2024.03.10

A Fresh Start

I changed several things with the blog setup. The biggest change that I'm now using the Digital Garden plugin to publish the site instead of Quartz. The main reason I changed was because the Digital Garden plugin supports the Dataview plugin, whereas Quartz does not - at least from my testing. I don't have a full picture in my mind of how this blog will develop over time, but I definitely want Research Takeaways to be a core piece of it. And with those comes transparency - I want to show the full line of thinking behind each of the Research Takeaways that I share here. I'm now able to trace the line of thinking using dataviewjs, so using a publishing method that works with dataviewjs removes a lot of friction involved with sharing Research Takeaways. On the bright side, I got some experience with using the Dataview documentation when looking for things to test out.

I used this walkthrough video from Prakash Joshi Pax to help me get my Obsidian notes published using the Digital Garden plugin. The process was fairly simple overall, but I had to fork the digitalgarden repository manually instead of deploying it directly from Vercel. I kept getting an error message when deploying from Vercel when following the instructions that are shown in the walkthrough video and that are described in this GitHub page for the Digital Garden plugin. Luckily, I found this set of steps for someone else's problem with deploying from Vercel and it worked for me.
I managed to get some code working to trace back primary sources from Research Takeaways. I updated my post on the Obsidian forum to share the update as I was having a lot of trouble with it. This code was a major roadblock to me working on Research Takeaways as I'd like to share those as soon as they are created - and I don't want to share them unless I am confident in the references. There was a lot of learning and frustration with getting the code to work. My main sticking points seemed to involve working with objects and arrays and how they are handled in dataviewjs vs. how they are handled in "regular" Javascript. For example, I could not get any of the methods shown here for "regular" Javascript to work for getting unique values from my arrays, but I was able to get something to work that was similar to the method shown here for dataviewjs.

I finished the 5-day "fasting" protocol I had started on 2024.02.26. I ended the fast on Friday night 2024.03.01 instead of on the following Saturday morning because I was offered steak - and it's hard to turn down steak. The fast was fairly smooth overall but was especially difficult on day 5. I had a lot of difficulty focusing on day 5 and was very lethargic compared to the previous days. The temptation to end the fast early was also highest on day 5, though it was mostly driven by the want to stress-eat while working and not necessarily driven by "true" hunger. Luckily, the lethargy seemed to be helped by eating an avocado, drinking some coffee, getting some more salt, and/or taking a short nap. I then felt confident I could make it to Saturday morning - but the steak offer came and I caved.
One important learning from the fast was that unripe avocados can make you sick. One of them stayed down for only ~10 minutes before I learned that lesson.
I started showing symptoms of a cold on Sunday 2024.03.03 and had a fever the next day. This was strange as I generally don't get sick often. I can only guess that something about the fasting and/or re-feeding made me more susceptible to getting sick. I'll need to take this into consideration when planning my next fast.