River: Onward to 2018

[mdlbear]

Last year, as you may recall, I titled my New Year's Day post "This had better work...". Last month I went back over it, in "That Was the Year That Was". I shorted myself some, by only reviewing my actual goals and not any other notable accomplishments along the way. Wait -- were there any?

Probably the biggest was simply living through it. It's not clear that anything else was that major.

Anyway, onward! Here are the goals for 2018:

1. Find the money for 2016 taxes and the garage room remodel. This will almost certainly involve a loan, rather than pulling it out of my retirement savings, because of the tax hit.
2. Get the garage sufficiently cleared out to serve as a workshop. Work some wood.
3. Do some real programming. Find an interesting open-source project and get involved, maybe. Write a DW client that works the way I want it to.
4. Learn Wordpress and Joomla. Maybe Drupal. Build the website that N is going to need for her business.
5. Do a lot more music. Continue lessons, play at some open mics and farmers' markets, record a CD or three.
6. Do a lot more writing. I wrote a book once; it's not impossible for me to do it again.
7. Attend Worldcon in San Jose. There are a lot of people in the Bay Area who we haven't seen since we left.
8. Take care of myself Self-care is still my weakest point. Walk. Find a therapist. Eat more green stuff.
9. Do things that get me out among people. I'm still something of a loner, and very much an introvert, but I need this.

There were also a bunch of WIBNIFs, none of which actually got done. Three of them, "Get back into recording", "Do a lot more writing", and "Do a little woodworking", are included above. That pretty much leaves:

• Record an album, either Amethyst Rose, Lookingglass Folk, or preferably both. Last year's version of this, "do some recording", is included in "do a lot more music". See above.
• Do something that will bring in a little money. I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again, but writing could do it. So could an album or two. And maybe I could start a patreon.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Writing as a second career after software engineering is working pretty well for me. It's a possibility to think about.

[jesse_the_k]

Write a DW client that works the way I want it to.
and
I'm not sure I'm up for contracting again.

Hmmm, I'm thinking that you could crowd source a mobile DW client -- the folks who are sticking here are mostly older, therefore more likely to have spare cash. I know I'd throw some money in the pot.

[silk_dragon_zen]

This! Especially if it allowed use of larger fonts and were compatible with iOS and Android's on-board screen-readers and text-to-speech software.

— Sage

[mdlbear]

Hmm. Sounds like it could become an interesting project. So now I want two clients:

* one possibly written in Javascript (for portability: you can supposedly wrap HTML5 as an iOS/Android app as well as running it in a browser). Or, more likely, something like Elm that compiles into Javascript.

* the command-line one I was originally thinking of, which would fit my own preferred workflow, which is built on text files and driven by makefiles.

hslj/LiveJournal could be useful.

ETA: iOS development might be impossible; it would depend on portability.

[silk_dragon_zen]

ETA: iOS development might be impossible; it would depend on portability.

Awwww darn. 😔 We pretty much have to use iOS because it's the most accessible for anyone legally blind. Oh well, we've gotten by okay so far just accessing DW from our laptop.

— Sage

[mdlbear]

I'll see what I can do, then.

BTW I heard a talk on Amazon's screen reader while I was there -- it sounded worth investigating. May only be available on Kindle Fire.

[silk_dragon_zen]

>> BTW I heard a talk on Amazon's screen reader while I was there -- it sounded worth investigating. May only be available on Kindle Fire. <<

Yes, I imagine that's the case: none of the Kindle apps on our browsers, our computer, nor our tablet offer TTS (text-to-speech) at all. we would have to own a Kindle Fire to be able to have it read books to us.

We do own an almost prehistoric Kindle — from before the invention of Fire — that does have a very old version of their screen-reader and TTS. But the voice and phrasing is just awful, which makes it pretty impossible four our brain to access, given our auditory processing and receptive language disabilities. So if we want to be able to listen to any of our Kindle books, we would have to download the file meant for that ancient Kindle, then run it through D-DRM (assuming this hack even still works after all these years), so the Kindle app will allow us to run it through Mac OS's TTS software. Otherwise, the DRM prevents us from using Mac OS's TTS software since the way the TTS software works is dependent on being able to “copy“ text (even though I never paste said text anywhere — I wish Apple would fix this problem!).

— Sage

[mdlbear]

Hmm. You might look into the Echo Dot -- that's the cheap version of the Echo, which has speech recognition and all that stuff. And as a voice-operated device it should be pretty easy for you to use. Don't know for certain whether it can read Kindle books, but it might be worth asking.

[silk_dragon_zen]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

— Sage

[callibr8]

WIBNIF? Please unpack?

[mdlbear]

Wouldn't It Be Nice IF?

It would probably make more sense to spell it WIBNIf, but...

[callibr8]

Thanks for unpacking that. I doubt that it would have helped to have a lowercase 'F', the whole thing was unfamiliar. Makes a nice addition to the lexicon, though. Thanks again!