@demo-rss-chat remote

I couldn't do it for work, at least not right away, but I'm contemplating leaving the web. Despite best efforts of those who are trying to save it, the web sucks. I almost think that that if was once worth saving, it's not anymore. It's too hostile an environment for gentle people, and I don't want to be anywhere where I have to grow a thick skin or have to dismiss the garbage that pops and tries to distract me from whatever I set out to do.

There's cozy corners of the web, but the people in those cozy corners only ever talk about how cozy it is there. They never talk about plants or swimming or lovemaking or settling disputes. It's only just about how great their corner of the web is. Boring.

(This is an uncorrected draft of a blog post going out tomorrow.)

A friend's wife suggested, about 10 years now, and I consider AquaFit for physical activity. That was during my running phase, so I didn't outride reject it if maybe keep it as an option along with yoga.

Fast-forward a decade, and a move across the country later, I started living in a neighbourhood that had a YMCA being built, one that would be a few years behind schedule. On July 16th, 2025, the second day it was open, I took my first class. We were all facing towards the shallow end, and I, not knowing too much about where to to, took the shallow end. At 6'3", I stuck out of the water a bit, but had a great workout, a gentle and low-impact aerobic workout that had elements of strengthening. Perfect! After the next few classes, we switched to facing the sides (perpecticular to either the shallow or deep ends). Since then, I am in the middle, with just enough water to cover my torso with the ability to touch the bottom of my feed. A month in, I noticed the impact already: Stronger arms and an earlier rise than I normally would to make the 8 AM classes. I'm now part of the 8 AM crew's group chat, and we have coffee every now and then and see each other on the street. It's one of 3 neighbourhood groups I'm part of, the other being the neighbourhood association and a friend group that grew out of that.

Over the summer, in my hometown of Courtenay, I took to swimming in the river, telling my dad that I'm leaving my phone at home, and that I'd be back in an hour, and would just dry off on the way back. That experience was so good, but my swimming so obviously degraded that, in the new year, I started taking swimming lessons. I decided to take "intermediate" lessons since I figured I knew how to swim already, but needed bolstering of my technique. What I didn't know that I needed was a lot of work on breathing and endurance. Since then, I'm now in my third "semester" of that lessons group. I'm close to feeling confident in the front crawl (commonly known as freestyle), somewhat confident that I know what I'm doing with the back crawl (backstroke), and have the beginnings of a breast stroke (with a long way to go).

That gave me the idea to do training in basketball, my first love in sports. More on that if I end up going through with that.

What I hope by talking about it is that others will think of doing it, too. I tried to tell as many men I know that they should come to my Yoga for Stiff Men class, which was very similar to the Yoga4StiffPeople™ (originally Yoga4StiffGuys) that I love so much when I lived in Vancouver. It seems to have taken off quite a bit since I left (good!) and is not much of a thing here in Toronto. (It was later re-branded as Stretch + Strength without changing the routine because not enough men were signing up. I did what I could!) I have heard from my 8 AM AquaFit crew that they're considering lessons (yes!) and that one is taking the "free lessons" the lifeguards teach when they're bored. Amazing!

If you did something in your youth, and you miss doing it, and you want to be better at it so that you can enjoy it again, look up whether there's lessons. The amount of shame in my swimming lessons group is very low. Everybody has to introduce themselves at the start of lessons and why they're there, and there's always two people who want the same thing. One woman in my current group said the same thing I did, that she enjoyed swimming but was gassed after a lap or two. Everybody else had different reasons, but everybody else had at least one other person in the group who had the same goals.

Presenters at this year’s conference include: Adam Curry, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, John Battelle, Dan Gillmor, and others. Okay, this is the kind of stuff that interests me. If sitting in a conference room for three days listening to people talk about blogging and podasting and RSS and shit like that doesn’t sound like any fun to you… you can start to understand why your idea of a vacation doesn’t make me clap my little hands.

PS: You had to be there.

The beauty of having access to coding agents is that you get to create a tool shaped exactly to the problem you're trying to solve. I'm working with some data in a PostgreSQL DB that has a JSONB column. This introduces problems in a typical client: either because only the first few characters of a multi-KB JSON structure is rendered, or the full JSON structure is rendered and it blows out the size of the table.

So I asked Claude Code to make a client that would open the value of JSONB columns in a separate window, nicely formatted and syntax highlighted. I'm using it right now and it's been a godsend. It's hard justifying putting in the time to build this manually for a project that will probably only last a month or so. But asking the agent to do it in a day? Not a problem.