I was thinking on the 4th of July about how I have this proclivity to write about what happens on the 4th of July, even though it’s not stuff about hot dog eating contents and apple pie and going to fireworks shows and wearing clothes made out of flags and whatever else. I’ve already written about this too much, but I’m bored, so here’s more.

The above picture is from 2002, when I flew from New York to Las Vegas, stayed at I think three? four? different hotels, and drove to Colorado in the middle of that. On the first night, I stayed at the Hacienda — not the old, classic one, but the hotel in Boulder City that’s now called the Hoover Dam Lodge. Horrible hotel. I got there late at night, and there was zero food to eat at the place. Passed out, woke up, tried to take a shower, and raw sewage started coming out of the drain. Drove to Colorado, got a speeding ticket in Arizona, and saw that giant asteroid hole in the ground. Stayed in Alamosa at a bad motel across the street from an AM radio station, and any time I picked up the phone, I could hear ranchero music on the line. Spent some time at the land, drove back to Vegas early, and ended up at the now-demolished Tropicana. I remember going out to see the fireworks and it was like 107 degrees at night and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder in this crowd in front of the MGM and looked over and saw someone who looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend from 1992. The other memory of that trip is that Rumored to Exist was waiting for final approval for production, and I think I got the email that week while I was gone.

In 2015, I had a solo trip to Vegas, although I was flying back on the actual 4th. It was even more hot on that trip, like 112 degrees out in the day. This was the trip where I put a case of Coke Zero in the trunk of my car at like 10am, and at noon, they all exploded. I got back to the hotel at like 5 and everything had evaporated. I stayed in the Hooters hotel, which was obviously a mistake. Interesting inflection point on a really bad and strange year, though.

I have a bizarre bathroom mirror selfie I won’t post from 7/4/20 where it looks like I haven’t had a haircut all year, which was true. I also for whatever reason went to Stoneridge Mall, probably for the air conditioning. I took a bunch of pictures of the recently closed Nordstrom. I can’t even remember the last time I went to that mall. I don’t even know if it’s still open. I think the last time I set foot in a mall was in Vietnam. (Once again, air conditioning.)

I just realized that next July 4 will mark 30 years since I left Indiana forever. I did the math the other day and next year also makes California the state I’ve lived in longest. I lived in Indiana for a total of 17 years, and I moved here in 2008, so, math.

In 2006, we went to Coney Island, which was probably not the best idea, because it was absolutely slammed with people. I remember hiding out in a McDonald’s watching the Space Shuttle launch, and this guy was filling a gigantic Igloo cooler with ice from the McDonald’s Coke machine, a cup at a time. I also remember meeting Sean Maloney, who was running for New York AG. He shook my hand and I had no idea who he was, except that it was like a hundred degrees out and he was wearing suit pants and an oxford dress shirt rolled up to mid-forearm like he was a tax accountant about to give a speech on fiscal policy.

In 2007, I went to an insane Rockies-Mets game in Denver. Highlights included the game going completely lopsided, like the Rockies were ahead by 167 runs. And also the giant purple dinosaur mascot slingshotted a t-shirt into the stands and it landed right into my fucking knee, which was injured and in a brace. For a long time, the Rockies had this habit of completely blowing out July 4 games, although now they are one of the worst teams in the sport, so I haven’t even paid attention this year.

All the other usuals come back to me. 1992, selling glowsticks, see also Summer Rain. 1991, Chicago with my ex, car broke, etc. It’s in the other story. 1995, move to Seattle, drive a U-Haul nonstop across the country with no sleep. 2004, I wrote a story about walking home from seeing a Terminator movie and said story got published in some anthology, but I can’t understand my own filing system enough to find it without wasting an hour of my time. Speaking of Summer Rain, I sent the masters to the publisher on July 5, 2000.

