Chuck Grimmett

Archives

Month: October 2022

  • Week of October 24

    Charlie sounded out some new words this week:

    • Pouch (like applesauce pouches)
    • Arthur (his friend who came to visit)

    Amanda put a stool by the front window so Charlie could climb up on it and look out. It has been a huge hit and he stands on it multiple times a day.

    We had one of Charlie’s daycare friends and his parents over on Saturday and are really glad we invited them. It was nice to connect with other parents of young kids and chat while they ran around. I made some pizzas in the Ooni, we had some wine and snacks, and generally just chilled.

    There is something comforting about all being in the same boat and being both unapologetic and understanding when one of the toddlers does a toddler thing and having to deal with that. It is harder to relax when people without kids come to visit and your kid does something weird.

    This visit was one of the first times another walking, interactive toddler like Charlie who doesn’t yet understand how to interact well with other kids came to our house, and Charlie had some bouts of jealousy and frustration when things didn’t go as he expected. There were some tears. I can understand that it is tough to see someone playing with your toys, standing on your stool, and being held by your parents. He hasn’t had to share before. It is better for him to learn now than a couple years from now. Still, it is tough to see him frustrated like that, and we snuggled him extra that night.

    Charlie and his friend Miles dressed up as Mario and Luigi for Halloween. So cute.

    The saffron crocuses are blooming! I’m harvesting the saffron to make rice, soups, and paellas.

    This week was peak fall color in Peekskill. The weather was also nice. It ended up being one of the more beautiful autumns we’ve had here.

    Currently reading:

    • Trust by Hernan Diaz
    • Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille
    • The Confusion by Neal Stephenson (part of the Baroque cycle)

    I had a conversation with a friend about working with neurodivergent people. I currently work with some neurodivergent folks and have worked with others in the past. Some helpful things I like to keep in mind:

    • When working with neurodivergent people, it is best to assume you aren’t working from a shared understanding of any given situation until you make your understanding explicit and have a conversation about it. This eliminates frustration on both sides.
    • Assume positive intent. If they miss a call/meeting/ping, don’t assume it is intended. For some, they can get zero’d in on something to the exclusion of other things.
    • Try to understand their strengths and weaknesses and try to structure their work to maximize use of their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
    • Make as much explicit as you can. Give clear expectations, clear instructions, and clear feedback. Minimize nuance. If you ask them for a call, give a clear list of what you’d like to discuss and why.
      • On the flip side, don’t assume. Ask!

    https://tenpages.github.io/us-level/us.html

    There are only 8 US states I haven’t been to!

  • Week of October 17

    Milkweed in the sun against a moody Adirondack sky

    We spent the past week in the Lake Placid/High Peaks region of the Adirondacks. Unfortunately Charlie was sick most of the time which put a damper on things, but we made the best of what little time (and sleep) we had. Lots of reading and snuggling Charlie (I read a bunch of essays from The Adirondack Reader (archive.org version), a walk at High Falls Gorge, scenic drives, and time in the hot tub at the hotel.

    The main takeaway for me is that I definitely want to go back and hike, fly fish, cross country ski, and row my guideboat.

    As always, I’m glad we went during the off season. No crowds or traffic, and even though lots of places are closed, it is a tradeoff worth making.

    I was quite taken with the birch bark.

    Charlie attempted lot of new words this week. He is trying his best to make the sounds for “tree”, “truck”, “dog”, and “duck”. He also pairs these words with the word “hi”, so we’ve been saying hi and waving to lots of trees, dogs, and trucks this week. He also started coming over and hugging us on his own, which is just the sweetest thing.

    Charlie’s illness made its way to Amanda and now to me. We haven’t been hit as hard has he was, but we are still taking it easy this weekend.

    Back at home, it has been a season of soups.

    Last weekend we made this Pho Ga:

    30-Minute Pressure Cooker Pho Ga (Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup) Recipe
    Make a superb bowl of Vietnamese pho ga (chicken noodle soup) with rich, aromatic broth and fall-off-the-bone tender chicken in 30 minutes using a pressure cooker.
    www.seriouseats.com

    Yesterday I made this chicken and wild rice soup:

    Best Instant Pot Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup Recipe – How to Make Instant Pot Soup
    Chicken and wild rice soup can now be made in the Instant Pot! Keep reading for this easy, weeknight recipe that’s perfect for chilly fall days.
    www.thepioneerwoman.com

    Today I’m making some kind of minestrone with orzo, recipe TBD.

