I travel everywhere with one bag. Partly to avoid the hassle of checking my bag and rolling suitcases. I also pack light and don’t care too much about fashion. But most importantly, I find it fun to optimize shit that doesn’t need optimizing. The most recent victim was deodorant. I don’t like buying travel-size anything if a normal version exists. It’s more expensive and worse for the environment, and goes against my principles. TSA doesn’t regulate solids, so I can bring a full-size stick anyways, but it’s bulky.
A few months ago I received a call from one of my friends. "They have unlimited pani puri," she said, "you in?" Without thinking twice, I ordered an Uber and was on my way. $17 for an Uber for some $10 unlimited pani puri. A few weeks prior I spent $33 Ubering to a tennis match and back. On the surface this sounds egregious, especially making a habit out of it. But it's intentional.
When I visited Japan, I would stumble across reviews like this on Tabelog: This place was life changing! I mean literally, they saved my mom’s life, the employee performed CPR. They also gave me a free meal for my troubles. 4 stars. Meanwhile back home on Google Maps, I see reviews like this: This place sucks! I mean literally, the employee killed my mom with some peanuts. They didn’t even comp the meal. 4 stars.
I like to think I'm principled in my approach to life. I don't play the lottery. I buy the cheapest apartment insurance possible. I've run the numbers. So why the hell do I vote? By a back-of-the-envelope estimate, future me will waste about ten hours voting in federal elections. Ten hours for something I’m pretty sure is useless. This is deeply unsettling, so naturally, I sat down and spent far more than ten hours proving whether those ten hours were, in fact, going to be wasted.
Today I wanted to create a personal website. I wanted a minimal setup that didn't require me to fiddle with any frontend code, which I already do more than enough at my day job. With this setup, creating new posts is as simple as creating markdown files and pushing them to GitHub. After half an hour of research, I landed on the current setup, which uses Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare Pages1. I was able to get this setup working in about 20 minutes on macOS. Note that these instructions are largely adapted from Cloudflare's tutorial on deploying a Hugo site, with some modifications (using a different theme, adding a .gitignore, etc).