Anyway, nothing spectacular going on here last Thursday. We went for a walk in the neighborhood in Berkeley by my old allergy clinic and looked at expensive houses, then went to Whole Foods to pick up stuff for dinner. Had to dose both cats because it sounded like Fallujah outside, then I think I fell asleep at like 9:30. A life of excitement for this writer.

Here is a sample of some basic Markdown syntax that can be used when writing Markdown content in Astro.

Headings

The following HTML <h1>—<h6> elements represent six levels of section headings. <h1> is the highest section level while <h6> is the lowest.

H1

H2

H3

H4

H5

H6

Paragraph

Xerum, quo qui aut unt expliquam qui dolut labo. Aque venitatiusda cum, voluptionse latur sitiae dolessi aut parist aut dollo enim qui voluptate ma dolestendit peritin re plis aut quas inctum laceat est volestemque commosa as cus endigna tectur, offic to cor sequas etum rerum idem sintibus eiur? Quianimin porecus evelectur, cum que nis nust voloribus ratem aut omnimi, sitatur? Quiatem. Nam, omnis sum am facea corem alique molestrunt et eos evelece arcillit ut aut eos eos nus, sin conecerem erum fuga. Ri oditatquam, ad quibus unda veliamenimin cusam et facea ipsamus es exerum sitate dolores editium rerore eost, temped molorro ratiae volorro te reribus dolorer sperchicium faceata tiustia prat.

Itatur? Quiatae cullecum rem ent aut odis in re eossequodi nonsequ idebis ne sapicia is sinveli squiatum, core et que aut hariosam ex eat.

Images

Syntax

![Alt text](./full/or/relative/path/of/image)

Output

Blockquotes

The blockquote element represents content that is quoted from another source, optionally with a citation which must be within a footer or cite element, and optionally with in-line changes such as annotations and abbreviations.

Blockquote without attribution

Syntax

> Tiam, ad mint andaepu dandae nostion secatur sequo quae.  
> **Note** that you can use _Markdown syntax_ within a blockquote.

Output

Tiam, ad mint andaepu dandae nostion secatur sequo quae.
Note that you can use Markdown syntax within a blockquote.

Blockquote with attribution

Syntax

> Don't communicate by sharing memory, share memory by communicating.<br>
> — <cite>Rob Pike[^1]</cite>

Output

Don’t communicate by sharing memory, share memory by communicating.
— Rob Pike¹

Tables

Syntax

| Italics   | Bold     | Code   |
| --------- | -------- | ------ |
| _italics_ | **bold** | `code` |

Output

Italics	Bold	Code
italics	bold	code

Code Blocks

Syntax

we can use 3 backticks ``` in new line and write snippet and close with 3 backticks on new line and to highlight language specific syntax, write one word of language name after first 3 backticks, for eg. html, javascript, css, markdown, typescript, txt, bash

```html
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Example HTML5 Document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Test</p>
  </body>
</html>
```

Output

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Example HTML5 Document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Test</p>
  </body>
</html>

List Types

Ordered List

Syntax

1. First item
2. Second item
3. Third item

Output

1. First item
2. Second item
3. Third item

Unordered List

Syntax

- List item
- Another item
- And another item

Output

• List item
• Another item
• And another item

Nested list

Syntax

- Fruit
  - Apple
  - Orange
  - Banana
- Dairy
  - Milk
  - Cheese

Output

• Fruit
  • Apple
  • Orange
  • Banana
• Dairy
  • Milk
  • Cheese

Other Elements — abbr, sub, sup, kbd, mark

Syntax

<abbr title="Graphics Interchange Format">GIF</abbr> is a bitmap image format.

H<sub>2</sub>O

X<sup>n</sup> + Y<sup>n</sup> = Z<sup>n</sup>

Press <kbd>CTRL</kbd> + <kbd>ALT</kbd> + <kbd>Delete</kbd> to end the session.

Most <mark>salamanders</mark> are nocturnal, and hunt for insects, worms, and other small creatures.

Output

GIF is a bitmap image format.