    Some links worth sharing from this week:

    Hudson shipwrecks and 3000 year old submerged walls!

    What appears to be a largely intact 19th-century sailing sloop — something that historians and sailors have hungered after for years and never found — has been located in Haverstraw Bay, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, for instance, and the suspected remains of a half-dozen Revolutionary War vessels scuttled in 1777 have been tentatively identified farther north.

    The surveys have also turned up more mysterious structures, including a series of submerged walls more than 900 feet long that scientists say are clearly of human construction. They say the walls are probably 3,000 years old because that was the last time the river’s water levels were low enough to have allowed construction on dry land.

    Prehistoric rock hunting structures under the great lakes!

    Archaeologists Have Found Prehistoric Rock Structures Under the Great Lakes. Here’s What the Stones Can Tell Us | Discover Magazine
    A Doggerland of the Great Lakes? Underwater rock formations on the lakebed of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron may have been created by hunters thousands of years ago.
    www.discovermagazine.com

    A nice visual representation of different ways to distribute points randomly in a circle:

    This coming week we hope to have some new friends over as long as everyone is illness-free. Some parents of kids from Charlie’s daycare and some new neighbors. I’ll report back next week 👋

  • Week of October 10

    Charlie

    Charlie is getting really close to one nap territory now. When he has two naps it is very difficult to get him down at night, but he falls asleep pretty quickly at night when he only has one nap. I guess the trick is to get the timing of that one nap right so that he doesn’t crash too soon before his bedtime.

    He has been very into Wheels on the Bus and Itsy Bitsy Spider this week, hand motions included.

    Mimicking things we do is a new pastime. It is so cute!

    Charlie likes kefir.

    He is getting so confident and fast with walking, which is really fun to see. His climbing is improving a lot, too. That one is more fun for him and less fun for us. I love that he is adventurous, but he doesn’t quite understand what he can and can’t climb on and what will hurt him, so we need to pay pretty close attention to him.

    WordPress

    I’m trying out Jan Boddez’s new Indieblocks plugin. It has some of the same functionality as the old IndieWeb plugins, but made for the block editor. After resolving a conflict with another plugin and flushing my permalinks, things started working as expected. I sent out a few likes to some friends and it looks like they went through!

    Next steps:

    • Make a better looking archive page for Likes and Notes.
    • Figure out a workflow for sending likes and creating bookmarks that is faster than doing it through wp-admin.
    • Auto post short notes to Twitter or micro.blog?
    • I might rewrite the slug from notes to “micro” or “short” in order to not get confused with my digital garden, notes.cagrimmett.com.

    WordPress 6.1 is shaping up to be a pretty cool release.

    WordPress 6.1 Field Guide

    Tl;dr:

    • Performance improvements and more query caching
    • Accessibility additions
    • Extending the query loop block
    • Locking blocks
    • Much more!

    I’d like to do more core testing, providing feedback, docs improvement, and maybe even some development work. Maybe I should set aside a couple hours a week at work to do that?

    I noticed that some updates to the Gutenberg plugin and TwentyTwentyTwo are making my site look wonky. I know I need to update it, but I probably won’t get to it for another week or two. The cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes.

    Everything Else

    I went down a rabbit hole of figuring out Winter/Christmas/Holiday tiki.

    started with a question: What does Winter Tiki look like? Lots of overlap between island spices and winter spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, anise). How do you make a tiki drink that feels seasonally appropriate in a cold climate?

    I asked this question to some friends and I emailed some well-known tiki bartenders. I heard a lot of “tiki is a mindset” and “tiki is a year-round thing for me.” There didn’t seem to be a repository for holiday tiki drinks, so I decided to put one together from what I found. It is a work in progress, but off to a great start. You can find that here:

    Protected: Winter Holiday Tiki

    I want to make more generative art. I need to make some time for it. Here’s how I’m thinking about that:

    How can I set the stage so that when I have ~30 minutes I can sit down and explore right away, rather than spending those 30 minutes getting things set up? What templates can I leverage? What ideas can I sketch out on paper beforehand?

