The Mandelbear's Musings

There is sadness this week, as NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End. Oppy's last transmission amounted to “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”. Several songs have already been written; I'll almost certainly try to write one of my own. Probably from Oppy's POV; I seem to enjoy anthropomorphizing AIs and other inanimate objects.

Not a whole lot has been getting done this week. I did manage to run some errands Thursday and Friday, with the car on the street. Pulled back into the driveway Friday after things were done, anticipating that the predicted good weather would make it possible to get up again the next time I need to. Fingers crossed.

I started working on the potential writing (tutorials) gig -- we'll see whether $editor likes my proposal. Not many notes Friday and Saturday as a result. Not sure I'm working fast enough. That remains to be seen; it's going slower than I'd like but that may just be because I'm working on the outline.

If you're into music at all, you'll get a kick out of (Gimme Some of That) Ol' Atonal Music - YouTube and Twelve Tones - YouTube (via ysabetwordsmith).

And I was highly amused to find someone seriously advocating the use of RFC 1149, some 18 years after I wrote a song about it.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Good grief! Got so wrapped in songwriting -- or is that FAWMwriting -- that I didn't notice it was Sunday. I will attempt to rectify that error.

I managed to start FAWM (February Album-Writing Month, in case you missed the announcements) pretty well; the silly thing's been well received, I think. You can also see the lyrics on yesterday's Songs for Saturday, but you'll have to click through to FAWM if you want the audio. Which is not too bad for something that was slapped together in under an hour. It's only the one song so far, we'll see whether I can make a second song come together by tomorrow night.

Related to that, I finally got around to uploading Coffee, Computers, and Song to bandcamp

It's still snowing here on Whidbey; we're well on our way to getting the predicted 3-4 inches. I am not crazy about driving in snow, but I can do it when I have to. I parked on the street this evening; I don't know what the driveway is going to be like after the slush freezes, but I don't really want to know.

The most useful links this week are probably the ones on Monday about Data Privacy Day.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm still not getting as much real work done as I need to, so I'm still down on myself as usual, but I've gotten a few, mostly less important, things done.

I actually did a little hacking this week: we wanted to put the music collection onto an mp3 player for m, so I had to transcode the existing collection, most of which is in ogg vorbis. I realized that I could shrink them considerably in the process, which got all the folk and filk in under 20GB. The whole thing will almost certainly come in under 64GB, and micro SD cards that size are getting cheap. There was a moderate amount of bash scripting involved. There will be even more next time; the server is about a quarter the speed of my fastest laptop.

I seem to be the official household recipient for dead or dubious electronics. It's not that I'm necessarily capable of fixing it, just that I'm the only one who might consider it worth attempting. Not that I actually do attempt it in all cases; that's why I also maintain the household's collection of dead phones and tablets. However, I've gotten pretty good at simple laptop repair and linux installs.

Top link for the week goes to The Ultimate Rain Sound Generator, which includes a very effective conversation-blocker setting. If you prefer something other than rain its parent site, myNoise.net, has an enormous number of alternatives. Done by Stéphane Pigeon, who also built (the internet has a cat)Purrli.

Also, .wtf is a top-level domain. WTF??!

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm still not getting much done. The week between Christmas and New Year felt like a vacation, but getting back to work afterwards? Not so much. this article may explain some of that. Though I can't escape the feeling that I'm simply lazy. I've noticed a tendency to get annoyed when Colleen nags me to do something that I've been putting off for too long; I think a large part of that is that these are things that I beat myself up over every damned day.

Most of my current problems are self-inflicted. The few that aren't, I've simply made worse by neglecting them. I don't like myself very much this morning. This week.

On the plus side, Colleen and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary with dinner at Toby's on Friday. And I made a wooden guide to replace the totally inadequate L-hook holding the cat lock in place. And I did a small amount of writing, and an even smaller but still non-zero amount of programming. So there's that.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Whidbey Island has wind storms. Last week was punctuated by a pair of power outages: one from 12:40am to 3:30pm Monday, and one from 11am Thursday to 10:55 Friday. I was actually surprised that they got the power up as fast as they did Friday; I was expecting another day's worth. I never did get a good look at the eventual outage map.

In the first outage, I learned that my bedroom UPS will keep my CPAP running for about three hours. It would be significantly more without the huidifier, but there doesn't seem to be a way of turning it off remotely; next time I'll try to remember to take it off if the UPS alarm wakes me up (as it did this time). The IT UPS (in the entryway/laundry room) kept the routers up for about ten, even without shutting down the server, which is probably the biggest power draw.

