Today, Apple announced new three iPhones, an iPad, and the Apple Watch series 5. I’m sure you’ve already seen all the news about this, my post is not about specific features or what Apple didn’t release. I’m only posting to note that I’m going to be buying the iPhone 11 not the “Pro” model.

This will be my first time upgrading and not going for the flagship model. In the past, Apple has mostly kept to the mid-size and large size iPhones but as of the iPhone XR, it’s clear that the line up will now have a 3rd, the lower end iPhone. Here “lower” end doesn’t necessarily mean low-end, because the specs of an iPhone 11 non-pro are pretty spectacular except the screen which is still the LCD screen. But is an extra $300 worth the slightly brighter screen?

You might be thinking is it really slightly brighter or actually very different? Let’s go with the latter, let’s say the OLED screen is vastly better than the LCD screen. Does that mean it’s necessary for an average smartphone user to have a vastly better screen on their phone? Probably not. After today’s announcement, some features are not must-haves at this point for me, and I bet for a lot of other people as well.

I upgrade my phone every two years and this year, I might be moving very much laterally than upwards with a new iPhone.

I just finished reading Maus: My Father Bleeds History, written and illustrated by Art Spieglman. I’m still processing it. I’ve been reading it over the past days. I’m currently in New York City and I brought the book with me. I wanted to read something different while traveling. I didn’t know much or even anything about the book before I started it. I got it as a gift from a friend last year and I’m finally getting around to reading it now.

If you’ve never heard of this book before, it’s a graphic novel that’s written about Art’s parents, from an interesting perspective. Art visits his father over the course of the novel and each time finds out a bit more about his parents’ time in World War 2.

I enjoyed reading it because I’m on vacation here in New York City. I took breaks whenever I couldn’t take any more of the grim reality Art’s parents were going through.

September in New York is pretty much perfect and I’ve taken advantage of the weather. Whenever I took a break, I either napped or walked around the neighborhood. I’m still processing the book so walking around, with nothing but what I had just read in my head, I’m grateful for this experience since I’m privileged to be able to do this.

I’ve been going through some painful self discovery in 2019. A lot of contradictory thoughts and feelings in my head. Anything from simple things at work and home to big things like where I want to live has been unreal this year. For instance, at the start of this year, I felt like I wanted to move away from the city to Southern California. That has changed and I don’t really know where I’d like to live in the coming few years, fortunately, the place I’m in right now I don’t have any complaints about.

This post is about meditation, I recently started getting serious about doing meditation. My earlier attempts at meditation were always driven by incorrect or ill-informed ideas such as “you need an empty mind to meditate” or “be away from everything and in a quiet place”. The latter is pretty bad because at my house, the pets are always around me so I wouldn’t be able to be myself and it’s not often quiet. I got a tip from my therapist that I should just try to meditate in places that are far from quiet, like the bus or at work. So far from what I understand, emptying your mind is not the goal of meditation. Seeing your thoughts and letting the float by is one goal and it has been pretty tough. I’ve been reading Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris which has some good ideas on getting started and it also has convinced me of getting rid of some of my doubts. I highly recommend checking it out.

One of the big things I’ve started learning from meditation is that you are going to be always restarting and there isn’t anything wrong with this. The conventional sense of “failure” is actual a success case in the world of meditation. It will get easier to focus on my breathing as time passes by every time a thought takes over me, it’s not a “failure” but instead a challenge that came up and I need to overcome.

My awareness and mindfulness has become something now but I can’t say it’s much yet. I’m trying to be mindful and mindfulness can be cultivated by meditating but I’m still very early in the process.

I spend a lot of time looking at Unicode, at work and personally, just because I love finding a shape already available by default through my default system fonts instead of adding an image for it. The basics that everyone has seen are things like ← ↑ ↓ → and © ™ etc.

A couple of months ago, I worked on a page that had some types of dashes that I often confuse myself, check it out here:

I wanted to share some interesting ones I’ve found recently:

☉ Sol, or the Sun. It’s also used for solar mass.

☤ Caduceus and ⚚ Herald’s staff. I can’t believe these are available in Unicode, they’re so detailed! They’re also used for healthcare related signage nowadays.

▧ ▤ ▥ These are some shapes I really like out of the many available geometric shapes: Geometric Shapes – Wikipedia

℻ You read that right, it’s just fax as a symbol in Unicode 🤪. But, while looking this one up, I found out that “fax” is short for facsimile which means to make an exact copy of something.

⅋ Turned ampersand. This makes me uncomfortable.

Now all in H1 sizes! (Yes, the alignment of the Caduceus symbols is a bit off…)

☉ ☤ ⚚ ▧ ▤ ▥ ⅋ ℻

I will post more as I find them. 😁

This month has been a quick one, I can’t believe it’s already the 18th as I type this. Below is a short review of the month and my 29th year.

Continuing my habit building for reading, I’ve been making steady progress reading books and listening to audiobooks. This month, I finished up 3 books and one audiobook so far. The books were Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, and How to Invent Everything by Ryan North. Each of these books is pretty different each other which kept me engaged the whole time. I was reading How to Invent Everything on my iPhone any time I was bored or had a few minutes, in a couple of months, I finished it which actually surprised me how little effort was required to finish it. I wanted to read a fantasy book that’s different than what I was into before (mostly Game of Thrones and Witcher lore) and Guards! Guards! is a good departure from that. I took a trip to Las Vegas and Los Angeles last week and so I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My experience in Vegas was pretty tame and wildly different than Thompson’s characters’ but it was still a fun read.

