Chuck Grimmett

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  • Week of January 9, 2023

    Whew, what a week. Charlie was pretty sick all week and stayed home from daycare. We think it was a combination of something resembling the flu and RSV from the symptoms, plus some teething thrown in there for good measure. He was miserable.

    For the first three days there was a lot of vomiting and fevers. We had to wash every towel and blanket in our house, most pillows, and some rugs. We each changed our outfits multiple times a day and took multiple showers. His nose was also a constant faucet, so anything that didn’t have puke on it had snot. Then came the constipation and coughing, and shortly after that the teething pain. He was lethargic most of the week. Days 4 and 5 were the worst. Thankfully his breathing remained good and we were able to keep fluids in him long enough for him to make diapers, so no need for urgent care.

    He wanted to be held 24/7 (and cried when we had to set him down), so Amanda and I switched off who help him and who slept or worked. It was like we reverted to the newborn days again. To top it off, Amanda and I both got sick too, but thankully not as sick as Charlie. Coughs, sore throats, and fatigue were the extent of it for us. COVID tests came back negative, so we don’t know what it was. It was certainly the most challenging parenting week we’ve had since he was a newborn. I am very thankful to have Amanda as my partner and that we are usually on the same page for how to handle tough situations like this and share the burden. I’m also thankful we have flexible jobs and work from home.

    Poor kid. We felt so bad for him.

    As of writing this on Saturday night, he is on the upswing. Eating more, less coughing, interested in playing again, and he slept in his own bed for a little bit.

    The night before Charlie got sick, we made fondue at home for dinner. It was a hit, but a consequence I hadn’t considered is that Charlie may refuse to eat anything for the foreseeable future if he can’t poke it with a fondue fork first 🫕 🤷‍♂️

    Charlie has been signing with us more to communicate what he wants, and it has been really gratifying to watch his face light up when we understand what he is signing and he gets his desired outcome.

    I helped a friend move on Saturday morning. I was pleasantly surprised that despite carrying heavy furniture down the stairs of a three floor walk up and the aforementioned tribulations of the week, I didn’t get fatigued or even out of breath.

    I’m reminded that it is nice to have a circle of friends who help each other.

    They were giving away an old soda siphon that doesn’t work, so I grabbed it on a whim. After some trial and error I finally got it apart to figure out what is wrong with it (the rubber gaskets are cracked and hard as rocks). So guess who is researching replacement parts for antique soda siphons?

    I’ve been testing out posting short-form content on this site first, then syndicating it out to Mastodon and Twitter. That stuff lives over at https://cagrimmett.com/notes for the time being. I’ll probably change the slug to micro or something. Or maybe I’ll rename my digital garden (current called notes.cagrimmet.com) instead, I haven’t decided.

    I have more work to do there because Twitter syndication isn’t working as well as I’d hoped and I don’t love how my theme is outputting the content, so I haven’t linked it in the navigation yet. I had hoped to work on it more this week, but, well, you know.

    Since Twitter APIs for third parties aren’t working for unknown reasons, I probably wouldn’t have made much progress on this front anyway.

    I’ve also been sending out web mentions for Likes that I post here at https://cagrimmett.com/likes/ (also not linked in the nav yet).

    I’m getting really into tiki recently. Moreso the drinks and less the faux-Polynesian pop-culture, though there is some of it that isn’t problematic. I’ve been searching out various styles of rums locally (see both Smuggler’s Cove categories and Minimalist Tiki categories), tracking down recipes, and mixing up fun concoctions at home.

    We also got a standalone pellet ice maker, which is a game changer. We’d definitely use it for more than cocktails, too. I’m envisioning lots of iced tea and coffee this summer.

    Who thought we’d be talking about gas stoves on social media this week?

    My take on gas stoves: I prefer them, but the emissions do give me pause with a baby in the house, so I have CO detectors on all floors and replaced my recirculating fan with an actual exhaust fan (which entailed cutting a hole in the side of my house to install a vent).

    One thing a lot of people miss is that you can still cook on gas when the power is out, which is becoming a more frequent occurrence recently. When the power was out for a week, it was really nice to be able to cook meals and heat water.

    I currently have no plans to replace my gas stove. If/when it is no longer working and more expensive to fix than replace, I’ll revisit the current evidence and reconsider.

    I’ve had a lot of time for reading books or listening to audiobooks this week, so I’ve been reading Blake Crouch’s Recursion and listening to more of book 5 of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.

    For TV/movies, we watched a lot of Songs for Littles, various remakes of 101 Dalmatians, the 1992 animated Aladdin, and Animal Planet this week with the sick boy. Even when he is sick and lethargic, he loves animals. Zebras, giraffes, and dogs never fail to get his attention.

    At work I’ve been thinking a lot about payment platforms and migrating billing tokens for subscriptions with zero downtime and zero customer disruption (purchases and renewals still happening during the migration period). I also did some FTP dumpster diving on a site we recently started working with to resurrect some code that had gone missing, which was a success. Another week in the life of the Special Projects Team.

    Last week’s meal plan didn’t work out as expected. See above. I did make a couple of the meals (chicken soup, gyudon), but we ate a lot of leftovers and purchased meals from the freezer, so carrying over some of the plan from last week to this week. Some TBD here because Amanda will be traveling and what I cook will be somewhat dependent on how my work day goes and how Charlie is.

    • Sunday: Gnocci + sauce + arugula side salad with vinaigrette
    • Monday: Pork tenderloin with green beans and roasted potatoes
    • Tuesday: Chicken and pasta (garlic linguine?), side of roasted zucchini
    • Wednesday: TBD
    • Thursday: TBD
    • Friday: Dinner with friends, menu TBD
    • Saturday: Sheet pan dinner of some kind. Probably chicken thighs + some kind of vegetable. Side of cous cous?
    • Sunday: White bean soup with coconut milk?

    See you again next week. In the meantime, post some cool stuff on your own feed and send me the link. Also reach out to me if you are into tiki and want to chat, or if you have knowledge about antique soda siphons. 👋

  • Week of Jan 2, 2023

    New year! 2023! The prime factors of 2023 are 7 and 17.

    Charlie walking more has opened up additional entertainment possibilities. One of my favorite activities is walking by the Peekskill waterfront, and now he enjoys it, too! We walked a lot before he could walk, too, but carrying him the whole way got tiring and he didn’t love being in the stroller for long periods. Now he can run around on the playground for a bit and walk a good distance before he needs picked up.

    I’ve been reflecting a lot on the last year and it is incredible to me the amount of growth that happens for a baby between 6 months and 18 months. This time last year he couldn’t crawl. Now he is running, climbing stairs, communicating, and very curious about the world. Amazing.

    We had breakfast with some friends and their family this morning, which was really nice. It is fun seeing non-family love and interact with Charlie, too. It is also nice to see Charlie with older kids and learn how caring and gentle the older kids can be, even if they themselves don’t have younger siblings.

    Some house projects I want to do this year:

    • Replace the shutters
    • Replace the fence
    • Paint the shed and add gutters
    • Enlarge the back porch (May not happen this year, but I’d like to at least have a plan to move forward on)

    I subscribed to some popular advice/tips newsletters for a while, then I followed some of the authors on Twitter and realized that they are not people I want to take advice from, so I promptly unsubscribed.

    We watched Glass Onion on Friday night. It was enjoyable, but I liked the first Knives Out more. We also finished season 5 of Billions this week, and I think they did Wendy Rhodes wrong at the end of the season by writing her as powerless and subservient, which is completely out of character for her.

    I’m trying to sort out my POSSE stack for this site, but don’t quite have it figured out yet. Mastodon works well, but the Twitter connection via Bridgy publishing is unreliable, so I need to find something new there.

    I’d love to learn about other people’s setups!

    Also, I’m getting itchy to do a redesign… I suspect that I’ll make some progress in the next couple weeks.

    I wonder how I could insert archive.org links after external links in old posts in an automated way? 🤔

    I’m enjoying the @smllwrlds tiny sci-fi illustrations project. Some are dark, but still cool.

    One of the many things that have changed since having Charlie is that we now need to meal plan more in order to speed up the dinner-making process at the end of the day. Here is this week’s plan:

    • Monday: Gyudon with cauliflower rice + stir fried veggies
    • Tuesday: Chicken noodle soup
    • Wednesday: Pork tenderloin with broccolini and roasted potatoes
    • Thursday: Gnocci + sauce + arugula side salad with vinaigrette
    • Friday: Dinner with friends, menu TBD
    • Saturday: White bean soup with coconut milk?
    • Sunday: Sheet pan dinner of some kind. Probably chicken thighs + some kind of vegetable. Side of cous cous?

    Now that my team has grown at work from ~10 to ~40, it is time for me to rethink how I handle Slack channels, P2s, notifications, emails, task lists, check-in reminders, etc. I implemented about half my ideas last week and hope to implement the other half this week. Then I’ll see how they work for a few weeks.

    Update on clarifying used cooking oil fuel ideas from last week’s post: I talked to someone who used to work in a restaurant and they had a filter powder they’d pour into the oil before filtering that would clump the fatty acids and other solubles together so that they’d get caught by a filter. This kind of stuff.

    I upgraded my iPhone X to a 14 Pro. The battery life is much better, the on/off button is in a better location, and the new widget areas are nice (I have a shortcut to set an alarm from my lock screen now). The main thing I miss from the iPhone X, besides it being slightly smaller than the 14 Pro, is the 3D touch, especially from the keyboard to move the cursor. My friend Sean mentioned that you can long tap on the space bar to move the cursor, but I miss the haptic feedback and the convenience of having the entire keyboard has a trackpad.

    See ya next week! 👋

  • Learning Card Games: Pitch

    This year we started what I hope will become a new tradition for the week after Christmas: Learning a card game.

    My parents and I both have copies of Hoyle Up-to-Date from the 1970s, a collection of official rules of card games (ever heard the expression “according to Hoyle”?), so why not get some use out of it?

    Here is a version pretty similar to the books we have available from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/hoyleuptodate0000unse_n6q2/mode/2up

    This year we chose Pitch.

    Why Pitch? I read English Creek by Ivan Doig this year, and the ranch hands played a game I hadn’t heard of:

    “What are you going to play?”

    “Pitch,” stipulated Plain Mike. “What else is there?”

