1. About three months ago I stopped eating bread completely, cut way back on pastas, rice, chips etc as well. I've lost almost 15 pounds.

2. For the past month I've been doing 30-40 push-ups each morning. I'm looking more fit as a result. It's so simple.

3. I'm traveling a ton this month. Way too much.

4. We received a lot of attention from our NPR interview. Went well I think. You can hear it here:

Hope all of you are doing well!

Made another two shirts, here's my first long-sleeved one. I think my current fashion vibe can be more or less summed up as "the nursery 'snuggle fabric' section of Joann's Fabrics". I think this is the best put-together shirt I've made so far (figured out sleeves!), and I have plans to make a Twin Peaks themed long-sleeve for Halloween.

I'm moving to Chicago tomorrow.

I finally finished recording yesterday. I'm planning to have this album mixed over the next two weeks or so, sending it to someone else to master it, and putting it out at roughly my birthday (election day, nov. 8th). I am really happy with the way it is shaping up, even though it is all over the place genre-wise. I think I would classify it as "mathy freak-folk" right now, do with that what you will.

My company was just acquired.

It looks like a really good deal for us... we are already a leader in what we do, and now we have the backing of an incredibly strong $45bn international company, to help us bring our products world-wide.

As is my tendency, I drank all the Kool-Aid they handed me, and I'm feeling positive about the future. (Some of my co-workers? Not so much.)

But I'm also looking 4-5 years out, and the distinct possibility that I could live overseas again, if my role continues to grow and I have the opportunity to eventually transfer to another division of the company... and that's really exciting!

So yeah... gotta somehow keep focus on the little things that currently cover my desk, and not get distracted by the new Big Picture...

Everything must be measured. Food. Water. Weight. Sodium intake, serum sodium levels, potassium intake, serum potassium levels, calcium intake, serum calcium levels, bi-daily symptom inventories and ADL-based quality of life surveys.

I'm all in favor of the quantified self but this is just out of hand.

Been eating mostly like a rabbit to recalibrate my taste buds to a lower sodium diet. Whenever I'm free to eat as I please, a salad always sounds like a good idea, but when my options are limited I come to resent them.

Meditation last night was... Different somehow. I've been in a rut for a long time now with regard to my practice and last night felt like a return to the first time I touched on the phenomenon of 'watching the watcher' that's so commonly described in Buddhist and Daoist practice. I am now familiar with this, but there was an unfamiliarity to last night that felt like what I might loosely term 'progress.'

Short version - I reaffirmed that I don't want to be an asshole to myself constantly. When I am being an asshole to myself, it is a reaction to a feeling of utter scarcity. 'There isn't enough, and the weak will go without. There is never enough, and the weak will go without. You are weak, you will go without' It isn't who or what I am, or what I believe. Meditation has to one degree or another showed me that I am not the angry, judgemental, disappointed thoughts that sometimes (Often) occupy my brain. It's not a solution, but it's a start.

News on my brother:

First of all: biopsy results are back. It's benign! Chemotherapy will be fully determined while my brother recovers after the biopsy. In the meantime doctors will do additional tests on the sample.

Biopsy went not without complications. I'm not even close to understanding everything that my mother and uncle told me, but here's what I gathered:

- There was a problem with CSF pressure soon after the surgeons inserted most of the instruments for biopsy.

- Soon after they got their sample my brother's blood pressure started to spike. Because of that, surgery took almost twice as long as it was planned.

Truth be told, compared to other possible complications (list contained things like "we will puncture what isolates possible cancer from the rest of the body and release it" and "brain stem damage") it sounds like nothing. It isn't, but it would be the understatement of the year if I were to say "it could have been worse".

I will keep you updated. Big thank you for your support and kind words! :)

Update on me:

I met with my new adviser/guide with whom I will be assisting in research. While not the superconductor guru that I've mentioned last time… it's actually even better. The bulk of his research is in the homotopy theory and dualities that I have picked up after lm showed me the ropes during one of our discussions at IRC.

Another person I met is my successor who will work with my former adviser. Truth be told I don't know if she's that smart or it was me who didn't do much for the past year, but after barely four hours I got her up to speed with all of the fruits of my research projects. I feel really disturbed while talking to her for some reason.

Other than that, I have realised one of the problems with getting stipends. It's talking to people from finances! Two hours of being talked to like I'm autistic for getting GPA-based scholarship on maths and physics… :/

Oh, and I have picked up fencing for my physical activity block. Costs quite a bit, but I have always wanted to try it out and after today's practice I would be a filthy liar if I would say anything other than "it was so friggin' cool!". :D

Yesterday

1:30am: Maybe I should just go to the ER. Why does my abdomen feel like it's tearing myself apart. A lot of spasms or gas movement, pain, and what I can best describe as something halfway between a knot and a hole slightly below my belly-button. Packed a backpack with books and other things just in case.

