Faking Out Portuguese Reading, Writing, and Listening Immersion

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0400

In this post I laid out how I fake out speaking immersion for studying European Portuguese. That’s only one small part of the puzzle though. The other three components of language learning I want to try to recreate immersion on are: reading, writing, and listening. How do I go about faking out immersion in those areas?

Faking Out Portuguese Speaking Immersion

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0400

They say one of the best ways to learn a language is immersion. That is often thought of primarily as living in a country and being forced to use it on a day-to-day basis. That is obviously one very good version of immersion but there are other methods to getting daily practice with a language. One of the hardest ones for me when learning Spanish was getting over the hump of “Think in English->translate to Spanish->Speak in Spanish”. I really never got over that hump over four years of learning it in high school. Ironically I did get over that hump more when I did a year of Spanish learning through DuoLingo a few years ago. I’ve decided to try to get past that hump right away while learning European Portuguese by practicing real world listening, reading, writing, thought and conversation even with myself. This post will focus on what I’m doing for the last two, since I think it is potentially more unique.

Typing Foreign Languages on US Keyboards in Linux

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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!

Annual Review 2025: Continued Health & Running Progress

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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.

Annual Review 2024: My First Good Performance

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 21:00:00 -0400

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.

My Jacksonville Marathon Journal

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:00:00 -0500

I did the high level recap in my first post about my running the Jacksonville Marathon. That was more the nitty gritty technical details. I wanted to capture more of the whole experience as well though.

My Jacksonville Marathon 2024 Run Recap

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 23:00:00 -0400

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!

Exploring Dart/Flutter Riverpod Lifecycles

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:00:00 -0500

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

Dart Hashmap Tips

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:30:00 -0500

I’ve been meaning to document a couple of tips/tricks about Dart hashmaps for some time. It’s things I’m often looking up and/or double checking which would be better to just have on my blog.

2024 Goal Accountability May Closeout/June Kickoff

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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.

2024 Goal Accountability April Closeout/May Kickoff

Wed, 01 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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.

My Short and Long Term Running Goals

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

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.

Measuring My Return to Running Fitness

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

When I had my first bout of getting into running in the 2011/2012 period it was clear to me that I should have some sort of benchmark to measure my progress. While it was possible to measure VO2Max and heart rate zones with an expensive test I didn’t want to rely on that. Instead I devised my own running fitness test that I could repeatably do over time to see changes in my cardiovascular fitness. I am now nearly a year from the beginning of my health reboot and nine months since starting to incorporate running into that. I have been doing running training pretty consistently since August. It started off as relatively high intensity running workouts. Starting in October I shifted to a very Zone 2, low heart rate zone, style of training. After slacking off a bit in the end of year holiday period I buckled down starting at the end of January. I’ve been making slow but study progress ever since.

For years I’ve wondered if I could ever get to those cardiovascular fitness highs again. With this very different training style than what I applied before I was thinking I may be sacrificyng shorter term “faster” cardio performance levels for better base building. Having now performed the test again I think I actually am getting both at the same time. In fact I think I am almost at the same performance I was at in my best trained times.

2024 Goal Accountability March Closeout/April Kickoff

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

I knew going into March that there would be challenges meeting or exceeding how well I did in February. The month was as full of travel and stressors as I had anticipated, maybe even more so. I’m pleased to report that while I didn’t maintain my February good grades across the board I was able to keep it together more than I did in January.

Zone 2 Training Lessons

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 15:45:00 -0400

In today’s example of “this is why I blog”: as I implement Zone 2 training for doing distance running again I was lamenting not having done so for my 2013 marathon training. According to my race recap post it turns out I did implement Zone 2 training. Well, I thought I had anyway. Looking back over the data however it is pretty clear that I did not. That’s not just a question of my race performance, where I threw all of that to the wind anyway, but also looking at the training data from that era as well.

2024 Goal Accountability February Closeout/March Kickoff

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

February was a lot stronger showing than January, especially in the diet department. Whether I can keep that momentum moving forward into a much more difficult March will be the challenge.

2024 Goal Accountability January Closeout/February Kickoff

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

I’m a bit late on my closeout/kickoff for the goal accountability but here we have it. So how did I do with meeting my goals for January and what are my plans for goals for February?

Closeout of My Potential Cancer Risk Reduction Multi-Day Fast Version 2.0

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:30:00 -0500

At the beginning of the month I did a week long “water” fast meant to potentially reduce my life-long cancer risk. The methodology I was trying for was described in this kick-off post . With now two weeks of data for the period afterward I can fully document how successfully the fast went and what the effects were on my immediately measurable and tracked biomarkers. What is impossible to do is determine if this is actually doing anything to reduce my cancer risk. That’s something that will at best be determined over time. It’s anti-climactic I know. The “results” question for me in the immediate term is if I’ve crafted a fasting protocol that works for me with minimal side effects.

The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a doctor, trainer, dietitian, nutritionist, or any other expert in any related field. I’m talking about my amateur and anecdotal experiences here and none of this should replace expert medical advice.

My Potential Cancer Risk Reduction Multi-Day Fast Version 2.0

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0400

It’s about time for me to ramp up my second week long fasts. I developed this for my own needs and did the first try of it back in July, as documented here . For this second round I’m going to be tweaking some things based on lessons learned from my first attempt. Below I’ll outline everything again and the changes I’m making to it.

Annual Review 2023: Finally A Real Fitness Reboot

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Year after year my annual review starts with a lament about wanting to do better, a candid review of actual metrics, and then some plan for moving forward. This year is similar but also different. I still wish I did better but this is the first year that I had a serious, long term fitness reboot since I started this annual tradition. So no, it wasn’t perfect. It started off pretty poorly actually, but with the longest period of having stuff dialed in and a stronger finish than I’ve had before I am excited for what is to come.