15:09 Thu Feb 25 2016

Suspicions arise

It just got quiet. Jeff usually doesn’t just stop talking in the middle of a sentence, does he? Let’s give him some time to gather his thoughts.

Ok yeah he’s not talking anymore. Somebody is probably gonna say “looks like we lost Jeff”.

…Hm. Is it my turn to do that?

15:19 Thu Feb 25 2016

I am the problem

Resetting router. Grumble grumble, I was in the flow, just barely tuned into that meeting.

15:21 Thu Feb 25 2016

Comcast is the problem

Modem is blinking angrily. I should’ve practiced that morse code game more. Now would be a great time to refresh some of those skills…

Comcast’s website confirms an outage, optimistically guesses they’ll have it fixed by 7pm.

15:24 Thu Feb 25 2016

Too cheap to tether

My phone can become a hotspot, but eff that noise I gobble up GBs like it’s my job. (It kinda is my job.) Eh, it’s already 3:30, day’s almost done. Suppose I’ll just clock out.

15:25 Thu Feb 25 2016

Questioning my core values

Technically, I can write code without the internet. I shouldn’t need to look up any documentation or use stackoverflow for this ticket.

But how the hell am I supposed to focus without any music? Wait why do I think that you can’t have music without the internet?

Oh yeah, because I’m a fucking millenial and OBVIOUSLY media should always be streamed. What Kind of neanderthal would store media locally? Spotify til I die. Even my radio comes via the internet.

I might actually die pretty soon here.

15:31 Thu Feb 25 2016

REDEMPTION

I actually have 39.04 GB of music on this computer. I’ve been carrying that collection around since high school. Let’s see what we’ve got here…

15:31 Thu Feb 25 2016

Now playing: 1 2 Step - Ciara

God damn it, Lewis.

CHEAT 1: I had to look up this reference to Andy Weir's "The Martian" on my 
phone.

How much is my wit my own? Am I clever at all, or am I just a proficient Googler? Shit just got real over here.

16:00 Thu Feb 25 2016

Better Than Ezra is criminally underrated

Haven’t even been offline for an hour yet, and already the revelations are stacking up. Fully expecting to reach a higher form of awareness by 7pm.

16:15 Thu Feb 25 2016

Strike one

Made it an hour trying to be productive on my computer without getting an error message. Then I got tired of writing this log without proper Markdown syntax highlighting.

CHEAT 2: "mac screenshot single window"

CHEAT 3: "jekyll include image"

no-package

CHEAT 4: "imagemagick resize png"

Tensions are rising.

CHEAT 5: "markdown image width"

CHEAT 6: "css image width"

Damn. I don’t know anything.

On another note, can we talk about how banging Slumdog Millionaire’s soundtrack was? Hot damn ���

CHEAT 7: "emoji in sublime text"

🔥 There it is.

16:40 Thu Feb 25 2016

(notsureif)

I’m using Google Fonts for this blog right now. I’m connected to my WiFi network, which currently has no connection to the Internet, and debugging the above (incredibly basic) issue of putting an image in a blog post.

Chrome renders nothing until the requests to fonts.googleapis.com fail. Then it renders with the fallback fonts.

chrome-while-offline

If I turn off WiFi, we get straight to the point: my blog is ugly now.

Some thoughts:

  • I’m probably doing something wrong, making the site block until those assets can download. Will wait to debug until such time as I don’t feel obligated to self-report my Googling.
  • Going to assume that I’m the only one viewing my web site without an internet connection and continue ignoring how awful things look without those fonts.
  • But what about the poor souls with bad internet connections? Do they wander the rest of the internet with 20s page load times because assholes like me need pretty letters?
  • I now have an intuitive understanding of why it’s good to “fail fast”.
  • Pretty sure A R Rahman ripped Dreams On Fire from the Dark Cloud 2 OST. I have no problem with that.

17:10 Thu Feb 25 2016

Call it a day

For an hour and a half, I tried to work from home without Internet access.

OK maybe I “tried”, but the point is I am generally a competent developer, capable of managing my own time for 2 hours without fucking around too much. But, without the Internet, I couldn’t even write 120 lines of a blog without trying to get help from the outside world. What’s more upsetting, I couldn’t convince myself to focus on the offline task at hand.

Between you and me, most of the time between these updates was spent trying to write these updates. I was working hard on figuring out some seriously basic shit.

Is this a problem? Or am I worrying too much about something everybody does?

I’ve answered Stack Overflow questions. Those people really had no idea what they were doing. I suspect they were just learning and doing side projects. Should I feel good that I knew the answers to their questions, yet I have my own questions throughout every day of my actual job? I apparently can’t get through a single commit without trying to phone a friend.

Maybe this is the norm. Maybe I’m exaggerating for the sake of this narrative. Either way, I really got nothing done this evening.

And I tried, folks. I tried.