In the second one, I learned that:

• Phone service is spotty to nonexistant during a sufficiently long outage. (My phone's hotspot went away just as I was trying to post Thankful Thursday.)
• I can sleep without a CPAP if I have to. (Actually I knew that already, but recent confirmation is nice.)
• We don't have water during an outage because the well has an electric pump with no backup generator. Water stayed up long enough for me to fill a couple of gallon bottles, though.
• We didn't have nearly enough water available for flushing the toilets.
• Molly, our electric car, can be used to charge phones and other electronics. (On the other hand, we don't have a way to keep her charged; that would have been problematic in a longer outage.) Her WiFi hotspot can be used to network a couple of laptops together even if it can't get to the internet. I like Molly.
• Although I'm positive we have a hardwired phone someplace in the house or the garage, I have no idea where it went.
• We did have enough flashlights and LED lanterns to go around, but we probably don't have enough batteries for a longer outage.

N has been up from Seattle for the entire week -- that's been wonderful. (The kids are with their father because their cousins are in town.) She's been staying in the Box Barn (as we've started calling the apartment over the garage). It has hot water, finally; the only thing left to do is some electrical work; that's scheduled for the first week in January.

I'm continuing to have problems configuring a WiFi repeater to cover the Box Barn. You would think that it would be easy to configure a dual-band router as a bridge -- you'd be wrong. Apparently there are some problems with the WiFi protocol and DHCP that make this difficult. It would be easier if it wasn't so easy to break the configuration to the point where it becomes inaccessible and I have to do a hard reset.

I've also learned that my recording and cd-burning toolchain has serious problems, which is not at all surprising. It hasn't been used for years, so the whole transition to MakeStuff has sort of passed it by. I finally have most of it working; it's enough to put together and burn a CD. The parts for publishing concerts on the web mostly aren't working; I've fallen far behind in that department.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I guess not a bad week. Not a good one, I don't think. Just a week. But we have our internet connection back, I spent some time down at the south end of the household, and I have the YD's wedding present (one of my famous cutting boards) mostly made. Not as good a finish as I like, because I couldn't find most of my planes (they turned up today, so I may be able to do some fixing) and had to make do with the sander. The beauty of the wood may make up for the slight irregularity of the surface.

One bit of good news: I heard from the vet about the histology report on the cysts removed from Desti last week -- they were benign, and were completely excised. So she's going to be okay. She's getting her sutures removed tomorrow.

Elsenet, Tumblr gave me a great excuse for a meta post. There's nothing wrong with event-driven scheduling, is there?

Not much programming -- just filling in some gaps in word-count -- and no writing beyond what's here in the blog. I think I'm supposed to feel accomplished because of what I did get done, but I know that I'm losing ground.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not too bad a week, modulo the fact that Colleen has been in the hospital since Monday; she went straight from her nephrology appointment to the ER. Her kidney function is recovering, thank goodness, and she has fired her old urologist in hope of finding someone in the Everett/Providence system who can do a better job of it. (Notes may include medical TMI, so be aware of that. On the other hand, we had the whole family together for Thanksgiving, both in Colleen's hospital room and the house. We'll end it with music in Colleen's room. this afternoon.

We've done quite a bit of singing, so that's good too.

In NaBloPoMo status, I missed posting Friday (and posted what I'd intended to post then on Saturday). So I'm still on track with number of posts, but not posts per day. Blarg. (For writing every day, I could count the work I did in the Rails tutorial.)

Anyway, not much to say this time. Probably the top link is One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives, by Alexandra Rowland, by way of this comment from kyleri on last week's s4s about "The Mary Ellen Carter". It's about "hopepunk", which seems particularly appropriate for this week.

( Notes & links, as usual )

NaBloPoMo stats:
  15374 words in 27 posts this month (average 569/post)
   1513 words in 1 post today

Pretty good week, on the whole, but kind of a bumpy ride. My self-confidence bottomed out a couple of times. However:

N and the kids came up Tuesday evening (after appointments), and stayed until Thursday afternoon. It was wonderful to have the rest of the family here. Wednesday morning I worked on math with j; much of that evening and Thursday were spent singing with N and m (who has a lovely voice and a good ear for harmony). I had a few problems keeping up -- for some reason I kept screwing up D chords, and it's always a little tricky learning new vocals and a guitar part at the same time. But it was all good.

There was some progress on the job front, too. I heard back from 7cups on Monday, scheduled a phone screen, and did that on Friday. I think it went pretty well, though of course there's no telling whether it will go any farther. One can hope. Also, I finally finished the application to DuckDuckGo. It had some questions on it that made it difficult, but I did hear back on Friday and scheduled a phone screen for a week from Monday. So there's that.

