markjgsmith

The new thing is someone driving by shouting 'boy' then a bit later a small group of gang stalkers driving by doing faux maniacle evil laughter. ’Hey go home' bloke just drove past as I was writting this. He’s obviously getting a bit tired and bored of the whole thing, he’s clearly running out of different ways to say his line. He’s done every possible variation at this stage. I’m just exhausted, so I’m like yeah whatever mate.

Yesterday’s escallations got weird, I’ll let them speak for themselves, here are my notes:

• Loads and loads of manufactured situations where people exageratedly freak out and start lashing out verbally as soon as I even hint at looking in their direction. Tested and confirmed by only looking around them. The literal microsecond I looked directly at them, massive freak out. Happened all morning by several different groups of 2 people. They are literally doing some pretend interaction, but the real thing they are doing is this strange uber sensitive behaviour.
• This afternoon at the internet place there was more of the same and also just now a woman walking an infant up and down the pathway on front of me. The woman was making what very much appeared to be female sex noises. It was very blatant. Remove the infant child and the moaning sounds emanating from her would have seemed like she was practicing for a porno. She wasn’t doing anything bad to the child but it’s super frigging strange.
• Btw an awful lot of women old and middle aged wearing yellow, and also several babies wearing all yellow outfits today.
• This was followed by another baby walkby, combined with a motorbike drive by where the driver did an evil laugh then said in a serious voice ‘yah okay’
• A woman that passed me earlier today and said ‘yah’ on her way to the park, just passed again wearing bright pink mini shorts and bright pink shoes, stopped to have an extended chat with the babywalker. They appeared to be waiting for me to look at them and reacted when I momentarily glanced up from my apple device.
• Woman wearing pink driving a rental city bike dropping her enormous bunch of keys in the gutter on purpose at the exact moment I arrived. There was a whole gutter thing going on during the last garbage war.

I got quite a lot of coding done yesterday, but it was tough because after 3 weeks of not coding, the locals aren’t used to me being at the internet place for longer stretches, and so they get very passive aggressive angry. I have to stand my ground or I get nothing done, and it innevitably turns into some form of war, and it makes the coding more difficult, and the bugs I’ve been fixing have all been particulary difficult ones. So it rapidly becomes very tough going.

The final remaining issue appears to be with the tagclouds. Hoping to fix that this morning. #

This would normally be part of tomorrow’s morning note, a list of the previous day’s escallations, but I feel like it would be better to just get it published now so I can start tomorrow fresh. A lot of strangeness in the universe for me this morning, here are my notes, it’s somewhat quieter now after lunch:

• Walked past a primary school on my way to the sandwich shop, it just happened to be what I guess is the morning gathering where they sing a song or say some chants or something. Hundreds of kids all lined up facing the front. I walked past and went to get my sandwich and on the way back, there was a random bloke standing on front of the school on the other side of the road. As I passed him he looks at me and aggressively shouts ‘liar’. I’d had an entire morning already of people playing tricks on me. At the hot water & egg shop they had apparently run out of plastic bags, and the young woman staffer there tried to give me an old transparent bag that had a sweet bread filled with yellow cream in it. At the internet place before that there was a whole thing where one of the regulars was pretending to be a young boy with an attitude problem. I was woken up this morning by a motorbike driveby with someone shouting ‘boy!’ at me. On the way to the internet place the butch woman that sits on the motorbike to distract me, was there sitting on her motorbike, and the lights on the entire street were turned off, and guess what, yet again a very large piece of sliced fruit had been placed in a way that you could quite easily step on and lead to a serious injury, and wouldn’t you know it but just before I passed it, a man wearing all white casually rounded the corner up ahead slowly on a bicycle, which would very easily lead you to get up into the pavement and step into said fruit. Luckily I had seen it ahead of time. But it was distraction after distraction after distraction. Anyway all this, and there was a boat load more, to say that by the time I passed the bloke outside the school I was past caring about any of this shit, and had decided that I just wasn’t going to let all this bull crap ruin my day. Already in the hot water shop, I had wished the staffer girl a merry Christmas when she put on Christmas music, even though she was likely blocking plastic bags. Luckily I had my own plastic bag. So when I passed the ‘liar’ bloke I just said ‘good luck to you mate’. Of course in retrospect perhaps not the wisest thing to say to a strange bloke outside a primary school, but I was just thinking maybe he was having a bad day and that’s why he was shouting ‘liar’ at people. Just genuinely was wishing him well. Anyway, yet another anyway, skip forward about an hour and I’m listening to a comedy podcast, the end of one I’ve been listening to for the past 2 days. It ends with one of the comedians shouting ‘sex with children!’, or something similar, pretty clearly just a roudy joke intended to shock, but gee what are the chances eh, oh yeah and guess what guess what, his name was Mark and the host comedy’s chastises him for ‘ruining everything’. Gee world what are the chances? Blaming everything on me much? Come on world you aren’t fooling anyone. Oh and the universe in all it’s wisdom had squeezed in yet another synchronicity when I woke up this morning I thought to myself, I might have even said it out loud, I bet they are going to start playing fucking Christmas music today since it’s beginning of December. It’s amazing I haven’t been mutilated yet today. But it will happen. Worldo is clearly angry while pretending not to be angry, and blaming everything on me. I’m exhausted already. Why do you insist on me carrying the entire universe world?

Bear in mind I’m not spending anytime to make these prose sound good, the world around me is way too chaotic for that, it’s stream of consciousness.

The good news is that I just managed to finish, test and deploy the item hash links feature on the website. The past 48 hours have been quite narly, lots of very niggly bugs that were very difficult to troubleshoot, and the world was doing it’s favorite thing where it somehow throws at me all sorts of strange similarly shaped real world problems.

Anyway, it was super nice to move the feature to done. #

cat << EOF > Finished the item hash link feature

A quick post to celebrate a small win. It’s been an uphill struggle for this feature on the website for many weeks at this point. I realised a couple of months back that with the new everything main page, which shows all post types interleaved, that it was in some cases really difficult to figure out where the end of a post and the beginning of the next post was.

This was particularly obvious when a notes post followed a blog post, or a newsletter post. At the time I was up against running out of build minutes, so I implemented a temporary workaround. The workaround, which was to have post delimiters was functional, but it was also kind of geek cool, because the delimiters were inspired by bash heredocs.

The longer term solution though was to ensure that all posts had a hash link at the end. Notes and link items already had these, but blog, newsletter and podcast posts didn’t. But I could see that it would likely involve quite a lot of work since it required changes in all the plugins, hence the workaround. I had initially planned to add the hash link outside the plugin components, but that turned out to be essentially impossible using current HTML and CSS. I wasted quite a lot of time fuguring that out.

The second attempt was a simpler solution. Instead of adding the hash link outside the plugin, just generate the url for the hash link and pass that into the plugin. The plugins are basically serverside template components, and these then are responsible for using the url to create a hash link. At least the url generation logic is all in one place, rather than done differently in each plugin.

Well I got the feature working earlier. It was a really tough one to get right. I ran out of build minutes twice, which is why it took so long. But on the flip side, I had the workaround in place, and managed to get it all done with zero downtime on the production site.

The end result is really minimal. Basically it’s just a hash link which looks like # but with a link to the individual post. Every post now has one of these. I also managed to keep the heredocs workaround in place as I turned it into a feature that can be turned on and off easily. I’ll likely test that over the next few days.

All that to say it’s now easy to see where posts start and end via the hash link. A small but very important feature. Glad it’s done. #