Jason Frye

Ramblings of a web developer and sometimes writer

Jason Frye

Things of Interest – January 20th – 26th

by Leave a Comment

The Things of Interest (TI) series looks at the previous week and some interesting things I’d like to log and share. No theme, other than I found them interesting.

Tim Ferris Podcast

The Tim Ferris Podcast has to be one I somehow missed all these years. Admittedly I haven’t been listening to podcasts all that much prior to working at the U of I, but this one is a must listen most weeks. I listened to Tim’s interview with Disney’s CEO Bob Iger and the magician Penn Jillette. He gives the interviewee plenty of time to respond. He’s thoughtful with his questions and has a knack for finding the things that make these very successful people come back down to earth.

Book Lists

I’ve often thought of plowing through the top 100 books of all time list found at Barnes and Noble, giving those top books my attention for a year or more (I’ve read many of them). But I think a much more manageable list would be to read the last decade’s best works. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m starting with the Pulitzer Fiction Winners and working from there. I’ll probably mix it up with the Hugo winners during the same time, as I still enjoy a good science fiction work.

I’m trying to find a good way to log that information on the site. Probably a widget showing the list with the ones I’ve read marked as such. Stay tuned for that.

Intermittent Fasting

The search for losing weight continues. I’m officially 203 pounds, down from 216. I’m heading towards 180, with a short “hell yeah!” to be heard at 190. Intermittent fasting seems to have me on the pace to reach 190 by the end of March. I’ll likely reach 180 by June or so.

I’m doing a 16-8 fast. I stop eating at 8pm and don’t have anything other than water and black coffee until noon the next day. I don’t fast on the weekend however, as I find it a bit too much in the way of social aspects of family life. We’re used to doing a Saturday morning breakfast as a family, so I don’t want to interrupt that. For right now, during the week will suffice.

What I’ve been reading this week

Bob Iger — CEO and Chairman of Disney (#406)

Things of Interest

by Leave a Comment

A new series about the things I’ve found interesting this week/month. A freeform post where I can ramble and not feel obligated to do any type of summation of learning. So let’s get started.

Meal prepping

The wife and I have been trying to eat healthier for a good while and I think we’ve struck on something that works for us. We use an app called MealPrepPro to create our weekly meal plan. They have a few different diet types and we tried keto for a week with good success, but neither of us liked going without most fruits, so we’re back to a low carb approach.

And let me say that eating right makes a huge difference for me, mentally and physically. I feel energized during the day and rarely feel wore down on the weekends, whereas before eating right I always felt like I needed a nap. Not that naps are bad, mind you, but I don’t feel the desperate need to catch one.

Reading nook

We’ve been living in our new house for almost two years now. It’s spacious compared to our last home, witch triple the square footage. I finished the basement last spring, putting in a workout room and theater area alongside a large recreation area. While all that work has provided me with plenty of space to enjoy a movie, I really didn’t have a place I preferred to sit to write or read a book. So I’ve made a space for that.

I love it. I can go there after work and read a short story, write up part of a post on my site, do a tutorial, or just meditate for a bit. It’s relaxing and provides me with a bit of solitary reflection that I often need after a day’s work.

A view of my reading nook
A view of my reading nook. Natural light, a comfy chair, and a good book make it the best spot in the house.

The Outsider show on HBO

I renewed our HBO subscription after pausing a few other streaming services. It’s like round robin with the services these days. I don’t have enough time to watch them all.

If you haven’t heard of The Outsider before, it’s an adaption of Stephen King’s novel by the same name. I read The Outsider a few years ago and was impressed by it then, but I had no idea how great the show would be. In large part, I’m fascinated by the cinematography, the characters, and the way they’ve created the mystery behind all that’s happening in that small town.

It’s likely the best adaptation of a King work I’ve seen.

How time has changed what I read

by Leave a Comment

Not all online banter deserves to be heard.

