zacharyc

Life is full of things to catalog, especially for someone like me. Someone who loves organization in data and looking for patterns. Someone who is convinced that the random things in my life will probably come together someday like the unification theory. But how? How does one sort, contain, and search data? The first step is recording the data. There are many ways to do this. Databases have traditionally been a great way. NoSQL databases with their loose document format are interesting. The second brain methodology uses documents or notes to contain the same thing. And while these documents can be formatted in things like Markdown and have front matter for categorization, much of the data is contained in the raw text which means a human has to parse and read it. ...

Coco and I are on this epic van journey that I do about once a year. Currently we are in California, but we are about to head back to the east coast shortly. There is a lot of stuff on the #VanLife movement these days, but not a ton on dogs. Disclaimer: my dog is amazing. She will jump up and kiss you, and jump all over you, but she is relatively regular when it comes to going to the restroom, is vocal she needs to be and holds her business like no one else. ...

There are very few consistencies on this website. Pretty much the only one is the year review and accountability for the following. This is that post. Review of 2022 and Goals Going through the goals from 2022. Rent The House I’m giving myself a check on this. The original goal was to try and rent the home for the summer and live with my parents or in the van or somewhere else over the summer. The problem came in with the dog. While I can easily find a place to stay, it’s not always as easy to find a place to stay with Coco. I originally wanted to go the West Coast for the summer, but decided against that. With all those factors, I decided to find roommates instead of renting the whole house. ...

For many years of my life I was an iOS Programmer. I worked in Objective-C, but Swift came out while I was working transitioning out of that area. Swift has always been a bit confusing for me, but I have a new complaint today. The amount of changes in Swift has caused a lot of online code to be out of date, and hard to parse. The problem. I’m looking at my address book and I want to iterate through my contacts. I started by looking at ABAddressBook, but it turns out that technology has been depricated. Then I started looking at CNContactStore which is the new hotness. There are several fun methods on that object including unifiedMeContactWithKeys which is pretty cool. It only returns my contact, not all contacts, but at least I was able to get it work. There is a similar function called ...

I’m pretty obsessed with the notion of a second brain. I’m super into carrying a notebook and have carried pocket notebooks since 2008. I’m on #48 in my series of notebooks, which is pretty bad, but crazy when you think how long I’ve been carrying them. The thought that my brain is porous and stuff slips through my mental grasps is pretty upsetting. Writing it down saves it in a way that I can return and look at it again in the future. ...