    That drew me. Pitch is the most perfect of card games. It excels poker in that there can be more than one winner during each hand, and cribbage in that it doesn’t take an eternity to play, and rummy and hearts in that judgement is more important than the cards you are dealt, and stuff like canasta and pinochle can’t even be mentioned in the same breath with pitch.

    English Creek, page 260

    There are a couple conflicting rules between Hoyle, Bicycle, and some YouTube videos, primarily around the bidding. But they are close enough that we figured it out quickly.

    Here are the Hoyle rules:

    This video helped us see how a hand is played:

    This was also helpful from Hoyle regarding the strategy:

    The dealer, bidding last, has a great advantage and should press it by taking risks to win the bid. The first two hands to the left of the dealer should be conservative.

    A holding of three trumps is worth a bid of one, for it will usually capture the game point, if nothing else. The jack once guarded is worth a bid of one, and the two spot even once guarded has a good chance of being saved. It is reasonable to bid in the hope that a king in hand will prove to be high, or a threespot low. Side aces and tens strengthen the hand but cannot be relied upon to capture the game point.

    It took a couple hands to start understanding some of the betting strategy, but then we were able to play a couple full games pretty easily.

    Next year, we may learn Euchre or Cinch!

  • Weeks of December 19 and 26

    We spent Christmas in Ohio. We left a day early to avoid the major snowstorm and single digit temps, but the weather during the drive was still pretty rough. It snowed for the first four hours, then rained for the second four hours. With very little traction, we narrowly avoided hitting a car that had spun out on the ice and the police car that was trying to stop and help it. There was no snow on the way back, but there was rain and thick fog for the final two hours after dark, which made visibility very low. What crazy weather… 1F for a couple days, then 60F a couple days later. My sinuses were going crazy.

    Charlie is a completely different baby from this time last year. He is running around, learning to say words, understands a lot more, and is a lot of fun. It was great to see him interact with more people, including some of his young cousins.

    One big thing this week is that Charlie is learning to walk down stairs while holding someone’s hand. He is trying so hard and making a lot of progress. A big step for him!

    Charlie played in the snow for the first time!

    This year’s Christmas ornament. (My Dad has been making them since 2006.) This year he did something new and laser etched a sign similar to the one we saw in Lake Placid earlier this year, onto real birch bark!

    We started what might become a new tradition: Learning a new card game the week after Christmas. We chose Pitch. Blog post coming soon.

    We made red beans a rice with domingo rojo beans (Rancho Gordo), andouille, and some of my tasso ham. It was easier to make than gumbo, so I think I’ll make it for Mardi Gras this year instead of gumbo.

    On the way back to NY, we stopped overnight with some friends in Pittsburgh who had a baby this year. It was great to connect with them on a different level now that we are all parents. Charlie had a great time meeting their cats, trying to pet their dog, feeding and chasing their chickens, and playing at the playground.

    This trip’s audiobooks were both by Mark Kurlansky: Salt and The Big Oyster.

    My Dad is interested in making biodiesel from used vegetable oil to heat his barn with. So we went down the rabbit hole tonight of trying to figure out which combo of alcohol and catalyst is the cheapest and highest yield. Options are methanol, ethanol, or isopropyl for alcohol, sodium hydroxide (lye) or potassium hydroxide for the catalyst. Looks like he’ll need to set up some small-scale (quart-sized) tests of each combo in various proportions once the weather warms up.

    A friend mentioned that biodiesel might be overkill for heating, and that if the goal is to clean up the the used veg oil to make it burn better, treating it with bentonite clay might work.

    I spent some time after Charlie went to bed each night working on a WordPress plugin that fetches posts I’ve starred from my RSS reader and outputs them as Likes on my site. I’ll publish the code later this week.

    Since posting Likes is kind of a pain on mobile, I want to do the something similar for posts I’ve come across online outside of my RSS reader and think that I’ll do bookmark app -> cron job -> Like post. Most of that is already written for the other plugin and I just need to adapt the source.

    While in Ohio my Twitter feed was completely swamped by sports betting ads, which was sad. Especially so because I have family there with gambling problems. It is also interesting to me that sports betting online is legal in New York, but I don’t recall ever having gotten ads for it on Twitter. Billboards yes, Twitter no. What was so stark in Ohio was the huge number of ads I was bombarded with immediately.

    I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s year-end blog posts and I wrote a couple of them myself. I’m adding a lot to my To Read list from people’s reading roundups.

    New Year’s Eve was low-key. We were completely worn out from the car ride (we got home around 7pm), put Charlie to bed, then watched two episodes of The Crown and went to bed around 10:45pm.

    Charlie got up at 5pm, so we went grocery shopping around 9am and had a sweet moment by the bagel shop as we shared a breakfast sandwich outside on a bench and he waved at the dogs out for their walks.

    Some neat things I came across the past two weeks:

    A reminder to back up your cloud content because it could go away at any time.

    Also, ditch LastPass if you haven’t already.

  • 100 things that made my year (2022)

    I wrote one of these in 2017 and enjoyed the process (and outcome!), so when I saw Austin Kleon’s this year, I decided to write one again. Maybe I’ll make it a yearly thing.

    1. Sean and Jacqueline’s wedding in Chicago in early January. We spent a week there before the wedding, which was our first time staying somewhere that wasn’t with family after we had Charlie, who was 5 months at the time. Catching up with lots of friends in person for the first time post-pandemic was cathartic.
    2. Participating in Genuary 2022. I learned some of the basic techniques of creating generative art.
    3. Charlie’s growth. From 5 months to 17 months is a magical time for babies. They go from not being able to crawl or eat solid foods to being able to run, feed themselves almost anything, and start saying words. It has been incredible watching him grow and helping him learn.
    4. Parental leave. Spending four months being the primary caretaker during the day for Charlie was a great learning experience and I really bonded with Charlie. He is my little buddy!
    5. Walks with Charlie. We took lots of walks in the woods, parks, and along the river. Trying to foster a love of being outside for him.
    6. Solo parenting. Amanda travels for work, so I’ve done many multi-night solo stretches with Charlie starting as early as six months. They are tiring, but it is great knowing that I can do it.
    7. Woodworking. Before I started looking through my photos to write this, I thought I hadn’t made anything in the shop this year, but it turns out that isn’t true. I made a dry vase, two ring holders, and some peg people for Charlie.
    8. Culinary experimentation. Tasso ham, pastrami, gumbo, red beans and rice, enfrijoladas, King Cake, cinnamon bread, chipotles, char siu, english muffins, biscuits, blueberry pie, sous vide egg bites, tomatillo salsa, chicken in the pizza oven, Salsa de Chile Morita, galettes, Maid Rites
    9. All the baby naps. He took naps on my daily during my parental leave, and now on weekends, days off, and when he is sick now that I’m back to work.
    10. Bedtime baby snuggles. We opted not to sleep train Charlie, which has been a good decision for us. Instead we rock him to sleep every night.
    11. Experiments with booze: Making orange bitters, orgeat, allspice dram, pineapple rum, coquito, the Clyde Common eggnog, batching cocktails like the Sneaky Peat and Black Christmas.
    12. Setting up a Digital Garden with WordPress and beginning to tend it.
    13. Witnessing Amanda as a mother. She is tender, loving, caring, and considered. She is a great mother to Charlie.
    14. Watching Amanda start a new job and grow into new roles and create her own opportunities.
    15. Attending a Jewish funeral and helping my friend fill in his father’s grave with shovels, in our suits.
    16. Swim lessons with Charlie. He loves splashing and learning to kick kick kick!
    17. DIA:Beacon with Charlie, especially hearing his young voice echo in the large Serra sculptures.
    18. Going to the NY State Bridge Authority to get a Historic Bridges of the Hudson Valley poster and some cool stickers.
    19. Backyard picnics. Amanda, Charlie, and I spent a lot of time outside on picnic blankets with snacks while Charlie was learning to crawl and walk.
    20. Making pizza on the porch. We got an Ooni, which was a great purchase. Making pizza at home is a fun activity, and a great thing to do when guests come over, too.
    21. Publishing a generative art project on fx(hash) – Pattern Plus Plus.
    22. Catching up with Chef Eric, an old friend from Irvington, who now lives in Croton, and works in the crypto space.
    23. Going to Amish Country and seeing the Amish ride electric bicycles. Then emailing Kevin Kelly about it and having him respond! KK has written about Amish Hackers, so I thought he would be interested.
    24. Helping Grandma make the Easter Cheese (mostly eggs and milk) this year, and eating some.
    25. Bill Strohm and Judy Alexander meeting Charlie. In many ways they were great mentors to me in high school and I kept in touch through college and afterward.
    26. Taking Amanda out in the guideboat. I finished it in 2021 about two weeks before Charlie was born, and Amanda was way too pregnant by then to go out.
    27. Finding morels in our backyard!
    28. Finding a great daycare for Charlie. He loves going and interacting with his friends, and he is learning new things there every week. We feel good with him being there while we work.
    29. Helping Jon with his timber framing project. It was a great learning experience.
    30. Our garden! Tomatoes, tomatillos, peas, kale, radishes, jalapenos, hungarian black peppers, okra, potatoes, dill, thyme, chives, sage, oregano, mint, nasturtium, calendula, borage, chamomile.
    31. Planting the seeds for the garden with Charlie, watering and checking on the plants with him, Charlie grabbing tomatoes right off the vine and eating them, Charlie helping us sort tomatoes at the end of the season.
    32. Experimenting with a new way to water the tomatoes: Wick irrigation.
    33. Going to see the Sol LeWitt prints gallery at Williams College
    34. Eating at the West Taghkanic Diner.
    35. The Baci Baby! To this day, Charlie is known as the Baci Baby at Pizzeria Baci, and some of the only non-pizza photos on their feed are of Charlie.
    36. Getting into making tiki drinks at home.
    37. Streets blocked off in downtown Peekskill on Fridays and Saturday evenings in the summer for restaurants and music.
    38. Charlie’s first birthday. It was small, but we were were with the people who helped us navigate the first year of Charlie’s life. It was special.
    39. Building Charlie a swingset, publishing the plans, then later building one for Miles (our friends’ son, close in age to Charlie)
    40. Pushing Charlie on that swingset multiple times a week as long as the weather was nice.
    41. Building more of a community – Meg and Jeremy, Erica and Trevor, Helen and Kolson, play dates with daycare parents
    42. Starting my weekly blogging habit and sticking with it.
    43. Crashing another team’s meetup in NYC to hang out with them.
    44. Prince Street Pizza. Spicy Pepperoni slice. A delicacy.
    45. Reading. I finished 26 books this year (less than previous years), and I started many more. Some standouts: Eager, The Amish, English Creek, Trust.
    46. Attending a team meetup in San Francisco for work.
    47. Visiting with old friends William and Jenna in Walnut Creek, CA. Meeting their youngest, Harrison, for the first time.
    48. Tiki drinks at Smuggler’s Cove, Pagan Idol, and Tonga Room.
    49. Visiting Alcatraz. The flies were awful.
    50. Visiting Muir Woods.
    51. Taking a new role as a lead of an engineering team at Automattic.
    52. Engaging more with the indie web by sending webmentions and using microformats.
    53. Attending a division meetup with 200 other Automatticians in Denver. Meeting most of Team51 for the first time.
    54. Seeing first-hand how a large company like Automattic responds to major security incidents.
    55. Ice cream at the Blue Pig.
    56. Dinner and walks in Cold Spring.
    57. Anniversary dinner with Amanda at The Bird & Bottle in Garrison.
    58. BLTs with garden tomatoes.
    59. Charlie learning to walk.
    60. Reading books to Charlie.
    61. Jon and Kristin’s wedding reception.
    62. Ice cream, swings, merry-go-round, and farm brewery day in Goshen.
    63. Restaurants with Charlie
    64. Volunteering to be the photographer for Charlie’s daycare Fall Festival
    65. Charlie learning animal noises. Cows, horses, chickens, turkeys, lions, dogs.
    66. Rossi & Sons in Poughkeepsie. Incredible sandwiches.
    67. Going to the Adirondacks for the first time and staying in the Whiteface Lodge in Lake Placid with my parents. Going in the hottub and heated pool in 30F weather was fun, as was seeing an old Adirondack guideboat. High Falls Gorge, milkweed and moody winter skies. Adirondack Mountain Club, maple stand, birch bark.
    68. Charlie’s bathtimes. He loves playing in the bath and is so happy!
    69. Charlie wanting to help us and be involved with whatever we are working on. He is so sweet and even though it takes longer, he is a good helper. It is about fostering that spirit, not maximizing efficiency.
    70. Saturday Morning Donuts, a semi-irregular toddler playdate.
    71. Charlie’s Mario halloween costume. Miles as Luigi, Belle as Princess Peach.
    72. Decorating and having friends over for Amanda’s birthday.
    73. Picking out a Christmas tree and Charlie helping us decorate it.
    74. Taking Charlie to the zoo. Bronx Zoo first, then Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
    75. Charlie’s Cheers! Now an essential part of having any beverage.
    76. Seeing my art behind Matt at the State of the Word this year.
    77. Tumblr Important Internet checkmarks.
    78. Twexit. More people moving back to blogging and Mastodon.
    79. Bucking tradition and doing Thanksgiving ham.
    80. Charlie’s first Ikea trip.
    81. Learning things quickly with ChatGPT. Asking questions is a great way to learn!
    82. Finding the Sippin Santa tiki drink recipes.
    83. Playing in the snow with Charlie.
    84. Charlie playing with his cousin Nora (3 weeks older than him) at Christmas.
    85. Learning to play Pitch.
    86. Programming more and getting good feedback: Building CLI commands, custom blocks, and plugins that fetch content and turn them into posts.
    87. Going to the farmers market on Saturday mornings
    88. Verplanck Italian fest sausage. Great sausage and peppers sandwiches on what is almost always the hottest week of the year. But a fun local thing nonetheless.
    89. Breakfast and lunch dates with Amanda, something we’ve prioritized for some “us” time since having Charlie.
    90. The Hudson Valley’s sunsets.
    91. Charlie’s giggles, especially when we can see his 6 teeth.
    92. Charlie coming to my door to say Hi while I’m on calls. I usually only close my door when I’m on calls, but since it has panes of glass, he comes up and smiles at me and I melt every time.
    93. Indie games like Wordle, Worldle, and more. Fun diversions.
    94. At work I spearheaded a project where I figured out how to transition to a new method of connecting to our sites via SSH and implemented it. I learned a ton in the process!
    95. Visiting Erin and Tyler in Sewickley, PA, and meeting their son. Charlie had a great time meeting their dog, cats, and chickens, as well as running around their yard and putting mud in his hair.
    96. Sharing struggles more openly with friends and having them reciprocate and open up as well.
    97. Connecting with long-time friends on a different level now that we have children.
    98. Some shows we enjoyed: The new season of Westworld, House of Dragons, new season of Ozark, Billions, Wheel of Time. And of course Goncharov, Scorsese’s 1973 mafia film.
    99. Listening to some new music: Michael Kiwanuka, Slim Gaillard, Caspar Babypants.
    100. Nice, friendly, helpful neighbors. We are grateful to live in our neighborhood.