H₂O

Xⁿ + Yⁿ = Zⁿ

Press CTRL + ALT + Delete to end the session.

Most salamanders are nocturnal, and hunt for insects, worms, and other small creatures.

Footnotes

1. The above quote is excerpted from Rob Pike’s talk during Gopherfest, November 18, 2015. ↩

Had a quick trip to Barcelona for work a week ago. I did zero research before I left, so it was a bit of a rush. Here’s a quick summary:

• This was a work thing, and 90% of it was strictly work, and I don’t talk about work here, so this isn’t as all-access as I normally am with summaries. Anyway.
• I did not pack until the last second. I was not sure what to do about camera stuff, because I broke my arm and I didn’t think I could carry a DSLR. So I brought my Sony a6400 mirrorless and a couple of lenses.
• I left on the afternoon of Memorial Day, which meant I’d arrive in the late afternoon on Tuesday. This meant I absolutely had to sleep on the plane on the way out. Of course, I didn’t.
• I was lucky enough to have a window seat on the left side and nobody in the middle seat. My broken arm was maybe 80% better when we left, but It would have been problematic to have someone jammed next to me for twelve hours.
• I think eight or ten people from my company were on my flight, which is a bit unusual for me. I generally fly alone, or maybe there’s one other person on the same flight.
• Like I said, no sleep. Then I changed planes in Zürich, Switzerland for a smaller two-hour jump to Spain. Switzerland looked nice from the airport, but I didn’t see much. I also didn’t get to eat. I did buy a Coke Zero and totally forgot they use the Swiss Franc. I passed customs there in about two seconds. They have a very nice tram connecting the airport terminals.
• The airport in Spain was fine, with no baggage drama. The company had shuttle busses for us, so it was pretty painless to get from the airport.
• The whole thing was at a Hyatt that was right next to the University of Barcelona. I had a narrow room but in good shape and I had a fridge.
• We had 400 people from 20 countries there, and like I said, I won’t get into work, but the whole day was work and the whole schedule was work and there was lots of work, work, work.  (I was not “working” though; it was “tourism.” I don’t have an EU work visa.) On Wednesday through Friday, my schedule was pretty much all work stuff from six AM to one AM every day.
• Spain has never really been on my radar and I did not know what to expect. I mean, it’s a European country, and the base things are all European: the money, the voltage, the general look of the thing. There’s old architecture that’s definitively Spanish, but the area around the university looked and felt like any European suburb built after the war.
• One thing that threw me was Catalan. My two semesters of Spanish in an Indiana public school 40 years ago basically taught me that people in Spain spoke Spanish with a lisp. That’s incorrect. Catalan is a different language, and about 40% of people speak it there. So everything was written in Spanish, in Catalan, and maybe in English. It also meant the default outside the hotel was usually rapid-fire Spanish, and I had to just act stupid. I know maybe 200 words of Spanish, when it’s at glacial speed. I know zero Catalan. So that was fun.
• I did get a brief look at the university each morning, as I went for a quick walk before breakfast. I think UB is like twice as big as IU Bloomington, student-wise. It’s also like two or three times older. We were staying near the hospital facilities, and I think the main part of the campus is like a mile or two away. I absolutely could not figure out the layout of the thing, and I just tried to google it and I still can’t.
• Aside from the meetings in the hotel, there were three dinner/evening events. One was a rock band at a castle. Another was a beach event with a DJ (which wasn’t an actual beach on the water, but was an event space with sand), and the last was a sit-down dinner with flamenco dancers.
• I did have Friday off to spend with my team, so we went to Park Güell, which is this freaky park designed by Antoni Gaudí. It’s way at the top of this hill, and it’s a municipal garden with natural park features like trees and such, but it’s framed by trippy bridges and houses and stairs with tile mosaics and almost surreal shapes to them. The top of it has a terrace with a bench seat wrapped around it that’s in the shape of a sea serpent, its scales being an ornate tile mosaic. It’s way north up a hill, which was a back-breaking hike for me, but worth it.
• On that trip, I also got to use their metro system, which was not as nice as Singapore’s, but it was pretty good. I also got to stop at a Polish restaurant and get some pierogis.
• I had to check out of the work hotel Saturday morning, but I was not flying out until Sunday because I extended my stay, so I moved across town. American Express hooked me up with a room at The Cotton House in the Gothic Quarter, which was absolutely insane. It’s rated as one of the 30 best hotels in the world, and Amex was paying me $300 to stay there. I got a room on the top floor of the hotel, and had my own balcony that looked south over the Gothic Quarter.
• After settling in and eating a stellar lunch, I went walking and went to the Picasso museum. There’s a lot there, but if you made a list of the top ten Picasso paintings, I think one of them is in Barcelona and like seven or eight are at MOMA in New York.
• Spent a lot of time wandering the gothic quarter and taking pictures. It was nice to just wander. I was slightly on edge about walking on cobblestone and uneven sidewalks with the fear of falling again. I also didn’t get any great photos, maybe because of the arm. Lots of blur; I probably should have switched to S and moved a stop faster on the shutter.
• Went walking the next day and looked at the Casa Battló, another Gaudí design. Unfortunately I didn’t get tickets, so I just looked at the outside.
• Stopped at a McDonald’s, just to be the ugly American. It was largely the same there.
• Flight back was direct, 12 hours. I stayed awake the whole time and forced myself to watch five movies, so I would collapse when I got home and get back on regular schedule.

