I Walked Again Today and Site Opinions and On Losing Ability

8:24 PM

Today was great. I mean okay I took only 5200 steps today, which is less than yesterday's roughly 9000 steps, but today I deliberately walked this morning for exercise instead of walking by necessity. I was browsing the Internet for a few hours, man I really am wasting a lot of time doing nothing, while my dad was washing our dirty clothes by hand. He was there for like 2-3 hours just washing clothes, so I decided to walk outside in the sun since I was just waiting for him anyway.

I walked outside shirtless and just enjoyed the morning sun. The first lap around the neighborhood was a chore, I hated doing it. I was like, man this sucks. My phone was low battery too so I didn't even bring it with me on my walk, I didn't listen to any audio or music or anything, just the sound of neighbors and "nature" although there's not much of that in this suburban neighborhood. Also another thing people don't realize is that my mind is silent. I don't understand how other people have thoughts in their head 24/7, but majority of the time I literally have no thoughts, so when I mentioned I was just listening to neighbors and "nature" while walking, that's literally all that was happening, I had no thoughts at all. Every action I take is instinctual.

I saw a neighbor grinning or maybe chuckling or laughing at me walking around shirtless and me being fat, and I just laughed with them as my first reaction as I continued my walk. I walked 3 laps around the neighborhood totaling over 2500 steps.

My dad still wasn't done yet when I got home, so I did some crunches and push ups. I can barely do 5 push ups in a single set now. I forgot to mention but I weigh a bit more now, 207 pounds. I was really close to getting under 200 pounds, but I fcked up a lot, stayed at home a lot, ate a lot, and did not exercise or do anything like before. So yeah I guess I became a bit weaker too, because 10 push ups in one set is difficult again. I still did 100 crunches though, that was still easy. And I did like 5 or 6 sets of push ups, so I still did around 25 to 30 overall, just more sets of them.

After my dad was done washing the laundry by hand, which took like 3-4 hours, he said some clothes were so dirty we should throw them away. Okay whatever, I was fine with that. Then we went to the Wal-Mart in Santurce, to see if they had another of those kid puzzle mats because we bought the only one in the other Wal-Mart. I need another one of those so we can completely cover the gym floor, but they didn't have it in stock here either. We just ended up buying a drill, and I also ordered 4 smoothies for us, two frappe verde's and two mixtas frutas.

I dropped my dad off at Aguinaldo (the new home I bought) at like 1 PM. Seriously. It was so late. And I went back home to the apartment I'm renting to do some work.

Okay this is stuff I did think about. I got a new "challenge" at work today, yay. I love it when I get some "difficult" creative work I can do. I mean all this stuff is relative, some things that are easy to me might be hard for someone else, and some things that are hard for me might be super easy for someone else. Anyway my work title is "software engineer", so I do coding and programming work. Although the previous company I worked for did suggest this title for me too, that's actually a title I gave myself, since I run my own company. My previous given title though when I was working for a company was "software developer", but I thought engineer sounded cooler.

I could also just have just titled myself "chief executive officer" or even "chief technology officer" but I think that sounds so pretentious for a company with one person. If the company had like 30 employees or whatever, I wouldn't have any issues with those titles, but since it's literally just me right now, I would never give myself those titles. The first work title I ever got though was at the first company I worked for; Canvas Solutions Inc, and my given title was "App Architect", which I thought was so pretentious that I never used that title in any resume. I just called myself instead "App Builder," for that role. I don't like standing out although sometimes it's required. Even for my description for my profile for this website is "I'm just a normal user" even though I'm actually the creator of the site so I'm not really just a normal user. I just don't want to stand out so much.

Also, just because I'm the creator of the website doesn't mean much. There's not really any special privileges or anything I have more than any other user, I have access to all the same features and abilities as any other user, so I am just another user in that regard. I do have some admin privileges and I can make and add any features I want, but in general, all users have access to every feature I have access to, except for the admin privileges. I have never deleted any post or deleted any user, except I did have to change this one user's public spam post to private, it was just a public post with a bunch of links to some bad looking spammy websites. Also even though I do have access to all the data on the site, I don't go around reading anything private, and passwords are salted and hashed meaning literally no one in the world can ever read them, not even me or anyone anyone that has access to the database.

I'm glad it hasn't happened yet, but if the site suddenly got spammed a bunch, it would take a while to control it. Because there's no active spam control features or whatever right now. I could build one that can ban IP addresses and stuff like that, but there just hasn't been any opportunity in over a year for that to be needed. Which is really nice, so I haven't had any need or whatever to do that.

Also I haven't posted on the "AYearAgoToday" account in a while, but as long as I am posting stuff on this account, know that there's still an "official" for the website actively maintaining it. I am still making backups and paying the bills to keep this website up. Everything is free too, I don't gain any income from this site. I don't sell any data or invade anyone's privacy, as the terms of service and privacy policy state. Apart from maintaining the site, I really am just another user of the platform. All the features are nice and cool, exact features I want for myself from a journaling website.

From my experience working on this site, I learned that other websites and platforms are basically the same thing. The people that made and run all those other websites, they don't own or control it apart from just maintaining it and having admin privileges. They share the same user abilities and features as any other user. Even the people that run Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, they have less followers than regular users of the platform. And that should always be the case, followers should be gained based on merit and likeability and social ability and other factors, not just because they run or created the platform. Anyone should be able go gain subscribers or whatever. Maybe this site should get followers / subscribers too?

So at work today, again difficulty is relative, but I got a cool challenge today. It's for a search filter feature, basically in the database there's some columns that can store multiple values separated by commas. So like a column can contain multiple somethings like "Level 1, Level 2, Level 3" and I have to add all of these separately into a search filter. Like those things on the side of eBay or Amazon where if you search for shoes you can search for brand like "Nike, Adidas, Reebok" on the sidebar and put a checkmark on them if you want them filtered.

So for example there's like 100 shoes and they can be associated with more than one brand, and if so that's saved in the database like "Reebok, Nike", and I have to dynamically build a search filter based on the brands the shoes have. Like there might be a new shoe added one day and it has 2 brands no one has heard of Bobaff and Mnffaer which is saved as "Bobaff, Mnffaer", and the search filter has to be load dynamically adding those to the filter because that newly added shoe has them.

Eh maybe what I'm writing about isn't that difficult to do. Now that I've written it out, it actually seems quite simple. Like dang, this is a problem for babies basically. It's not that hard. Um. I want to cry because I think I've lost ability in programming now too. It's been a while since I did anything serious, so I'm not even confident I can make an admin feature that can ban IP addresses so easily now. That's the problem with being so lenient. I've been so careless and absentminded. Obviously I know I can do it, and like it's not even that hard to do to make a feature like that, but I'm kinda depressed because I don't think I can do that from memory anymore. I have to build up to being good again.

Oh man that really sucks. I just looked it up online and some people even lose their ability to draw after not drawing for a while. Some guy says he stopped drawing for a few years and it took him a few months to get back to being good again. It is true that you lose your ability to perform after you stop doing it for a while. That's depressing. So I'll take this as a life lesson and try not to slack off in the future.

Anyway that was my day today. The only thing I ate today were the two smoothies, and two bags of chips. I'm about to have some rice and beans right now. It's 9:29 PM so it's kinda late to be eating. But I am a little bit hungry. I'm energetic too. I'm not even sleepy or tired right now. Just freaking out that I've lost ability. Freaking out. Existential crisis. I'm just gonna eat some rice and beans and watch some anime or something. Maybe make a website update after to get back into the flow.