I reached the end of the excellent Utopia Avenue today. It took me a few weeks. The story was an absorbing ride through the late 1960's, with fully fleshed characters and a real example of how good writing benefits from having multiple protagonists. The way they interact, when they all have their own motivations and back-stories really gives them character. As someone who has been paid to write words about music - something that is not worth doing! - I also appreciated his technical ability to bring sound to life through the written word.

I have been listening to a lot of music from the era as well, thanks to its countless name drops, to try and enrich the senses, but I don't have any inclination to go down a psychedelic rabbit hole so I am writing this now to remember reading about Dean, Griff, Jasper and Elf.

To bring this journal entry back to my own life, I listened to that audiobook this morning while mowing the lawn, pruning the vines and sweeping up half-pecked lilly-pilly berries from the backyard. Then I did some rehab, lat pulldowns and side planks.

The weather so far this May has been amazing, other than the creepy stat that it has barely rained since January. This morning's walk to the bakery with Nash was especially picturesque.

It was probably an "e", but when that turned out to not be the case I figured it was a "q". Alas it was ironically a "c", as in, I can't fucking C. Okay, I can see quite well and even the optometrist was overly enthusiastic about how excellent the blood vessels and pressure of my eyeballs was. Unfortunately time makes nerds of us all, and the year I turn forty will also be the year I get prescription glasses. To be used purely for computer work, late in the day...

Until now it was a good run. I beat so many eye exams in the past. I'd hoped that denial would get me through this one. All I really wanted was to get a pair of sunglasses for a discount thanks to the thousands of dollars a year I pay for health insurance. But you can't get the cheap sunglasses without doing the letter reading test and getting air puffed at your irises. And while I succeeded at the latter the aforementioned c tripped me up at the pointy end when the letters get smaller than anything I would need to read on a computer screen late at night. Alas.

After that I had to pick out a pair of glasses which was a wholly new experience for me and one that - as someone who had to google how to eat a fig in a toilet stall once - I would have liked some advanced warning for. Why does every pair of glasses make your eyes look so big? Something to tune for next time I guess.

I also got a pair of sunglasses for a discount. And I got my first chance in nearly 19 years since to make another IC joke. Ironic, given that it's years of internet computing that have probably done this number on my eyes.

In a sea of sunshine, a tail appears above the light like the dorsal fin of a fluffy shark.

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 that resource stays in memory for 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 Google?
  
• 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.