BetterByDecember – From the disheveled desk of Nathan Bak

A Stroll Around Portland

The other weekend, my Wife and I wanted to go for a stroll around downtown Portland. Since we wanted to be down by the water, we decided to give the Classic Downtown Waterfront Loop Walk a try. This is a summary of our adventure:

Since I dislike driving downtown, we opted to take the Max.
The most convenient stop for us was Old Town/Chinatown MAX Station which put us at the second section of the route, but since it is a loop it doesn’t much matter where starting.
I’ve driven across the Steel Bridge at least once and ridden the Max over it numerous times, but this was my first time crossing it on foot.
The picture above is an AI-filtered selfie with the Steel Bridge in the background.
The weather was cold, but sunny and beautiful so we chose to not cross over the Hawthorne Bridge, but rather keep walking.
The OMSI provided brief respite where we were able to drink water and utilize the “all-user (gender-neutral) restroom” that is located in the hallway near the Kendall Planetarium.
We walked over the Tilikum Crossing Bridge. While crossing, we took another selfie with the Marquam Bridge in the background. The image below is an AI-filtered remix.
We checked out Poet’s Beach, but were not overly impressed.
As we headed north along the west bank of of the Willamette River, we started encountering various people headed to a protest.
A family with young kids holding signs with offensive language offered us some of their extra signs. We politely declined.
In lieu of participating in the protest, we walked over to Mother’s Bistro and ate a fantastic brunch. I had the Wild Salmon Hash.
In a highly unusual display of judicious consumption and showing extraordinary restraint, I did not get a Fresh-Baked Pecan Cinnamon Roll.
Without waddling too much, we made our way back to the Old Town/Chinatown MAX Station, caught a train, and made it back in time to warm down before heading to the school district Honor Band concert.

This year my Wife and I made a goal to go on more little adventures. This counts and I’m we’re tracking it on Better by December.

AI-filtered remix of The Girl Child in “concert black” after the concert

2023: Reading Like It’s 1986

Early in elementary school I was not much of a reader. I could read fine, but wasn’t really motivated to read a lot on my own. That changed for me when the family moved [back] to Belgium and I started fifth grade with Ms. Pamay.

Wendy Pamay is one of my favorite teachers of all time. She introduced me to Shakespeare as our class worked on “The Scottish Play”. We sewed frogs. We sewed books. We even sewed frog books. But the thing I remember most about fifth grade was reading. Every week we would fill out a 3×5 card for each book that we had read–along with basic bibliographic information we would also write a few sentences giving a summary of the book. Also, to earn an “A” we were supposed to read 350 pages per week. At first it was hard for me, but by the second half of the school year I was exceeding and sometimes doubling that amount. I had become a reader.

Despite learning to love reading, I didn’t enjoy filling out the 3×5 cards and recording what I read. So once fifth grade ended, I continued being an avid reader, but typically didn’t keep track of what I read beyond my memory.

After I created Better by December I decided that along with tracking things like pushups and situps, that I would also track the books I read. And so, here are the 48 books which I read in 2023 (and the date I finished reading each book):