  • 40 Questions for 2022

    These questions come from Stephan Ango’s 40 questions to ask yourself every year. Answering them was a good exercise, though I think I might modify the list for next year and make it my own.

    1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before?
      • Went on parental leave for four months and was Charlie’s primary caretaker during the day. I’ve never been off work for that long, and I’d never been the primary caretaker for a baby!
    2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions?
      • This is the first year in a while that I didn’t make resolutions. But a couple weeks later I started blogging weekly, which I kept up the rest of the year.
    3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
      • Some did! Sara and Josh, Eric and Whitney, Mark and Jill, Erin and Tyler, Lindsay and Casey.
    4. Did anyone close to you die?
    5. What cities/states/countries did you visit?
      • San Francisco, CA
      • Amherst, OH
      • Chicago, IL
      • Lake Placid, NY
      • Denver, CO
    6. What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year?
      • More family walks, more time in the workshop, and more time rowing on the Hudson
    7. What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
      • Charlie’s Birthday party – It was a small group of people who we are close with and who helped us through the first year of his life. It was special.
      • Going to DIA:Beacon with Charlie and hearing the echos of his voice inside the giant Serra Torqued Ellipses.
      • Not specific dates, but recurring memories of pushing Charlie on the swings we built in our backyard.
    8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
      • Connecting with Charlie during my parental leave. Spending all day every day as the primary caretaker for Charlie for four months was incredible and I cherished that time.
      • Building more of a community in Peekskill. We have more friends there this year than we have since we moved there!
      • Starting a weekly blogging habit.
    9. What was your biggest failure?
      • It isn’t a failure in the sense that I did something and failed at it, but rather my biggest shortcoming that I need to improve upon. I am aware almost every day that I need to get better at navigating my emotions and frustrations and how I express them. I also need to be more grateful for each day.
    10. What other hardships did you face?
      • Nothing awful. Mostly difficulties in the transition to becoming a father. It is a huge change and some days/weeks are much harder than others.
    11. Did you suffer illness or injury?
      • Mostly run-of-the-mill colds or upper respiratory infections. Once Charlie started daycare, he picked up various illnesses, which Amanda and I inevitably got.
    12. What was the best thing you bought?
      • Probably the Ooni Pizza Oven. We made a lot of tasty pizza and had fun hanging out on the back porch with friends making pizza.
    13. Whose behavior merited celebration?
      • Jason Kottke stopped posting on his very popular blog and took a sabbatical. It is worth celebrating people stepping away from something like that and taking a financial risk to take the time they need to recharge and reset.
    14. Whose behavior made you appalled?
      • Elon Musk’s shitty treatment of employees after taking over Twitter.
      • Sam Bankman-Fried – Paraded under the Effective Altruism banner, which seems to have been disingenuous at best and closer to a complete front, gave insane amounts of money to partisan political campaigns for personal gain, and knowingly defrauded investors and crypto users, setting the entire industry back at least 5 years.
    15. Where did most of your money go?
      • Top two expenses are our mortgage and Charlie’s daycare. That said, this year we put as much into our savings as we put into our mortgage, which we are proud of.
    16. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
    17. What song will always remind you of this year?
      • Either Wheels on the Bus or Barnyard Dance, two songs Charlie wanted to hear over and over this year.
    18. Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer?
      • Happier (more rested, out of the tough infant stage, less work stress)
      • Fatter (Gained a few pounds)
      • Richer (Savings and investments are higher and loan debts are lower than this time last year, and I feel richer because of a more robust family life now that Charlie is getting his own personality and interacting with us more.)
    19. What do you wish you’d done more of?
      • Took Charlie on more walks.
      • Made more things in the workshop.
    20. What do you wish you’d done less of?
      • Scrolling social media.
    21. How are you spending the holidays?
      • With my parents in Ohio, then hopefully visiting some friends in Pittsburgh on the way back home.
    22. Did you fall in love this year?
      • I’m happily married, and working together with Amanda to raise a child shined a light on some facets of love that aren’t talked about as often: Safety, acceptance, openness, shared purpose. Not that I didn’t feel those things before, but I felt them more acutely this year.
    23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
      • I don’t know about hate, but there are a couple people I dislike a lot more strongly than I did last year, and a couple people I like a lot more than I did last year. Not great to name names on a blog, though.
    24. What was your favorite show?
      • No stand-out favorite from this year, but Billions, The Wheel of Time, and House of the Dragon were all pretty good.
    25. What was the best book you read?
      • Non-fiction: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb
      • Fiction: English Creek by Ivan Doig
    26. What was your greatest musical discovery of the year?
      • New: Michael Kiwanuka
      • Old: Slim Gaillard
    27. What was your favorite film?
      • Goncharov, Scorsese’s 1973 mafia film
    28. What was your favorite meal?
      • With family: There was one specific meal Amanda, Charlie, and I had in the backyard on a picnic blanket that sticks out in my mind. We had chicken shawarma over rice and we ate it on a picnic blanket under the wild cherry tree. The weather was perfect and we had a great time laughing and being present with Charlie. It was wonderful.
      • With friends: I really enjoyed having a giant meal at China Live with my coworkers in San Francisco. After a couple years of pandemic uneasiness, no work travel, and limited access to really good Chinese food, it was awesome. Christy Nyiri and I basically ordered for the whole table of 8, and it was glorious.
    29. What did you want and get?
      • Work-wise, I wanted to get back into more technical work, and we made that happen by moving me to be the lead of an engineering team. It has been a positive change.
    30. What did you want and not get?
      • I wanted to get out on the river more this year, but didn’t make it happen. I think next year I should consider timeshifting more to make it happen one morning a week.
    31. What did you do on your birthday?
      • It was low-key this year. Amanda made me a cheesecake and we probably ordered some takeout, but that was the extent of it. Charlie was still pretty young, so we weren’t yet comfortable getting a sitter. I expect that next year we’ll probably go to dinner since Charlie is more used to that now.
      • I started a yearly tradition of writing birthday posts. Here is this years: https://cagrimmett.com/thoughts/2022/02/27/thirty-two/
    32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
      • Probably more consistent sleep. That front is improving, but it made much of the early part of the year tough.
    33. How would you describe your personal fashion this year?
      • Two years of Pandemic has turned my personal fashion into more comfortable/functional. Fewer button-downs, more tshirts and sweatshirts.
    34. What kept you sane?
      • Having a toddler to care for kept me focused on the present more than ever before. It also helped me keep my work days constrained to standard business hours rather than leaking into the evening.
      • On the flip side of that, the quiet hours after Charlie went to bed helped me recover from the tough days where he was super fussy.
      • It has been a year since I started talking with a therapist, Steve, to help me counter my anxiety and stress and process my emotions in a better way. It has helped a lot.
    35. Which celebrity/public figure did you admire the most?
    36. What political issue stirred you the most?
      • I found the extreme sides of the COVID debates (“everyone should still be in lockdown” on one side and “anti-vaxxers” on the other) to both be very frustrating. There is a pretty reasonable middle ground that makes a lot of sense.
      • I also found much of the Roe v Wade overturn debate to be frustrating. So little empathy on both sides of the issue. While I can’t prove he wrote it, I’m pretty sure I personally know the clerk who wrote a lot of the leaked majority opinion from the Supreme Court case, and he is a person who I hold in low regard, so the idea of that individual writing a legal precedent of that scale really bothered me.
    37. Who did you miss?
      • I mostly missed my family this year. Living 8 hours away is difficult.
    38. Who was the best new person you met?
      • We made a lot of progress on finding a new group of friends locally this year after struggling with that for the past couple of years.
    39. What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?
      • Before having a baby, I thought I was even-keeled and had a good handle on my emotions. 3am inconsolable baby crying, lack of sleep, never getting out the door on time due to last-minute vomiting/diaper changes/messes, and baby throwing food taught me I have a long way to go.
    40. What is a quote that sums up your year?

