~balise's blog (powered by TTBP)



25 june 2024

Books

I finished Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It was actually amazing. I'm incredibly impressed by her ability to make me see images of contexts I do not know (something I'm not typically very good at). I was a bit afraid, at the beginning, of getting lost in proper names, but I finally got the gist of it (it may or may not have me search for a map of Gethen, which helped a lot.)

Vague spoilers (skip this section if you don't want spoilers)

I must admit I would have loved a HEA. It was fairly obvious from a few chapters before that it was probably not going to happen, and that ending got me frantically turn pages with a "no, no, nooooo" in my head, and it probably delivered a more emotional/memorable ending this way... but I would have loved a HEA.

What's next

I think I'm going to give Cal Newport's Slow Productivity a try - I'm a bit wary, considering what I read about this book, but the title makes me very curious/interested. We'll see. (Worst case, it's a short book :D )

I did manage to call my doctor's office to move an appointment that was planned during Wikimania (which I plan to attend) - victory! And I also did manage to pat myself on the back for doing it despite it being hard than berate myself for it being hard.

Watched half of Bridgerton S03E05 (will watch the second half with lunch). I really do like Penelope, but I wish Eloise would stop brooding for a minute :P

More meta-commentary: I was thinking under the shower that I really really like the TTBP/feels workflow, but that I'd like a bit more features on the web display front. And also: I really really like the tilde.town internal integration of feels, and I don't want to lose that. BUT looking at the code the other day, I can get the best of both worlds! I can roll out my modified TTBP engine for my stuff, and still rely on the global TTBP to continue working, as long as I don't touch the internal file structure. Mmmmmh. I sense some additional Python hacking in my near future (including integrating my current "paginated.py" in said personal fork, rather than relying on thinking about executing it after modifying/creating a post.

SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. (exciting!)

Work was okay, I guess - didn't feel like I achieved much, but I talked to people, and I have (unrelatedly) more understing of language variant handling of wiki titles.

Other than that, went to the burrito popup place for lunch, and my hunch was correct: I enjoyed the same food better as bowl than as burrito.

Still managed to do the 5120 steps (don't ask me why that number, Garmin got stuck on it, it seems), although I was just shy of 5000 when coming back after our evening "let's have my steps" walk.

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24 june 2024

Mostly quiet day today. Back to work after the holidays, so it was mainly catching up with stuff and people, which is perfectly fine. Also watched the meetings that I missed, and all that sort of things. All in all, I'm essentially ready to restart where I left things before the holidays, which sounds about right. And I still managed to do some code review - not a much, but some, so there's that.

After work I went for a walk - my current objective is to keep my streak of "more than 5000 steps a day" which I accidentally started over the holidays. Hey, we've been back on Friday and it's still alive, I'll take that as a success. I do need to get up more during the day, though, probably (which, well, is also kind of a Current Goal). That may be the one thing I miss by not going to an office: actually going there and walking AT LEAST A BIT during my day - it's pretty hard to make it an habit otherwise (this is not the first time I try), and it's very easy to deprioritize it (whereas when it's part of the commute, well, I actually need to go where I'm going!) Hopefully the weather will help a bit (although tonight's 26°C was almost too hot, if I'm perfectly honest :/ )

Oooh and the day ends well - officially, MediaWiki core is not moving to GitLab, and we're keeping both Gerrit and GitLab for the time being (and, as I understand it, staying on Gerrit for the use cases that are currently relevant to me). Wiki page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GitLab/Migration_status This is not necessarily a huge surprise, but it is a large relief. I do like Gerrit a lot, I'm used to it by now, and I was definitely not looking forward to changing my current workflow.

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23 june 2024

There, the web version of this blog has a paginated version with five days per page! It was indeed pretty straightforward. It's not super pretty, but it works (although it's not fully featured yet, and I need to write a bit of doc for, like, the headers & the placeholder vars. But the MVP is visible here :)

I have reduced my set of DSLR pictures from 609 to 147! Well, that was the first selection anyway. Now - processing and more reduction, probably... and integration of the phone pictures in the final album.

Had a large steak lunch with family today, so we skipped dinner, but still watched the latest Doctor Who. Overall a very enjoyable season, both from a "writing" perspective and a "Doctor" perspective. Went for a walk after dinner to Keep The Streak - I've been hitting 5000+ steps every day during the holidays, and it feels like I should continue trying doing that.

Edited 37 pictures out of (now) 141 - well, that's progress made, I guess.

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22 june 2024

Some meta commentary: I wanted to fix a couple of typos in a 10-day-old post. The documentation of TTBP indicates: "however, changing old entries might cause strange things to happen with timestamps. the main program looks at the filename first for setting the date, then the last modified time to sort recent posts."

So I dug a bit into the source, and my conclusion on that is:

Caveat: no idea what happens on gopher. But, it seems to have worked well enough on main engine and on HTML file generation.

More meta thought: pondering whether I can/I should write a smol script that generates a paginated blog from feels entries, rather than a Very Long Page™.

Today was a good day, despite the "back from holiday" fatigue.

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21 june 2024

I am back home and typing on a physical keyboard rather than an Android phone! 'Tis better. But, let me finish my travel log for this trip :)

Travel log

Today was the "fly back home" day, but our flight was at 3PM, so we had some more time to spend if we wanted to. We decided to go visit Helsingør (also known as Elsinore), which is the closest town from Sweden in Denmark. We could indeed see the Swedish coast quite clearly, including buildings! The town is very pretty, a lot of older buildings. At first, I was a bit puzzled by the amount of liquor shops in the main street... until I remembered that is was probably a smart commercial move considering the regular ferry from Sweden!

We visited the Sankt Olai (St Olaf) church, which had a lot of very elaborate and very gilded decoration, and a great looking organ (I really liked that one!). It also had a small kids table in the entrance, with a box of plush toys labelled "Noah's Ark", which, I'll admit, made me chuckle.

After our parking adventures in Aahrus due to the half-marathon, we were quite amused to find that Helsingør had a half-Ironman planned for this week-end; that one didn't bother us that much, but we were impressed by the amount of organization and infrastructure involved.

We walked around the Kronborg castle, which is the location of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but we didn't feel like we had time to actually visit it.

We could have, though, because by the time we were at the airport, past the security... we were still two hours before our flight (which got delayed an extra half-hour too.) Bah, we took the opportunity to finally have smørrebrød - it would have been a pity to leave Denmark without having that.

The flight was a bit delayed, a bit bumpy, but we finally arrived in Zürich around 6PM; luggage was long to be delivered (and super wet) when it arrived, but we made it home.

And now for the "back to the regular program" of this blog (well, as "regular" as this thing can be with its young age, I guess):

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