    Sheet pans and bowls were the dinners of choice this week. Roasting chicken and vegetables, and grilled meats with rice and sautéed green. All done in quantity so there were abundant leftovers.

    Doing some pho ga in the instant pot for dinner tonight.

    I wrote a blog post about using curl to determine if a site uses Cloudflare cache:

    https://cagrimmett.com/tech/2022/10/15/how-to-determine-if-a-site-uses-cloudflare-cache-with-curl/

    My uncle mentioned to me this week that he stopped getting emails for new blog posts, which seemed to be running through the old Feedburner I set up in college. I investigated, and it looks like Feedburner got some updates:

    • The styled feed page is gone. Now it returns a standard XML feed.
    • The account editing screen for existing accounts has some UI updates.
    • Emails look like they are turned off, but there was a way to export email addresses of subscribers, so I migrated those emails to Jetpack Subscriptions.

    The end of an era. Feedburner was once ubiquitous.

    The Obsidian 1.0 update that dropped this week is great. I’ve been using Obsidian daily for the past year and the update makes it even better.

    Obsidian 1.0 – Obsidian
    Obsidian: A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files.
    obsidian.md

    Mostly Twitter is to be avoided, but there have been two high points for me recently:

    1. Connecting more with the greater WordPress community
    2. Martin Doudoroff (the guy who makes the good cocktail apps) sharing things from the Cocktail Kingdom library.
    3. Threads like this one on Afghan fall recipes.

    This is my lemongrass harvest for the year. A bit underwhelming (I expected it to grow larger), but this will work for ~4 meals. Planning on using it this sweet potato curry and this tom kha gai soup.

  • How to determine if a site uses Cloudflare cache with curl

    Why would you want to know if a site is using Cloudflare cache? If you are debugging or responding to an incident, it is easy to forget that Cloudflare might be caching a site and it will hamper your efforts. Since most hosts cache, you’ll be dealing with a host/CDN cache, Cloudflare cache, and local browser cache. Knowing how to purge or bypass those is important.

    So, how can you tell if a site is using Cloudflare cache? Good news: Cloudflare returns a specific header for sites using their cache: cf-cache-status

    You can check for it with curl! 

    curl -sI https://example.com | grep "cf-cache-status"

    the -sI option there means “silent” and “headers only.“

    You might notice some different values attached to that cf-cache-status header: DYNAMIC, HIT, MISS, etc. You can learn about those here:

    Default Cache Behavior · Cloudflare Cache docs
    Cloudflare makes customer websites faster by storing a copy of the website’s content on our servers. Caching static resources at Cloudflare reduces your server load and bandwidth, with no extra charges for bandwidth spikes
    developers.cloudflare.com

    It is worth noting that the cache response you get for the homepage is not necessarily the same response you’ll get for other pages and assets on the site, but the presence of the header is a dead giveaway.

    If you support a lot of sites like we do at work, you can script it with bash and get a neat list of which ones use Cloudflare cache:

    for url in $(head -n800 urls.txt); do
    content="$(curl -sI $url | grep "cf-cache-status")"
    if test -z "$content"
    then
        continue
    else
        echo "$url || $content" >> cloudflare.txt
    fi
done

    This assumes a file named urls.txt with one URL per line. It runs the curl command for each URL and only outputs a result in the text file (cloudflare.txt) if the grep is not empty.

  • Week of October 3

    Tough week. Charlie got a stomach bug on Tuesday and was up all night vomiting, so we kept him home Wednesday and Amanda missed a work trip. By Thursday morning Charlie was fine, but Amanda and I came down with what we assume is the same bug and were vomiting all afternoon and early evening. Taking care of an energetic toddler while sick is zero fun. Thankfully it passed by mid Friday.

    Charlie is transitioning to one nap a day, which comes with some sleep regression at night and trouble getting him down for his naps during the day. Accordingly, he was fussy this week, seems to be having some separation anxiety, and some big toddler emotions in reaction to small inconveniences.

    So, tough week.

    Despite that, there were some high points:

    Charlie’s daycare had a fun Fall Festival for families. I volunteered to take photos.

