©2026 Chris McWain
I’ve been messing with the RSS template for too many hours tonight. It’s stupid and I hate this so much. This site’s RSS will stay this way for a while because it’s not worth my sanity.
Something broke how things are formatted a few weeks back and I simply can’t find why.
F*%@#
Woke up to this guy on the way to the garage. No coffee, eyes half-open, zombie-walking to the car to drop the kids off at school, and this three and a half foot snake was staring at me.
I don’t do snakes. They’re not something I ever want to be near. Finding one in the wild always makes me Biden my pants. The last one received quite a few 2x4 blows to the head while I cried and yelled, “DIE MONSTER! DIE!”
We live in the mountains, so random animals are very common. We regularly get turkeys, deer, and coyotes, and they’re all pretty chill. The rare snake or mountain lion sightings are not something we’re cool with.
My family and I went to the track at the local college this morning. This gave me the perfect opportunity to test my cardio (and knees) after being in mediocre shape for so long. Turns out that my body is generally fine, but my endurance is crap once more.
This is good. This is workable.
I’m debating on writing about stock investing tips, tricks, tickers, and methods, but am very hesitant given the current state of the economy.
We’re living in extremely volatile times. The market and real life simply don’t exist in the same universe. While we have people suffering, not being able to make ends meet, and constantly pushing their debt higher, the market is running away with massive profits making rich people richer. We all realize this won’t last, but the timing is incredibly difficult to speculate.
I’ll likely write a post about it soon, but it’ll be disclaimered heavily throughout. Perhaps it’ll focus more on ETFs and the understanding that your money may not be there tomorrow if the global economy shits the bed as expected.
I should probably open the site up to feedback and comments too, but there’s not a method that impresses me yet. It’ll need to be clean, easy to use, and be lightweight, but also prevent the majority of bot spam. Lots of ideas exist in this fat head, so content will keep coming whether you like it or not.
My wife recently earned her second Master’s degree, so we packed our bags and headed down to LA for the USC celebration. It was the perfect opportunity to take a much-needed vacation. While we were in Southern California, we managed to squeeze in some fun for the kids.
The kids had never been to Disneyland before and were incredibly excited to meet some of their heroes. My son watched Spider-Man perform his show at California Adventure, and my daughter met and walked with Cinderella. We all visited the Star Wars area where we bumped into Chewbacca and Boba Fett and grabbed some colored lightsabers for their collection. We didn’t dive into the $200+ lightsabers for obvious reasons, but we each walked away with our own special picks. Rey Palpatine was out walking around too, but none of the families at the park cared. Star Tours was pretty cool with their new updates to the story flows, but since the new Star Wars content is total garbage, we were stuck watching A-sucka-ton-o navigate around space whales or some nonsense for the second half.
The park was insanely packed, and this was on a Tuesday. I can’t imagine what it would be like on a weekend. If Disney would limit the number of people to less than a third of what was there, it would have been a pleasurable experience. The crowds were so tightly packed that it was practically shoulder to shoulder trying to wander around the park. Every line was at least a 45-minute to an hour wait, so we only had enough time to visit about six rides during our day-long trip. My fitness tracker said we walked over 22 miles in total.
The rest of the trip was spent relaxing as tourists, and we finished the trip in Palm Springs to visit the grandparents. It was a tiring yet much-needed getaway from the daily grind.
I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want everything connected. People frequently discuss how much better things could be if only all their systems were interconnected.
Yesterday, Dave2D was discussing AI on the Rabbit R1. His argument was that the device should be a phone app, but it is a separate device because either Google or Apple would control it. Having an Apple or Google AI on the phone is the exact opposite of anything I would be interested in. In fact, I’m getting really close to not having a smartphone at all. It just feels like every time the screen is unlocked, there are millions of eyes looking at everything on there. Why would I want a device like that to also have AI access my contacts, calendar, and web experience?
I’m very happy not relying on one company to maintain all my personal data. Google software hasn’t been on my phone for quite some time, and there’s absolutely zero reason to go back. My dream device would be an iPod with Signal and open-source maps. It would be small with one, low-quality camera on the back. No more, no less.
I’ve never understood the idea of “cheat meals.” You’re working toward a goal, like weight loss, and others convince you that you simply “can’t eat healthy all the time.” That’s nonsense. Not only did you set your goal and push yourself to stick to it, but you’re giving yourself an out to be lazy and half-ass your committment.
Can’t exists only as a scapegoat - something that you can blame your slow progress or your lack of will on.
“I tried to lose weight, but I can’t.”