01/07/23	The Priory of the Orange Tree
01/12/23	Jade City
01/24/23	Jade War
02/02/23	The Golden Apples of the Sun
02/13/23	Jade Legacy
02/15/23	The Reflection on Mount Vitaki
02/19/23	The Dream Thief
02/20/23	Clockwork Princess
02/26/23	The Perfect Perfume and Other Tales
03/03/23	Card Sharp Silver
03/09/23	Prohibition Orcs
03/12/23	Clockwork Heart
04/01/23	War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches
04/08/23	Shadow Warrior: The CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles
04/13/23	Steampunks and Other Heavy Hitters
04/15/23	Fiction River Presents: Sorcery & Steam
05/29/23	A Kamigata Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Metropolitan Centers, 1600–1750
06/03/23	The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Secret Projects 2)
06/08/23	Tress of the Emerald Sea: A Cosmere Novel (Secret Projects 1)
06/19/23	The Dark Forest
06/21/23	Milky Way Railroad
06/28/23	A Shameful Life
07/01/23	Doomsday Match (The Dresden Codex Book 1)
07/04/23	Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: A Cosmere Novel (Secret Projects Book 3)
07/21/23	Death’s End
07/24/23	The Funny Business
07/27/23	Skeleton in the Closet: A Dragon Business Adventure
07/30/23	Eat, Drink, and Be Wary: Satisfying Stories with a Delicious Twist
08/04/23	The Nyte Patrol: Book One
08/06/23	Lover’s Moon (Canadian Werewolf Book 5)
08/10/23	Superhero Portal : An Action-Packed Superhero Origin Story (Dice Ford, Superhero Book 1)
08/12/23	Fat Vampire
08/19/23	The Magic Touch
08/21/23	Behold the Ape
08/24/23	The Hole
08/25/23	Tales from the Wood: A Modern Fairytale
08/28/23	Myths and Magic: A Humorous Fantasy Adventure (The Faerie King Trilogy)
09/04/23	A Cat’s Guide to Bonding with Dragons: A Humorous Fantasy Adventure (Dragoncat Book 1)
09/04/23	Deadlands: A Novel
09/09/23	A Good Running Away (Misplaced Mercenaries Book 1)
09/13/23	Just Another Day in Suburbia
09/14/23	Nowhere Man
09/20/23	Gardens of the Moon: Book One of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
10/07/23	Deadhouse Gates: Book Two of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
10/22/23	Memories of Ice: Book Three of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
11/11/23	D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
12/02/23	House of Chains: Book Four of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
12/18/23	Midnight Tides – A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen

Books read in 2023

I don’t have a goal to read any particular number of books. Some books I read have under 200 pages while several had over 1000 pages so I don’t consider the number of books to be too significant. Similarly, I do not track the number of pages since the amount and difficulty of content per page varies significantly between books.

Without recording things on betterbydecember.com, I probably would have guessed I’d read about 30 books over the course of the year, but now, as I did in fifth grade, I’m tracking each book I read. Reading is awesome and I am a reader. Thank you, Ms. Pamay.

Better by December

At the end of 2022 I had scheduled vacation days, but plans fell through and I found myself with extra time to kill. I generally do better when I have something to keep me out of trouble, so I built a web application.

With the new year rapidly approaching I was starting to think about goals that I had for 2023 and how to track them. I again wanted to do 10,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups over the year. Also, my Wife and I wanted to go on 150 walks together. In addition to goals, I also wanted track other things such as the books I read and the number of days I played guitar. The hope was by doing those things I’d be a better person by the next December.

For those who might be interested in the basic architecture, here’s a summary of the various pieces I built and/or assembled:

I have a “december-back” repository on Github (currently the repository is private) which does most of the work for the service. I wrote that in Golang.
I have a “december-front” repository on Github (currently the repository is private) which provides the web user interface for the service. I wrote that in JavaScript/TypeScript using React.
The “december-front” project is built using npm and the resulting artifacts are stored in an AWS S3 bucket and delivered via Cloudfront.
The “december-back” project is packaged into a Docker image and published to a registry via a Github action.
Docker containers are spun up in AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service) on Fargate.
Route53 on AWS takes care of domain registration for betterbydecember.com and also provides all the DNS goodness and ensures requests are correctly directed to the front or back end.
An EC2 Load Application Load Balancer can direct traffic to one of two different regions and also takes care of all the https certificate goodness.
All the data is stored in a DataStax Astra database since it’s “a database I want to use“.

The web app is available at https://www.betterbydecember.com/ and anybody can try it out. It’s been over a year since the basic functionality was complete and I started using it to track my progress. I met my 2023 goals and feel like I became Better by December. Now that 2024 is in full swing, I’ve set new goals and am actively working towards becoming Better by December.