I've managed to keep up with my NaBloPoMo plans as well. There's nothing like a well over a thousand word worth of notes once a week to keep the average up -- it's sort of cheating, but I'll take it. I also wrote the little word-count script that computes the current stats, and made some fixes and improvements in the blogging code. It's quite usable at this point, although it still requires being comfortable on the command line.

The "apartment" -- the room over the garage -- finally has working plumbing! It will still be a while before it has hot water, but it's pretty usable at this point.

On the down side, I'm still beating myself up about all the stupid things I've done, ever, and worrying about how in hell I'm going to survive the next few years after the money runs out.

( Notes & links, as usual )

NaBloPoMo stats:
   6590 words in 12 posts this month (average 549/post)
   1515 words in 1 post today

It has not been a good week. Between a synagogue mass murder in Pittsburgh yesterday, filk fan Harold Stein (hms42) dying of cancer Friday, and pipe bombs in the mail, the fact that I'm despairing of finding work in time to keep from going broke seems comparatively small, but it isn't helping either.

The fundamental problem is that I can't think of any area of expertise I have that would be worth charging consulting rates for, and as time goes on it becomes less and less likely that any of my skills will get me hired for doing it as an employee. Yes, I'm acquiring new ones. But I'm not going to acquire four years of experience in Ruby or JavaScript overnight. I'm a genuine expert at git, but I think that's pretty common. Maybe I could predict the next big thing, but my track record as a seer isn't all that good either.

I certainly didn't predict that IBM would buy Red Hat. Big Blue Hat? Nah. Does "If AOL Buys RedHat" count for a prediction? I wrote it in 2002, and it has nothing whatever to do with the current situation. I guess if Microsoft can buy GitHub...

I did manage to get some website work done, including importing quite a few older software-related posts into the blog on computer-curmudgeon.com/. I'm not sure it matters. And last Sunday I swatted the second simplex bug in hyperviewer, but I don't think tetrahedra and tesseracts have a lot of market value.

I'm blathering, aren't I?

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not too bad of a week, and productive after a fashion. A job rejection (npm; I didn't have much hope for that one), and a couple of applications including one Friday that got a same-day response asking more questions. I posted on Monday about one of my latest software, under the title Adventures in Hyperspace (and Javascript) -- then spent at least half of this week chasing a very mysterious bug. That post originally appeared on Computer-Curmudgeon.com, and was pretty successful as an experiment in cross-posting. It did produce much uglier HTML than I prefer; the post was originally written in markdown. (I also used pandoc to do the conversion; it looks as though the converter Jekyll uses does a better job of it, so I'll have to see if I can take advantage of that.)

I also started the process of separating the Computer Curmudgeon site, which exists mainly for my (currently non-existent) consulting business, from my GitHub Pages site, which I've decided ought to be about the software I'm sharing. They have a very similar look at the moment, but that's changing. Tell me what you think!

There's obviously going to be a lot of cross-posting going on (and I still need to automate that) -- I think I'll put that in my next curmudgeon post. TL;DR: everything except specifically site-related news will get cross-posted to DW (and from there to LJ), and the news posts will at least be linked. For completeness, I probably ought to post links on twitter and FB, too -- I don't read them unless I get a link, but I know some people do. Maybe.

Let's see... the usual collection of data breaches. This time, Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public, but now that the cat's out of the bag, they're (belatedly) "Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+". That last bit is the main one affecting those of us who were using G+ as our main alternative to Twitter and The Book of Faces Lies. As for me, I guess I'll be reading more eBooks on the ferry.

My mood's been all over the place. Tuesday, I wrote, "I seem to be feeling more competent/confident now that I've spent the last couple of weeks getting back into a work groove. Who knew?" It does indicate that I actually can work full days, if the work fascinates me. But Thursday, I wrote, "losing hope. Cash low; no jobs I'm qualified for", and had a "bit of a breakdown". More like a meltdown, I suppose. Still enough for me to snap at Colleen for trying to help. Mostly a case of "what not to say to a depressed person", but I can't fault her for suggesting that I get out of the house or make some music, because those really do help. It's just that when I'm that depressed, it feels as though nothing will help. And of course the underlying cause is mostly my financial trainwreck, which only makes me feel worse about myself.

I'd really like to get onto Drip, but it's invite-only at the moment. Meanwhile, anyone have any advice for choosing between Patreon, Buy Me A Coffee, Ko-fi, PayPal, or anything else? (I should get on Bandcamp, too, I suppose.) update: PayPal donation button added to DW profile. Feed the bear?