Of course, I caught a cold or something on the way back. I’ve been dragging all week, but I’m back. Good trip, but I wish I would have had more time and more research. 20 countries down. Back to work.

This theme comes with the @astrojs/mdx integration installed and configured in your astro.config.mjs config file. If you prefer not to use MDX, you can disable support by removing the integration from your config file.

Why MDX?

MDX is a special flavor of Markdown that supports embedded JavaScript & JSX syntax. This unlocks the ability to mix JavaScript and UI Components into your Markdown content for things like interactive charts or alerts.

If you have existing content authored in MDX, this integration will hopefully make migrating to Astro a breeze.

Example

Here is how you import and use a UI component inside of MDX.
When you open this page in the browser, you should see the clickable button below.

Embedded component in MDX

More Links

• MDX Syntax Documentation
• Astro Usage Documentation
• Note: Client Directives are still required to create interactive components. Otherwise, all components in your MDX will render as static HTML (no JavaScript) by default.

So I have a good excuse for my blogging slowdown as of late: I broke my arm. This was two weeks ago, and there’s no exciting story behind it. I was walking from work to a hotel where we were having a convention in SF, and I wasn’t looking down and hit some uneven patch of sidewalk and fell. Landed on my right arm (I’m right-handed) and knee, and set off my Apple Watch fall detection. I went to the conference anyway, unsure if I’d actually broken anything, but within a few minutes, I knew I had, so I scrambled to find anything nearby that could see me at 4:30 without spending twelve hours in a war hospital triage room. To further complicate things, Sarah was out of town, and I don’t know where anything is in SF.

I found a Carbon Health clinic on Market, who bounced me to another branch with an x-ray a half-mile further out. I made an appointment on their app on the way there, and got in semi-immediately. This isn’t the first time I’ve broken an arm; I broke the left one in 1992, and the right one in 2009. Both of those were bike accidents, and it turns out all three were the same exact break: a hairline radial head fracture.

Like 2009, the urgent care folks shot some x-rays, took a look, then put me in a fiberglass splint that went from mid-hand to above the elbow. The doctor got this long strip wet, then molded it onto my arm in a U shape. It felt hot, and it looked like some emergency fiberglass repair strip you’d use to patch a hole in a boat hull. He then wrapped the arm in compression bandages, put it in a sling, and told me the name of an urgent orthopedic surgeon to see. I got on their web site and got in the next day.