    Frustration has to do with expectations. Replace expectations with preferences.

  • Week of December 12

    • Around Thanksgiving Charlie and I were looking at a picture book with a turkey in it and I made a turkey sound that he found hilarious. Fast forward to this week, Charlie picked up that book and we were flipping through it. When we got to the turkey page, he started making the sound himself, even though he hasn’t heard it in a couple weeks. He remembers more than I thought!
    • One of Amanda’s favorite books growing up was Cockatoos by Quentin Blake, and we have a copy that we read with Charlie. I was surprised this week that by the middle of the book where the Cockatoos are hiding, Charlie was able to pick them out on most pages.
    • Another instance of Charlie’s image recognition and memory expanding: We occasionally watch shows like Sesame Street and Bluey when one of us doesn’t feel well and we need some snuggly downtime. Occasionally animals pop up one the screen that Charlie recognizes, and when they do, he goes and gets a book and excitedly points them out.
    • Charlie started throwing big-feeling toddler fits where he flops down on the floor crying and doesn’t want to be picked up and consoled. He has also been taking longer naps and eating more than usual, so maybe he is going through a growth and/or developmental spurt?

    I had my Mastodon username in my Twitter bio before the rule changes went up. I wonder how long it will be before I get suspended? 🤷‍♂️

    Edit: The rule change link now goes to a 404. Constant rule changes are a great indication of a healthy platform.

    It was very cool to see art I made behind Matt during the 2022 State of the Word:

    I did the circular rainbow using only WP core blocks for the Museum of Block Art:

    Circular rainbow

    I’m sick, which is a bummer, because this is one weekend where I would have really liked to have been well. I missed a date night with Amanda that we had been planning for a couple months and a concert (Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West 25th anniversary) with a friend that I was excited about (and I don’t usually want to go to concerts).

    My Raycast Wrapped:

    I’m thinking about redesigning my site to better incorporate my non-blog content (short posts with text, images, likes, bookmarks). Seems like a good January project instead of doing Genuary again.

  • Some AI use cases

    I had a good conversation with Russell Hunter, one of my coworkers at Automattic. He mentioned some uses of AI like ChatGPT that I hadn’t considered:

    • Using AI to “read” your writing and respond with Devil’s Advocate-type responses so you can make your argument stronger.
    • Using AI to help you with mundane things like formatting citations and footnotes.
      • I suppose you could ask AI to go find you sources for a given statement, but I have ethical concerns about doing that. That would be confirmation bias or Texas Sharpshooter fallacy on steroids.
    • Summarizing your work. I write a weekly post at work every Monday. What if I fed ChatGPT all of my meetings, meeting notes, emails, Slack threads, GitHub commits, and P2 posts, and asked it to summarize what I worked on that week?

    That got me thinking a bit more afterward as well:

    • OpenAI has Whisper, the video transcription engine. What if we feed a meeting video to Whisper, then pipe the output to ChatGPT and ask it to write meeting notes with actions items? If it works well, everyone can be present in the meeting instead of taking notes.

    In general, I think people focusing on how “dull” or “mediocre” the ChatGPT writing is misses the point. The most important use-cases for AI are to help us be happier, more productive, and more effective by teaching us where we can improve, helping us get there, and taking care of all the boring stuff we don’t like doing so we can focusing on the things that bring us joy and fulfillment.

  • Week of December 5

    Charlie in his “that” phase. He points to things constantly throughout the day asks what they are by saying “that?”. Sometimes it takes a tired daddy a few seconds to remember what a kettle is called first thing in the morning.

    We got invited to a play date with some kids who were a year to a couple years older than Charlie, but Charlie held his own and did great with them. More progress on the making parents friends front, too! We find that you’ve gotta be intentional and share your number or ask for theirs, or else it doesn’t happen.

    We went to the Bronx Zoo on Saturday. We forgot that lots of warm weather animals are not out when it is cold outside, so there was a lot we couldn’t see, including Charlie’s favorite from his books, the zebras. Next time! He did get to go inside and see some giraffes though, which he enjoyed. He loved the sea lions, too.

    We did more Christmas cards this week (Charlie signed some!) and a bit more decorating (drying grapefruit slices, getting the wreath up out front). We treat it as an ongoing holiday process and it is less stressful that way.

    Here is the Christmas tree that still needs dried grapefruits hung on it.

    We had the first real snow cover last night. We have about an inch and a half covering the ground.

    This week I learned about Maid-Rite sandwiches, an Iowa thing. Loose ground beef cooked with onions, on a bun with mustard and pickles. Think of a sloppy joe with no sauce or a chopped cheese without the cheese. Naturally I had to try them, so I made us some for dinner one night. They were pretty good!

    Twitter’s infinite scroll behavior has been pretty broken for me all week. No more than 14 tweets will load in the feed on the web interface. Good impetus to shut the tab and get back to work.

    Unfortunately, some of the shitty hot-take viral factory accounts that I thought were mostly sticking to Twitter came through on my Mastodon feed as boosts recently. I unfollowed the person who boosted that nonsense, and it looks like I need to migrate my block list from Twitter.

    I’ve been brushing up on my PHP at work, making some CLI commands with the Symfony Console component.

    Getting phpcs and phpcbf set up with the WordPress-Extra standards proved to be time consuming. There is a known error with the WordPress Standards and PHP 8. When I switch to the develop branch, I get different errors, and when I switch down to PHP 7.4, my Composer dependencies break for projects. Fun.

    It is possible to run the command on the command line using the -d error_reporting="E_ALL&~E_DEPRECATED" flag, but that doesn’t allow VSCode extensions to run phpcs and phpcbf.

    So I added this rule to my local version of the WordPress-Extra ruleset, as explained in this comment:

    <ini name="error_reporting" value="E_ALL &#38; ~E_DEPRECATED" />

    Kind of hacky, but at least phpcs and cbf are working 🤷‍♂️

    For fun I generated some of those AI avatars people have been posting about. They are mostly meh for me, but I also didn’t have a ton a great selfies to feed into it. I don’t plan on using these for anything.

    Maybe I should buy a rust colored suit? 🤔

    A cool set of drawings of real root systems I came across this week:

    View the collection here: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13

  • Week of November 28

    Charlie has been completely attached to stuffed animals this week. He carries one with him at all times, including when we are at the grocery store and when he is sleeping. He refused to let an Elmo from daycare go on Friday, so Elmo is hanging out at our house this weekend.

    We went and cut a Christmas tree today. Compare this photo of Amanda & Charlie picking out a Christmas tree today to Amanda & Charlie last year. He is getting so big! 😍

    ChatGPT was the big thing in the tech world this week. I got access to the beta and have been using it as a learning tool. Pairing that with GitHub Copilot has sped up my programming and quickly resolving errors that would have otherwise taken me a while to figure out, such as “Serialization of ‘Closure’ is not allowed.” ChatGPT told me exactly where the error was and how to fix it! Amazing. It also coached me on how to break large requests down into smaller chunks to avoid timeouts.

    Unfortunately it is still in early stages and sometimes makes up complete falsehoods. For example, I asked it to recommend a mystery book, which it did, but then it said the book won a prestigious award that I can’t find any evidence of it having won. Or suggesting API endpoints on public APIs that don’t exist. Or confusing WordPress.org with WordPress.com, which is a common mistake.

    I used the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday emails as a chance to clean out my subscriptions with Leave Me Alone. Their $7 7-day pass is gold. They are an indie company, and unlike Unroll they don’t sell your email data.

    I fixed a couple of bugs on my site that have been bothering me for a while. Feels good. I also made a ton of progress on making Jetpack Likes for posts into Webmention likes. I have a few things to tweak and test, but I expect to run it on my own site this week and then blog about it and share my script.

