Today, me and my dawg got brunch at Rise and Shine. Unfortunately, the Tetris game does not work well on mobile at the moment. Tapping the buttons loses focus on the game and auto pauses. Will need to fix.

I decided to sleep in a little bit today and get an iced coffee when I finally did roll out of bed. Looking for something to do, I decided I would play with this web page a little more and see if I can figure out a way to create public and private blog posts depending on whether my user is signed in. Right now my middleware prevents any other users besides my GitHub user from signing into the application so only I can see the private blog posts. Considering this is more of a personal web page and the site does not need a wealth of users from being able to sign in, I figured this was OK for now. I added a boolean value to my database tables called "private" which indicates whether or not a post should be able to be loaded depending on if my user is signed in. From there I modified the fetch calls for the all blog posts and individual blogs to see if a session is passed into the call. If a valid session is passed, we fetch all the blogs on the blogs landing page, otherwise we only fetch the public blog posts. If we navigate to a specific blog, we only fetch private post if the user is logged, otherwise an error is thrown and we show the user an error page. Individual public blog posts are still fetched in the same manner. If we pass an invalid blog post UUID, the same error page is also shown. I also updated the create blog page that only my signed in user can access to allow for creating public and private blogs straight from the web. A simple checkbox was added to the blog creation page to mark the post public or private, which is then passed to the create blog API. I had been meaning to add this enhancement to the web page for quite a while but life has been a bit busy recently. Maybe I will make a more private blog post about that as a follow up. ;) Anyway, if you're reading this, hope all is well. Cheers, Dan

Wednesday night I play on a pool league with a group of guys that all work for UPS. The home bar is Ted's Place up in Commerce City. It's about a 15-20 minute drive up i25 and east on i70. They are a solid group of guys and don't seem to get too disappointed when I play poorly. I had a really good night last week where I went 4-1 but tonight I went 1-4. Sometimes it happens I guess. We played at Doctor Proctor's which is an old haunt for me at this point. It was the default for a while after the owner of the local bar said some weird shit to a girl I was dating. Either way, I don't really like to play there or the local bar these days. Too many memories. Tomorrow Tim and I leave to go to Aspen for a couple days to snowboard / go to this music festival with my friend, Courtney, and a whole bunch of her travel nurse friends. We are staying in a room with two girls we have never met before. Could be interesting? One of the girls I think is super attractive, but not counting on anything happening. Just hoping to have fun and vibe out, be safe and snowboard well, and then rave my life away, sober, at night. Aspen is supposed to be really nice. I am feeling very restless though tonight. It's funny. Now that I'm sober I have been more motivated to work on this side project, this website, when I am feeling anxious and feeling like I have nothing else to do. I'll probably continue to code on it and slowly add in some things over time, while taking the time to write out some of my thoughts. I used to write a bunch of things down in a wordpress blog. Maybe I will link it. Torn between wanting to keep this page for myself, but also show it to potential employers as an example of what I can do. Maybe more is yet to be revealed. Anyway, take it easy.

This weekend was the first weekend I have been able to go snowboarding since I broke my collarbone on December 13, 2024. It's been about 9 weeks and it seems like a lot has changed during that time. I've been starting to feel better most days, all though the horrors do persist at times. "The horrors persist, but so do I." Jack, Eva, Tim and I decided to get up on Saturday at about 4:30 AM and make the trek out to the mountains. We initially thought we would hit up Copper but the GPS said it would take about 3 hours to get there so we pivoted and hit Winter Park instead. The snow was great! I think we got in about 5-6 runs and called it early at about 12:30. When I got back home last night I told myself I wanted to get auth working on this site so that way I could sign in create blog posts straight from the web page, but didn't really know what the best way of going about it would be. I started with the tutorial on NextJS's page but ended up getting stuck after about an hour of digging. Plus, my brother, Pete, ended up calling and we discussed some plans on how to best deal with the current political landscape. Anyway, woke up this morning and after playing with Next-Auth, which is now just known as Auth.js, I was able to finally get Auth working on the site! I used Github as an oAuth provider and from there added in functionality to create blog posts. This blog post is being made from right inside the site itself, after I have authenticated my user! There is a middleware running to prevent non-authenticated users from accessing the create blog route, I wonder if that will be robust enough to prevent attacks but I still have more to learn! So far unauthenticated users will be redirected away from the '/blog/create' route immediately back to the home page due to the current set up of the middleware! I'm super excited to have this all working and now will need to come up with my next thing to do! Later y'all.

Close to 9 months ago I was really struggling. I found myself in a relationship that I could feel slipping away, while simultaneously (and secretly) battling substance abuse for the second real time in my life. My confidence was shot, and my ability to concentrate on anything other than myself was non-existent. I was in a dark place, and I was scared. One of my friends, who stayed on my ex's side after the breakup, had been building a web page for their university after recently completing a personal web app that they were using to track concerts they were going to see. I told myself I needed to build something, but I just wasn't sure what I wanted to build. Every time I started a project I would get stuck, and never follow through. Six months ago, on August 3rd, 2024, I got sober, for the second time, and two weeks later, when my girlfriend found out that I wasn't honest with her in my substance abuse struggles, I got broken up with. I felt lost. I told myself I didn't deserve it for a long time and I was angry. I was angry at myself for not being honest, her for not understanding, and my friends for not being there for me. In the months that followed I have slowly relearned what it means to be a sober man in this world and have been trying to let go of my past, while not shutting the door on it either. I am still learning, and I am still growing. I am still trying to figure out what I want to build ultimately, but I figured I would start with a personal web site that I could use to track my progress. I am proud of what I have built so far, and I am excited to see where it goes. Hopefully it will continue to grow as I become more and more inspired. Thanks for stopping by.