2:30am: Why is Dan awake? Maybe I'll talk to Dan, that might help. Turns out he's in Frankfurt and it was 11:30am there.

3:00am: Finally fall asleep.

12:00pm: Wake up. Welp. Guess I'm taking the whole day off instead of the half day. Felt like I hadn't slept at all.

1:45pm: Get to the doctor for the scheduled appointment. 15 minutes later "I don't know what's wrong with you right now, there are a lot of symptoms and if gets worse, go to the ER". Blood and urine samples provided, CAT Scan and Stress Test in the process of being scheduled.

2:20pm: Rear-end a car on the way home due to the mental and physical exhaustion from not sleeping the past few nights. Fortunately there was no damage and everybody was okay and able to drive off just okay.

5:20pm: Physical Therapy time. Light day, two steps forward one step back. This is the one step back part of it, severe pain and lack of movement that woke me up a few nights in a row. Self-described as being an eight on the pain scale and on-and-off pain/tightness during the day. No impression that it's structural damage.

11:30pm: Actually fell asleep without too much difficulty or anxiety. Maybe it's the exhaustion.

I have on my phone now not one, but two sets of photos of lizards. One is a skink and the other I can't figure out what it is (it might be a juvenile, so it's adult colors haven't set in). Seeing as how those guys tend to be elusive, skittish, and fast as hell, I'm pretty proud of that. Overall, this has been a pretty decent year for nature around the yard and I've seen quite a few cool things at the local parks too. If next year is even half as good, I'll be happy.

Luke Cage is alright. I'm only two and a half episodes in, but I'm liking it more than Jessica Jones. That said, I hear they've started shooting the new Punisher show, so I'm kind of looking forward to that.

Im buying a used car. Its a ginormous pain in the ass. Because Im not following conventional routes and trying to eliminate the middle man.

Im cheap and I think 10-20% dealer markup is too much so I'm trying to get prices to the point where I can get the car at or slightly above auction price and that is very difficult. The dealer profit is equal to 6 months of ownership or 2+ weeks of work for me so its hard to part with that much money for the "service".

The first problem Im tackling is trying to figure out what the wholesale price for a RX350 is. This should be theoretically easy because the market reference price is published by a company called Mahneim that does all the dealer auctions as MMR (which I think means middle market reference). Unfortunately they are a sort of Monopoly that only makes this data available to dealers so I need to find someone that had access and pay them to pull the numbers for me. I cant really build that kind of data up on my own because I have no idea what cars actually sell for and the Craigslist volume is too low (with too many variables miles, year,condition,features). Ive been told that even with that data handy I will have no luck negotiating a price close to this value. Perhaps this is true but I don't really see why there would be any cars at Auction then, as there is clearly costs to take a car to auction so why not just sell it to me for slightly above that... Im told that that dealers wont go that low, but some of these transactions have to come out at cost or bellow because otherwise the auction market wouldn't really exist.

The secondary possibly even more difficult problem is having someone act as my proxy to bid on the vehicles. That makes for some possibly complicated financial transactions and escrow services. Assuming that I can even get to this point. I cant even get though the first gate. I have some leads but so far no bites.

The alternative is Craigslist... Not a bad alternative but volume sucks and sellers are retarded when it comes to pricing (not in a good way). Lots of people want more then the dealer advertised price... because Magic... Or stupid, and even better form of magic. Also dealing with peoples financing payoff and associated escrow problems is just as bad as dealing with the auction escrow paperwork.

From all this I did get a bit of interesting bits of insight thats worth sharing:

The best advertised prices seem to be at Off brand dealers : eg. Buying a lexus? Look at the BMW or Mercedes dealers.

The dealers with the best advertised price are also least likely to move on price, so when negotiating is smart to call the guys with the high prices and use the low advertised prices to try and push them down.

If anyone has a buddy that has access to the Manheim auction data let me know. I'll pay to pull some data for me for Pacific Northwest Lexus RX 350s. If they want to be my proxy bidder I would also pay for that service as well.

I'm still learning Greek, which is cool. Not really literate yet, but it's getting better!

I plan on writing more about this at a later date, but I'm finding some interesting things. I'm learning more about what the Bible really says, although this is less a matter of issues with translation as it is actually reading parts of it for the first time. I look forward to being able to really sit down and read it. When people talk about an elegant mathematical formula or scientific theory, that's how a good Greek sentence feels to me.