    Amanda and I both noticed that we had some free time in our work schedules one day this week, so we decided to go out and have a lunch date at the spur of the moment and spend some child-free time together. That was really nice. More things like that in 2023, please.

    Currently watching:

    • The new season of The Crown on Netflix.
    • The new Star Wars Andor series on Disney Plus.

    Currently Reading:

    • Neal Stephenson’s The Juncto, the fifth book in the Baroque Cycle series.
    • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

    I added my Blogroll to the site this week after seeing great resources like blogroll.org and ooh.directory. Blogrolls are now more important than ever in our age of online social diaspora.

    Blogroll

    I also blogged about holiday cocktail ingredients and batch cocktails over at CookLikeChuck:

    Homemade cocktail ingredients and batched holiday drinks that make great gifts – Cook Like Chuck
    Have a cocktail lover in your life and want to make them something unique? Or want a host gift for a holiday party that will stand out against the bottles of wine everyone else is bringing? Here are some cocktail ingredients you can make at home and some batched holiday drinks you can make. Homemade…
    cooklikechuck.com

    I’ve been on a holiday cocktail quest lately, tracking down recipes from the Sippin’ Santa tiki popup, making syrups and liqueurs (cranberry syrup, cinnamon syrup, nutmeg syrup, ginger liqueur), infusing pineapple rum, and mixing up batches of Black Christmas and tequila and sherry eggnog. Some for personal consumption, some for gifts.

    We are making good progress through our holiday card list, aided by the drinks above.

    My Spotify Wrapped for 2022. Again I’m in the top 1/2% of Tycho listeners. I think they must be excluding certain artists, because we listened to A LOT of Caspar Babypants.

    I’m off to do some Christmas decorating, cookie baking, and card writing! 🎄👋

  • Week of November 21

    This was a week of rest, recovery, and hanging out. Of course, it was Thanksgiving, but I also took Tuesday off to compensate for working last Saturday. I made some bread, renewed my passport online, and caught up on some much-needed household admin work.

    For Thanksgiving, it was only the three of us this year, but we had a nice relaxing day. I made a ham from Hemlock Hill Farm, homemade scalloped potatoes and rolls, and green bean casserole. Cranberry Galette for dessert. We sipped a scotch cocktail with cranberry syrup and oolong tea. Charlie spent the day going between playing outside in the leaves, helping in the kitchen, and playing in the living room. It was nice!

    Friday Amanda started cleaning out some stuff in the basement we wanted to get rid of, which we then dropped off at a second-hand store. We went to a birthday party for a 3 year old and connected with some new parent friends, got some coffee, ate leftovers, and played with Charlie.

    Saturday we went to IKEA to pick up a few things to help us turn part of one of the basement rooms into a play area for Charlie (the reason for Amanda’s clean-out!), then we went to some friends’ house for pizza, wine, and a toddler play date. I know I’ve said this before, but feels like we are getting more of a community here, which is nice.

    Sunday was more playroom clean up and assembly, grocery shopping, a trip to Home Depot, laundry, and getting ready for the week ahead. It is fun giving Charlie little jobs like putting screws from a disassembled bookshelf into a container, or wiping down the baseboards with a paper towel. He loves helping.

    Charlie has a new pre-bathtime ritual: Bringing us the Barnyard Dance book by Sandra Boynton and then pointing to the computer so we will play the song that goes along with it while he dances along. He loves it!

    Charlie is making his wants and interests more clear, which is great. He gets a thrill when we understand what he is communicating, and it is helpful to us to know what he wants. At the grocery store he made it clear that he’d like some raspberries and pretzels by getting very excited and pointing at them while we walked by.

    What do you call a gnome in the military?

    A nom de guerre.

    New infusion going: a ginger liqueur akin to Domaine de Canton. Ginger, vanilla bean, orange peel, sugar, water, and an aged rum.

    Every year around Thanksgiving I get a harebrained idea for a new project.

    This year the idea is to make a tool that will turn Jetpack likes into webmention-style likes as WordPress comments, kind of how brid.gy does for Twitter and Mastodon likes. The WordPress.com API exposing likes seems pretty straightforward and returns names, URLs, and avatars, which is all you really need for a Like comment with the Semantic Linkbacks plugin.

    I think this will be a one-time tool (you run it once to migrate, then turn off Jetpack Likes for posts) rather than a syncing tool. Probably something run with wp-cli. I need to look further into how the Semantic Linkbacks plugin is storing metadata in order to figure it out.

    Speaking of IndieWeb stuff, I’ve been on a mission recently. Yesterday I set up brid.gy to backfeed likes, shares, and comments from other platforms as webmentions, and I backfilled hundreds of comments on old posts. What a cool service. That brings my current state to:

    ✅ Sending and receiving webmentions
    ✅ Backfeeding mentions from other platforms via brid.gy
    ✅ Syndicating via RSS, JSON Feed, ActivityPub, and autoposting services
    ✅ Microformats and my representative h-card

    To do: Implement bookmarking + script a way to make that sync from other bookmarking services, set up short notes like tweets that originate on my site then get syndicated

    What else should I work on?

    I had some excitement on Twitter this week. I replied to a post by Archduke Eduard of Austria (one of the Habsburgs who used to be the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) where he said he was skeptical of “vox populi, vox dei.” I pointed out that we likely know the phrase from Alcuin, who said: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” Translated: “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”

    The exchange got hundreds of likes, RTs, and replies, including a couple from Eduard himself.

    Work win of the week: I suggested an improvement to Tumblr’s open graph tags to make tumblr blogs show up better on Twitter. The fix got shipped within a couple hours and improved Twitter sharing for everyone. Twexit!

    Speaking of, have you heard of the 1973 Scorsese mafia film Goncharov? It was so good. You should watch it if you haven’t.

    Archived Link

  • Week of November 14

    Charlie has been showing more interest in stuffed animals recently and has been very affectionate toward them, giving them hugs and snuggling them. This week he started carrying around a stuffed sloth almost as large as he is. Some times when he gets home from daycare, Sloth is the first thing he picks up.

    Charlie also has a new thing where he takes his sippy cup and hits it against your cup and says “Cheers!” He’ll also do it with whatever food he and you have in your hands at any given time.

    I was a solo dad for a few days this week while Amanda was on a work trip. Totally doable, but it tends to crowd out the possibility of doing anything other than the baseline during that time. Each time I solo parent for a few days, I have a new appreciation for single parents.

    I had to work on Saturday for a quick turnaround project. Thankfully that only happens once a year.

    After I published last week’s post, I spent some time outside sowing some flower seeds that need cold stratification. Then I came in and made dinner. Sitter was sick and we couldn’t find anyone else, so we canceled our dinner reservations for Amanda’s birthday and instead did “NY Steakhouse Night” at home. A 2.5in NY strip cooked in the sous vide and seared in butter, creamed spinach, hash browns, and a bottle of French wine. It was great!

    First big freeze of the season froze all of my jalapeños before most of them turned red, so I had to pick them all and throw them in the smoker to make chipotles, even though they were still green. They seemed to turn out pretty well after 6.5 hours in the smoker, though I haven’t eaten any yet. The plan is to pack most of them in adobo sauce.

    IndieWeb stuff:

    Two project ideas:

    1. I like the idea of BookWyrm, but I like keeping my books all on my own site. Perhaps I write a dedicated ActivityPub feed for my books page? Something like @books@cagrimmett.com. What If I make this into a WordPress plugin so others can use it, too? Make book lists and notes available via RSS and ActivityPub. Maybe it extends the existing ActivityPub plugin. We can call it the IndieWeb Book Club.
    2. A good project for learning how to make WordPress blocks: An easy block to allow WordPress site owners to add a representative hCard to their site. It should optionally support all hcard properties.

    A couple thoughts on the Twitter debacle:

    • If Musk were quietly, diligently making changes internally for the first month and announcing occasional improvements after they were shipped and stable, we’d all have a different outlook and maybe give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, he chose mass firings and daily public spectacles. Makes me think the real reason that Tesla and SpaceX are so loved is because of incredible PR and comms teams keeping his nonsense reigned in. People he doesn’t have at Twitter.
    • How can the remaining staff at Twitter get anything done amidst such radical uncertainty?
    • Chris Aldrich on your Twitter Go-Bag.
    • Scrape useful metadata about your Twitter archive.

    This week I learned there are tools run by OpenDNS, Google DNS, and Cloudflare DNS where you can request that they update their DNS cache for a particular domain and record type.

    Two cocktails we’ve been enjoying this week:

    1. Scotch hot toddy
      • 2oz Scotch
      • 1 tsp honey
      • 1 star anise
      • 3 cloves
      • 1 lemon slice, juice squeezed into the cup
      • Top with boiling water
    2. As an alternative to the scotch toddy, I subbed in an amaro for the scotch, which was pretty good!
    3. Bobby Burns
      • 1oz Scotch
      • 1oz Sweet vermouth
      • 1/2oz Benedictine
      • Stir in a mixing glass with ice, strain into a coupe.

  • Week of November 7

    Charlie is getting better at making some animal sounds like “ruff ruff” and “moo.” It is adorable.

    We went to a friend’s house last weekend and Charlie discovered the magnets on their fridge and loved playing with them. We have some art magnets, but they are difficult for his little fingers to pull off the fridge, so we ordered some fun magnets that he can play with. Now every morning while we are making coffee he has fun putting magnets on the fridge, pulling them off, transferring them to the dishwasher, etc. There are some on the garage door in my office, too. Great purchase.

    This is the first Daylight Savings change that affected Charlie. On Monday he got up at 5am and we ran out of things to do, so I took him grocery shopping at 7am. He loves the grocery store.

    So, what do you do with an energetic toddler at 6:30am? I still don’t know, but today we made some cinnamon bread together. I went into it knowing there would be a mess, and there was, but he enjoyed it.

    It was Amanda’s birthday this week! I decorated the dining room, got a cake and her favorite ice cream, and threw a little get-together for her. Also planning on making her a nice dinner tonight (our sitter plans fell through so we canceled the restaurant plans) and soon going to Regarding Oysters to celebrate.

    It feels like so much of what we considered our normal lives was put on hold during the pandemic and is now pretty different with a child, so we have to be flexible and celebrate whenever and however we can.

