mdlbear | Done Since 2018-03-11 (Reply)

Well, I'm officially looking for work, for Reasons. Economics isn't called "the dismal science" for nothing.

PullRequest -- code review as a service -- is a possibility for part-time; I'll see whether I qualify. Reading other people's crappy code isn't my first choice of things to do, but... I should look into whether there are projects that offer bounties for fixing bugs.

Making something to sell is, of course, another possibility. I've gotten interested in developing an Alexa skill; the only way to monetize that is to drive sales to something else, but that might be possible. We'll see. One can monetize a phone app, and that's also a possibility. Wonder whether there's a way to link the two...

The big developent in development -- at least my software development, was that I put in a couple of days fixing my online songbook management software. You can see the results at Filksongs by Steve Savitzky and LookingGlass Folk's Songs. There's still some work to be done, but it's tagging and writing, not software. Some of the features are:

There's a page for (almost) every song in our repertoire, but lyrics are only on those pages if we have the rights to post them.
Lyrics -- even in HTML -- have chords, and use decent proportional-spaced fonts. (Different styles for chords and lyrics are coming soon.)
It's all driven by tags, and you can tag songs as "WIP" or "REJ" to keep them off the website.
The song pages are generated using a mustache template. The index pages aren't quite there yet, but they will be. Mustache is popular, and the templates are dead simple to make and use.
Every song page has an optional section for notes and links.
The code's on GitHub.

Wednesday I sang Bigger On the Inside and QV for our singing teacher. The last couple of days I've been working out how to play QV in D -- that's a whole step up from where I originally sang it, so the original arrangement, which is in G capoed up five frets, is no longer practical. It does, however, sound pretty good in D, and even better in drop-D.

Apart from all that, not much got done.

Notes & links:

0311Su
* Up 6:30PDT; W=201.2; shower
Woke just before the alarm went off; slept pretty well, so apparently the L mask is
working.
@ Habitica - Gamify Your Life
Habitica: a role-playing game for self improvement [LWN.net]
@ Buy or Rent? The Cost Model of Hosting in the Cloud and in a Colo! | Operos ([LWN.net])
Bottom line: colo starts winning over AWS at around $100-120K/month
@ OviOS Linux (DistroWatch via LWN)
lightweight storage server. zfs
* only had to reset the microwave; somebody else (G?) apparently reset the clock on the
stove. That, or it magically syncs itself; that seems unlikely.
% Paradoxical drop in anxiety and depression now that I know what my actual cash flow
is. Not clear what's going on there. Maybe uncertainty is worse?
Long-term problems dealing with paperwork, taxes, finances, etc. possibly due to the
% The problem may be that thinking of any of those things inevitably leads to thinking
about
- my poor financial management/out of control spending starting around 1990 -- that
led directly to having a $350K mortgage on the Starport when we sold it.
- not selling my PE stock when it was at its peak, thus losing about $200K -- that
was a combination of pure denial and being unable to make phone calls.
- more recently, the near-certainty that retiring (as opposed to finding a less
stressful job) and moving from Seattle was about the worst possible thing I could
have done for me and my family.
-> self-hatred, in other words, with denial as a coping strategy
* SL: cat litter, pantsu, paper towels, chicken breasts for lemon chicken, lemons,
steaks for 5, baking potatoes, asparagus, bake-at-home bread, butter or red lettuce
for salad, gin, juices, tofu, eggs, marmalade, swiss cheese, granola, malt-o-meal,
grits, juices, pretzels, shredded coconut, mushrooms, kid bread, English muffins
* for j: an orange, a grapefruit, grapes, cherry tomatoes, gauze bandage
* cat litter
: There's going to be a meeting between Trump and Kim in May. N panicking. Price
tickets to someplace safe; maybe Belize.

