Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
I’m gonna go out to the park and write. Probably gonna do a mood piece of a traveler getting lost in a sandstorm and stumbling upon an oasis that has someone to put them back on track to get home.
I really admire how prolific you are. I really don’t know how you have time to try out all of this tech stuff and write about it and apparently write fiction. 👏
It’s a group effort :)
I guess it boils down to time management.
my two biggest gains of personal quality time have been:
The next thing was picking up gardening in 2019 (from my mum, she can not handle it any more). I changed to food-only gardening (I don’t care about flowers) and implemented no-dig methods, which greatly reduce time needed for gardening. So, where others go having a coffee or for a smoke during the day, I go outside with the wire weeder for 15 mins. I do not have back pains any more. And I have fresh veggies in summer and preserved food in Winter. My pastime is now something useful.
Since 2021 I prescribed myself an offline weekend (printed books allowed) every two weeks - I started that because of too much stupid news in the media.
For writing: I did that a lot in 1986, when I was in school, outside was “Chernobyl fallout” here in Bavaria, and we should play inside. I wrote one DIN A4 page squared paper fantasy novel, gave it to my wanna-be-girlfirend (only holding hands - outside there was also HIV) and she would write on where I left off the cliffhanger at the end of the page. vice versa next day.
The other big part has been slowly getting rid of doomscrolling time in favor of more productive things.
thank you, today I learned a new word :)
Trying not to play Stardew Valley for 20 hours straight. Holy crap I never expected that game to be quite so addictive.
It is!
I did hit a point however where the addiction petered out. For me it was the amount of repetitive action like watering etc.
You are lucky you did not discover Factorio yet.
Ha! I have! I played a bunch of that too :)
Happily my addiction curve for games falls off after a bit.
I am currently playing the crud out of Skyrim on my Xbox Series X. Lots of depth to that game too.
Don’t play Factorio, it’s worse in the addiction factor.
Fortunately, I have already played it to death.
A few weekends ago I mentioned here that I was going to try flying a kite.
We now have six kites and one on order. I am trying not to become a kite nerd the same way I’m a computer nerd, an audio nerd, a LEGO nerd, an SF nerd and a theater nerd. I think I have it under control.
Flying a kite is the opposite experience of flying a drone. A drone doesn’t want to fly and is held aloft by brute force computation and motors until the batteries run out. The experience is all about trying to get it to go where you want and failing a lot.
If you’ve found a good clear spot with some wind, a [stable] kite wants to fly more than anything else. It would like to get away from the ground and flutter away. If where you want it to go is up, you’re going to succeed a lot. And then you start feeling the wind through the line, and there’s a correlation between what you see the kite doing and how the line feels. Pretty soon your gentle tugs are meaningful and have effect, but it’s still a kite dancing in the currents near the bottom of the huge ocean of air that we are standing in.
A nice brightly colored polyester delta kite is about $30 from a large number of vendors. The wind is mostly outdoors, so make sure you’ve got sun protection.
Thank you for inspiring me to get off my butt and actually fly my kites :)
Problem is the field we have nearby for that is C-R-A-W-L-I-N-G with ticks right now :(
You should be in range of a beach, yes? Maybe not this weekend, it’s going to be bloody hot, but in general, beaches are good, especially on days when nobody wants to go swimming.
Yes. When this stupid pandemic lets up I know I can get to Revere beach via MBTA.
Building a staircase for my house. It is wayyy harder than I thought, both on paper, and the actual measuring/cut/assemble.
This comment reminded me of an essay I enjoyed reading a few years ago: Reality has a Surprising Amount of Detail
This hits very close to what I experienced this weekend :x
Yeah staircases and cabinets are both way more difficult than they look, because they have lots of interlocking parts that have be very precise. Tables and bookshelves are much simpler, and easier to adjust/level/etc a little after the fact if necessary. Even thought it feels like the difference should not be large…
Exacly. My wife looked very disappointed when all I produced after a day of working outside with the tools was… one stringer, out of three, and not even glued
Thinking about resigning after 6 months working as dev in startup.