“I tried to exercise, but I can’t.”
“I can’t eat healthy forever.”
“It’s too hard” is another one I hear a lot. If your committment is too difficult, back it off a little. Stop putting too much pressure on yourself. Weight loss and fitness isn’t a battle that can be won over a few weeks. For most, the committment is a lifelong journey. Set your goal further out and take it slower.
Eating better is 100% up to you. No one is forcing you to eat cheeseburgers for lunch every day. No one begged you to have an extra slice of cake, or any slice of cake for that matter. All of those decisions are yours and yours alone. Either do it or don’t.
Can’t is that voice in your head pushing you to quit. It allows you to give up when things get tough. Pretty sure I’m not the only runner whose brain says, “WTF are you doing? It’s cold, early, and we’re tired. Take your shoes off and go back to bed. Three miles today? Are you crazy? Let’s go have a big breakfast and relax instead.” We just do our best and tell that voice to shut the fuck up. We have things to do.
I thought we all agreed that wine sommeliers were absolute nonsense. But instead of the idea naturally disappearing, it scaled into every market needing pretentious over-analysis. Now, even weed gets this treatment, with descriptions that sound like they’re ripped from a romance novel.
Her petals delicately dropped down past my silky lips, while her essence tingled not only my tongue, but my sensitive inner being.
It’s just weed. You smoke it to get high. Let’s tone it down.
At this rate, high-end restaurants might start saying things like, “I recommend pairing tonight’s Coq au Vin with O-G Diesel MF. Just two hits from the Platinum Bong, with its piney and spicy notes, will enhance our Merlot mushroom reduction beautifully. It’ll add fruity undertones and awaken your palate.”
Web scraping with Python has become my latest passion. Take, for instance, the challenge of keeping up with my daughter’s Little League schedule. The league’s way of managing game calendars is over-complicated and requires a login to view. My wife has struggled to stay updated due to their clunky and slow web calendar, as well as not having the time to copy & paste into our family calendar. Is it really so hard to offer a public .ics or even a Google Calendar?
So, rather than wrestling with their unique solution every day, I wrote a web-scraping script so the computer can do the work. Setting up this kind of thing to automatically grab info for me is super handy, which I briefly talked about here.
import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright
import json
from urllib import request, parse
import datetime
today_code = datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%a %b %d') # match the date format on the site "Thu Apr 11"
def send_message_to_slack(text):
post = {"text": "{0}".format(text)}
try:
json_data = json.dumps(post)
req = request.Request("https://hooks.slack.com/services/API_KEY",data=json_data.encode('ascii'),headers={'Content-Type': 'application/json'})
resp = request.urlopen(req)
except Exception as em:
print("EXCEPTION: " + str(em))
async def scrape_event_cards():
async with async_playwright() as p:
browser = await p.chromium.launch()
page = await browser.new_page()
// removed for privacy //
await page.get_by_role("button", name="Sign in").click()
await page.wait_for_selector('.event-card')
event_cards = await page.query_selector_all('.event-card')
def clean_text(text):
lines = [line.strip() for line in text.split('\n') if line.strip()]
return ' '.join(lines)
rina_baseball_message = ""
for card in event_cards:
text_content = await card.text_content()
cleaned_text = clean_text(text_content)
# Check if cleaned_text starts with today's day code
if cleaned_text.startswith(today_code):
rina_baseball_message += "\n>" + cleaned_text
if rina_baseball_message != "":
send_message_to_slack("⚾ RinaBot 🧢\nToday's Schedule: \n" + rina_baseball_message.strip())
await browser.close()
Setting up bots like this are great, because it allows me to look at Slack to know what’s important for the day.
Bouncing back from significant abdominal surgery has been a challenge, especially when it comes to burning calories, as I’ve been facing new physical hurdles every week.
However, the Meta Quest 3 VR we got a few months ago has been a game-changer for me and the kids. It’s packed with a lot of fun games that make you excited to jump back in. One standout is Les Mills Body Combat, which mixes the addictive formula of games like Rock Band and Beat Saber with intense kickboxing cardio workouts. It starts off easy but keeps you engaged with a variety of moves like punches, knee slams, squats, and dodges. I end up exhausted but always ready for more. Honestly, after just finishing an hour-long session, I’d much prefer another few rounds over sitting through yet another data meeting.
I highly suggest getting a Meta Quest VR 3 and setting up a dummy Facebook account to go with it. Anyone with a bit of self-respect probably doesn’t use a real Facebook account much, if at all, and if you’re reading this, chances are you don’t either.