Tonight thanks to my local MS support group I learned about progression independent of relapse activity, or PIRA. I’m blown away by how much this speaks to my experience with MS since last year. From the way my neurologist said my symptoms were atypical, to my last MRI showing no new brain lesions, even though I haven’t been feeling 100%. The idea that demyelination is a by-product of the neurodegeneration caused by PIRA is very interesting. I’m so grateful for my support group right now. ❤️

I figured out what the difference is between cats and dogs.

Dogs do not take you for granted for one single second. Go out the door for a minute? Time to get fed? Playtime? They come running every time, never assuming that there will be another opportunity.

Cats, on the contrary, totally take you for granted. You can try coaxing them all you want, but they will only come to you when they’re good and ready, and they will walk away without a thank you or even a look back.

Cats are the privileged of the animal world.

I finally committed 100% to Obsidian. I deleted from Apple Notes everything that I had kept there for months “just in case” I wanted to go back after all. No longer. I love Obsidian and now I’m all in.

One example of why: tonight I wanted to see some link as previews in my notes. No problem. Installed the Link Embed community plugin, et voilà! This kind of extensibility and community, paired with notes being simple text files, that’s hard to beat.

About Time is one of those rare movies that affected how I live. It blindsided me when I first saw it. It’s charming and true and deep and light. It’s about love and life and death and it reminds me of all the wonderful details in between that make it all worthwhile.

I’m happy because today I called Canada Blood Services and spoke with a nurse to go over my MS diagnosis and medications. She confirmed that I’m still eligible to donate blood!

I was at the gas station tonight and the pump computer had a fit. Before I could pump any gas, it spit out a “no transaction” receipt but then refused to give me my card back! The attendant had to go in the backstore and get help on the phone to literally reboot the pump in question. Upon shutting down, I heard the click and I was able to pull my card out.

Those moments when you miss everything being mechanical or analog.

Writing Code Explained to Writers

My cousin-in-law is a talented playwright and I had this notion after he shared some of his work with us.

It occurred to me that an author of software has all the same fun as an author of books or plays. We get to create worlds out of thin air. We populate it with actors and define rules dictating how they interact, together and with the rest of the environment. Creating software is that same fun as a traditional author, with the additional benefit that all we have to do once we’re done writing the code is, simply, to hit Run.

Imagine that, writing a short story or a novel, and then just tapping a button and suddenly your story and your characters come to life in front of you like a play or a movie. There is no production phase, getting the financing, finding the right people, the actors, rehearsing, etc, before you can see what you wrote. No, all you have to do is hit Run. And it… plays. Instantly.

That’s why writing code is so much fun and so addicting.

I ordered something from Walmart and everything about the whole experience feels like Walmart, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

– Email field capitalizes the first letter? Check.
– No password manager autocomplete? Check.
– Delivery confirmation that spells my name “SteveTEST”? Check.
– Multiple unsolicited emails per day, ignoring my request to stop? Check.

I feel icky.

My cousin-in-law arrived this week to spend a few days with us. He’s been in Estonia so he brought some local beer and chocolates as gifts.

Now that’s a house guest who knows how to be polite!

Ending 2025 on a Good Note

This year was very challenging on multiple levels.

First I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in April, which brought with it a lot of uncertainty and questioning, not mentioning the doctor visits and medications, things that have never been part of my routine before.

My father-in-law also passed away this year and my wife had to spend a lot of time away from home, all during a time when I wasn’t sure I could hold myself together.

So I’m incredibly grateful during these holidays for my wife and kids, the people I love the most, for their presence today and for their presence in my life overall. I’m also grateful that my mom is still doing fairly well for her age. And I miss my dad, in a good way. It’s odd to think this will be the third year he doesn’t call me on my birthday, although I can hear him in my mind and that makes me smile.

Despite the hurdles that I faced, I’m feeling really good as we’re ending the year.

For starters, my MS has not progressed since the beginning of the year, according to the latest MRI, which possibly means that the treatment I’m on is helping, or at least that the disease is stable. It’s a big relief for me to know I’m not facing an aggressive form of MS.

There was also a recent change in the medication I’m on to manage my MS symptoms. And the improvement is remarkable. With the previous one, I had brain fog, needed to sleep a lot, didn’t feel like myself. The new medication works better in controlling my symptoms, I’m lighthearted, and clearheaded. I feel great.

Some other things I don’t want to get into here also started finally trending in the right direction. All of it coming at just the right time with the holidays and me being on vacation until the new year. I’m happy to get that break.

My first iOS game, Clear It, is a block sudoku game with a few twists and it’s now available from the App Store.

It’s nothing groundbreaking but my family has been playing it for some time and they think it’s pretty nice. 🙂

Give it a try if you have some free time!

During the Christmas break of 2022, I made a little game in SwiftUI to learn sides of it that I don’t normally get to use at my day job.

Fast forward three years, my wife and kids are still playing the game and have been asking me to put it up in the App Store.