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not a bad week? Hard for me to tell. Nothing disastrous happened, anyway, and my trigger thumb appears to be mostly better. I sent out two job applications, and got back a rejection from the one I had a phone screen for last week. There is one from a couple of weeks ago that I'm also waiting to hear from.

I spent almost all of Friday and a lot of Saturday programming -- it's very encouraging to know that I can still do that. It suggests that I probably can handle a full-time job. The program in question is an update of the rotating hypercube (and other polytopes) demo I wrote somewhere around 1990. The original was, of course, in C; the current version is in JavaScript. I'll be packaging the pieces, thereby adding to the confoundingly cluttered chaos that is the npm package ecosystem. Last night's work was unit tests for the polytope classes. So those are working, and I'm learning more about JavaScript.

The security kerfuffle of the week was Facebook's announcement that 90 million accounts had been compromised. Think about that number for a moment. You can find out whether your account was compromised in this or any other breach by entering your email address at Have I Been Pwned. Think about the fact that Facebook is not on their list of the ten largest breaches.

The privacy kerfuffle of the week was the latest version of Google's Chrome browser, which automatically logs in the browser whenever you log in to any of Google's other properties, e.g. gmail, calendar, and maps. You can turn the "feature" off, but you'll have to google for the instructions. Irony intended.

It's worth noting that if you only have one Google account and keep Chrome logged in so that you can sync, , this doesn't affect you, and you might even consider it the convenience that Google says it is. And if you're on Android or ChromeOS, where Google is your login, or (like me) have already switched to Firefox for other reasons, this doesn't affect you either.

I went through the list of symptoms at Burning Out: 12 Real Signs That You’re Overdoing It, referring to my last couple of years at $A. Twelve out of twelve. The author says that "Burnout is [...] a sustained—yet unsustainable—pressure on yourself that causes a physical, mental, or emotional collapse. That collapse can cause you to make really drastic, and sometimes disastrous, decisions." Yeah. That.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I guess the last week was... I don't know. Not awful? I got some things done. My new website, computer-curmudgeon.com, saw enough work to make it at least presentable; I'll want to do some more work on the content before I go public. Comments welcome.

Some other things accomplished included sorting through, and mostly shelving, a box of songbooks. There's at least one more, and the convention songbooks and other stuff without covers isn't shelved and probably shouldn't be. Damned if I know what I should do with them, though.

Friday I had a phone screen for a front-end job; we'll see how well I survive the coding test that's the next step. I don't have a whole lot of hope for that one, but it would be fun if I got it. For certain values of fun -- I still have no idea whether I'll have the discipline to pull off a full-time job again. I put in four other job apps.

I also realized that maybe my biggest problem is fear of making decisions. It's not surprising, considering how many of my decisions over the last couple of decades have been wrong, in some cases disastrously so.

In other news, things have been happening. Our new household member, L, arrived yesterday and all of her stuff is at least in the house, if not in its eventual target locations. The office, also known as "the cats' room", was the staging area and still has a lot of stuff in it. I'll suggest having (housekeeper) T', do most of the lifting when she comes on Tuesday. T' also came Sunday to move stuff in the apartment to prepare a space for the second bed box, which arrived Monday. And my Oval-8 thumb brace finally arrived, Tuesday, dropped off by the neighbor it had been misdelivered to. Cecil, the neighbor's cat we briefly took in a couple of weeks ago, is back in circulation. He's sporting a collar now, so he won't be mistaken for a stray again.

Okay, I think I have to upgrade this to a good week. How long has it been? (*goes to look*) Well, the last three have been sort of acceptable. Several don't have assessments, and there have been a few "moderately productive" weeks. The last weekly post in which I actually used the word "good" (preceeded by "pretty") was 20171008Su - 14Sa. So there's that.

In the links, a couple of programming language intros -- JavaScript for Cats and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python -- and one scary and extremely effective weather report.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I guess it's been a pretty decent week in many respects. I started learning a new programming language (Go, AKA Golang), met dialecticdreamer, did some singing, put in three job applications (one of which I don't expect to go anywhere; the form didn't have a place for a cover letter), and acquired a new domain (computer-curmudgeon.com -- the site is still under construction). Also, Colleen came home from rehab on Wednesday, and progress has been made on re-organizing various parts of the house.

So why do I feel like an utter failure who can't get anything done?