    This Elon Musk Twitter takeover has been such a mess. Early on I thought it would go pretty well (cutting costs, shipping features faster), but in reality it is a lot worse than I thought.

    The $8 verification has turned into a fiasco, with accounts impersonating huge companies:

    • Lockheed Martin
    • Coca Cola
    • Tesla
    • SpaceX
    • Nestle
    • Eli Lilly
    • Every major politician you can think of

    It has honestly been funny to watch, but I expect lawsuits to start popping up.

    Advertisers pulling out, entire teams (including the communications team and accessibility team) fired, and reversal of their work at home policy. Like I said, a mess.

    Meanwhile, the team over at Tumblr is having fun trolling Twitter with their Important Blue Internet Checkmark.

    Combine that with the FTX.com bankruptcy and someone running off with the FTX.us assets, it is been a wild week on the internet.

    Honestly, Mastodon is not the answer. It is a crappier Twitter and I don’t expect it to get better. Instead, I think I should spend my time reading more indie blogs and liking/responding via webmentions. I know this isn’t a great setup for everyone, but I feel it is right for me.

    There are a number of new tools this week to find people who have Mastodon handles in their profile, but I’d like a tool that looks for blogs with RSS feeds. There has to be one out there. If not, modifying one of the Mastodon tools could do the trick.

    Hoping to carve out some time this coming week to work on it.

    Another related tool: shawnhooper / twitter-archive-to-wp – import your Twitter archive to a custom post type using wp-cli.

    GitHub Blocks looks pretty cool! Kind of like the next iteration of bl.ocks.org or a GitHub-centric lightweight Observable.

    If you update to macOS Ventura and have trouble with your SSH connections, you’ll probably need to add PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa to your ~/.ssh/config file.

    macOS 13 (Ventura) ships with a version of OpenSSH that “disables RSA signatures using the SHA-1 hash algorithm by default.”

    Still reading Hernan Diaz’s Trust. I’m very close to the end. Maybe picking up Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Unraveling or Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star next.

    I’ve been more frustrated, irritated, impatient, and less empathetic than normal this week by small-ish things that don’t usually get under my skin. I’m not sure why, but I do know it isn’t other people, it is definitely me. I probably need to get outside, maybe start meditating again, and get back to my practice of writing down three things I’m grateful for each day.

    I have a couple ideas for new posts on my neglected cooking blog. I need some time to put them together, but hoping I can make it happen!

    The rosemary has been blooming like crazy. Almost time to bring it back inside since we are expecting some freezes this week.

  • WordPress 6.1 Sponsored Contributor Stats

    A month ago I wrote a post about stats for WP Core releases and received some good feedback on it. Some folks also pointed out that Jb Audras writes better general stats posts for releases than what I put together, and I agree!

    One thing that I found was missing from all other sources was stats on sponsored contributors, so I’m starting to keep track of that here in this spreadsheet: 

    I’m collecting:

    • Number of sponsored contributors
    • Breakdown of the companies they are being sponsored by
    • Breakdown of listed employers, sponsored or not

    If anyone wants to help me backfill sponsorship stats for previous releases from data Jb Audras and the core release team pulls before each release, I’d be happy to collaborate!

    Stats for 6.1

    Total contributors: 798
    Sponsored: 149
    % sponsored: 18.7%

    The top sponsoring companies:

    • Automattic sponsored 63 contributors (42.28%)
    • WPDeveloper sponsored 11 contributors (7.38%)
    • Yoast sponsored 8 contributors (5.37%)
    • GoDaddy sponsored 6 contributors (4.03%)
    • Awsm Innovations sponsored 6 contributors (4.03%)
    • XWP sponsored 5 contributors (3.36%)
    • Multidots sponsored 5 contributors (3.36%)
    • Extendify sponsored 5 contributors (3.36%)

  • Week of October 31

    I spent Sunday through Friday in Denver at an Automattic meetup. This was the first large meetup held since I joined the company in early 2020. ~200 people across three of the companies divisions attended. It was wonderful to meet so many of my coworkers and make new connections. The days were packed and I think I made the most of my time there by:

    • Working on some projects in-person
    • Sitting with different groups of people at meals
    • Giving a flash talk
    • Taking walks with people and chatting
    • Asking a question during the group AMA with Matt
    • Volunteering to help coordinate some of the programming
    • Connecting with other teams like some of the Jetpack product teams, Pressable, Day One, Sensei, etc.
    • Participating in the coffee exchange (swapping coffee from local roasters around the world)
    • Going out for social time at the end of each day (board games, karaoke, bars)

    I met a lot of cool people I want to keep in touch with and am looking forward to the next one.

    One thing I did is taking some time before dinner each day to write some notes on the conversations I had, which will be very helpful in following up on some project ideas once we are back at our desks next week.

    Me giving a flash talk about making bitters. I'm standing in front of a slide showing photos of bitter ingredients explaining how I use each one.
    Me giving a flash talk about making bitters
    Team photo. Look at those nerds.

    Bob Ralian, head of advertising at Automattic, told me something very insightful (and maybe even inciteful!) during dinner one night:

    Don’t assume good ideas are being worked on.

    Bob Ralian

    This week I learned about the The HTTP Archive, an open source project that tracks how the web is built, including historical data. It is queryable by BigQuery, so I plan to check that out this coming week.

    Before I left for the work trip, I did some grocery shopping and meal planning for Amanda and Charlie. The goal was to minimize stress where I could even though I was away. I’m going to continue doing that when I travel in the future because Amanda found that helpful. Wrangling a toddler solo is no joke!

    Some of our planning to make more local friends, especially other parents of toddlers, is finally starting to come to fruition. We went to a morning play date on Saturday where everyone seemed to have a good time, and then made some concrete plans again before leaving. Looks like a rotating “Saturday morning donuts” playdate is going to be a monthly occurrence.

    Charlie enjoyed painting pumpkins and himself.

    We also had some new neighbors over for dinner, which was really nice. They are the closest in age to us on our street and we have some interests in common, so it was nice to connect.

    When Amanda and Charlie picked me up from the train station when I came home on Friday, I picked Charlie up and he immediately buried his head in my shoulder, clutched me, and refused to let go for ~5 mins. That really got my heart. I missed him so much last week!

    Charlie’s vocabulary is continuing to expand, as is his understanding of what we are saying and what is going on in pictures and illustrated books. You know that part of Llama Llama Red Pajama where baby llama is weeping wailing for his mama? When we get to that page, even if we don’t say anything, Charlie throws his head back, raises his arms, and yells. It is very funny.

    We’ve been listening to a lot of Caspar Babypants with Charlie, so I started to listen to Presidents of the United States of America again, which is Chris Ballew’s other band. It is funny how similar the lyrical style is. Peaches could easily be a Caspar Babypants song.

    Looking for an alternative to Twitter? Give Tumblr another try. (Yeah, that-thing-you-used-10-years-ago.tumblr.com). Great community, good people behind it, good vibes.

    I read a lot of Hernan Diaz’s Trust during my flights and am really enjoying it. After I finish it I might pick up his In the Distance.

    Charlie is waking up from his nap, so it is time to wrap this up, make some lunch, and spend the rest of this unseasonably warm day outside with Amanda and Charlie 👋

  • 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:

  • Week of September 19

    My thirty-third weekly post! A good week at work, some autumnal fare, a sick baby, planning ahead,and some WordPress data exploration.

    Charlie

    Charlie surprised us this week! We played a children’s song playlist on Spotify and he started doing hand motions to some of the songs. We had no idea they were doing that at daycare and it was really fun to see that. Over the weekend he started sounding out a songg by himself without music playing and making hand motions.

    Daycare had picture day and Charlie’s photos were adorable. He knows how to ham it up for the camera.

    Amanda realized that after a day of playing with other kids, Charlie needs some quiet snuggle time when he gets home, so one of us holds him on the couch or on the porch while he has a snack and the other parent gets dinner going. Such a sweet time with our little boy.

    Charlie graduated to taking a bath in the regular tub instead of the baby bath that sets in the tub. He loves playing with floating tug boats and the faucet.

    Poor little guy got sick at the end of the week and is having a tough weekend. He was supposed to go to the first day of fall swim lessons on Saturday, but unfortunately he couldn’t. He is snoozing on me while I type this.

    When Charlie wakes up from a nap on either Amanda or me and looks up and smiles because he realizes he is snuggling with one of us, it melts our hearts.

    Projects & work

    My Jekyll Tools repo reached 100 stars and 30 forks this week!

    I don’t use Jekyll anymore, so I haven’t updated this in a couple years. Cool to see it continue being used. I’d be happy to take PRs and add other contributors.

    I published a post exploring WordPress core contributor stats:

    https://cagrimmett.com/data-viz/2022/09/24/some-wp-core-contributor-stats/

    I learned how to use pup (a command line tool for processing HTML) and Datasette (a tool for exploring data) while compiling this.

    The post generated some community discussion on Twitter, and I learned:

    I helped Charlie’s previous nanny (who we hired for a couple months when I had to go back to work but nighttime wake ups and feedings were still tough and Amanda needed to get some sleep) set up a website for her business this week. It is nice to walk people through using WordPress for the first time and take them from not having a domain to launching a landing page in under an hour.

    I had a really good week at work. I can’t talk about most of it, but I’ll just say that I got a lot of work done, got some good feedback, helped out coworkers, and moved some important projects forward.

    Food & Drink

    A few things of note this week (I won’t bore you with the ham sandwiches or grilled chicken):

    Amanda made bacon cheddar chive scones with our garden chives.

    I made the first lentil sausage soup of the season. It was chilly in the second half of the week!

    Lentil, Sausage, Potato, and Greens Soup – Cook Like Chuck
    This is one of my favorite soups. As soon as the cold weather sets in, I make this at least twice a month.
    cooklikechuck.com

    I made one of my favorite quick meals again this week: Turmeric black pepper chicken and vegetables. Takes less than 30 minutes and is delicious. Charlie eats it, too. Asparagus, green beans, broccoli, and snow peas all work well.