I read a lot of bullshit online. The comments on a sports media outlet’s Facebook post. A random thread identifying all types of abuse and sloven behavior on Twitter. Once I read about a man who had a Jolly Rancher in places one should not have them. And that brings me to Reddit. The front page of the internet. The place I’ve likely read as much as multiple volumes of Dostoyevsky. The time sink of the internet. 

In 2007 I really hit blogging hard. It gave me a way to voice different ideas about marketing and the freelance jobs I was taking at the time. It was interesting and I made quite a few acquaintances during that time. People that I still see tweets from and the occasional Facebook post. But back then we were like a community. We had sites like Entrecard and Stumbleupon to engage us and to bring us new visitors. We lifted each other up. I remember helping a fellow blogger put together a graphic for his sidebar. Someone else stopped by and helped me fix css on my site. And we all marveled at the large audience blogs. Heck, I even posted a guest blog post on one of them, and a few others. The site where I used to blog was purchased 13 years ago and I named it jasonboom.com. 

Today I decided not to renew that domain. 

It’s been gone for a few years now in all actuality. I have a backup of it, but it’s not online. I’ve thought about putting it in a separate directory for old time’s sake, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. 

That transition, from owning to not owning the domain, started me thinking about what it is I do with my time now compared to then. Back then I didn’t have a smart phone. I logged many hours reading blog posts, writing blog posts, bettering my website. Then Twitter came along and I hopped on there, like so many other bloggers at the time. We engaged and had fun, but somewhere along the way I lost my voice. I stopped interacting on sites. I only consumed the content, and rarely made myself heard. In an online game I used to play our officers had a policy that new members could only read the text of the chat, but they couldn’t communicate until they verified with us that they read the rules. We called them window lickers. The look but not touch users of the digital era. I feel like that now and I’m not sure I know how to really engage in modern social media. It’s all a bit overwhelming. Even Twitter seems like a giant vacuum of smart people all clamoring for attention. 

My life changed too around the time I started blogging. I was recently married in 2007 and we welcomed our only daughter in 2009, so there was a short window where I was a newlywed without much disposable income. And during that time I enjoyed the golden age of blogging. I miss it. 

Sure I have more I can do today. I have better toys, a bigger house, a job that’s way more fulfilling. But I’m still missing something from that time. So I decided why not try to bring it back, even if no one is listening. Here. On this blog. Where I can again find a voice among the many online. I can stretch my imagination. I can recapture what has been lost among the comment threads, social media snapshots, and the ten second attention span. 

And maybe, in the process of enlivening this site, I can also cut down on the phone use. I can stop reading the meme driven comments on Facebook. I can put down the dull threads of chaos on Twitter. I can dive into the interesting ones on Reddit and stay away from the time sink as much as possible.

Maybe. We’ll see. At least, this feels like a start. 

Code readability

by Leave a Comment

I just finished reading this wonderful blog post entitled, “It’s all Greek to me: Thoughts on code readability and aesthetics” and I got to thinking about how I viewed these crazy one-liner code exercises. The earliest JavaScript example I saw was this guy who had replicated Flappy Bird in something like 14 lines of code. I took a look at it, and considered this guy a genius. And there have been others. Reddit posts where someone made a fancy feature in a few lines. Often the resulting code looked like a cousin to hieroglyphics rather than the language I was used to writing.

But what I’ve come to learn about programming is it’s not all about how small the codebase has become. If I reduce down my code, then sometimes I forfeit understanding as a result.

For instance a variable might be $a in someone’s function, but it might be $title in another. I think the latter makes the most sense, even as temporary variables in code. Losing site of the message means the reader has to interpret what’s happening and they might not see the intent.

I’ve worked on a codebase for a few years now that was written by a talented programmer. He could get things to work, so he knew the language. But he was also writing the code only for himself, so the lines are littered with $a, $b, $xx, and other nondescript variables.

When it comes to readability, being a bit more verbose doesn’t hurt at all. Keep things DRY, but tell the who story.