Why are you thinking of resigning?
My Adalogger and the ESP32 boards are here. I’m going to be learning how to write code and log data with it. Looking forward to having a little wifi connected embedded device that I can learn how to talk to.
The ESP32 is an incredible little system. It’s at the heart of the Fujinet wifi interface for ancient computers that I have been having just a ton of fun with.
I wish I had more time, they’re looking for help adding protocol adapters and the like to the firmware.
I live in Colorado, and we’re expecting to be somewhat snowed in this weekend. So right now I’m planning for a weekend with the fireplace on, lots of tea and baked treats, and an interesting book.
Depending on whether I feel like reading something vaguely work-related, current candidates include:
I’ve been recently promoted to staff eng, and I need to start reading some of this staff engineer literature. I don’t quite have imposter syndrome (although maybe I should 🙃), but it would be good to have a clearer idea about what “growth” looks like. Would love to hear your review on the book after you’ve read it.
Here in Thailand the rainy season is in swing so if I’m lucky I can turn off the AC and let the misty breeze chill my place.
I live in Australia and today is our federal election. We get to go vote at the local school, and they usually put on a sausage sizzle and a little fete. The weather’s very clear here today so it’ll be a lovely time out.
Recharging after pwn2own and helping drive the Firefox incident & release progress (we published a release yesterday).
Going to the museum with the kids (yay, dinos).
Visiting a friend for drinks and talking hackery.
Given that it’s going to be a snowy weekend, I plan on trying to work on my Dream Crush Scoreboard webapp that I’ve been building in Phoenix/LiveView.
This time around, I feel like I understand BEAM/OTP a lot more for having taken some time over Christmas break reading through relevant parts of Learn you some Erlang, and translating them to Elixir as a code exercise. For example, I’m making use of Monitors and a session plugin to keep an eye on if players are connected or disconnected from the game. Before reading up on those parts of Erlang, that thought process wouldn’t have occurred to me.
That being said, it consumed far more of my brain than I meant it to earlier this week, so I’m not starting on a longer session with it until tomorrow morning.
There will also be some housework, and some resting from the week.
Depending on how this project goes over the next week or two, I may try to revisit some other Elixir projects I’ve had in mind in the past.
The forecast looks warm, and sunny, and windy for my tiny local cosy spot over this weekend, so I’m planning for some wingfoiling tomorrow! Actually, it may be too windy for my skills and equipment, so I might be struggling or just swept down to the beach; but physical exercise and off-screen time and vit. D anyway, and also with weather you just never know if you don’t try :)
Working on an initial version of comments service for my blog. If I’m motivated, I might be able to release it this weekend, but there’s a significant chance that I’ll be playing Battlefield 1 on xbox instead.
Re-writing ForceAtlas2 in Julia because I need to layout a 10k node dense graph relatively quickly. I’m writing a huge post about scraping, data science (lite), and mapping Discord servers
I’ve got two things on my to-do list this weekend:
We’re taking the kid for his COVID booster tomorrow morning, and attending a local festival the next day. I’m feeling burnt out from the week and I’d predict that I’ll probably stay away from coding during the weekend, but it seems like every time I make that prediction, I end up randomly pulling an all-nighter.
Shipped a few updates to some Haskell packages I maintain, in particular
reflex-backend-socketandreflex-libtelnet.Still trying to get traction on the blog post from https://lobste.rs/s/eqwgts/what_are_you_doing_this_week#c_gnhfuy.
I did make a little progress on a code example that I need for the early part of the post; I think I’ve been ~procrastinating on it once I decided I didn’t like the first attempt at a code example.
Finish moving non tech related posts from my newly classified as professional blog to my actually new-ish personal blog. I need to figure out how I want to accomplish that. It’s just static content so I’m using Netlify for convenience and thus can’t set up HTTP redirects. Maybe I’ll just change the content of the posts on the old blog to “Hey this post has moved. Go ” and remove them from the generated index. Annoying but it’d do the job.
