The sad truth of the matter is, you don’t matter. I don’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, our lives are meaningless.

Now if that isn’t the most fucking depressing start to a blog post that anyone has ever written, then I don’t know what is. But I do have a point, but I need to talk about some personal stuff to make it.

The health of my family has been on my mind a lot lately. My brother is suffering from kidney failure, my mom’s health is declining, my dad is up there in age. Nobody lives forever. I, myself, will turn 41 years old in March. With the way I take care of myself, I’m probably well over half way through my life. Granted, I can’t know that for sure. I may croak tomorrow or I might live another 60 years.

My lack of blogging recently has bothered me. Part of it was that I was a little burnt out. I just had very little to talk about. But there was something else. Around that same time Umami decided to go to version 3.0. For those of you who don’t know, Umami is a Google Analytics alternative that is self hostable and privacy focused. The problem is, the new update is garbage. The new UI is unintuitive an requires more work to get around to stats you’d like to see.

Yes, this is late. It has been a busy few days.

Work

Wait. Work? Yeah, kinda. I got a call back a few days ago, and now have an interview scheduled for January. I received another call back today, but no interview with that one yet, they had some questions about the C/V.

I’m honestly surprised about both of these given the time of year and how shit the economy is.

I was so close, y’all. I promised myself that I would blog every day from mid-September to the end of the year. But I’ve failed. I wanted to write yesterday, but I had nothing to write about. Same with today. It’s not like I have no ideas, but nothing that I’m motivated to actually take up.

I’ve learned a few things during this process. First, forcing it is a bad idea. Most times I did fine, but there were several times where I just did not want to blog but forced one out anyway. It never felt good nor did those blog posts turn out well.

Normally, it takes until about the middle of February for me to get sick of Winter. Usually, in mid-December we still see some 40 degree days. Almost never are we under 20 degrees. This year, we’ve seen -8 Degrees (these are all in Fahrenheit). More than once. It has been effin’ cold. And we have a ton of snow on the ground. In some places near me, we’ve already had 50 inches of snow, which is damn near unheard of here in the lower peninsula. The UP, sure. Those backwoods mofos are used to this kind of shit. Down here, we’re basically Florida.

Another week gone past. The year is almost over. How’d that happen?

Programming

This week was focused on Checkbox. It is very slow going. I’ve spent basically the entire week on native language scheduling. First, I tried an existing crate that someone else developed that looks for date creation. I thought that would do well enough, but the issue is that I will end up having to account for every permutation of a date that exists. That is a ton of work, and obviously opens up problems with those expressions that I didn’t hard code into the app.

I use FreshRSS to manage all of my RSS feeds. It is wonderful. Maybe the best thing I use on a daily basis. I adore being able to use the internet in this way, for many reasons. I’ve talked about my eternal love of RSS before, so I don’t need to get all gushy over it here. But damn is it good.

But I have a problem. Back in August, I participated in Blaugust 2025 along with a couple hundred of my fellow bloggers. My silly ass decided to subscribe to every single participant’s RSS feed. Now, I’ve spent months weeding them out to just those that I’m actually interested in. But I’ve found a ton of new content thanks to that mass subscribe.