To answer my own question... it's clearly because there's so much I haven't done. The yard is a mess, there are boxes sitting around from when we moved in a year and a half ago (and some of those haven't been opened since we moved from the Starport in 2012), there's mail stacked up on five different surfaces, I have three different medical referrals I need to follow up on, and so on. So, ... yeah. That.

Part of that, I suspect, is due to the fact that I've never been able to deal well with uncertainty, and so many of my decisions in the past have gone disastrously wrong. Never mind that some of those seemed like the right thing to do at the time; that doesn't help get me out of the trainwreck I'm in now. In many cases, as N puts it, I was making decisions based on who I wanted to be rather than who I am. That's probably worth a post or ten by itself.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Really not a good week. Colleen is still in Providence Hospital, in Everett (room A505, if you want to call or visit). I still see Cecil, the cat from across the street, occasionally.

I had my left thumb looked at by an orthopedist, including X-rays; no sign of arthritis, which is good. He gave me a new brace, which works better, and a prescription for an NSAID cream, which hasn't had much effect yet. Go back in 8 weeks if it's not better by then.

It's been a pretty unproductive week, apart from my daily trips to Everett (which I guess count) and a little (less than I'd like) work on the new website. I'd been hoping to get that online (in the sense of replacing stephen.savitzky.net; it's already up as a GitHub Pages site) by the weekend. I may still get it up today, but we'll see. I did write a Makefile for it, with targets "draft" and "post" that work like the ones I use for DW. So that's a small bit of progress.

Too many things have been put off for too long. That's also a strong indication that I don't have the kind of self-discipline required for remote work, which is a problem. Perhaps I can also do some writing this afternoon. There's something about sitting in a hospital room wearing nitrile gloves that make it hard to focus on typing.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been a week. There were some good parts. Music Under the Trees, yesterday at Betsy Tinney's, was one of them, even if we did have to leave early because Colleen was flagging. (I didn't object, because to be honest I'd been dreading driving home in the dark after three nights of not enough sleep. But still.)

Another was getting the rest of the bed box installation done, which happened last Sunday. It's awesome. N got to try it out Saturday night; it was complete enough for sleeping in at that point.

A third good thing wa a very nice visit to the southern end of the Rainbow Caravan, to spend a day with N and the kids. We will get our household back together. It may take a while.

And I got a very preliminary version of my "Consulting business" website done, as a GitHub Pages site. Last week N and I had picked a theme: Read Only, by HTML5 Up. It's cool - big banner across the top of the text, and a neat circular image (which it turned out was masked out by setting the enclosing box's boundary radius to 100%). Only one problem.

GitHub Pages are a snap to set up; you can do it in five minutes if you accept all the defaults. And it uses a nice static site builder called Jekyll which has themes that are pretty easy to set up. The devil's in the details, as usual. Because although we found "Read Only" through a gallery of Jekyll themes, it turned out that it wasn't a theme at all, just a mock-up. And although I eventually found a Jekyll version, it wasn't particularly usable.

I now know how to roll my own Jekyll theme, and I can consider myself an advanced beginner at the – Liquid template language and CSS stylesheets. By the way, the MDN Web Docs (MDN stands for Mozilla Developer Network, BTW) are awesome. They have tutorials on all the important web technologies: HTML, Javascript, and CSS, plus some more obscure ones. And when you get to the edge cases, they have reference docs.

It took me, basically, all week, with a huge amount of frustration along the way.

We appear to be getting into the bad parts of the week, don't we? Right.

I believe I mentioned that I'd been dreading going home from Betsy's late at night (I'm nowhere near as good a driver as I was at 50, and I know it). My guess is that that was at the root of the anxiety attacks I had Saturday and Sunday. (Panic attacks are intense, and supposedly last for only a few minutes to an hour or so. Anxiety attacks can -- and in my case, do -- last all day.

And I have "Trigger finger" in my left thumb. It's been getting worse, not better, in spite of the brace I'm wearing, which incidentally makes it almost impossible to type because my thumb keeps hitting my laptop's trackpad and left button. Anyway.

Aaaaaaand, I've been spending almost all my time grappling with Jekyll and CSS, and not getting any job applications done. Bletch.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Not a particularly productive week, especially on the job front: one application, some email, a phone conversation, and setting up another phone conversation for this week. I have made some progress on software; the React web app I started last week is basically working, and just needs some CSS cleanup and refactoring before I won't be embarrassed to link to it. (At which point I'll have to figure out just how to deploy it, but that's another matter.)

The React app is partly aimed at adding a marketable skill to my repertoire, and partly at giving me something (a related phone app, using React Native) that I can potentially sell. Because I don't want to count on being able to land an actual job. It's no longer a given, at my age.

