The Mandelbear's Musings

It's been a surprisingly good, unsuprisingly short, and occasionally scary week; the second and last in my trip with N in The Netherlands. Quite a lot of back-and-forthing between Den Haag and Leiden. Yesterday I spent all afternoon helping j put flat-pack furniture together; we got a couple of pieces mostly finished, thwarted by the lack of a hammer for nailing on backs. (Cue obvious song.)

I marked the third anniversary of Colleen's death on Friday with a post and a cup of green tea. Also I miss my cats.

I've decided not to bother logging walking statistics for this trip, except to note that I went over 3,000 steps on five days in the last week, and actually got over 20 "heart points" on Wednesday. I might need to see whether $G Fit can export data in any useful format. Or switch apps. Or buy a ring or a watch?

Links this week include Daniel Simu And His Dancing Robot SURPRISE The Judges With Acrobotics! (with a tip of the hat to ysabetwordsmith), and Oxford University Mathematician REACTS to "Animation vs. Math" (the entire "Animation vs. {Math, Physics, Geometry} series is well worth watching, along with the corresponding reactions -- you can find them all by chasing links).

( Notes & links, as usual )

I started this DreamWidth account twelve years ago today in 2010. (I started my LJ account in June of 2002, so there will be another blogiversary coming up in a couple of months.) I believe I started cross-posting around then, although for a while I continued doing quick posts on LJ for things like birthdays. Eventually I imported all of my LJ posts, so DreamWidth is the authoritative copy now.

By 2010 I had already been using ljupdate, an Emacs-based LJ client, for a couple of years; I started working on my current emacs/make/git system in late 2015 when DW switched to HTTPS and ljupdate stopped working. For all I know it might have been fixed by now, but I like my hack better. (You can find it in MakeStuff/blogging/ on GitHub; it's acquired a few features since I wrote the README. I should fix that. Real Soon Now(TM).)

Another thing I need to do RSN is fix the links in imported posts that still point back to other posts in LJ, and add "imported-from" links to the posts that don't have "crossposted-to" links.

I will refrain from boring you with statistics. In part that's because I don't have everything archived in one place. Yet. That's another thing I've been meaning to do for several years now. (The reason for things being scattered is another thing I won't bore you with. In this post.) And besides, I just found a problem with my word-counting program.

There was no post yesterday, because we had a power failure at 11:30, and I didn't think to post a quick note about it until this morning. *sigh*

This post is going to be rather disorganized, and probably a lot shorter than I expected it to be, but I think it will be mainly about grieving. I'm always somewhat weird around the edges this time of year.

My middle child, Amethyst Rose, was stillborn thirty years ago. I'm... okay? I'm still getting used to the idea that my oldest turned thirty-five this year, and that my youngest is the same age I was when I married Colleen. I didn't notice any hill, but this damned handbasket seems to be picking up speed regardless.

I think most of my grieving this month is for America, not Ame. (The coincidence is not intentional.) I need to write about that, too, because writing appears to be how I process grief. Writing prose poems, mostly, about a totally fictional but nonetheless comforting afterlife. A few songs.

So, how does it feel to be thirty, Ame?

//Let's get this straight -- you're asking a fictional character that you created what she feels like to have non-existed for the last thirty years?//

When you put it that way...

//Silly Bear. A little less real, I suppose, but it's still a comfortable kind of unreality. I'm glad I can still be around when you need me.//

//I like Curio, by the way. He's a good cat.//

He was. I'm glad you found each other. See you next year?

//Always, Daddy. I love you.//

So, yeah; guess I didn't have as much to say as I thought I would a week ago. Doesn't matter.

Still there in the twilight my Amethyst Rose
Will be blooming untarnished by tears. *

You may remember that, somewhat over a month ago, I asked whether there were any tools for voice teaching online. I didn't get any useful suggestions. (Discord was suggested, but with an inherent 200ms delay it would be pretty useless for teaching or band practice.)

Since then, a couple of things -- not necessarily answers -- have turned up. From the National Association of Teachers of Singing, we have a COVID Resources Page and two video panel discussions: Emergency NATS Chat Calming the Coronavirus Crisis and Taking Your Teaching Online #natschats, and A Conversation: What Do Science and Data Say About the Near Term Future of Singing. The description of the latter is:

The National Association of Teachers of Singing, the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), Chorus America, Barbershop Harmony Society, and Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA) present an important webinar about the near term future of singing as we seek fact based solutions in protecting our singers, teachers, and conductors during this time.

