2/26/26 New CD Mix

I finally finished up my new January 2026 cd mix! I know, it's a bit late. But I made the playlist in January, so I'm counting it as January. In one of my previous posts I wrote that my CD's only held 80 minutes, and the playlist I made was 82 minutes. Well after listening to the playlist MANY times and putting a lot of thought into the order of the songs what was included, I was still really having a hard time removing a song... Then I realized that the song "Riot" by "Three Days Grace" was actually in my last mix, so that was the one to go :p

And my partner helped me take the picture for the cover! I waited until it was dark so I could use a flash to get a dramatic shadow. I put my flash on a tripod on the ground beneath me and pointed it up towards me. Here's how the digital design turned out:

A digital master of the CD cover. It is me sitting in front of a truck receiving bay. My eyes are closed and I am sitting cross legged, in a meditative pose


And here's how the physical disk came out:

An image of the physical CD


I'm very happy with how this one turned out, it's just like what I envisioned! It's my favorite self-made cd in my collection so far.

I'm still taking a lot of time off work (only working 10hrs/week) in order to try and improve my day-to-day. (I've been playing a lot of chess recently) I consider this move to take a bunch of time off like a gambit. I'm spending time trying to focus on building habits that will make my life easier in the future. I'm also trying to decrease my general anxiety levels and build my focus/attention span. I'm almost 3 months in now. It's definitely working. I just started an anxiety medication last week, so I'm hoping that'll help make a difference when it kicks in too. I'm planning to spend another 2-3 months underemployed, then I'll look for a 30-hour work week again somewhere else.

A digital chess board showing Jerome's Gambit

This is one of my favorite gambits to pull out. It's completely absurd and objectively losing, but it's easy to make a mistake against. Counterintuitively, the best move for black is to move the king towards the center of the board to defend the knight. Many players don't find this move, or they often struggle to defend such an unusual position where their king is being pushed around so far up early in the game. It's great for giggles, or to throw someone off in a rapid game

A lot of my time is being spent on focusing on personal projects. I'm doing my best to not be a couch potato (sometimes I fail, but I correct myself). The efforts refocusing has been so successful that playing video games now often feels shallow and boring compared to working on my projects, and I have a very natural draw to doing longer tasks once again. I've had victories on other fronts as well. I'm definitely not done yet, but I'm making great progress. Before I reduced my hours I had stress/anxiety stomach aches that made it difficult to sleep almost every night. Now it's significantly less frequent and the draw to always be distracting myself much weaker. Many times when I feel the pull to distract myself, I decide to just stare forward at a wall.


Oh, and sorry to my email subscribers. I had some bugs in the email system I built, you might have noticed some weird stuff with the notifications. After this notification, it should be all fixed now!

It took a bit of digging to track down the bug, but it turned out it was just a greater then should have been greater then or equal:

A git diff


And a list needed to be sorted differently:

A git diff


It's funny how much work it takes to track down the teeniest of problems. I was so sure the whole thing must have been bug free due to my numerous tests. Well turns out there was a minor oversight... And now I'm back to being sure it's bug free due to my NEWLY added tests xD