0312Mo
& cat cuddle for about an hour. Ticia lay on top of my arm and purred -- very sweet.
* up 6am; W=203.2;
: C has a horrendous case of hives, presumably from her antibiotic. On doctor's advice
she's stopped those, started taking benedryl, and will check in again if they're not
going away by Wednesday. Ouch!
@ The True Story of Star Trek’s First “Green Girl” | Gender Focus (amaebi)
@ ysabetwordsmith | Poem: "Debugging the Brain"
@ Why I stay on Facebook even though I don’t enjoy it much | Down the Road
" Facebook is like an abusive relationship. It’s good just often enough that you don’t
leave. "
@ Burnout, recovery and honesty – DevOps Is Common Sense… L.S[lack]
@ monicahq/monica: Intuitive web application to remember everything about your friends
and family. hosted service is $5/month. The code is AGPL.
: Framing work on the apartment starts tomorrow
* Monday: mac and cheese
@ I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. L.S
trojaned npm module. Those things are scary.
: the weather outside is gorgeous - mid-60s. Going barefoot across the deck.
@ PullRequest L.S
code review as a service -- brilliant. Possibly worth signing on.
* mostly working on songs.make and related stuff. Wrote songinfo (Perl), which extracts
metadata and outputs it in either yaml, shell, or make format.
# I have a preliminary take on an app -- lyrics display, setlist, playlist. Build using
React.js (which can build cross-platorm apps) as well as my website. Lyrics in html,
chordpro, plain text, or flktex. Possibly PDF if the app engine can handle it.
@ React Native · A framework for building native apps using React good tutorial
not really cross-platform: iOS and Android have different widgets
@ Elm is another possibility
@ so is Electron Build cross platform desktop apps
with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.; but it's only on the desktop
: Most likely neither React nor Elm is great for websites that have to work with JS
turned off, so suitable only for parts of the site. Need something that supports
graceful degradation -- that's likely to be mostly SCSS and only a littls JS.
Home | Responsive Web Design
Guidelines to building a responsive web design | Responsive Web Design
@ Elena Brower’s 10-Minute Guided Yoga Nidra to Ease Stress + Insomnia
includes audio
@ Create a Customized HTML5 Audio Player
Build an HTML5 Audio Player
HTML5 Tutorial - Audio
Of course there's always Bandcamp and Soundcloud

0313Tu my birthday
* Up 4:30; ;
* carpenters here starting on the framing.
* Template expansion for song/index.html working. Correctly handles conditional
inclusion for lyrics. The template needs some work, but that's ok. Took longer than
it should have to figure out that 1) the -v option means version, not verbose; and
2) most strings in YAML need quotes around them. The ruby version of mustache gives
good error messages about the template, but not about the YAML frontmatter.
* 4:15 preheat to 400; put the potatoes in around 4:30
: there was a cake and presents.
: there are frogs

0314We Pi Day
@ Stephen Hawking is dead
at the age of 76. (found out about it last night before bedtime, but that's because
of time-zone differences.
-> ysabetwordsmith |
Moment of Silence: Stephen Hawking and Poem: "Stardust to Stardust"
% awake 3:45 or so; regrets, worries; the usual emotional storm with dry sobs.
It sucks. I know I'm not supposed to say that I suck, but it feels like it.
$ Not clear that declaring bankruptcy would even help at this point.
I've ruined everything.
: Colleen is out in the living room. Hope she's ok.
-> she got up an hour before I did. Not a good night for sleeping.
: Bronx slipped and ended up withhis arse in the toilet. Dried him off a little.
Probably not all that good for him, except as a lesson. Maybe.
# apparently I didn't push from Cygnus all day; this bit should merge cleanly. I hope.
% 4:30ish my back hurts. Left QL.
-> 5:30am naproxen.
@ Docear - the academic literature suite (siderea
| [tech] Reference Document Management Software?)
& 9:30 leave to be at Maxwelton by 9:40 for walkout
@ Women's March on
Twitter: "Enough is enough! Women's March Youth EMPOWER is calling for students,
teachers, and allies to take part in a #NationalSchoolWalkout for 17 minutes at 10am
on March 14, 2018. Join us in saying #ENOUGH! https://t.co/8ZE8uthRlZ…
https://t.co/0Cm7v0oDv0"
* 3pm C Freeland clinic -> definitely hives. injected benedryl
* Singing. Went very well; sang Bigger On the Inside and QV.
-> I should read through the tongue-twisters, and practice singing, not just guitar.
-> QV wants to be in D; that will mean playing it in either C or D.
* put con fliers in backpack for next time
* make ferry reservations
* pushed the rebuilt Songs directories. Turned up a cut-and-paste problem with the
templates. Noted that Songs doesn't get rebuilt because it's not at the top level,
and the parent doesn't recurse.
. projects for the weekend:
~ get Songs back in operation -> took until Wednesday night, but it's working.
* down ~11:55. Slept well.