React is an extremely popular Javascript framework for building "single-page (web) applications", usually abbreviated SPAs. It's pretty good as such things go, and lets you use functional programming for almost everything. It gets confusing when you actually need to manage state; I eventually figured out that you have to put all your state in one place, in a top-level object that only gets created once.

It's also been pointed out (thanks, texxgadget!) that I should pull my entries tagged with curmudgeon together into a book. That's always been the plan, actually; the only question is how long it would take me to do it. See above about "not particularly productive". I have wasted a lot of time over the last year. (Some people are no doubt going to point out that I've also been recovering from a bad case of burnout; that's true but doesn't keep me from being annoyed at myself about it.)

An intermediate step in that program is mirroring my computer-related blogging to someplace other than DW; Stephen.Savitzky.net is the obvious choice. I've made a little progress with setup there, but I got stuck a week or two ago trying to find a templating engine I can stand. The other possibility is a GitHub blog.

I had a lot of fun yesterday going to the Whidbey Island Area Fair with C and N. N came up Friday night and stayed in what used to be her bedroom, where we've set up an airbed.

Other activity for the week included a trip to Coupeville so C could have labs done and her PICC line taken out, and two trips to the mainland: one for C's urology appointment, and the other for dentist appointments for both of us. The urology appointment is always a good excuse to visit the Mexican restaurant across the parking lot. They have salsa mole. C's labs showed that her kidneys are continuing to recover, but her potassium is low. We went home and ate bananas, potato chips, and baked potatoes.

Neither of us has anything scheduled for this week, so I may take an opportunity to go down and visit the other end of the caravan. Tuesday might work.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Hmm. Moderately productive week? Not so much on the job search: one phone screen, and one application submitted. They're interesting ones, however: the phone screen was for SUSE, a Linux distribution; the application was for a half-time junior engineer position at ISC (the Internet Software Consortium, makers of bind9, bind10, and isc-dhcp). I would really like to land that last one because of the half-time aspect, but either would be cool.

The ISC job description mentioned working with the IETF, which led by a comparatively short chain of links to this week's Songs for Saturday post. SUSE led to me installing the latest version of openSUSE (Leap 15; they have several) on one of my spare laptops. Interesting. It's RPM-based and favors KDE as a desktop; I'm not crazy about either one, and a lot of the defaults and other choices are,... odd. But, it's something else to put in my toolkit.

A fair amount of project time was also taken up by system administration -- my mirror drive apparently died in last week's power failure. Ugh. Fortunately I had a 700Gb laptop drive ready to go in a USB enclosure; not as big as the original mirror, but that wasn't anywhere near full. The mirror is 87% full, which isn't bad. A little project time also went into starting a React Native app based on the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 psych screeners; all of that was basically reading, setup, and tracking down the content.

Aside from S4S, I also got to sing with N last Sunday, and I had a good singing lesson. So there was music.

There was also posting -- S4S, a fishbowl signal boost, Thankful Thursday, and the latest Computer Curmudgeon post. I'm pretty happy with the positive response to that one; my inclination is to do scripting languages next.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Last Sunday was Father's Day, which has always been kind of a downer for me since Dad died, but I did get calls from both my kids (and my Mom), so there's that.

I went for two walks. Not enough. I used to walk three miles every lunch-time.

Everyone's looking for Python, Ruby, and Javascript programmers these days, so when I found myself wanting a program to help me split up web pages into body content and metadata (as input to a template engine) I wrote it in Python. No harder than I expected; after the first dozen or so programming languages they all start to look alike. I'll use Ruby for tne next one, I guess. The first thing is to revamp my "formal" (i.e. job-hunting) website -- I want to move the blurb on the home page over to an "about" page, and replace it with something that looks like a blog. Yes, I could use one of the existing static site generators, but it's more fun and more practice to do it myself and try to learn something doing it. Maybe? It's going more slowly than I'd like.

I did some other website and project cleanup. Not enough. My time management is getting worse, not better. Two phone screens, one of which was followed an hour later by a rejection by email. I'm getting a few more leads by signing up with FlexJobs.com, and put in one application through them and one through jobspresso.com. Not enough.

Four blog posts. I'd like to work up to at least one per day. Is it time to start asking for tips? Probably. Would I get anything out of that? Probably not.

( Notes & links, as usual )

A second week without N and the kids. I've kept busy, but it isn't the same. Only two job applications -- that has to increase. Still not using my time all that well, but a little better. Another Computer Curmudgeon post, plus a Thankful Thursday and a Songs for Saturday. Some work clearing out the plastic greenhouse -- found out Friday morning that it has to be gone by Wednesday. Urk.

