This morning I am powering through all of my 300+ projects in my projects folder, and triaging and doing any next actions that take next than 5 minutes.
One of the first things to do was to fix bushwhich, my old choose-your-own adventure game where I bike around my old neighbourhood, Bushwick, in Brooklyn. I had moved it off of the domain it was on and to https://richardlitt.github.io/bushwhich, but the assets weren’t working. I set my timer to go.
It took me ten minutes, 30 seconds to fix the problem; BASE_PATH wasn’t being used anywhere, and wasn’t set in the config. I removed all of the hardcoded paths, set base path to the domain, and grepped for all <a href="/"> and changed them to <a href="">. Upload, refresh, and it’s working now. I’ve changed the link on my project on burntfen.com, too.
Not a bad amount of time to end a project. Ricardo asked me to blog about it, so here I am.
I use a folder called projects for holding my GTD projects, in Markdown files. I wanted a way to search for the occurrence of a word - say, fritz if I wanted to message my friend @fritzvd - but also to find that word if it was in a filename. I use the silver searcher (ag) because it is faster than grep, but I couldn’t find a way in the man files to combine both -i for ignore case and -g for finding patterns in filenames. A short trip to my ~.bash_profile later, and I’ve got this:
function aga(){
ag -i$1
ag -ig$1}
Maybe not the most convenient, but it should work for now.
Ironically, I had to use grep to find that command in my .bash_profile, because ag doesn’t have the -n5 command I wanted. Let’s fix that.
…
A quick trip to the man ag files later, and I’ve got this: cat ~/.bash_profile | ag 'ag' -C5. Glad I won’t have to see that problem again.
Morning again. Today is Friday; nominally a regroup and rethink day. I’ve got some emails to take care off. That’s my first priority, today - figuring out what I’ve left undone this week, and whether or not I can start it easily today or whether I need to allocate longer sections of time.
Yesterday, I rebuilt carbonzerow.org for my friends, in Jekyll and hosted on Netlify so that we can stop paying for the Wix site but still have SSL enabled and an easily editable site. That took a few hours. I also talked at length with Kyle about our plan to set up an expedition website (which I talked about a while ago here).
I also finished the metrics rebuttal for my thesis, spent time wondering if I could convert LaTeX to HTML easily enough to put it here (no, but it is in section 2.2 in the PDF), did some work for my UX auditing company, and generally worked on a lot of smaller tasks in between
Writing up a review and summary of the Language Endangerment Index used by endangeredlanguages.com, I had a wonderful experience. I didn’t like the fact that the LEI waved over some issues with language assessment raised by the other standards - in particular, by the UNESCO standard, which specifically prohibited counting up all of the measurements of the numbers into a single stat - and assigning a single number to a language as a measure of its endangerment. I found this to be qualitatively interesting as a method for fitting a square into a circle-shaped hole, but not exactly the most scientific approach to complexity, and to not be well backed up with reasons besides that they were building an assessment index.
Then, I found Grenoble’s response, which summarised my feelings much better than I could have, and using the appropriately hedged scientific language (unlike this blog, which is not academic and which should be taken with a grain of salt). It was immensely satisfying to have my doubts validated.
And the writing continues. Ten pages since last week this time.
I also just sat down with my friend Ruy, in the midst of writing this post, to discuss the now upcoming Open Source Montreal meetup! Probably on April 9th, this will be the first meetup just about open source, language agnostic, in Montreal. I’m excited for it - I had thoughts about running a FLOSS event in each city I visit, through @opensourcecities. I wonder how this will go.
Next up: it’s 1600. Time for a long break, because the 1600-1800 hour gap is almost never productive for me, no matter how hard I force it.
Talked to the CBC about by interview next week for Silent Book Club;
Went to Cafe Névé and showed them Heather’s art, which I put up on the website this morning. My last art I showed them wasn’t something they were interested in hanging; nominally, they said they wanted more colour, but I’m guessing they probably thought it looked like I made it five minutes. They wouldn’t technically be wrong, but that wasn’t why I did it.
Went grocery shopping and prepped dinner.
Watched the second episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender over lunch.
All of this is probably beyond uninteresting. That’s how it goes. Up next: describe the language endangerment index in my thesis.