So today I submitted it. Let’s see what happens.

Got a brain and neck MRI today, first one since my MS diagnosis at the beginning of the year. I’m curious and slightly anxious to see the results because my symptoms—mostly nerve pain—have intensified quite a bit during that time, more than I was expecting. Will be interesting to see if that’s visible in the lesions.

I tried to get used to the Ice Cubes client for Mastodon but it’s just too slow and I didn’t like the way timeline syncing worked.

I’m curious about my “too slow” experience with it because “fast” is the first word used to describe it in the App Store listing.

I’m back on Mona, which has always been snappy enough that it’s not something I thought about, and the automatic timeline syncing is more to my liking, even if it’s not perfect.

Thought of the day. I’m the first one to say that money has lost all meaning. But when you pay for something that costs $400 with a pile of $20 paper bills, it is, quite literally, a lot of money. Whereas when you pay for it with debit/credit/tap/device, every transaction physically feels the same. We lost the tactility of the transaction. Hm.

I caught on that using LocalSend to send files between random devices is faster than going through the mental process of 1) do both devices support AirDrop, 2) is Airdrop enabled, 3) why am I not seeing it oh it was set to contacts only.

With LocalSend it’s launch the app, send, receive, done. Dare I say boom?

It’s amazing that Firefox for iOS still doesn’t support extensions. How many years has it been?

Browser extensions are so important to a good browsing experience, you would think that one side would’ve caved by now.

I’ve been following Daring Fireball for something like 25 years but today I find myself wondering why I still do. I used to enjoy John’s writing when Apple was an underdog and most analysts did not understand what they were doing. Now that Apple itself has lost the plot and that John’s taste and opinions have become debatable at best, I can’t actually remember the last time I read something worthwhile on Daring Fireball. Maybe that’s the sign.

It’d be nice if the human race had become more life-savvy as the decades passed.

Back in the day you’d call your service provider, they’d give you an appointment, and they would show up around that time.

Now instead it takes 3 browser forms, 4 emails, and 5 texts for the technician to come install the Internet.

Yesterday my mother-in-law inquired, after watching me do something on her computer, how I learned all this. All I could say was that well, I’ve been using Macs since the 80’s.

For me it’s second nature to do all this, but for most people it’s not. We have to remember this when designing software.

Automatic Code Degeneration

At first I didn’t understand why some software developers are excited about AI code generation. If the stated goal is to make them obsolete and take away their very livelihood, why are they all for it?

Take authors, people who write books for a living. Should they be excited that an LLM can write an entire novel faster and more automatically than they can? No way. The act of creation, of sharing their humanity and lived experience is central to authoring books. Without that careful crafting of the words, there is no outlet anymore.

So what’s the difference? Me, I’ve always seen writing code as similar to authoring words. Coding is writing. It’s an act of creation, of crafting abstract ideas into a consistent whole that other people find useful. It’s a manifestation of the fact that I was here and I produced a collection of words that mean something.

And thinking about this, I’ve come to the overly simplified theory that there are broadly two kinds of software developers: those who like the art of writing code, and those who see it as an obstacle. The former are in this profession for the love of designing and building and tweaking and solving puzzles until they get everything right. The latter are more interested in the result, in the fact that software can exist one moment when it didn’t before, and they have less regard for how it got made.

So given the choice, would I prefer to use software made by people who used every shortcut possible to get a product they can profit from? Or by people who love the craft of designing and coding and solving human problems?

The latter, hands down.

One of the fundamental issues with AI is just that, the name “AI”.

That cannot be understated. This technology is not artificial intelligence, and word choice matters. I cannot stress it enough. We would all have more meaningful discussions about its possible uses if we had another name for it that’s not so loaded.

I went into software development because I like writing code and making abstract concepts come to life. Coding is insanely fun. Why would I want something to generate it for me?

Netflix, in their infinite wisdom, decided to overhaul their UI. Now only the right half of the screen scrolls, so I have that much less space to scan for something to watch. It’s also an added cognitive load to decode the relationship between what’s scrolling on the right and what’s selected on the left. ‍♂️

So I switched right over to Plex to look there for something to watch instead.

I like what Joshua Jackson said on CBC’s Q a couple months ago about being Canadian:

For all of the things that Americans like to make fun of us for, I think are positives.
I think it is good that we’re kind and polite people.
I think that it is good that we have socialized medicine and think it’s important to take care of our neighbors.
I think that it’s good that we have decent public education for our children.
I think it’s good that we care about the health of our air and water and the preservation of our natural resources.
I think it’s good that we think that our country is better for having waves of immigrants who can be wherever they are from and also Canadian at the same time and those two things are not mutually exclusive.
I think that it is good that we want to be good citizens in the world.
I think that it is good that we’re able to admit when we are wrong.
I think that it is good for us to look at the sins of our own past and try to make redress with, say, the First Nations which we are still in the process to do properly.
These are good things. And these make be proud to be Canadian.