There are more specialized services specifically for jamming that were mentioned in some of the related discussions -- JamKazam, Jamulus, and NINJAM, and a couple of others. With the possible exception of JamKazam they all work by delaying sound by an integral number of beats or bars, which may work for improvisation but probably not for teaching. It's difficult to find good comparisons. There's a conversation going on in this forum; the 2020 part starts on Page 3. Jitsi might work, too, perhaps with a lightly-loaded private server.

(added 5/12) VoiceLessons.com was recommended in one of the NATS videos; didn't make it onto the list in the previous paragraph because it wouldn't be useful to most of my readership, but definitely worth a look if you're teaching.

Disclaimer: I have not (yet) worked through all -- or even most -- of the stuff linked from NATS, and I have not tried any of the remote jam software.

For performers who want to stream concerts, there are lots more options. Here is a blog post on the Pros and Cons of 6 live streaming sites for musicians (from 2016, so a bit dated), and Lynn Noel's Crosscurrents Blog. Lynn has been hosting virtual "house concerts" recently, and has written a great blog series about how to do it.

• Live From the Mermaid's Tavern Part I: Digital Houseconcerts in the Age of COVID-19
• Live from the Mermaid's Tavern Part II: Set Up, Schedule, and Announce a Livestream
• Live from the Mermaid's Tavern Part III: Going Live on Facebook
• Q&A for Online Sessions I: Is It The App, Or My Internet?
• Q&A for Online Sessions II: Livestreaming Setup Checklist
• Q&A For Online Sessions III: Managing Performers, Singers, and Listeners
• Live From the Mermaid's Tavern Participant FAQ
• Live From the Mermaid's Tavern Houseconcert FAQ
• Live From the Mermaid's Tavern: Reflections on Our First Six Weeks

I'll close with a quote from the last section, titled "Crisis and Transformation" of Reflections on Our First Six Weeks. (I'd link to it directly, but the sections don't have IDs.) Then double back and read the rest. (taken out of sequence because it makes a good closer)

Crisis builds community from within. Six weeks ago, my mom had just died, I was laid off, my knee replacement had just been postponed as an elective surgery, and the Mermaid's Tavern was a pile of old Macs and cables in my basement. I needed motivation to face a pandemic day to day. I found it in a community that urgently needed to sing together. Thank you all for making me believe I too could be essential.

We WILL make harmony again in real time. Harmony is like bread: staple soul food, powered by a living community organism. There's nothing like it hot and fresh. Still, once you've sung with dear friends across five time zones, there's no going back. Online community is here to stay. Come on down to the Mermaid's Tavern.

Feel free to point me at other resources in the comments.

If you've been hanging around this blog for a little while, you've probably noticed a sprinkling of entries tagged with "river". If you've been hanging around for the last decade or so, you'll have noticed that there have been a lot fewer of them recently.

The "River" posts are basically about self-exploration -- love, friendship, grieving, depression,... a lot of them are also tagged "psych". The series takes its name from the metaphor in the eponymous song, which I'll have more to say about tomorrow. The song was written in 2008 (just in time for Valentine's Day); the "river" tag series started a week later.

In the course of tracking down some significant mood shifts falling down a rabbit-hole, it occurred to me to wonder about the distribution of posts. The series started in 2008 (when the song was written, although I went back and tagged a few earlier posts that fit the theme), with a total of 190 posts. The next year, which is when a lot of things happened, there were 225. There were a total of 170 in all the years since then. Somehow I don't think that's because all my questions were answered and all my problems went away.

There have been a couple of mood-shifts; the recent one that started me down this particular hole happened around mid-September of this year, when I noticed that my self-talk had become "strangely non-negative". It seems to have been connected to my ongoing therapy at 7cups.com, though I'm still having trouble figuring out how.

That led me to look up the one in 2009, described in "Turning a corner". (If you're interested, that sequence continues through the next three River posts. I also think there was some pretty decent writing in there, for what that's worth.) There was a lot going on back then; Colleen's health had taken a frightening downturn, I had just started therapy (those two are related), and I was doing a lot of introspection.