I'm taking it easy this week. We had a kung fu seminar last weekend (Thursday-Saturday) on the luk dim poon kwan, Ving Tsun's equivalent of a staff. Problem is these things are about twice the diameter of the typical "bo" staff, and about 8-9 feet long. So they are heavy, which means a lot of conditioning is required. About 15 hours of that over three days is a lot, and I was feeling stairs through yesterday. So much fun!

Writing some more, and I have some vague ideas floating around in my head of things that I want to say. One day I plan on doing fiction too! I'm still trying to draw when I have a chance as well, but it's a lower priority than Greek and I just haven't had a chance to devote much time to it the last couple weeks.

On the more prosaic side, lots of playing Banished and let's plays on YouTube.

I shaved my face!

note: I don't work for Foley

The start of October marked four years at my job, and I figure I've got to stay at least one more or else I won't be vested in the pension. I'm starting to think about trying to put together a small rpg. I'm mucking about with the `play-clj` framework a tiny bit, and learning pixel art. All of the old hands I know are telling me to GTFO, but they also own houeses...

I'm not sure how I feel about that. Programming is interesting to me in the abstract, but doesn't really do it for me. That said, neither does logistics. But the later has insane job security (short term, I don't think any job does long term thanks to automation) and benefits. And part-time hours. 40 hour work weeks sound depressing as fuck to me.

We've gone through almost an entire 50lb bag of flour since I started my sourdough starter at the end of August.

I stalled out on reading "Capital" for the moment.

I /really/ want to GTFO of JOCO kansas once this lease is up. We shall see. I'm still burnt out on moving. It'll probably depend on what the offer is on the renewed lease.

The guy running to be my state senator is a coworker. Which is cool, and I'm voting for him, but, goddamn. Dude keeps posting to the work facebook group asking when start time is. I get that he is busy, but it seems like a bit of a red flag that he can't keep track of that.

Skipping out of class early to head to Baltimore on an all-night Megabus. Wish me luck!

Slowly learning that I'm not special, especially in regards to other people and relationships. My ego is resisting.

Aiming to date soon. Still looking for a person to invite out.

My laptop broke a week ago. Today I found out that I've lost about a year of material: all the music, the programming and writing projects, a year+ worth of uni material and all the rest of the good stuff, - due to SSD's failure. Replacing it with the HDD that the laptop held prior, with hopes to scrape enough to buy a new SSD in a couple of months. Backups are to become mandatory weekly.

Prepped for Hurricane Matthew, but now the 'rents need help too. At least they are 15 miles west from uni, so that's a plus. Need to be in-doors and secure at 5 PM latest. There's one of two roommates staying at the apartment. Thankfully, I already went shopping and whatnot and sandbags are in place. Left most supplies for him in case he needs them. Surprised he's staying, to be honest, though he has a car so he's no sitting duck. Kinda a pain that my 'rents hadn't fully prepared by the day of landfall, but I guess adulting needed tending to. Oh well, see ya on the other side hubs.

Been working on a videogame. I had 'finished' it like a year ago after I realized I've started like a dozen big projects and finished exactly 0 and gave myself an arbitrary deadline. I was never happy with how it turned out and I've gone back to the old grind of wildly increasing the scope until it becomes unfinishable again. Just 'finished' adding a Shepard tone generator so that the you-just-got-a-point chimes can sound like theyre increasing forever. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3zgopc5XYLaSTc2LVZmZUdXVTQ It plays too many sounds for the game to handle if youre too fast at getting points though so at some point I'm going to have to fix that. I'm also geting close to done with my website idea, rifflist.org, (right now at http://www.spentronics.heliohost.org ) but learning how on earth php/sql works isnt nearly as fun as screwing around with 'ding' sound effects.

It's also Inktober, so here are my bests this week:

Projects

I always have to many ongoing projects to make steady progress on any of them. I'm in the middle of setting up a backup server with a raspberry-pi with rsnapshot. My goal is a completely automatic, wife-friendly backup system. I'm 90% done; only a couple windows 10 kinks to sort out.

I've also started working again on a dormant coding project I started to teach myself about machine learning. I've been interested in it ever since I read a Martin Gardner book in middle-school that had an explanation of a simple reinforcement-leaning idea. My purpose is to teach myself about ML, not solve a particular problem, so I am teaching as many ML algorithms as I can understand to play tic-tac-toe.

And the third, and highest priority project I'm about to start is to sand, stain, finish, and re-cushion four discarded dining room chairs we found last week.