Daily - Jan. 28, 2026

Today’s recap

Okay, so its been a minute since I wrote one of these daily posts. Now that I’ve updated the site to have separate feeds for the regular posts and these dailies (and keep the daily posts off the homepage) I guess its time to start writing them. I’ve changed the format a little, but I like this better. Honestly, these posts didn’t need my todo’s.

I’m also changing the time of day I write them. Now that I’m coming out of hibernation, writing these in the morning will be hard. If I do them in the evenings while the gorls get ready for bed I not only have time, but significantly less distractions.

So, what was up today.

I was in a grumpy mood right from the get go. One of those days where a bunch of shit hits you first thing and then fucks up the rest of your day. I’ve been battling some serious depression the last couple days, compounded by the state asking us for a bunch of financial information during a “review” of our health insurance. We are on state insurance and all this admin work feels like they are getting ready to kick us off. Which means we won’t have any. I mean, we couldn’t afford insurance from the exchange before they ended the ACA subsidies, let alone now. A quick peek at it and even the cheapest policies for our family are $1k+ a month.

We have been dealing with the cats marking a spot in the house and had to clean it repeatedly. It looks like they’ve stopped. But, its the middle of winter and its hard to dry out carpet, especially in an area that gets so much rain. I’m worried about mold in the spot, so the fan has been running all day and will run until tomorrow.

Next up was doing car+home insurance shopping, which I’ve been putting off for a long time. We go through a local broker because I like dealing with people instead of websites. But, that broker got bought by a larger agency and the quality of service has steeply declined in the last year. I wanted to shop around today, but every website I went to made things as difficult as possible. After about an hour I gave up and ended up with no new quotes. Now, the last office job I had before founding our contracting business was doing marketing for an insurance agency. So, I’m well versed in insurance policies and what I want out of them. I reviewed ours and its good. We might get a better price shopping around, but only by pennies and they’ll probably make us use a telematic or tracking app on our phones, which I am vehemently against. Our current policy doesn’t require that and the price is fine. All I know is I’m not lowering my liability when folks are driving new cars that cost almost $80k and I’m not letting my insurance track my driving.

Before lunch I adjusted my office desk. We are in the end of my hibernation, so money is tight. This means I’m really, really cutting back and I won’t be turning on my desktop to keep my power usage down. I reconfigured my desk to be laptop only.

Lunch and then I got started on a self-hosted project in my office (which is also our bedroom depending on the time of day). More on that below.

Dinner was homemade veggie pot pie. We have been watching some old Disney animated movies after the kids go to bed, but I think we are at the end of our list. We finished The Rescuers Down Under last night, after The Rescuers the night before, Robin Hood previously, and finally The Great Mouse Detective before that. Feeling like is a Bollywood night. So, maybe the first Dabangg.

Projects

Today’s project was completely vibe coded lol. I’ve actually never done something like this. I’ve been strongly against A.I. and that really hasn’t changed. But, that’s because the A.I. companies and how they got the data is the primary reason (obviously the climate impact, too). Plus, the folks running these companies are the purest form of dirtbags. Nevertheless, I do want to spend occasional time with these tools so I am aware of them, see how they perform, and just to check my own biases. I live firmly in a bubble that is anti-A.I.. So, I gotta go into the neighbors yard every once in a while.

I’m hesitant to say what I vibe coded because it goes against so many things for both the smol and indie web 😅. Plus, it has dug up some deeper emotional feelings using these tools. I’m going to write a longer post about this experience later. I will share a little now.

Since my business uses Google Workspace I get Gemini Pro as part of that package. Over the last week I’ve been chatting with Gemini to come up with random homelab projects and today I worked on creating a Gemini (the protocol) clone of my blog and my Mastodon feed. I figured out how to host the capsule. However, I vide coded a python script that grabs the RSS feeds and rewrites them into markdown that Gemini can use. I then used the Gemini A.I. to help me write up notes.

Using A.I. to create a Gemini blog? Blasphemy!

Stay tuned.

Daily gratitude

• I posted on Mastodon some depression thoughts and couple folks reached out. So I’m grateful for Mike and Robert. Y’all are the best.
• I’m happy to have this Dell 7490 (that also came from Mike) that is my daily driver for the next 28 days or so.
• I actually had fun doing the vibe coding session and I’m happy with what I “made”. I need to clean it up and get it published.

Tomorrow’s big thing(s)

I want to get this vibe coded disasterpiece published and then write up my blog post about the experience. I don’t think both of those will happen tomorrow. Probably just the publishing.

I need to test charging our EcoFlow River 3 power station from the generator. I recently read that power stations can be picky about their charging power source. They expect a pure sine wave source and most gas powered generators don’t provide that. If that’s the case, my whole power outage plan is toast.

Loose thoughts

Read about Papa John’s bringing back their pan pizza in an attempt to bring sales back. Article talked about most pizza chains sales are declining and blaming the eating habits of young folk. Bro, there’s like a million pizza places. I think sales are declining because we’ve hit peak pizza.

Been slowly looking through this site of concepts, methods, and principals. Talk about a rabbit hole.

Still thinking a lot about how Democrats have failed us.

- - - - -

Did you like this post? Give it an upvote by clicking on the arrows below! Sending me an upvote is like you and I giving each other a high five.

🙏 😎

If you enjoy the random stuff I write here, post to Mastodon, or watch on YouTube, and are feeling generous, I am open to tips of Ko-fi.