0315Th
* up 6:40; ;
* Determined the mustache has an include tag (starting with ">"). They're called
"partials". So we could avoid server-side includes if we wanted to.
@ The Joy of Tech comic... Stephen Hawking
@ Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on sale now at $35 - Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi 3B+: meet the new member of the family - The MagPi Magazine
Announced yesterday, of course. Because pi.
@ moonvoice | The Copper Forest - COMPLETE
* B1, B2 cleanup and bug fixes in songs.make, flktran, and songinfo
There are still a few bugs, a total lack of sensible formatting, and some really ugly
song-lists. But the stuff that keeps people from seeing lyrics that we don't have
rights to works as intended.
* The lemon chicken came out fairly well; there were several points in the process when
I was expecting it not to. The sauce was basically the juice of three lemons and a
jar of lemon curd. The chicken chunks were dredged in flour -- that provided the
thickening -- and the pan was deglazed with white wine.
@ Serverless Blog - really what it is is
event-driven computation running on, e.g., AWS Lambda.
@ serverless/examples: Serverless
Examples – A collection of boilerplates and examples of serverless architectures
built with the Serverless Framework and AWS Lambda
: N's job fell through. Not clear what's going on there;
* humira

0316Fr C's birthday
* up 6:32; W=203.2;
@ Private Internet Access | Anonymous VPN Service Provider
Private Internet Access – Open Source [LJ]
~ 11am chat on Slack with tmio -> next time set an alarm
@ git@github.com:quantumew/mustache-cli.git works as a template engine, and seems to be
a fully-linked binary. So there's that. We'll see if it also works on DH, which is a
different version and doesn't have go installed. -> it does.
-> so now I have to take the index.html files out of git. So it goes...
* B1 guitar - QV in various keys. C lets me use D->F and D->G slides; D can use the
latter. Both work pretty well if one isn't trying to hit all the melody notes. Have
to see what it does to the coda.
& since C and V were going out I asked them to pick up the corned beef, cabbage, and
baking potatoes.
* leave 5:00pm -> C got home just as we were having to leave for the ferry.
* Called $A to change my address. Never did get the W2, but it's on the ADP portal.
* out for dinner at Hong Kong Gardens in Clinton. -> China City in Freeland. The house
beef is excellent; basically a better version of Mongolian beef. The sizzling rice
soup is also good. The mushroom chicken and veggie fried rice were ok.
% two cleanups, one when we got home, one just after going to bed. My back hurts.

0317Sa St. Patrick's Day
* Up 4:54; W=204.2;
x goat 101 at the fairgrounds -> no tickets left :(
* more cleanup in Songs; the index is now presentable, if not elegant.
@ Don’t people slack off when they work remotely? – Chelsea Troy S(L)
* apply at https://boards.greenhouse.io/invision/jobs/847190#.Wq1_2HWnFhG
Digital Product Design, Workflow & Collaboration | InVision
: Observation: Facebook is really zucked up.
@ Sensory Sensitivities: Understanding Triggers | Musings of an Aspie
" Now I realize that if I haven’t gotten used to the tags in my shirts after 45 years,
it’s probably not going to happen. Ever. "
-> N suggested an Alexa skill -- "when was the last time I ...?"
@ Amazon Announces New Ways to Earn Money with Your Alexa Skills (Developer Preview) :
Alexa Blogs
AWS Promotional Credits for Alexa - Amazon Alexa
* Saturday: corned beef and cabbage; baked potatoes (St. Patrick's Day)
-> came off ok; N didn't have anything but the potato. Two potatoes and about a
third of the corned beef left over. Not complaining.

= menu: 0311-0317 - * revise later
* Sunday: leftovers
* Monday: mac and cheese
* Tuesday: (Family dinner; my and C's birthdays) steak, baked potatoes, asparagus, salad
* Wednesday: sandwiches
* Thursday: lemon chicken
* Friday: out for C's birthday. Hong Kong Gardens (Clinton) -> China City (Freeland)
* Saturday: corned beef and cabbage; baked potatoes (St. Patrick's Day)