    Turmeric-Black Pepper Chicken With Asparagus Recipe – NYT Cooking
    In this sweet and spicy stir-fry, black pepper, honey and rice vinegar help accentuate turmeric’s delightfully earthy qualities Thinly sliced asparagus doesn’t need much time to cook, but feel free to swap with any other vegetables that cook in just a few minutes, like thinly sliced green beans, frozen peas or baby spinach Serve this with rice or rice vermicelli noodles, or tuck it into a lettuce cup or pita with yogurt and fresh herbs
    cooking.nytimes.com

    I finally bottled the orange bitters I started in April.

    • It turned out good! Closest to Regan’s, but has a bit more spice. Nice in Manhattans and Boulevardiers.
    • I used 6 oranges last time and 12 oranges this time. Next time it needs to be 18 or 24 to get the intense orange flavor I’m looking for.
      • I don’t know how some of the brands of orange bitters out there get the flavor and color. I think they use orange extract and caramel coloring.

    The recipe for this batch is up in my digital garden.

    I have a bunch of 1oz eye droppers of the stuff. If you want a bottle, let me know!

    Planning

    • Cold weather is coming. Time to start thinking about getting garlic and flowers that need a cold period (black-eyed susans, milkweed, echinacea, poppies)
    • We’ve been toying with the idea of expanding our deck and maybe putting an outdoor screened in porch on part of it.
      • Do we need permits?
      • Can we do this work ourselves?
      • How big is too big?
    • We planned a trip to Lake Placid.
      • What are the must-dos/sees?
      • What is good to eat around there?
      • What are some good books set in the area to read while we are there or listen to on the drive up?
    • I’m looking for some good autumn reads. I’m starting with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. What else should I read?

    Reading

    Currently reading:

    • The Adirondack Reader by various authors
    • Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig, second in the Montana trilogy
    • The Juncto by Neal Stephenson, fifth in the Baroque Cycle series

    Around the web

    Cool things I read or dug into for the first time this week.

    Robin Rendle’s notes on taking care of your blog:

    Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning or blog about the sky above you right this very second. How many clouds are up there? Blog about your annoying kids and your fucked up relationship and blog about that terrifying time when you went to the beach with some people you weren’t really friends with and you got drunk and then it got real dark and you didn’t have a tent so you slept on a sand dune all night long.

    I say again to ye: just blog!

    There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away. But don’t wait up for success to come, it’s going to be a slog—there will be years before you see any benefit. But slowly, with enough momentum behind it, your blog will show you the world: there will be distant new friends, new enemies, whole continents might open up and welcome themselves to you.

    The revitalization of NY’s waters:

    Nine humpback whales recently surfaced there together, spouting and breeching against the city skyline as though vying for the most dramatic selfie. Fin whales and right whales are also appearing in startling numbers—along with bottlenose dolphins, spinner and hammerhead sharks, seals, blue crabs and seahorses. Oysters, which all but vanished decades ago, are clamping themselves to bulkheads from Brooklyn’s Coney Island Creek to the Mario Cuomo Bridge, almost 20 miles up the Hudson from the city.

    Off to hold a sick baby and maybe make applesauce from the two bushels of apples on our table 👋🍎

  • Some WordPress Core Contributor stats

    The Inspiration

    Earlier this week David Bisset asked:

    This got me curious. Is this data out there? How might one get it?

    I started looking at core release posts and saw that contributors are linked, which gave me the idea to scrape it and see what I could come up with.

    Caveats about this data

    1. Since this data is from the thanked contributors in core release posts, it includes more than just code contributions. It also includes documentation, testing, design, marketing, etc.
    2. I only included data from 5.0-6.0 named releases.
      • 5.0 was released in December 2018, almost 4 years ago. 4 years seemed far enough to go back.
      • I only included named core releases, as those are the larger ones that more people contribute to. The maintenance and security releases have a much smaller set of contributors.
    3. The data gets less accurate the further I go back in terms of release dates because I can only scrape their current profile, not their previous profiles. Some most likely switched employers.
    4. The data is only as accurate as the profiles on WordPress.org. Not all profiles have employers listed. There are some folks I know work for big companies in the WordPress ecosystem and contribute to core who do not have an employer listed. I did not add any that were missing, I went by what is available.
    5. I had to do a lot of manual clean up to make the data consistent, which is typical when you scrape data from the web. If I made a mistake or missed something, that mistake is mine alone.
    6. In full transparency, I work at Automattic. This exploration was not done as part of my work there, but as a curious member of the WordPress.org community. In the WordPress project, I am a part of the Photos team.
    7. There are many other ways to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem and project that are not captured in this data. I only pulled data on contributors to named core releases.
    8. It is possible I made some scraping, formula, or calculation mistakes. If you find something wrong, please let me know.

    Contributors to named core releases, grouped by company, for versions 5.0-6.0

    Note: If someone has an employer listed on their profile, that does not necessarily mean they are sponsored by that company. If you want to know about sponsored contributors, go to the Sponsored section.

    Core release6.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.0
    Total contributors551658560502679866592707385550477
    Company 1Automattic (77, 14%)Automattic (94, 14.3%)Automattic (88, 15.7%)Automattic (66, 13.1%)Automattic (79, 11.6%)Automattic (87, 10%)Automattic (60, 10.1%)Automattic (61, 8.6%)Automattic (42, 10.9%)Automattic (55, 10%)Automattic (62, 13%)
    Company 210up (15, 2.7%)Yoast (14, 2.1%)Yoast (12, 2.1%)10up (12, 2.4%)Yoast (14, 2.1%)10up (16, 1.8%)10up (11, 1.9%)Yoast (16, 2.3%)10up (11, 2.9%)Yoast (20, 3.6%)10up (14, 2.9%)
    Company 3Yoast (10, 1.8%)10up (11, 1.7%)10up (11, 2%)Yoast (11, 2.2%)10up (13, 1.9%)Whodunit (11, 1.3%)Yoast, Whodunit, Human Made (7, 1.2%)10up (14, 2%)Human Made (6, 1.6%)10up (16, 2.9%)Human Made (11, 2.3%)
    Company 4Multidots (9, 1.6%)Multidots (10, 1.5%)Human Made (5, 0.9%)XWP, Google (6, 1.2%)Awesome Motive (8, 1.2%)Yoast, rtCamp (9, 1%)XWP (6, 1%)Human Made (9, 1.3%)Yoast (5, 1.3%)Human Made (9, 1.6%)Yoast (10, 2.1%)
    Company 5rtCamp (6, 1.1%)XWP (6, 0.9%)XWP, rtCamp Google, Bluehost, Awesome Motive, Alley (4, 0.7%)Awesome Motive (5, 1%)XWP (6, 0.9%)XWP, WP Engine, Human Made (8, 0.9%)Multidots, Google, Bluehost (4, 0.7%)Multidots (7, 1%)Google (4, 1%)rtCamp (7, 1.3%)Bluehost (6, 1.3%)
    No company listed245 (44.5%)306 (46.5%)259 (46.3%)238 (47.4%)332 (48.9%)434 (50.1%)307 (51.9%)348 (49.2%)182 (47.3%)247 (44.9%)230 (48.2%)
    Company name (Count of employed contributors, percentage of the total number of contributors)

    Individuals who contributed to all 11 of the most recent named core releases

    49 people have contributed to all 11 releases (5.0-6.0) I pulled data for. I think these people deserve special recognition:

    The companies these awesome individuals work for:

    • Automattic (13)
    • Google (4)
    • 10up (3)
    • Alley (2)
    • XWP (2)
    • Yoast (2)
    • Accessible Web Design (1)
    • Advies en zo (1)
    • Awesome Motive (1)
    • Bluehost (1)
    • Dekode Interaktiv AS (1)
    • FlipMetrics (1)
    • GoDaddy (1)
    • Happy Prime (1)
    • Human Made (1)
    • Parship Group (1)
    • Penske Media Corporation (1)
    • SendtoNews Incorporated (1)
    • Shopify (1)
    • Whodunit (1)
    • iThemes (1)
    • required (1)

    7 of these individuals has no employer listed in their wordpress.org profile.

    27 of these individuals have the Sponsored tag on their profile.

    These are the number of contributors per release that have the Sponsored tag in their profile. This is a count of sponsored contributors, not necessarily a good breakdown of the amount contributed by each.

    Core release6.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.0
    Total contributors551658560502679866592707385550477
    Sponsored110125103771061046772546362
    Sponsored %19.9%18.9%18.4%15.3%15.6%12%11.3%10.2%14%11.5%13%

    These are the sponsored contributors grouped by company. Includes count of sponsored contributors and the percentage of the total number of sponsored contributors for that release.

    Core release6.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.0
    Company 1Automattic (61, 55.5%)Automattic (65, 52%)Automattic (55, 53.4%)Automattic (32, 41.6%)Automattic (43, 40.6%)Automattic (36, 34.6%)Automattic (24, 35.8%)Automattic (23, 31.9%)Automattic (16, 29.6%)Automattic (16, 25.4%)Automattic (21, 33.9%)
    Company 2XWP (7, 6.4%)Yoast (10, 8%)Yoast (7, 6.8%)Yoast (8, 10.4%)Yoast (11, 10.4%)Whodunit (7, 6.7%)Yoast (6, 9%)Yoast (10, 13.9%)Yoast (5, 9.3%)Yoast (11, 17.5%)Yoast, XWP (6, 9.7%)
    Company 3Yoast (6, 5.5%)Multidots (6, 4.8%)XWP (5, 4.9%)XWP (5, 6.5%)XWP, 10up (5, 4.7%)Yoast, XWP, WP Engine (6, 5.8%)Whodunit (5, 7.5%)Whodunit, Google (4, 5.6%)Google (4, 7.4%)XWP, Human Made, Google (4, 6.3%)Google (4, 6.5%)
    Company 4Google, GoDaddy, Extendify (4, 3.6%)XWP (5, 4%)Google, 10up (4, 3.9%)Google, 10up (4, 5.2%)WP Engine, Google, Awesome Motive (4, 3.8%)Human Made, Google, Awesome Motive (4, 3.8%)Google (4, 6%)XWP, Human Made (3, 4.2%)XWP, Human Made, Bluehost, 10up (3, 5.6%)10up (3, 4.8%)Human Made, Bluehost, 10up (3, 4.8%)
    Company 5Multidots, Human Made, Awesome Motive (3, 2.7%)Google, Bluehost (4, 3.2%)GoDaddy, Awesome Motive (3, 2.9%)WP Engine, Whodunit, Required, Human Made, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Awesome Motive (2, 2.6%)Human Made, Extendify, Bluehost (3, 2.8%)GoDaddy, Bluehost, 10up (3, 2.9%)XWP, Human Made, 10up (3, 4.5%)WP Engine, rtCamp, Required, Bluehost, Awesome Motive, 10up (2, 2.8%)WP Engine, WebDevStudios, Awesome Motive (2, 3.7%)WPMUDEV, Whodunit, WebDevStudios, Required, Bluehost, Awesome Motive (2, 3.2%)WebDevStudios Required (2, 3.2%)
    Company name (Count of sponsored contributors, percentage of the total number of sponsored contributors)

