because adulthood is lonely

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#147 — Jan 13, 2026 by Evan Chen

Two hours of surfing r/Teachers later I think I might want to seriously consider moving out of the United States if the quality of education is as bad as people on Reddit are making it sound.


#146 — Jan 13, 2026 by Evan Chen

I somehow stumbled upon r/Teachers and it ruined my day. Man am I glad I get to teach a specialized group of students.


#145 — Jan 12, 2026 by Evan Chen

Whoa, Python 3.14 argparse has colors in help by default. That's nice!


#144 — Jan 10, 2026 by Evan Chen

You can tell how much I'm enjoying any given month by how many diary entries I have for that month.


#143 — Jan 6, 2026 by Evan Chen

Things always feel unnatural to me once there is enough money involved.


#142 — Jan 4, 2026 by Evan Chen

Oh I just saw the updated Christmas Clawd too, with asterisks for snowflakes. That's cute.


#141 — Jan 4, 2026 by Evan Chen

I think it's really cute how in Claude Code, the Clawd mascot makes > < eyes and runs away from the mouse cursor. Like petting a cat or something.


#140 — Jan 4, 2026 by Evan Chen

I swear my postegresql always needs a major version upgrade.


#139 — Jan 3, 2026 by Evan Chen

olypack#7 is the stuff of my nightmares. worst code outcome in a while.


#138 — Jan 2, 2026 by Evan Chen

Okay, to get this in writing, my New Year's resolution is to make my task management system actually say what I mean to do. That means:

  1. task next should show immediate next tasks, not a laundry list of things-to-do-at-some-point. Tasks that won't happen until tomorrow or later should be scheduled for future or someday.
  2. Daily routines should be completed in dijo, or marked with X if I need to skip a day.

If both things are done correctly, then as a corollary, my Google Calendar should show a schedule of things to be done in task ready and dijo (this is one of the daily routines in Dijo).

I feel a bit apprehensive because I never paid much heed to task management before, cf XKCD 874. But I also feel like my to-do lists have gotten so long I can no longer have them in my head. So I want to see if this helps me focus on a single task at a time while not having to spend headspace thinking about the other $n-1$. (Well, even if it doesn't, if it increases my dijo success rate it's still a win.)


#137 — Jan 2, 2026 by Evan Chen

imagine being so bad at code that you write unit tests that only fail at certain times of day. couldn't be me 😵‍💫


#136 — Jan 2, 2026 by Evan Chen

The stepmania packages on AUR are such a mess hahahaha. Anyway, starting out 2026 by pulling out the old dance mat (after a year of not playing due to breaking my ankle at the start of 2025). I've missed this game.


#135 — Jan 1, 2026 by Evan Chen

I feel like there's more and more of a tendency to do installations into ~/.local or Docker containers or similar, instead of /usr. I guess I can understand the rationale, but I do miss the times I felt like my package manager took care of everything.


#134 — Dec 31, 2025 by Evan Chen

I really don't have a concept of holiday. Woke up on New Year's Eve and went straight into a 3-hour work meeting.


#133 — Dec 31, 2025 by Evan Chen

oh yeah, I get to update my Common App profile to say "Dr. Evan Chen" instead of "Mr. Evan Chen". One of the few places that might actually make a difference...


#132 — Dec 31, 2025 by Evan Chen

I think a lot of people who write to me asking for advice actually are asking for therapy. And it's like, I do want to help, but I don't actually know how.


#131 — Dec 28, 2025 by Evan Chen

What happens if I wake up one day and my computer won't turn on? It's not like I know anything about hardware or kernels.


#130 — Dec 27, 2025 by Evan Chen

the horrors of realizing that random columns in my database are still on utfmb3 no wonder emoji never worked sigh


#129 — Dec 24, 2025 by Evan Chen

Super enjoyed the boss fight with Gerson Boom in Chapter 4 of Deltarune. I think I just really like this character. Glad to see him getting so much new screen time since Undertale.


#128 — Dec 24, 2025 by Evan Chen

how do you beat the hammer of justice jesus