I have too many social networks. I realised recently that I continually drop notifications when I switch between them. So, I wrote up a list, and now, a few times a week, I go through all of them and check if there are any updates and any missed messages.
On April 20th and 21st, I am going to Pittsburgh for Heartifacts, a conference run by Code & Supply. As I am going down there, anyway, I want to do a few things - high point, road-trip, minimise my carbon footprint, and see friends in Philadelphia and perhaps Baltimore.
The route looks something like this:
I’ve already highpointed all of New England, so I’m not that interested in doing them again (although Rhode Island is fun). This trip would high point the remaining states in the direct area: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia. All in all, it should be roughly 35 hours of driving - 5 to Boston, 4 to New Jersey and 6 to Pittsburgh, and then the rest coming back. Getting to Pittsburgh should take around two or three days. Going to Boston would be necessary if I drop off Heather, and going to Philly would be necessary if I pick up Matt or if I can see Jen. That’s my general plan.
All in all, it should take roughly 10 days - 3 to Pittsburgh (perhaps 2), 2 in Pittsburgh, and 3-4 back, with some extra days for good luck. I plan to book the car from April 17th.
I also may not return to Canada. It’s possible that I could pack up all of my stuff, drive down to my storage unit near Boston, drop it off, do the drive, and then have a friend take the car back up to Canada. Then, I’d drive across the country with my sister or with my stuff, moving to Seattle or Boulder or something. In late May I need to be in Berlin for the Node Summit, but that’s about all of the plan I have currently. All of this is liable to change.
Yesterday, after my friend couldn’t get off work at 3:00, Heather and I decided to stop working slightly before noon and go to see the Oka National Park sooner rather than later in the day. After looking at this presentation, it became clear that there was an outcropping near St. Andrew East that could also be considered a Monteregian hill. So, that was the first destination.
On the way, we passed Mirabel Airport, once the world’s largest airport and now largely abandoned. That was interesting to see, if only in passing. It is massive. Then, on the side of the highway, I saw my first two Horned Larks flying next to the roadside. I thought they were Snow Buntings at first, but it was clear that they were slightly bigger and had a more curved wing. Later in the day, I added American Robins, European Starlings, Mourning Doves, Common Grackles, White-Breasted Nuthatches, and Red-winged Blackbirds to my list of birds I’ve seen in Canada - around a fifth of what I’ve sen in the States in my past year or two of birding.
The St. Andre hill was a slight rise, wooded and threaded through with maple syrup tubes. There was no public access to the top. As we drove down towards Oka, we passed through the Mohawk Nation of Kanehsatà:ke, which I didn’t know existed here. There were many signs in Kanien’kéha, which was great to see. Mohawk (the exonym for the language) is endangered, with roughly 3500 speakers. It is characterised as 6b Threatened on Ethnologue, and 80% endangered on ELP, and definitely endangered by UNESCO. As I was writing about these measurements yesterday morning in my thesis, it’s fitting that even on an excursion I couldn’t escape it.
Thirty minutes down the road, the National Parc d’Oka was open for the off-season, and there were kite-surfers on the lake. Heather and I walked up the hill there, around 200 meters, for two hours - not much birdlife, at all, and the sky was a dull grey to match the snow. It looked almost exactly like Mont Royal (for which Montréal is named), except with far fewer people and Catholic shrines on top. Then, another drive home. Got in at around 5, decamped, cleaned the house, made dinner, watched most of Avatar (mostly because I find it exceedingly relaxing, not because of the ideological links to seeing a First Nations group - reading into this would not be productive), and went to bed.
That was yesterday. Increasingly, my hobbies - birdwatching, geological sightseeing, and linguistics - seem to drag me to far-out places.
I built a little script for automatically copying over a week’s journal over to a new repository. Repos are cheap; and while I could tag everything and use the same blog, I don’t really see a need to. And I like the idea of starting fresh every week.
Yesterday I worked mainly on my thesis, something which has continued today. This morning I wrote the section on EGIDS; next up, explaining the Language Endangerment Index (LEI) from Google’s endangeredlanguages.com.
I also moved theuserisdrunk.com this morning from GitHub over to Netlify. It now has SSL enabled. Been meaning to do that for a while; only took twenty minutes.
I went hiking last weekend, but came back sooner than I expected. This afternoon I am going to Oka National Parc, the last of the Monteregian Hills (of which Mont Royal is also one).
