Dino’s Journal 📖

Got this link from The Monday Kickoff. Good framework for helping you focus amidst a sea of distractions.

Link: How to Focus in the Age of Distraction

Reason #2: filtering out information takes effort.

Contrary to common sense, ignoring things is not a passive mental process.

Researchers have found that it takes energy to ignore irrelevant stimuli.

In other words, ignoring something still takes a toll on your mental stamina. Think of it this way, we wake up in the morning and our mental stamina bar is at 100% full. If you have to go through the day trying to ignore irrelevant stimuli, your mental stamina bar will probably be down to 50% by lunchtime. By the time you go home, it may be down to 10%. Then you end up just getting fast food because you can't think of anything else better to eat. And you crash down on your sofa to binge-watch Netflix, because your brain is too tired to do something else.

First song for today is “I'm Made of Wax, Larry, What Are You Made Of?” Yes the title is a handful. It is based off a line from the movie Night At The Museum — and that just made me miss Robin Williams. Anyway, this song was my intro to the band A Day To Remember. I first heard it on Pandora and really liked it. Soon enough I had bought their album off iTunes. This is a great rock song from start to finish. Easily my favorite of all ADTR tracks. The bonus here is that their music video is funny too.

I have been slacking off on sharing bookmark posts lately. It's not that I haven't been reading new articles or posts. I'm still reading, almost everyday. I've just been so busy at work and at home that I run out of time to write bookmark posts. After reading a lengthy article for instance, it's usually time for me to get back to work or help with the kids. I've no time left to write down my reflections on the articles or posts I've read. So, going forward I might eschew that practice in favor of getting more bookmark posts out faster. The goal of my bookmark posts was always to bookmark and share what I think are good reads anyway. Writing down my thoughts on it are just a bonus.

This is a great read on the topic of parenting. Specifically, how to avoid over-parenting your child. I myself think that I could be considered a “helicopter dad,” so this read was a very good wake-up call for me.

Link: How to raise a resilient child

I went from an Archive Page that used an embedded Glitch app, to a static Archive Page.

Previously, I used an embedded Glitch app to dynamically create the contents for my Archive page. It worked well, but it was also slow. It was slow because every time you visit the page, the Glitch app had to wake up, then pull all my write.as posts and finally display them in a list. The slowness was a stark contrast to other pages on this site — most of which load very quickly. I also didn't like the idea of depending on a third-party service to serve up the contents of my Archive page.

So, I've been wanting to switch to a static Archive page for awhile now. My problem was that I already had over 350 posts on this site. To get me started, I needed a way to quickly generate a list of all posts on this site. For this, I created a .NET Core console app. This app would get all my posts using the write.as API. Then the app would spit out the list of all posts in HTML format. My first pass actually had it spitting out text in Markdown. But I quickly ran into issues with Markdown and <div> elements not playing well together. So, HTML it was. Anyway, once I had the output on a text file, all I had to do was copy over the HTML and paste it into my Archive page.

Update: I added a new version, which in my opinion is much better than the first one I shared on this post. I'm keeping the first one for historical purposes, but I don't use it anymore.

Got a new PC at work some time ago. That means I lost all the EQ settings that I used with the Creative SoundBlaster E1 external amp/sound card. Thankfully I still have the EQ settings for my Audio Technica ATH-M50 headphones here. But I lost the ones for my Bose Soundsport Wired earphones. Just another reminder to save your stuff to devices/locations that you control.

Anyway, I had to start from scratch with my Bose Soundsport Wired earphones. These earphones are bright sounding earphones. They don't have that much bass to begin with. This is where an external amp/sound card with EQ settings can come in handy. Using the built-in “Rock” preset from Creative, I modified it to add more bass. The result was surprisingly good. This setting sounds even better than any of the previous EQ settings that I've made for my Bose Soundsport Wired earphones. There is now enough bass — more than enough for these earphones — but with minimal degradation to the mids and highs.

Looks like it's been over a month since I wrote a music log entry. And since it's Friday, here's a new one. Today's music log will once again feature piano/cello covers by The Piano Guys. I love listening to their covers. They're always great re-arrangements of popular hits. They make them sound like their own. And they make them sound beautiful. I credit them for my recent appreciation of classical musical instruments, like the piano and cello. That or I'm just getting old. Probably a bit of both. 😄

Anyway, first one for today is a cover of “Just The Way You Are”, originally by Bruno Mars. I love that they simply didn't follow along with the original melody and tune. Instead, they took inspiration from the original song and re-arranged it to where it sounds like at times, an original piece. Beautiful cover of the original.