In my last post, I stated that I’m stopping work on Bookends and over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do next with my personal time at home. One of the big goals is to become more aware of myself, meaning more time spent being healthy which includes mental and physical health. I haven’t talked about this before on my blog but around the end of last year, I started seeing a therapist and it has helped my mental health a lot. I’m becoming more aware of myself and others around me. One of my main weaknesses is lack of empathy and I’m trying to hone that part of my brain. I’m also feeling less down all the time and excited (not just motivated in bursts) to work on new things. After I built some parts of Bookends and also my go link shortener, I realized that some things just take time and others will come with time, e.g. building a useful version of the link shortener took a couple of iterations but spending time learning node.js and some javascript concepts I didn’t understand helped me move ahead with confidence.

For learning in programming, I want to start focusing on ruby mainly because I use it at work and secondly because I want to build things using a different technology stack (rails, Sinatra, non-JS tools). The next few months are going to be focused on learning ruby and trying to build some tools with ruby.

In other aspects of my life, nothing major is going on. I am hoping to spend more time become self-aware and introspecting. Thank you for reading!

This post is just a summary of my month of April. I was in a lull at the beginning of the month but I started to get more aware of myself and started reading, writing, and doing things to get myself out of that initial lull.

Books

I finished listening to At Home by Bill Bryson in April which was a nice listen. It was a good summary of the past 250 years of history about things around the house. Like why we have different rooms like closet, kitchen, and bedroom. Where do we get the concept of having lawns? There were so many interesting facts in this book, I couldn’t keep up!
I also listened to Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was a fun and quick listen, it’s a great intro book for astrophysics and the author makes everything pretty approachable for a non-astrophysicist.
I finished reading Aladdin by Yasmine Seale which I didn’t enjoy as much I was hoping to. It’s too simplistic and that might be because of the original book and not the translation itself.

Health + fitness

I’ve been getting more active recently. I started doing about 10 minutes of yoga every morning and I’m trying to get back to riding the bike about 1-2 times a week.
I’m also trying to be more conscious of what I eat but that hasn’t been a huge concern for me. I try to limit myself to some meat throughout the week and not everyday.

Code + side projects

I worked a bit on Bookends in April but I didn’t make a huge dent in all the things I’d like to get done before I consider the app ready to be used. I am deploying as many small changes as I can. Each time I am adding something new, I’m having to rethink about the models I’ve already set. Once I got search working, things have gotten a bit easier to work with. Next is just getting a nice user flow going and not removing all new user data on each deploy, I am doing this to avoid any unforeseen issues since I’m treating the current version of the app at bookends.app as an alpha release.
I’m hoping to spend more time learning Ruby in May as I’ve gotten super busy at work and haven’t been able to spend any time learning concepts and language specific oddities.

It’s a beautiful day in San Francisco, I got up and made some coffee today. I wrote a short tutorial on how to serve Vue.js apps through Github Pages and then I stepped away from the computer for a bit. But now, I’ve been sitting at my computer for about 2 hours and I have barely anything to show for it except a list Stack Overflow answers that were the correct answers for the questions but my problem was not solved by them.

So a few days ago, I finally got book search and user accounts working on Bookends. You can check it out here: bookends.app. So after this, I wanted to try something else. I want to be able to track a book when I’m reading it and update the progress as I go on and mark it finished at the end. There are a few new things for me to consider, one is making a composite table of users and their books, this proved to be a simple enough exercise thanks for Sequelize.

Next, I wanted to start tracking through the UI. And this is where I’m just flabbergasted! Okay so this is my route:

/api/tracking/start?bookId=[id]&userId=[id]

Simple enough, so I tried it in Postman, works as expected. I try accessing the page and it works as expected. Then I tried to put it on the Bookpage so when a user clicks “Start reading” the book gets tracked…

Well, I thought this would work but it didn’t. And well, fair enough, our good ole pal CORS was what I thought was causing the issue because usually that’s what messes up local dev if you’re serving Vue.js on one post and the server on another port. Well, after spending about an hour trying differen things, cleaning up my routes and looking at each character in my URL to make sure I’m not making a dumb human mistake, it turned out that it wasn’t the issue.

The issue was that for some reason, express routing doesn’t work past the 2nd nesting…I’m not even sure if that’s a legit problem. But at some point, I decided to try this URL instead:

/api/tracking-start

And bam! No cors issues, no network errors, and everything worked. 😐

I’m frustrated with some basic things about Express.js and Node.js together and I’m wondering how long my patience will last. The small jolts of energy I get from getting something work are cool but I don’t know when the negatives will outweigh those.

📚📈🌺

So over the past few months, I’ve been trudging along slowly to add basic features to Bookends. If you haven’t read of my other posts, Bookends is a project I’m working on by myself to create a book tracking and discovery website. There are many reasons as to why I’ve been making slow progress but the main ones that I’ve noticed, I wanted to talk about in this post.

Node and Expess.js are great for small projects as I’ve built a couple of small applications of some sort with them, an example being the URL shortening service: Go. It was a quick and fun to build but there was something else that I didn’t realize until I continued adding common features in Bookends. When I started adding models and talking to the database, I had to rely Sequelize. But this isn’t a complaint against the tools, it’s mostly the ecosystem, I am often able to find a package for something in node but there isn’t a framework that dictates some sort of standard. Building an app comes one step at a time and one layer at a time with Node.js, unlike in other ecosystems where the conventions come with the framework.

Well, enough ranting about that. I’ve been adding some features to Bookends and I’m hoping to finish the book profile soon to launch the beta for people to try.