Excess Morning (with excess rainbow)

Excess Steps

Excess oats and golden syrup.

Excess Love

The problem of attaching your ego to Google Analytics and other metrics is that at any moment or month the opaque workings of tech giants can flip on you and ruin your mood.

Maybe my Android phone is always listening to me, because it feels like every time I warn someone that building successful websites is completely dependent on Google algorithms, those algorithms then result in bad news.

After solid and then incredible growth last year, autumn has seen falling visitors, revenue and search rankings for a site that I've only been enhancing.

Maybe it's because I disabled the obnoxious auto ads that Google is punishing me.

The only other issue I can see is that my LCP timing for mobile is averaging 5 seconds.

To try and address the latter, I spent the weekend optimising the front end and back end to try and increase the speeds. I didn't learn a lot about React, because I got AI to refactor that with some lazy and suspense commands.

Memcached is cool, because it's triggered by a visit to a resource, and then it stays in memory of a little while, making it faster and easier to recall again.

It made me realise that a lot of my memories of life are about things I journaled about, or took a photo of, and are therefore cached. Unlike MySQL, human memories deteriorate over time and you can't export them, so using forms of cache is super helpful for tethering your existence to reality like a trail of breadcrumbs through space time.

Here's some things I want to cache from this exercise:

• Turning on compression in CPanel really helped the speed and download size
  
• Pre-Caching a bunch of stuff by making fetch requests to the controller instead of just loading the content through a SQL query is inefficient, but saved me a lot of development time.
  
• I probably should have learnt a server-side rendered framework first instead of using React with a PHP back end. Oh well.
  
• After doing all the work on the weekend, I realised on Tuesday that I could actually radically improve performance by reducing a chain of dependent API calls and instead do a location lookup inside the event look up. Fuck me for trying to implement a RESTful architecture, right?
  
• I do so much IT during my work times, and yet I spent a sunny autumn Sunday implementing memcached. However, the same amount of time could have been used to watch a couple of football games and a movie. I didn't do that, I rarely do that anymore. I just enjoy solving problems with technology. And I really want to beat Google at their ruin-my-mood challenge.
  
• Breath of the Wild doesn't hold your hand much. Either that or I'm missing some tutorial somewhere. So when I did take a short break and played it, I had an amazing ah-hah moment when I realised that I could knock down trees with bombs and use the fallen trunk to cross a chasm and reach a shrine. As gaming goes, it was a really rewarding experience and much better than the adrenaline filled checklist ticking exercise that AoE2 build order into resign was back when that was my game of choice. It also has dynamic time of day and when I knocked the tree down it was sunset and so quite a picturesque moment of triumph. I am caching that memory for sure.
  

I went to a concert tonight to see an old (relative) man sing old songs for me, who is also becoming an old man. I brought ear plugs and wore fingerless gloves and comfortable shoes.

I enjoyed the set, mostly the old songs. At one point, probably during a new song, I had to mentally check to see if I had attended a live concert since I turned 30. The answer I think is basically just Jebediah at Schützenfest in 2016. It seems hard to believe I spent so much of my twenties attending live music and then completely stopped.

I did not stand in front of anyone. I didn't buy a t-shirt for causal Friday. I did enjoy the bass and the drums and the nostalgia.

Coming home from holidays
always curdles me with nostalgia,
and the end of daylight savings is also
a sure-fire reminder of my own mortality.
I'm not sure why I thought
it was a good idea
to combine the two...

Victor Harbor shares the nickname of God's Waiting Room with all the other retirement communities around the world adjacent to uncreative humourists. It's also got a few nice places to walk and is in close proximity to a good bakery. When I planned the weekend away with Vanessa and Nash a couple of months back I hadn't expected it to be much different to previous Nash holidays where Nash excitedly follows us up and down hills and through waves and then has a huge snooze while I drink a beer and then backs it up when the light is good for photography again.

Nash has been a bit limpy lately, but only when she gets up from lying on hard tiles ignoring the bed only metres away. I'd dismissed this as possibly mild arthritis coupled by her pretending to be a pretzel on our rock hard floors. Yes she is a decade old now, and her face is going a bit whiter around the edges, but I have never doubted that Nash wouldn't be a huge jerk slash adorable body of fluff for years to come. She's a mix breed, full of energy and sass, and I pay loads for high quality dog food for her.

The limping has become a bit worse over the last week and a half. I limp sometimes too, and I get over it, so I am hoping that's the case for Nash too. I can't help noticing how much older she looks when her limp affects her walking. The age seeps out of her. She looks so confused because the last time she looked in a mirror she was a chunky, golden, zooming, unstoppable beast. That's how I remember her too.

Nash had a great day today. She cruised country roads smelling cow pats, then climbed to the top of the bluff, then took a break for coffee. After coffee she walked to the rock pools out past Petrel Cove and over hills of granite. She's been there before and she loves it, teasing the waves and submerging herself in the rock pools and then zooming across the sand.

It was a real challenge to get her all the way there. Her legs, or her spirit, gave up on her. She enjoyed herself immensely once she arrived, and the destination of the car was motivation to complete the walk back, but while I watched her having fun at the beach I really couldn't stop myself from thinking that this was the last time she'd ever visit this place and have this experience. That was tolerable in the moment. I could handle these feelings while it meant Nash got to have a good time.
It was during the walk back, watching her trot with noticeable preference for one side, that I had to stop myself from hyperventilating. It's not the last visit to the beach for a dog that depresses me, it's the walk back to the car afterwards.

Nash is not dead and I think she will continue to rock out for a couple more years yet at least, but today was another gruesome reminder that life is cruel and that all of the awesome things about dogs risk being cancelled out by their far too short lifespans. I aim to keep her in God's Waiting Room for as long as possible - and by that I mean splashing in rock pools by The Bluff, not suffering for my benefit - until the time has to come. And then, good luck God because you have never met a dog like Nash.