July 2022 was a bit of a country music song. A friend’s brother passed away while she was visiting, nearly everyone we know got COVID, took my broken guitar to get fixed by the guy that fixes Willie’s guitar, got a flat tire on the family car, the oil change on my pickup truck turned into thousands of dollars worth of repairs, and I lost my AirPods. Somehow, despite all that, July was a good month.
Escape to California
In mid-July we escaped the Texas heat and headed to gloomy sunny San Diego, California for my wife’s birthday. My wife grew up going to Mission Beach every summer, so upon marriage I inherited a family vacation to San Diego. We went every year until our son was three and then we were juggling small babies and the entire extended family couldn’t fit under one roof, so it fell apart.
This year we picked it up again. It felt so great to beat the heat. The 72ºF highs of San Diego felt like a dream after the over 100ºF days in Austin. As we drove into San Diego from Phoenix (where my wife’s family is from), we watched the thermometer drop about 1ºF per mile as we came down from the desert mountains. Incredibly refreshing.
In San Diego, we went to the beach a ton where we dug in the sand and did endless cartwheels. The surf was a big rough that week so we stayed pretty shallow. One day we braved the crowds and went to Sea World where we got splashed by an Orca. Great memories and my biggest regret was that I did not get a Sir Winston Walrus vintage t-shirt. We also went to Old Town for dinner and I got to visit Gunnzo, an entire store dedicated to Gunpla! The staff there were incredibly nice (read: Japanese) and I picked up two new Gunpla models.
There’s something valuable in going to the same place for vacation every year. The first year you’re a tourist. The second year, you’re reliving the first. But after that, you can actually relax on your vacation. Anyways, here’s a picture of me having a pink drink 🏝🍹
Wizards and Waitlists
Exciting times at Luro. Behind the scenes I worked almost entirely on modals and step-by-step wizards. At first this was a bit deflating; it doesn’t get more boring than modals. And trying to normalize and account for every state someone can end up while stepping through a wizard of unknown steps is a brain melting activity. But I think we came up with a good architecture for reusability that will make building out any modal messaging, micro-interactions, or step-by-step flows a lot more predictable and a lot less painful in the future. You can even put a wizard inside a modal if you want and that’s useful for onboarding, speaking of… we opened up the waitlist.
Reminiscing about the early days of COVID
In someways, having no plans was a lot easier to deal with than cancelled plans. After this past month, I’m finding myself somewhat nostalgic for the old “stay in your house” days of the pandemic. Lots of friends got COVID this month, to the extent we’re wondering if we already had COVID a second time in June. Every interaction feels like a potential landmine now. The ever-shifting and cancelling of plans after every exposure, then the minor stress of quarantining for five days while we wait to see if someone gets sick is getting exhausting.
Stats-based recounting
- 💪 Fitness – Nah.
- 📖 Reading – Updates on the ol’ bookshelf.
- Finished
- How to F*ck Up Your Startup by Kim Hvidkjaer
- Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel
- The Power of Regret by Daniel H. Pink
- Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
- Started
- Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski
- The Factory by Hiroko Omayada
- Finished
- 📝 Blogging – 🔥 I hit a blogging streak.
- Where I’m at on climate change – Been thinking a lot about the environment.
- Solving “The Dangler” Conundrum with Container Queries and :has() – A genuine CSS trick!
- Creating a Netlify-to-Notion form – I expected this post to get more “juice”, but eh, it’s still cool.
- The kids are online – Notes about how I’m trying to parent my kids as they get on the Internet.
- Cloud-work vs. Land-work – A workplace dichotomy that I’ve been thinking about for over two years now.
- Before I go: What I know about putting on a rock show – Played rock shows, been to rock shows, ran sound for rock shows; this is what I know.
- 🧠 Learning – Nah
- 📺 Watching – Mostly sci-fi anime
- Movies
- Thor: Love and Thunder – Another classic Thor adventure. Really enjoyed this one and probably my favorite Marvel movie of recent years.
- Nope – A masterpiece. A perfect mix of horror, wester, sci-fi, and comedy.
- TV
- Only Murders in the Building S01 (Hulu)
- Ms. Marvel S01 (Disney+)
- Anime
- Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway
- Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans S01
- And a bunch of garbage isekai and harem anime not worth mentioning.
- Movies
- 🎙 Recording – A small selection of ShopTalk episodes with some special guests
- JS Party Frontend Feud: ShopTalk vs. CSS Podcast – Chris and I attempted to defend our title
- 522: Jay Hoffman and The History of the Web
- 524: Package Security with Feross Aboukhadijeh from Socket
- 🧶 Crafting – Finished three crafts this month and made my first Master Grade Gunpla, the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam!
- Mech Keys
- Vulcan ⨉ KBDFans Maja V2 – Ergonomically, not my favorite, but what a beautiful keyboard. I put some $17 Amazon RGB keycaps on it, so I’m not doing it justice but it’s nice.
- Gunpla
- HGGBB Gundam Livelance Heaven – Enjoyed the first part of this build but the cool cloak part was frustrating enough to ruin.
- MG RX-0 Unicorn Gundam – Finished a Master Grade! My first 1/100th scale model and it’s stunning and it transforms to become even more stunning. The transformations are somewhat finicky, and that’s a bit of a let down, but considering all that’s going on it’s pretty incredible this plastic model can transform. I hear the 1/144th scale Real Grade version of the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam does the transformation much better, so I look forward to trying that one day.
- Mech Keys
- ⌨️ Open source
- 👾 Video games – Nah
daverupert.com | Sciencx (2022-08-04T20:34:00+00:00) Vibe Check №19. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/08/04/vibe-check-%e2%84%9619/
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