    Charlie helped us clean out the tomato and tomatillo bed. He is excellent at putting green tomatoes in a brown paper bag to ripen.

    We went on a nice fall walk.

    I started a new book while holding Charlie for his morning naps: Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness by Anne LaBastille.

    I made Smitten Kitchen’s Apple Pancakes for breakfast on Sunday, and made a breakfast skillet with sausage, potatoes, and onions on Monday. Breakfast has felt pretty rushed around here recently, so taking the time to make a couple full breakfasts was nice.

    This is a heck of a thing to think about. The single issue that shaped American politics for the last 21 years (the amount of time people in my generation have been politically aware/active) amounted to much less than everyone expected.

    With the benefit of hindsight, everything about 9/11 and the War On Terror was a random blip in history with no broader implications. There was not a rising Islamofascism, there was not a clash of civilizations. There were a few guys in some caves doing terrorism, they got lucky once, the US got angry and invaded a few countries, and then everything continued as before. If people were ranking threats to the world order now, Islam and terrorism wouldn’t make the top twenty.

    I do take a few issues with this quote, but it gets the big picture right, which is that the threat is much smaller than we imagined.

    • I think there should be an asterisk stating that the US invasion of the middle east turned out to be disastrous for the middle east and set the whole region back 50 years.
    • The rise of support for the Islamic State and the related bombings/attacks in Europe might still be an issue there.

    Do you know about johnbillion/wp_mail? This document lists all the situations where WordPress core sends an email, how and when they happen, and how to filter or disable each one. Most of the time you don’t need it, but when you do it is invaluable. Sharing for those who don’t know about it.

    I spent much of my week auditing permissions, access, and security-related processes at work this week. More ahead this week, then hopefully I can set that aside for a while. It takes a particular kind of focus that I find taxing.

    I don’t think you should spend much mental energy on the possibility of nuclear war. Now is a good time to review your home emergency preparedness (food, water supply, heat, energy, emergency medicine) in case there is an emergency, otherwise ignore it as much as possible and go about your life.

    Things I’m looking forward to this week:

    • Picking the jalapenos from the garden and smoking them to make chipotles (and maybe fermenting some for jalapeno hot sauce).
    • Charlie got invited to two birthday parties next weekend. Maybe we’ll make some more parent friends?
    • Carving out a little bit of time to read.
    • More backyard time and walks with Amanda and Charlie

  • Week of September 26

    It is chilly outside, Charlie is showing more of his own personality and interests every day, and lots happening in my corner of the WordPress world this week.

    Table of contents:

    Charlie

    • Charlie’s favorite song right now is Wheels on the Bus. He loves doing the hand motions.
    • Charlie’s favorite author is Sandra Boynton.
    • He is getting faster at climbing the stairs every day. This weekend he figured out how to take a sippy cup up with him by putting it two steps above him, climbing up to it, then repeating.
    • He is learning how to do a high five. Next time you see him, ask him for a high five.

    Home & Garden

    Tomatillos were doing well at the beginning of the week, but the cold weather pretty much killed the plants, so this is the last of the tomatillos for the season.

    Currently waiting for my jalapeños to turn red so I can turn them into chipotles.

    With the arrival of chilly weather, I pulled the ACs out of the windows. It seems like we went from 80/90s (F) to 40/50s (F) with only a week of 70F in-between.

    We had a couple of fires in the chiminea on the porch this week. I’m really glad we got that.

    Good things from around the web

    WordPress

    Other things

    A new bar called Mothership opened in San Diego. We live on the other side of the country, but I want to go. Check out their gorgeous menu:

    MOTHERSHIP_2022_MENUDownload

    Other things I’m thinking about

    • What does Winter Tiki look like? Lots of overlap between island spices and winter spices (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, anise). How do you make a tiki drink that feels seasonally appropriate in a cold climate?
      • If you have any winter tiki favorites, let me know!
    • Christmas cards. We found a local artist who does house portraits and had her do one for our Christmas cards. We love it. Now we need to get the cards printed.
    • I’ve learned more about SSH in the past three weeks than I ever thought I’d know for a project at work. Updated my digital garden entry accordingly.

    I finally figured out how to stop Spotify from launching on startup. There is an option buried in the Spotify app settings: