Week of 2023-01-29
📷 Photography
It was really cold this week, so we didn't take many coffee walks, and I had a bunch of appointments mid-week that dampened my interest in getting out much, so I didn't take a lot of pictures. I did, however, go out to lunch on Wednesday and saw a few things around Alberta St.
I also spent some time on a "picture of the week" feature for my new Hugo blog, documented here. It was pretty fun to put that together because it leverages some workflow changes I've made using imgup and I got to take something from "clunky, semi-manual" to "mostly automated."
Also rare to catch a crow very close, but it was on the other side of a fence and I had the 35mm on the camera.
✏️ Writing
It wasn't a bad writing week. I have been pushing myself to do a few pomodoros of writing each day, whether I like where they're going or not. This week I posted a few, too:
- "Making a Picture of the Week feature on Hugo (Updated)""
- "The problem with doing it right."
- "A lot of 'experiments' aren't."
I'm still stuck on the whole LinkedIn thing. I can feel the wheels turning but I haven't arrived anywhere yet.
📚 Reading
I started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth, a space opera that manages high stakes and a sense of humor. He's one of my favorite authors and this has been delivering. I've look forward to it every night.
⚙️ Organization
I ought to write up my job hunting board. It has been working pretty well for me. Last week I added some metadata to the notes attached to cards I use for tracking, e.g.:
---
opened: 2023-01-24
applied:
closed: 2023-01-30
closereason: Bad fit
---
This week I also learned about Obsidian's data view. It lets you take metadata from individual notes and build reports around them. Here's an example of a query:
table closed, closereason
from "Kanbans/Job Notes"
sort opened desc
where closed
It just goes through the listings I've applied for if they have a value in the "closed" field and lists when and why.
It offers a little more concise reporting than visually scanning down the closed column, and it has been helpful for keeping perspective on my job search.
🫥 How are you feeling?
I am feeling ... okay.
I had some medical appointments this week and learned a few things that I sort of suspected but hadn't gotten around to acknowledging or really facing. I was hoping for better, I feared worse. After a round of tests, followup tests, then more followups to assess where I'm at, I am optimistic, but it's also the first time in my life that I've come up against a limitation with my body and that is taking some getting used to.
All that activity -- repeated trips for labs, doctor and nurse visits, more nurse visits, etc. -- was draining. I don't want to say "exhausting" because I kept doing most of the stuff I needed to do and didn't feel too put upon. I was just ready to be done each day.
I spent some time this week hacking on imgup, getting it to provide a JSON endpoint for the picture of the week feature I built on Hugo. It was fun to be in that place where I understand the thing I've build and can just add a feature without a lot of fuss.
I also rediscovered Minecraft. It's a sort of psychic comfort food to set up an easy game and just go through the cycle of gathering, basic shelter, mining, agriculture, and ultimately boredom with the game. There's this moment where I don't have to worry about anything and could just sustain what I've got indefinitely, and I briefly think "ah, I've arrived." Then it's just "I guess I could try to make something cool but it is amazingly tedious to make things of any complexity, maybe it's time for Diablo or something."