a dedicated space that I must work in but also because of the sociality of working from home. It is easy to stop work at 2 and hang out with friends or my girlfriend and veg out for the rest of the day. It is easy to get distracted from what I was doing, it is easy to go downstairs and have a bite to eat and read an article. All of these easy things make something simple, like sitting down and typing at a computer hard. It has made me soft; I am complacent with my own laziness, sloth, and ability to “not work as hard” during these times and I feel as though I have mostly myself to blame. I remember working in a kitchen at the Milepost restaurant for a year before I landed my current job at AirCycler (which is a whole other story) and it was honest work. I remember coming home some night, smelling like a rotting garbage bin and thinking to myself, “Wow, I can’t wait to get into the shower and crawl into bed, my body hurts and that was a hell of a day.”
There are things that I am grateful for and some things that I would like to change. Change doesn’t happen immediately though, it happens gradually, through consistent effort. Instead of making a 100% improvement on my life today, making a 1% improvement every day for a hundred days will net me 270% change in wellbeing. The second one is far more sustainable (and is another beautiful example of compound interest). My good friend Henry popped into my mind as I am writing this because he wasn’t hanging out with the gang earlier today. He works very hard and it is something that I admire. 40 hours a week, waking up at 6:30am, all things that don’t seem in reach to me but things that are very attainable through lifestyle changes. Althought right now, maybe this is procrastination with the work that I should be pursuing.
Earlier this day, Russell, Luke, Hannah, Dylan, Sam, Lillian, and I went to Dylan’s house in Saquish and relaxed on the beach. I was a great day with lots of grilled food, tubing, boating, talking with friends, and playing cornhole. The weather was perfect and it was entertaining to catch up with friends and just do whatever I wanted. I did not get sunburnt surprisingly and I was also very akeen to going swimming even though I didn’t bring a proper bathing suit. This is part of the reason why I am writing this. Today was fulfilling, but at the expense of my schedule and routine. I am tired in a good way but yet there is still work left undone. Bubbles needs to be finished and I want to move on from my demons of design and old outdated frameworks (.NET Framework 4.5 and Winforms). I have ideas for the stock market, self-automation, personal business that I want to pursue but do not want to cut my ties at AirCycler. I have enjoyed AirCycler very much and have had a pleasure working on the BATS project as well as this project (Bubbles) I am working on right now. It has been a fulfilling and rewarding expirience that has brought me great people, cool projects, and good connections and I am grateful. I am a bit rambly by now but in some ways I do wish I could go back to the office because I miss interacting with those coworkers. I do miss school because of my friends, the makerspace, and my classes/dorm living. This is the sacrifice that I make.
Some good news and updates about father’s day and life: My dad and I added a roof to the eagle scout sign project on fathers day. This came as a sign of relief and as one thing less to pester my (and my dad’s) thoughts at night. Sally was delighted to see that I had added it and it marked for me on of the last few things that I felt hanging over me from long before this whole thing started.
I am now beginning to realize at this very moment that to make adding pictures to this blog (which I have really wanted to do) making a python script that automates the process of implementing it onto the blog would be really nice.
Continuing: My grandmother’s birthday was recent and, as a surprise, my dad, Hailey, Lillian, and I decided to head out to her and as a surprise for dinner. We ate at Jae’s and I drove the entire way there (We met my dad at intersection between 44 and 495 to drop off the Jeep Grand Cherokee). Right when I was about to turn left and head up the hill to the hotel that Jae’s in under, I had a problem with the transmission. When I gave the car power, it seemed like the tranmission wasn’t enganging and the car wasn’t able to get into drive. I was able to get it to pop and make it up the hill but 3/4 up the hill, the same thing happened again. This is when I became concerned. I shifted into four-wheel drive and was able to get it to catch again and made it to the hotel parking lot. We all got out of the car and my dad wanted to check on the transmission to see if we were going to need to make alternate plans going home. Reverse still worked fine but my dad, 4-wheel or no 4-wheel, was not able to get the transmission to engage. After 336,000 miles, the iconic 2009 GMC Yukon was dead. It was in the shop for new brake calipers (It still had the original!!) just that weekend and now we were stranded 3 hours from home at my grandmother’s birthday dinner. We went in and had a delicious and funny dinner at Jae’s. My grandmother, her sister Lynn, my Aunt Suzanne and JG sat at one table and we sat a table right next to them, but slightly apart. I ordered a burger and picked at everyone else orders. My Aunt Suzanne drove us to the Jeep Grand Cherokee in the hotel parking lot to get us home that night and we played crosswords in the car. My dad began the process of purchasing a car and intended on purchasing a car the day before this all happened. Yesterday, he finally purchased the car he wanted, a pickup truck, something that I think is a really good purchase. I have not driven it yet, nor sat in the interior, but when I dropped him off at the dealership to drive it home, the interior looked really nice. This car should last him a while… I hope.
Minecraft 1.16 and 1.16.1 came out on the 23rd and 24th respectively and Lillian and I have been playing them nonstop. I have been busy with the multi-item sorter (so neccessary) while she’s been gathering some netherrite. I updated both of my servers and started contemplating a dedicated piece of hardware for all of this and for other projects I am interested in doing.
Also of note: I migrated back to Github pages because of the website bloat that Netlify was causing. To properly use netlify, I would have to added a few things that I did not want. I want this site to be lightweight (other than the photos I guess) and want each aspect to be tightly controlled. It was a fairly smooth process in my opinion.
Anyways, I think I have put off work long enough, or maybe I’m ready to just give up for the night and call it a day. Who knows?? (me, calling it a day) Till next time, Jack
Also just want to say briefly that moments ago (you can look at commits now, I found the www. subdomain was not working, currently trying to fix)
This past weekend was my birthday weekend and I got home from staying at my moms on the 13th. When we were up there we did a tremendous amount of yardwork. When I got home, my grandmother was down to visit. I learned how to make her incredible Kahlua cheesecake and spent time with her catching up. My dad announced on the 13th or the 14th that getting a dog this fall is almost certain. On the 14th, I got a terrible sunburn when me and my girlfriend went out to Saquish to look for moon snails and have a bit of a picnic.
On my birthday I recieved two gifts that I am looking forward to using. The first is an apple watch, which I am wearing right now. The second is a Kindle, which I would like to use to read in bed at night instead of my phone screen. Hopefully the display is not backlit like a normal lcd display and the tablet is suitable for nighttime reading. I also recieved new shoes from my mom which I have wanted badly these past couple of weeks.
As I get older, a birthday just feels like another normal day. If I was asked by someone how old I am, I’d probably respond with 18 accidentally still. This is the reality but fortunately I have not gotten to the point where I say an age from two years ago. I have found some difficulty and trouble trying to motivate to do work. The tasks that I have set out at AirCycler seem very doable and are broken up into bite size chunks but I find the work to be less interesting than that which I decide to do for my own personal improvement.
Some things I wanted to jot down for some note taking:
( 6-25-2020 )
I want a lot of things in life. And it always seems like there’s just not enought time. One small thing at a time though, and I know it will get done. I know it will.
This could have a ton of tags but because of the nature of this list, I think I am going to keep it with only these.
Till next time, - Jack
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
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.
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:
And priorities to others:
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
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
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
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)
(9/16/2020)
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
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