And the question everyone asks: no, there were no drugs. I got no painkillers, no shots or IVs or anything, just the advice that I should take Tylenol and ice the thing.

Went to the ortho the next day for another round of x-rays. The bone wasn’t chipped or shattered in any way that would require surgery. He took off the splint and said I’d be better off using the sling, keeping on the ice, and trying to get it moving as soon as the swelling let up.

The only real problem was this happened Monday night, and I had my biggest product release of the year on Wednesday morning. I had to wake up at 3:15am to get this thing rolling, and I had to do the whole thing one-handed. I switched from my Kinesis Advantage keyboard to a small 65% keyboard for one-handed typing, and a trackpad on my left hand. I also used Apple’s voice dictation, which has gotten surprisingly good. The release got out, and without the cast, I was able to actually shower, which was nice.

Not having a right hand is a problem. The first time I broke my right hand, I thought I would have a ton of trouble because I could not write, and it turns out that’s not much of a problem at all anymore. Also, it turns out I can write without much difficulty, because that doesn’t involve moving my arm. The mouse is the big problem. Also, turning things is bad: keys, doorknobs, the ignition of my car. And I can’t do anything involving weight.

It’s been almost two weeks, and I’m out of the sling for the most part. I still wear it on the train so I don’t accidentally grab an overhead strap, and so people don’t bug me. Typing on the Kinesis is no problem. The mouse still is. I’ve got more x-rays Tuesday, and a list of rehab exercises I’m supposed to be doing. I think the timeline for total healing is maybe 6-12 weeks, but I expect to be largely up to speed by the end of the month.

---

I’ve also got some dental trauma blogging to do, although this one is largely done. I finished a course of Invisalign on Friday. This was largely a stupid idea and I have serious buyer’s remorse over it, although not as bad as when I was in the middle of doing it.

I did an extremely short course of it: 14 trays, a week per tray. I also used a different brand than Invisalign, which only required me to wear the trays at night. The huge pain with this that I didn’t know until we got down to starting the whole thing was that you have to have attachments glued to your teeth. These are little porcelain buttons that are bonded to the front of your teeth, which anchor your teeth into the clear plastic trays. The attachments were not totally visible unless you were really looking at them, but they drove me insane. I continually felt like I’d been eating a candy apple and got a chunk of crushed peanut stuck on my teeth. I had nine attachments, and I never got used to them.

The first two weeks were horrible, mostly because they also coincided with the worst weeks of allergy season. I have this thing where my sinuses drain through my upper teeth during the worst of the worst part of allergy season, and with the plastic trays blocking my teeth, it felt like I was being waterboarded with battery acid. This eventually passed, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought to wear the trays at night. I would switch to a new tray on Fridays, and those were the worst days, but things moved around that first night, and by Saturday, they would be fine.

I went in on Friday and they ground off the attachments, and it feels so good to have just smooth teeth now. I don’t feel like a magically changed person or proud of my smile or anything else, and it was far too much money for what I got out of it. I’m just glad it’s done.

---

Speaking of allergies… First of all, I had zero allergies in Vietnam. Same in Iceland. Maybe I need to move. Anyway, I was doing allergy shots for like a decade and had to stop when Covid started up in 2020. I need to do something, and I don’t care about needles, but the whole drill is such a big waste of time, driving to Berkeley, paying to park, sitting in the waiting room full of sick kids, etc. I recently started doing sublingual immunotherapy, though. I got a blood test for allergies, and they sent me some drops in the mail, which I put under my tongue every day. It’s the same stuff as regular immunotherapy: pollens, dust mites, and grasses. I just started, and it’s supposed to take months or years to get up to full speed with them. I never thought the injections were a magic bullet or anything, but I think once I got to top dose, it maybe took 20% off. If I can get that without leaving my house, I’ll take it.

That’s about a thousand words of medical updates, and I don’t like talking about medical updates. So, back to your regularly scheduled program, I guess.