As I ramp up my Portuguese language learning I want to start writing in it more as well. That is beyond the stuff I’m doing in my language apps and in my classes. For both of those I am basically using the iOS Portuguese/English combined keyboard or hand writing the lesson homework out. When on a Mac I can use the same techniques that I had back when I studied Spanish several decades ago, which go back to the 1980s. How to type foreign characters, accent marks on letters, et cetera on my Linux machine (my primary desktop) was less clear to me. I was originally thinking of switching to a Portuguese key layout but since I mostly type with Dvorak and there is only a standard QWERTY-like layout that seemed less practical. I therefore wondered if there was something like the Mac equivalent of using key sequences to get custom characters. The answer is a big yes!

Another year in the books provides yet another opportunite to look at how things have held up for me on the longevity/health objectives I set out for myself. In 2023 I started a fitness reboot that totally transformed my mindset on exercise and rebooted my nutrition too. In 2024 I continued that momentum forward to the most dialed in year I ever had. I achieved athletic goals that I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to hit again. I had hoped to maintain that momentum into 2025. For the most part I did do just that.

I’ve done these annual reviews of my health/fitness/longevity journey every year going back to 2017. Every year it is the same lament about how off track I was most of the year. Last year was the first year where I had the better part of a year in a solidly performing zone. This year is the first one where I had an entire year in the solidly performing zone, having extended the fitness reboot I started in April of 2023 all the way through to the end of 2024. A perfect performance? Absolutely not. But perfect is the enemy of good enough, and I’m celebrating the win for what it is: a solid step towards improving the odds of having a good long healthspan. Not only that I started the year saying I was hoping to maybe run a half marathon strongly. Instead by the end of the year I ran two half marathons strongly, not counting training runs of equal or longer distances, and ran a marathon with a pretty solid performance as well.

When I wrote down my short and long term running goals back in April I didn’t think I’d realistically be able to knock out my two shorter term goals in the same year: running a half marathon strong and a full marathon strong. I knew I’d get the half done because I had one scheduled for that month but I wasn’t sure if I’d finish it strong. I did finish it strong. Completely a full marathon in 2024 seemed like a bridge too far so I was giving myself to the end of 2025. Talking with my coach towards the end of summer she thought it was totally doable for sometime in December. So here I am two weeks out from running a marathon for the second time in my life. This time I am going to say I ran it pretty strong, albeit not perfectly. Compared to my first marathon it was a huge success and one I’m going to chalk up as being a win. I therefore was able to knock out both of these short term running goals all in the same year!

Flutter architecturally is pretty agnostic about how one wires the state and business logic into the Flutter UI. It has no “standard” way of doing it although it does provide the foundational architecture to build declarative UIs. Most people use a framework on top of that to achieve it in a more intuitive and streamlined way. One such popular framework is Riverpod , “A Reactive Caching and Data-binding Framework”. I’ve recently switched from another framework to this and have enjoyed the experience a lot. However there are some nuances to the nature of the lifecyle of the components which I have found myself getting confused on half way through an implementation. These aren’t complicated concepts when looked at in isolation. It’s just something that I keep having to “relearn” if I haven’t seen it in awhile.

I thought it’d be good to document it for myself, and by extension for anyone else. This won’t cover the basics of Riverpod like setup, design pattern best practices, et cetera. except as needed to explore the concept of the lifecycle of the Riverpod components. Also, I am not a Riverpod expert so this is my relative new-to-the-framework point of view as well. If anything stands out to experts as being an over-simplification to the point of being wrong or adding confusion to what is happening please ping me on my socials. You can find the completed demo in this GitLab repo directory

May proved to be more of a struggle to keep things at a high level of performance. Some things, like a COVID relapse causing me to be more cautious on ramping up working out, explain part of it. Some things are me trying to transform my working out into something more focused on running performance but with side effects. Others are me just feeling more slack this month. Overall it wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t at the level I have been at.

April was supposed to be an easier month for me. That turned out to be kind of true. Goal Accountability grades definitely reflect that. I’m happy with the performance.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months now. Each time I want to commit it to “paper” I’m afraid I’m going to jinx myself by actually writing it down. My primary focus when it comes to exercise is extending my healthspan. Everything else is secondary to that. I can’t deny, though, that I get a charge out of distance running. I love the personal competition aspect. I love seeing how my body can adapt to the challenges. I like having a sense of accomplishment when I succeed. I like spending time doing the planning, tracking, and analysis. If at some point it interferes with my longevity/healthspan goals I’ll stop. In the mean time though I am enjoying being able to rejoin the recreational distance running world in a way I thought may have been solely a brief moment of my past. While I try to approach it with daily/weekly goals for personal satisfaction I can’t help but think about larger goals to target as well. In this post I want to lay out short and long term goals. If I achieve none of them but still stay constistent with my fitness regime then I would still be satisfied. Hitting them is just icing on top of that.