Also continuing to teach myself/remember how to code in Action! for the Atari 8 bit. There are so many aspects of coding on this platform in this language that tickle my fancy, I’m really having a ton of fun with it.
Also want to finally write up my misadventures with GatsbyJS. Need to get that out of my brain so I can make room for tools I enjoy using.
I first thought about HTML meta refresh redirects, but then I wondered: hm, doesn’t this netlify thing maybe provide some way to actually enable redirects? Thus a quick ddg gave me what follows - maybe it can help you? https://docs.netlify.com/routing/redirects/
Read The Fine Manual? What a truly novel idea! Thanks very much for the link, that will indeed do exactly what I want.
I’ve really enjoyed the outcome of separating the blogging “streams” as it were. There are plenty of opinions and thoughts I have at any given moment that I don’t necessarily want to attach to my technology “brand” (God I hate that word in this context. McEngineer! Now With Fewer Calories but the Same Crappy Taste!)
I’m still at the stage of: “I must totally finally start trying more to really write something in a blog, and somehow overcome my fear of publishing it.” I even managed to prepare a few small note-like article drafts! And even stopped writing my own SSG since the announcement of Soupault 4.0! (Still trying to tweak its config though.) I’m admittedly a bit tempted to write my own editor… But resisting it for now!
I totally get it, but I will say that overcoming that fear yields dividends beyond the obvious one of promoting your ‘brand’.
One of the life-hacks from $JOB I’ve become a big proponent of is “Writing is a machine that crystallizes thought”.
When we write something up, it forces us to think critically about the thing in question and helps us augment our understanding of it in ways that are rather unique in my experience.
Also, use your friends or colleagues as sounding boards! It’ll help you feel better about your writing.
Hell I’m happy to review any draft of anything for anyone at any time.
One “blog-hack” I’m thinking of is to somehow port some of my replies from HN and here to blog entries. But it doesn’t feel like making much sense if I paste them verbatim, and I haven’t yet come up with a way to do that easily otherwise. While non-easily (i.e. heavy editing) leads to a block again. It’s weird to me that I don’t have a problem writing HN replies, but have it writing blog articles/notes. One idea I got from someone is to write as if to myself before I knew $something. It sounds good in theory, but recently I somehow find it hard to put myself in this mental position. Hmh, head stuff is weird stuff.
As to reviewing… thank you, though won’t it make that even harder for me if I need to expect someone to criticize my writing even before it’s out? thinking of it now, it doesn’t clearly feel to me like it would boost to my confidence to push it out the door (?)
^^;Just my $.02 but I try not to out-clever myself. It’s counter-productive :) I’m just using [intensedebate[(https://www.intensedebate.com/) for comments. It works well, is non intrusive, and isn’t Disqus which is just AWFUL, so that’s a win :)
As to review - the idea is to help you feel more confident about what you’re posting.
People genuinely aren’t there to ridicule you, they want to help.
Look at the comments on my recent blog post that I linked here. Even when I had a ton of embarrassing spelling errors (I was relying on a vscode extension that wasn’t actually running) they were nothing but helpful.
If you’ll forgive me for quoting a science fiction film - “Fear is the mind killer”. Finding the confidence to use your voice is a hard problem, but one that’s worth putting in the work to overcome.
Addendum: The theme I love the aesthetics of on my ‘pro’ blog looks like CRAP on mobile :( Need to either fix or find a new theme that’s mobile friendly.
I’m moving at the end of May, so getting serious about organizing that. I’m even hiring movers this time and it’s still a huge hassle.
I’m on call, so staying close to home.
Doing some work around the house. Most importantly ripping up carpets and trying to sort out creaky chipboard floor boards before new floor arrives on Monday.
Breakfast with some friends who are visiting town for a few days, then off to a different town to celebrate another friend (and now colleague for the second time)’s wedding.
I’m nearly done with my invoice generator for
hledger’s timedot format: https://github.com/srid/timedot-invoice