    How I gathered and analyzed this data

    1. For each named core release (I.e. 6.0 “Arturo”, 5.9 “Josephine”, etc) I used the free version of Data Miner to pull the list of thanked contributors in the release post.
      • You could do this with a script too, but I already had Data Miner installed and knew how to use it, so it was the fastest way to get what I needed.
      • The element I targeted: p.is-style-wporg-props-long a
      • I saved the href attribute for each result in a text file.
    2. I looped through each text file of contributor URLs with a bash script and pulled in two fields from their wordpress.org profiles: Employer and Contributions.
      • I used curl, tr, awk, and pup to transform the data into something useable.
    // Assumes an input file named 5-1.txt with a list of profile URLs
// requires pup https://github.com/ericchiang/pup
for url in $(head -n800 5-1.txt); do
    employer="$(curl -s $url | pup -p 'li#user-company text{}' | awk '{sub(/Employer:/,"")} 1' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d '\t')"
    contributions="$(curl -s $url | pup -p 'div.item-meta-contribution text{}' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d '\t')"
    echo "$url | $employer | $contributions" >> 5-1_contributors.txt
done
    1. I first started exploring the data in Google Sheets and made pivot tables for each named release.
      • This took a lot of data clean up to make the data more consistent. Since the Employer field is open text, there were lots of different versions of the same company (Company, Company Inc, Company PVT LTD, etc). I cleaned it up the best I could in the time I wanted to spend on it, but there are still probably some duplicates.
      • This gave me the table of stats for the companies represented in each named release.
      • I used regex to find which company sponsors a contributor based on their Contributions section on their profile and made a pivot table of this information.
    2. I used Datasette to explore a CSV of all contributors and which version they contributed to. This gave me the list of 49 people who contributed to all 11 versions I checked and which companies they work for.

    Data sources

    Want to take a look at this data?

    More areas for exploration

    1. Code contributions from SVN?
      • Number of lines changed by contributor and also grouped by employer
    2. Finding more accurate data?
      • If there were snapshots of this data from each release, it would be nice to use those instead. I could only pull data from current profiles, and users may have switched employers. For example, up until recently mkaz worked at Automattic, but since he no longer does, his previous contributions are not grouped under Automattic.
      • Not all profiles have employers listed. There are some folks I know work for big companies in the WordPress ecosystem and contribute to core who do not have an employer listed.
    3. Graphing different facets of this data to see how it changes over time.

  • Week of September 12

    Charlie

    Charlie has been very sweet this week. Some things that come to mind from this week:

    • He has preferred to eat breakfast while snuggling on one of our laps.
    • He learned how to use a straw and he loves it. This opens up a new world of possibilities like smoothies.
    • He loves to dip whatever he is eating in sauces/dips.
    • He learned how to brush his teeth. He has an adorable giraffe toothbrush and we all brush our teeth together before bedtime.
    • He has been more and more interested in flipping through his books by himself. He also started to read books to us. We read books to him every night before going to bed as a way to wind down, and also whenever he brings us a book during the day. Once we finish, sometimes he takes it and talks while flipping through the pages like he is reading it to us.
    • He says words very close to “Buddy” (the neighbor’s dog) and “that” and “dog” while pointing to things. He has also started to mimic things we say, which is adorable.
    • He is transitioning to a 1-nap-a-day toddler.
    • He has been showing affection to stuffed animals, picking them up and hugging them.

    Food & Drink

    A couple things worth sharing from this week in cooking:

    • I made some pretty good pizza on Tuesday. We used dough from Trader Joe’s instead of making it ourselves this time. Their regular dough is pretty decent, but the stand out is their herb dough, which we used to make cheesy garlic bread.
    • I made some pizza sauce from garden tomatoes, garden basil and oregano, and garlic, onion, and salt.
      • Blanched the tomatoes and removed the peel
      • Tossed all of the ingredients in a pot and let it cook down for 30 minutes while occasionally smashing it with a potato masher
      • Put it in a quart container and blended it with the stick blender
    • A friend and I experimented with cooking a whole spatchcocked chicken in the pizza oven in a cast iron pan. It worked pretty well!
      • We let the Ooni get really hot after making pizza before we put the chicken in, then turned the flame way down when we did put the chicken in.
      • We turned the pan regularly.
      • Total time was probably 25 minutes, though we didn’t keep a close eye on the clock and went by the chicken’s temperature instead, which we checked with an instant read thermometer.
      • What I’d do different next time is covering the chicken with foil for the first 10-15 minutes to keep the skin from charring.

    Sean Nelson reminded me it was Negroni Week this week, so I made a Kingston Negroni, which essentially swaps the gin out for Smith & Cross Jamaican rum. The funky, fruit-forward rum holds up well to the spice in the sweet vermouth and the bitterness of the Campari.

    We’ve made a couple Jungle Bird cocktails this week since we have some pineapple juice we need to use up. The classic recipe is good, but so is swapping the simple syrup for passionfruit syrup like Pagan Idol does.

    Miscellany

    We are having Great Plains weather this week 40-60F at night, 75-85F during the day. This is the weather I like. Good for sleeping.

    I took the guideboat out on the Hudson River for the second time this year. It was great to get out and row a bit. I’m going to try to get out a few more times before it gets too cold to do so.

    Knowing when go weigh in and when not go weigh in is a key skill you have to learn by doing, not one that can be taught.

    Digging in to the motivations behind your actions and other people’s actions is one of the most helpful things in gaining empathy and resolving conflict.

    I am a heavy user of search on my own websites, so I made it easy on myself. On any page on this site or my digital garden, if you his Command+Shift+F, it will bring up the search modal.

    Reading

    • Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig, second in the Montana trilogy
    • The Juncto by Neal Stephenson, fifth in the Baroque Cycle series

    Cool stuff from around the internet this week

    “Life Goes On” With Stewart Brand
    www.palladiummag.com
    WordCamp US 2022 – Nick Diego
    nickdiego.com

    This is Nick Diego’s talk on building blocks from WordCamp US, a big WordPress conference. Very clever use of FSE, cover blocks, and anchor links to make a public presentation directly in WordPress. Great content on block development, too.

    A Mathematical Theory of License Plates | Charlie Meyer’s Blog
    Tags: math-that-isnt-useful Preface “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight… I saw a car with the license plate ARW357. Can you imagine?…
    blog.charliemeyer.co
    Running WordPress in the Browser
    Nowadays, you can run WordPress entirely in your browser thanks to WebAssembly, an exciting and growing technology that allows you to compile different languages into binaries. Read how we implemented it and try our demo.
    wasmlabs.dev
    Gutendex
    gutendex.com

    Cool JSON web API for Project Gutenberg books. h/t Ilya Radchenko

    Mental Models for Better Thinking – Farnam Street
    How do you make sense of the world around you? How do you navigate through it? When problems arise, how do you confront them?Mental models shape how you see the world, how you approach problems, and even unconsciously surface the information you think is important.
    fs.blog

    Cool course on mental models. The mental models books that Farnam Street put out are good, too!

    Caspar Babypants, fun rock music for kids, h/t Jeremy Felt

    Spicy, Seared, Smothered, Stacked: An Introduction to Mexican Sandwiches
    The Mexican sandwich takes the same taco flavors and turns them up to eleven, offering a world of fluffy buns and spicy meats that no food lover should leave uneaten. Here are a few of our favorite types.
    www.seriouseats.com

    That’s it for this week! Time to mow the grass, clean the house, and figure out what to make for dinner. Maybe we’ll have a fire in the chiminea tonight, too.

  • Week of September 5

    When we pick him up from daycare, Charlie has been signaling to be picked up, then he hugs us and gives us a kiss on the cheek. It is so sweet 🥰

    Charlie is Mr. Independent right now. Except when he crawls or walks underneath something and gets stuck, then he appreciates Mom and Dad coming to help.

    A pretty rainy week after a long dry spell. We definitely needed it.

    Finally got around to updating my Reading page to add what I’ve read the last couple months.

    Though, inspired by Mitchell Earl, I really ought to add the books I started but didn’t finish, too. There would be at least 10 more from the past two months across multiple genres. Currently the page only shows the ones I finished, which have been all fiction recently.

    Unfinished from the last couple months (but still in the pile to finish): William Gibson, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Saint-Exupery, Ivan Doig, Jane McGonigal, John McPhee, Zena Hitz, Allan Ginsberg, Ruth Reichl, Zadie Smith, Edward Abbey, and Sherwood Anderson. I jump around a bit.

    I’d love to say that I’m going to take autumn to finish these books, but I’ll honestly probably buy 12 more, finish 5 of those, and only finish 2-3 of these 🤷‍♂️

    Cooking of note this week:

    I find the new Instagram update that autoplays sounds on ads and video stories hostile and unusable. It breaks the traditional pattern of honoring the users’ silent setting and makes it impossible to stop the sound unless you turn your volume completely to zero.

    I wrote a traditional blog post this week:

    https://cagrimmett.com/miscellaneous/2022/09/08/wp-cron-and-the-clock-of-the-long-now/

    Our team at work played a remote team social game that was more fun than expected: Everyone takes a photo of their desk and everyone tries to figure out which desk belongs to which team member. We had a blast!

    Here is a photo of my desk:

    I helped my friend Jeremy build a swing set for his son Miles (Charlie’s friend!) on Saturday. The boys enjoyed it!

    Amanda and I are watching Billions and House of the Dragon right now after Charlie goes to bed and we finish cleaning up from dinner.

    I’m off to make some pizza sauce and clean the kitchen. I can’t use the pizza oven tonight because it is raining, but hopefully I can use it tomorrow. 👋