Lifelog

Just yesterday we celebrated my son’s first birthday. With that, my wife and I had been parents for a full year now. A one year ‘streak’, in the familiar lingo here. Not that I was tracking, and I can’t break the streak even if I wanted to, LOL.

This is not a post about my son – I’m usually reserved about talking about my family. What I would love to talk about is how the whole experience had shaped me in other areas of life, especially my work as an indie hacker:

⏳ The power of constraints
🏥 Trailblazing a deviant path far away from the mainstream

"A lot of successful creators set out to learn a skill, and their account is a public diary. It’s a feedback mechanism.They’re focused on understanding and learning, and less so on building an audience or monetizing. If you learn a skill effectively in public, people who also want to learn that skill will follow you and tag along on your journey." - @ljin18 about the Creator Economy, on Clubhouse

"People generally have more control over their actions than their feelings. But we can influence our feelings by taking action. Take one small step. Move the body first and the mind will follow." ~ James Clear

Goals powered by systems, and systems guided by goals, are for people who care about winning repeatedly.

I always described myself and my personality as not best fit to the task of programming, to the work of a developer. But perhaps from this experience—and all the past adventures—I might have found some character trait (or flaw) that I can look to as saving grace for my coding endeavour.

To be able to finally say, “Yes, I can code.”

To be able to say to myself, that there’s this particular part of me that gels well with coding. This addiction to the challenge. A challenge. Any challenge.

I can live with that.

Had to dump regex to fix the trailing cursor problem from yesterday, and use some code from a textarea-caret-position package from the Github user Component. And it worked!

Spent rest of day dolling it up with a caret pointer (that was also semi-difficult!), and adding scroll with arrow keys using scrollTo() and scrollBy().

Been pretty happy with my recent experiments in biohacking sleep:

* taping mouth to prevent mouth breathing, to enable less snoring, better sleep quality
* daylight alarms that use light to wake you instead of sound
* taking coffee right before my post-lunch power naps

The more I try this Twitter marketing thing, the more I realise... I just wanna chat with strangers on my hobbies/passions. Not market/sell them things.

All those habits I started in Fund Feb were great, and something I will continue with. But they were all but just a start. The tone of this month is meant to be more serious, so it won’t suffice to just “do 1 task” or say positive affirmations to oneself. I’m looking for tangible results, no matter how small. A dollar that I can attribute to all the marketing and monetization efforts, is “tangible”. But a one-off $1 is under-shooting a bit, so to aim slightly higher and feel more challenged, I’m shooting for these goals:

Acquire at least 2 new subscribers for Lifelog
Sell at least 2 copies of a Carrd clone template for Plugins For Carrd
Get at least 2 web design projects for Sweet Jams Sites

Why two? Because I might be lucky one time, but to be lucky twice is harder, and a better gauge that the marketing and monetization efforts are working. If I fail, so be it. But the challenge is to challenge myself seriously.

Onwards to Moolah March!

I’m glad to have done this review – I’d actually done a lot it seems, even though it didn’t feel so. I think that’s why it’s important—for me at least—to do this faithfully every month, because I’m my own worst critic. The kind of perpetually grumpy, unreasonably demanding critic that never has anything nice to say, even if warranted. Such reviews help me silence that critic for a while, and gives a more accurate assessment of the reality.

It was a great Fund Feb for sure! But I don’t think I’m done with money yet.

Onward.

They were talking about doing or investing in things that have asymmetric risk – huge upside, limited downside. Basically, huge potential of getting a lot on returns of your investment, with a controlled degree of risk of failure that you can easily walk away from without total personal ruin. Who doesn’t like that?

Things that were mentioned, like:

Writing a book, podcast, video
Investing in a startup
Starting a startup
Investing in the stock market, Bitcoin
Creating software
Go on many first dates
Move to a big city
Tweet
Investing in good health
Investing in travel

Poet Diane Ackerman on reinventing yourself, in Cultivating Delight:

“Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shapeshifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.”

Coffee takes time to take effect. So drinking it just before the nap, you won’t feel the caffeine kick in just yet. And when you wake up, the caffeine would be just about starting to seep into your brain, so giving a boost on top of the rest you just had! Apparently sleep also helps flush out a neuro-chemical in your brain called adenosine. Chemically, adenosine is molecularly similar to caffeine, so it competes with caffeine to take effect on your brain. By flushing it out via a nap, the caffeine has all the room to kick start your brain even more.

Who would have known!?

Wow this @mention autocomplete feature is really NEEDY! So many edge cases to account for!

This time, had to create a function to disable cursor movement when the tooltip list pops up. The event.keyCode is supposedly deprecated but it still works...? So to cover bases, I added event.key as well:

preventCursor(e) {
var visibleList = document.getElementById("usernamesList").style.visibility
if (e.keyCode >= 37 && e.keyCode <= 40 || e.keyCode == 13) {
e.preventDefault();
} else if (e.key === "Arrow-Left" ||
e.key === "Arrow-Right" ||
e.key === "Arrow-Down" ||
e.key === "ArrowUp" ||
e.key === "Enter"
) {
e.preventDefault();
}
},

And then adding an event listener to the showTooltip function:
document.getElementById("text").addEventListener("keydown", this.preventCursor);

And removing event listener when username is selected, by enter or mouse click, in the onEnter() and serResult() functions respectively:

document.getElementById("text").removeEventListener("keydown", this.preventCursor);

Noooow to the very last bit, moving the tooltip to pop up where the cursor's coordinates are. 🤞

Hashtags discovered:
💰 #writerslift - amazing amazing movement to lift one another among the writer's community

#nanowrimo #indieauthors #writerslife
#shamlessselfpromo #shamlessselfpromosaturday #shamlessselfpromotuesday
#followfriday

"Success in anything is just a byproduct of learning, and learning is a byproduct of curiosity. Ultimately, if you are curious about something, you will be successful at it, and the more curious you are about it, the more successful you will be at it." ~ @naval

Learned to save searches, and the significant difference between same search key words in words vs hashtags

There’s no sleep biohack better than just more sleep. In fact, your life depends on it.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/