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The story is told of the young man who comes back home after meeting a prospective match. His mother asks him, “How was she?”. The young man answers, “She wasn’t so pretty, but that didn’t bother me. And she didn’t have the most fine character, but that also didn’t bother me. She doesn’t come from such a good family, but that didn’t bother me…” And he continued down a long list of things which didn’t bother him about the young woman he had gone to meet. Finally, his mother cuts him off, and asks, “Why did none of that bother you??” ...

Slowly migrating my father’s blog from blogspot to github pages.

We want our homes to be safe. Many people suffice with a heavy door and a strong lock. But it isn’t always enough to fortify our homes. In our increasingly volatile world, it is wise to strengthen our selves, with firearms and the like. But even the most ardent believers in the importance of self defense don’t recommend removing your front door. The internet is good, bad, everywhere, and forever. Most people recognize the importance of restricting access to dangerous content on devices, even if they can’t be bothered to do anything about it. It is a challenge to set up filters on all of our family’s myriad devices, and there are often monthly fees attached. It has the potential to get confrontational, and even after all of that, it’s only for devices we know about. ...

A dozen times a day I say your name is great And holy I see their faces. The world is as you will I know you are the king So why Do I shake with their fear? Where is salvation Where is Messiah In our life And in the days Of all of your children Is your name so great? And still A dozen times a day I say your great name Is blessed For ever and ever And ever. Where is the praise The beauty and the splendor Thick stench Coarse hands A shattered world. Is your name still higher than every comfort? ...

My advice on putting up an industrial pipe shelving kit I’m not a professional or anything, so don’t take anything here too seriously. I just tried to write accurately what worked for me. Note that it’s technically possible to drill a hole in a live electric wire, which is dangerous, or a water pipe, which is messy. Be careful – if you’re going into a stud there isn’t much to worry about, but notice if something seems harder than it should (nice to check with an awl, but I haven’t done that) and quickly give up. Practically speaking, it’s not likely that you’ll hit something – a pipe and a stud can’t exist in the same space. If you’re using drywall anchors, don’t drill past the drywall. ...

Flutter web is coming. It promises excellent run time performance, smooth animations, elegant interface design -but at what cost? Flutter web is not production ready yet, so we have to cut it some slack, but looking at some basic demos show the main JS file weighing in at around 1MB, or 300KB gzipped. This isn’t totally unworkable, and we can expect some improvement by the time it hits production (for example, %40 of the JS file isn’t run and should be optimized out), but this still puts flutter at to upper end of web frameworks in terms of file size. And this is just a relatively small demo. ...

My two year old son was sad on the long drive home today. Very sad. Car sick, tired, miserable, alternating between tears and distraction to the sound of my barely coherent ramblings. We get home, and I unpack, and all the while inside the car he is the picture of misery. I take him out of the car, and he’s happy! He gets a bath, changed, a song in bed, and all the old suffering is gone, replaced by joy and security. ...

To my great consternation, route transition animations broke after upgrading the app – when going from one section to another, the old one was visible behind the new one until the transition was finished, and it looked terrible. I could not think what could be the problem. Then, out of the blue (well, after breaking my head on it for a while), it hit me – I didn’t have any material! (A bit of background – in the material design system, everything is based on material, which is inspired by how things work in the real world. ...

So – I finally finished rewriting all the low level code for my app, and I’m quite proud of it, actually. It was a big deal. And now it’s time for some UI stuff! I cranked up my trusty ol’ Visual Studio Code, opened up my flutter app code, some basic documentation, and started coding furiously. 💣 ⏳ 💥 After only a few minutes (really), I realized that I had no clue what I was doing. Which was a shocker – well, maybe not that much of a shocker, being that I had never learned what I was trying to do. But there was so much that I did know how to do! And I had just finished some Really Hard Stuff ™! Doesn’t that mean that everything I touch until the end of time will turn to gold? ...

Flutter Navigation Nested navigators, where there are tabs, and one or more tabs have their own navigation independent of the others, are a rite of passage which all flutter developers must go through. Navigation in flutter isn’t difficult per se, but it is something you have to wrap your head around. I found this article to be very helpful. I don’t know that I would recommend copy-pasta ing his precise methodology, but he brings a lot of the critical concepts out in stark relief in a small app.