I got a moderate amount of software-related stuff done -- the Elm timer app is coming along (too slowly), and some of my websites now have nicely-styled nav bars, in particular steve.savitzky.net, Lookingglass Folk, and Rainbow's End. I pushed the software I wrote with my father in the late 1980s up to GitHub. (Only, what, 3 years late? and it still needs a README.) Somebody wrote an Emacs mode for my songbook software. (We'll have to do some merging -- I have one too, and there are great ideas in both.)

It isn't enough. How do I expect to work full-time again if that's all I can manage? (In fairness to myself, I did put in a couple of full days. But am I productive enough?)

Reading The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work -- which I highly recommend if you have any interest in working remotely or managing a remote team -- tends to confirm that assessment. So does The Software Engineer's Guide to Freelance Consulting, which does have a few ideas I can put into practice, including how to write a blog that gets noticed. I'll address that in a later post.

As you can tell, I still have roughly zero self-confidence, and no idea how we're going to survive the next five years. The fact that this is depression talking and that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if I don't get things turned around soon is not helping. Oh, right -- has become. For at least a decade.

There have been a few good things. I have gotten some things done. It's been a relatively productive week, though that's not saying much. The cats have been wonderful -- Desti is a real lap-cat, when she isn't lounging in front of the (gas) fireplace or chewing on a cardboard box. (This occasionally makes typing difficult.) My left elbow seems to be almost healed, the left thumb is doing better now that I've found a brace that works, and I managed to move some boxes yesterday without making anything worse. I'll take what I can get.

For link highlights, I'd like to draw your attention to jeshyr's Just Invisible - Medical Access Issues For Homebound/Bedridden Persons (more in the notes), and this uplifting rendition of "This Is Me" by the Carleton Phoenix Project.

The members of the Carleton Phoenix Project have an unusual goal: to practice letting go of perfectionism. This spring they posted an open invitation for singers to take part in a music video—no experience necessary, only the courage to step up and participate.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been a week. Or rather, it's been a long month this week.

Monday and Tuesday I worked on an Elm project, and got it (minimally) working -- it lacks a style sheet so far. Also Monday, I got a rejection (expected) from NoRedInk. On the gripping hand, I had several phone conversations with possible job leads. So am I ahead? Who knows.

Thursday -- all week, really, but mostly Thursday -- I helped N and j pack; they left that night with Cricket. Friday the movers came for their stuff. They will be back this afternoon to visit and swap cats. (If you're just tuning in, they had to move down to Seattle to be closer to the intensive health care one of the kids needs. We're still a family, and we will get back together some day.)

And, of course, Wednesday was the day the GDPR went into effect in Europe -- just in case you were wondering why everybody is updating their privacy policy this week.

Meanwhile, I made three (other) posts this week. I'm trying to get into a posting schedule that includes foth long articles (like this one on compilers and interpreters) and shorter stuff (like the fudgie recipe), as well as my usual weekly posts. Anybody up for a tip jar or a Patreon?

The most interesting link this week is (hard to choose, but...) the IndieWeb movement (if that's the right word). Basically encouraging people to publish on their own websites, and syndicate (i.e. crosspost) elsewhere. I'm really close to being able to do that. There's more detail in the notes.

( Notes & links, as usual )

The high-order bit for this week is that I've put in three job applications for assorted remote positions, and gotten a response from one of them -- I'm getting a phone screen sometime this comimg week. We'll see. It's not a great fit.

I have a bit of a problem with both front-end jobs, which almost all require knowledge of some specific JS library (usually React) and backend jobs, which mostly require familiarity with databases and often either Ruby or Python. I'm working on the front-end stuff, but I got started late and it'll be a while before I'm fully comfortable in that space.

I did get in a couple of walks; about a mile each (which isn't much but I'll take what I can get). And the drywall is up in the garage -- it should be possible to start moving boxes and other stuff back into it sometime this week. I may actually be able to get back into doing some woodworking, if I can keep the clutter down.

I totally missed my music lesson Wednesday because it felt more like Tuesday after RainbowCon last weekend. Oops!

( Notes & links, as usual )

Public Service Announcement: RainbowCon 2.1 is next weekend! It's our second annual house-con (last year would have been just before we closed on selling Rainbow's End). Details at the link. Come visit our island paradise. It'll be awesome.

I seem to be finally, gradually, getting off my arse with projects -- I've installed Elm and cleared out some space in my working tree -- though not actually started coding. Probably later today.

