Got another weminder2 development demo video to show you.
In this one, I show what inviting another user looks like, and how you know when you’ve got an invite waiting for you.
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So I’ve been hard at work on weminder2, the better, bigger, faster, stronger update to my behavior chart app. And today, I got something big working.
This is the process by which you invite someone to a chart, and they, without having to have an account, can securely say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
I’m really proud of it.
some code!
Not the kind you’re thinking of.
I’m talking about the Document Object Model, or DOM.
I’m in the process of rewriting and vastly improving my behavior chart app, weminder. And one of the technologies in my stack is React, and its accompanying support library, react-router-dom. Because of other technologies in my stack, I’m currently using version 5 of r-r-d.
So a day or so ago, I was working on the part of the code where one user invites another to participate in a chart, and my helpful AI assistant, who I call Riley, suggested I do a particular technical something, using a particular feature of r-r-d that comes in version 6.
But I don’t use version 6.
So it suggested I upgrade. Which after some wrestling with indecision I decided to do.
This, as it turns out, was a Very Bad Choice™. Why? Because of that OTHER part of my stack, the Ionic Framework. I got halfway through the upgrade, and things were just not going well. So I consulted ANOTHER AI, the support bot over at the Ionic discord, which told me that they explicitly use react-router-dom version 5 and have no plans to upgrade at this time.
Oy.
So now I’m walking it back.
These are the kinds of hoops you jump through when you’re developing an app, and you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re responsible for the whole thing, soup-to-nuts.
But at least I get to vent about it here.
So I got to go on the Off The Cuffs Podcast about a month ago, and the episode just dropped. It was a blast. Dick, Max, and Gwen are fun, awesome folks who really do an amazing job.
I really appreciated the chance to go on. Both Dick and Max had special sauce that mixed well with my own. Max himself is an ageplayer, and Dick has a thing for behavior charts.
These are my people!
We had this fun, filthy, very thinky conversation about ageplay, about discipline, and about WeMinder. I really dig their podcast. I only discovered it myself a few months ago, but I love it enough that I decided to join their Patreon, too.
One of my favorite things about OTC is that they treat ageplay as a first-class citizen. We get to sit at the table with the big folks or something, just like any other fetish. They’re very matter of fact about it, in a way that’s super refreshing.
“Pottybot”
It seems I’m on a theme here. Because this post is about the intersection of mindfulness and… cat poop. It’s not the first time I’ve spoken of this, either.
So this would be my, er, “number two” post on the subject.
So this morning I woke up rather grumpy. I’ve just got a few heavy things on my mind.
First, of course, is that our piece-of-shit President has eight days left in office. He’s done a laundry list of terrible, immoral, illegal, unethical things for which he needs to be held accountable.
And yet, a number of GOP folks won’t. And yet, a whole lot of my fellow citizens don’t see it that way.
Which makes me despondent, and grumpy.
Then there’s tomorrow. Tomorrow is not just the day the Democrats will impeach him again. It’s also my fiftieth birthday. I am weirdly conflicted about this. On the one hand, it’s a milestone to have a fiftieth birthday. On the other, it’s just another day. I know what I wanted to do for my fiftieth birthday. I wanted to be spending it in Florida, at a paramotoring school, and lift off into the air to celebrate. The pandemic, and other life circumstances made that just not possible.
It’s okay.
I am going to do that. It’s not an IF, it’s a WHEN.
Okay, so what’s this all got to do with cat poop. So that death-star-looking-thing by my stairs, that’s my cats’ robotic litter box (seriously), “Pottybot.” (That’s the box’s name, technically speaking it’s a Litter-Robot 3 Connect.).
Well, I’m downstairs, feeding the cats and the fish and myself breakfast. I get the fish fed, get the cats fed, and then good ol’ Pottybot messages me (because, as I said, it’s a robot) that its drawer is full.
Joy.
I immediately stop the process of putting together a bowl of cereal, blueberries, and milk for myself, and go empty the drawer. Which really, is no big deal. It’s an incredibly fast process that is made as pleasant as possible for you by the machine. You open the drawer, draw up the sides of the plastic bag liner, twist the bag shut, knot it. Then you shake open a new liner, pull the edges of it over the four retaining hooks in the drawer to keep it open and taut, and replace the drawer.
It’s like a 4 minute thing, end-to-end. But here’s the thing: when it’s time to do it, it is 100%, no fucking around, time to do it. Leaving the drawer in a full state is what Colonel Joe Bishop in the Expeditionary Force books would call a November Golf, a no-go. The potential cat-poop-calamity that would likely ensue for not doing it is… horrible.
I was glad to do it. Not at first, yeah. But really once I had embraced the necessity of doing it, I was just fine, happy even.
That was when I found my zen. The taoist concept I’m tip-toeing around here, albeit with a gross example, is called wu-wei, the “action of inaction.” It’s the principle of doing only that which you must.
Which really has two sides to it.
First, there’s the not-doing-needless-things-part. Like, my being grumpy about Trump isn’t going to make tomorrow’s impeachment get here any faster. It isn’t going to change that some people are just not good people. It isn’t going to magically rewrite time to make me be in Florida right now, kiting a Paramotor.
But second, there’s the do what you must part. All that expectation-holding-nonsense gets in the way of meeting necessity. When Pottybot told me what I needed to do, it felt really, really good to be able to see that it was vital, and just go take care of it.
After I got Pottybot all taken care of, I washed my hands and made myself that breakfast, and sat mulling all this over. I realized I needed to write this post. And then, while I was doing so, Yang got in the box, and did what cats do in their litterboxes. And then Pottybot took care of it, without a problem. All three of us, just doing what’s necessary.