Anyway, I need to get back to the River. I apparently did a lot of self-exploration in those two years, gaining a lot of insights many of which I seem to have forgotten or mislaid in the interim. My view of myself also seems to have changed a lot in the intervening decade, and that's after the changes noted in "Turning a Corner". It's going to take quite a bit of work to figure out what I've gained, what I've lost, and what (pre-2008) I've slid back to.

See you further downstream.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8495 words in 15 posts this month (average 566/post)
    456 words in 1 post today

On the whole not too bad -- 9 days with no posts means around 2.5/week? So... not great either, when you consider that that includes "Done Since" and "Thankful Thursday" posts. But I've made a "Thankful Thursday" post every week, so that's something. Three "informative" posts, which is short of my preferred one/week, but more than half.

Posting stats:
   2399 2019/03/01--markup-markdown-tex-and-text.html
   1424 2019/03/03--done-since-0224.html
    273 2019/03/04--flashback.html
     81 2019/03/07--thankful-thursday.html
    156 2019/03/09--colleen-update.html
   1497 2019/03/10--done-since-0303.html
   2158 2019/03/11--git-for-poets.html
    154 2019/03/13--72.html
     83 2019/03/14--thankful-thursday.html
   1445 2019/03/15--climate-tragedy.html
    343 2019/03/16--s4s-colleens-birthday.html
   1270 2019/03/17--done-since-0310.html
    115 2019/03/19--word-of-the-day.html
     53 2019/03/21--thankful-thursday.html
   1282 2019/03/24--done-since-0317.html
     68 2019/03/28--thankful-thursday.html
   1346 2019/03/31--done-since-0324.html
     67 2019/03/31--no-foolin.html
    183 2019/03/31--stats-for-march.html
-------
  14397 words in 19 posts this month (average 757/post)
   1596 words in 3 posts today
      9 days with no posts

How it works: reply with "Oh! Shiny" and I'll choose three of your icons. Tell me about them: where they came from, what they mean to you, and/or when you deploy them. Drop a link here to your post in your own journal. Spread it around.

(Not sure how long it will take me, if there's a deluge of responses.)

jesse_the_k asked me about:

"My fandom predates TV"

A stylized, multicolor line drawing of a propeller beanie. The outlined gores are colored (left to right) red, purple, and blue; there are white spaces between them. The propeller is a green infinity sign.

I got this from lysana; it looks like it was made by her artist husband blackfyr. It has fallen out of use recently; I used it 26 times, between 2004 and 2011, for posts about science fiction fandom or conventions.

The icon isn't completely accurate; Science fiction fandom as we know it today dates back only to 1929. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated the first electronic television, using his image dissector tube, in 1928, and mechanical versions existed before then. Television broadcasting, however, only started in the late 1930s.

"hacker traveling"

The background is a 3x3 grid of black lines on a white background; five black circles make a "glider", instantly familiar to anyone who knows about Conway's Game of Life. Against this background a picture of an old guy in a tweed cap moves counter-clockwise in a circle centered somewhere in the lower right-hand corner.

This icon was made by snobahr, in 2007; the moving image came from the cover of my CD, Coffee, Computers and Song, which was in production at the time. It was first used in this post, the second of two posts from OSCon 2007. It was used a total of 30 times in 2007 and 2008, once in 2009, and once in 2012, mostly for posts about software-related conventions.

Consonance
On a purple background, the word "CONSONANCE", in black. The letters are compressed toward the top, and the two "N"'s are the support towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is the logo of Consonance - The SF Bay Area Filk Convention. Colleen and I attended all of them until 2012, when we moved to Seattle, and a few after that; our last one was in 2015. This icon appears to have been used only once, in this post, live-blogged from the Interfilk concert.

Signal boost: jesse_the_k | Markdown Simplifies Formatting Your DW Posts.

Markdown is a popular plain-text markup language that strongly resembles the conventions of email. In fact, posting by email has used markdown for a long time; you can now use it for posting by using the HTML editor and starting your post with !markdown. It also works if you're using a client that takes raw HTML, such as charm or MakeStuff. See Jesse's post for the cheat-sheet, or go to the official spec, at https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax. Note that most GitHub extensions, e.g. code fencing with triple backticks, are not supported. At least, not yet. There is one DW-specific extension: @username expands to a standard user link, e.g. mdlbear.