No progress on finding a job. I've noticed that I have a strong tendency to ignore problems and paperwork, apparetly thinking they'll go away if I don't look at them. I think I have to try -- again -- to get myself on a tight work schedule, with set times for job search, coding, and music. I suspect that the Pomodoro Technique -- 25-minute sprints -- may be about right. It's probably time to start using a "25min" tag.

Tuesday I cashed out my Amazon 401K. Net after taxes and transferring the Amazon shares to my brokerage account was enough to cover the rest of the remodeling, and maybe a month or two beyond that if nothing goes seriously wrong. I'm also getting a pretty substantial tax refund, mostly from the electric vehicle credit. I'll get another once I find the rest of the receipts for the work we did on Rainbow's End the year or so after we moved in. That will make the sale a pretty substantial net loss. :P

It's still a slow-motion trainwreck.

Cashing out the 401k required five phone calls -- I was a total wreck most of the afternoon.

In other news, our cat-lock -- a sliding gate across the entryway that keeps our cats from dashing out the front door the moment it's opened -- has become useless. Bronx (of course) learned that he could jump over it. Even turning the gate (a re-purposed whiteboard) 90 degrees to make it four feet high instead of three didn't work. N called Bronx "an agent of Chaos and Cuteness."

( Notes & links, as usual )

NOT a good week, modulo a couple of things. It started at bedtime last Sunday: I asked Colleen whether she was ready to go to sleep and she had trouble answering. I tried a couple of times and a few more questions, and after five or ten minutes decided to call 911. Good call.

Apparently mental confusion can be a side effect of a massive infection. She was released Thursday. If you're easily triggered by medical TMI, you might want to skip the notes.

After visiting Colleen in the hospital Monday, I drove up to Oak Harbor (for those of you not familiar with the island, the hospital in Coupeville is about 2/3 of the way there from home, so it made sense to combine trips) and picked up my new facehugger. It has a humidifier, a cellular modem, bluetooth, and a very comfortable mask (Philips Respironics DreamWear). First time I've had a mask that didn't leak. That was the first good thing this week.

The second was a very good singing lesson, and the third was making this post about planned projects -- we'll see how that goes.

Thursday was rough. For some reason, after taking Colleen home from the hospital, I ended up both physically and mentally exhausted, and in pain from what appears to be a torn muscle in my left arm that's been bothering me for a while. I was close to the edge, and over it a couple of times, for the rest of the day. Friday was worse.

The fourth (and last) good thing was taking another run at my taxes and finding out that I'm probably not going to owe anything. That, however, was blown all to hell by finding that the latest invoice from the builder was more than I had in my checking account (I'd known that was coming, but it was still alarming), and then taking another run at the budget spreadsheet and finding myself about $1500/month short. It went up to $1900 after I found a couple of cells that hadn't gotten added with the rest of the column of annual expenses. I don't usually have trouble with Friday the 13^th; this year was an exception.

I spent Saturday mostly being desperate and despairing. I'm going to need an income, and sooner than I'd expected. And my self-confidence is completely shot at this point. N finally got me calmed down by telling me to concentrate on self-care for the next couple of days; after that we'll work something out. I remain skeptical about that. After enjoying a year not working and getting very little else done, things don't look good for finding work. The projects list was meant to improve my marketability as a freelancer, but I don't have the year or two it would take to build up a reputation and a steady income.

I'm reasonably calm at the moment, but it still feels like I'm re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Which sank exactly 106 years ago today.

In other news, the copy of The Annotated Thursday that I ordered ten days ago is scheduled to arrive... next Thursday. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

( Notes & links, as usual )

A lot going on, most of it not good, but not really something I can talk about right now because it's mostly other people's stories.

The financial trainwreck is still going on; the crash is getting closer. I have a couple of job leads, but I'm way behind on personal writing and programming projects. Because reasons, but still. Not good.

One bright note is that the tax hit isn't going to be nearly as bad as I was expecting -- so far I'm only down about $3K. If we weren't in the middle of sinking $80K into building the ADU, I'd be in pretty decent shape except for the negative cash flow. As it is, it'll be coming out of my IRA.

Too many decisions that seemed like the right thing to do at the time, spread out over decades and leaving me with no resources. And it's almost impossible for me to just them let go of them, stop the "if only's". It's one thing when I'm giving that advice to other people.

The other bright note (literally?) is that my singing is improving noticably; there are times when I can actually hear a difference from one verse to the next, even though I can't tell exactly what I'm doing differently.

( Notes & links, as usual )

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, as usual )