It looks like the basic idea works, but I was using slashes as the delimiter for the sed command that puts the post url into the archived post. Since the url contains slashes, that failed.

Following up on mdlbear | Welcome, tumblr refugees: this might otherwise have just been a longish section of next Sunday's "done" post, but the Tumblr apocalypse (tumbling-down?) is happening now and I wanted to get tumblr_backup.py out there. (It's a tumblr backup script, via this tumblr post by greywash, who notes that the original post by Greymask has disappeared). I think some of my readers will find it useful.

It's also worth noting greywash | State of the Migration: On fannish archival catastrophes, and what happens next (by way of ysabetwordsmith; I saw this someplace else last week, but apparently didn't log it.)

More meta stuff:

• a remark by apricops: "It’s quite likely no... coincidence that that most ‘mismanaged’ and least profitable social media site is also the one that turned out to be most amenable to the formation of actual communities"
• pangodillo | What Dreamwidth lacks is the ability to use tags as "whisperspace".

This is (a first cut at) a sticky-post or landing post for mdlbear.dreamwidth.org. I intend for it to be edited rather than replaced, so the link should stay the same.

Counting the imports from LJ (same username; now no longer updated since they broke automatic crossposting), this blog has been in existence for twenty years as of June 10, 2022.

The Mandelbear

... is what I call the fractal you see in my default icon. The Mandelbear is infinitely fuzzy, being a two-dimensional cross-section of a four-dimensional object. It occasionally manifests as an elderly hacker-songwriter, and sometimes as a Middle-Sized Bear.

Series Tags

These tags mark ongoing series of posts (and are mostly lifted from the post I made last Thursday introducing NaBloPoMo, with a couple of additions and edits.

curmudgeon - The Computer Curmudgeon

This series is a combination of public service announcements, mostly about security- and privacy-related events, and longer informational pieces. These posts are cross-posted onto computer-curmudgeon.com. I'd like to work up to one or two per week.

done - Done Since...

Posted every Sunday (sometimes delayed or advanced depending on conventions and where the end of the month falls), this contains my summary of the week followed by (under a cut tag) the week's worth of to.do file entries. The format of the to.do entries is described in How to.do it, and has been described as sort of an online bullet journal.

river - The River

These are posts about, ... Hmm. What are they about? Love, friendship, grieving, ... I guess the overall theme is emotions.

s4s - Songs for Saturday

What it says on the tin. Songs, and occasionally other music. Sometimes posted late, as "Songs for Sunday".

thanks - Thankful Thursday

My weekly gratitude posts. I'm not entirely consistent about these -- you will occasionally see a "Thankful Friday". There's (almost) always one on (American) Thanksgiving. Of course.

trainwreck

Posts about my finances.

Other Tags

• goingsideways -- signal boost for weekly posts on GoingSideways.blog
• meta -- Posts about the blog itself, and other self-referential stuff.
• poem
• review
• song
• Conventions and other annual events get a pair of tags: the name of the event, and the year.

There are lots more; those are just the more important ones.

Websites

• @ssavitzky@indieweb.social
• GoingSideways.blog - Travelers With Chronic Health Baggage started late 2021.
• computer-curmudgeon.com. Strictly about computers and software, with the vague hope of finding something that people might find worth paying for.
• Lookingglass Folk -- my current band.
• steve.savitzky.net -- My "personal" website, including my songs, concerts, and CDs
• stephen.savitzky.net -- My "resume" website. This has links to my profiles on LinkedIn and a few other places.

So, ... this is the start of NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. I'm not doing that. My track record for writing fiction is rather dismal. I'd be tempted to blame it on the deficiency in imagination associated with Alexithymia, but mostly it's the fact that I didn't do any planning.

However, this is also National Blog Posting Month (supposedly; NaBloPoMo's web page, such as it is, seems to be mostly broken, possibly due to a change in ownership of BlogHer.com. Many other references have also gone stale.) No matter. I don't need somebody else's website to keep track of what I post this November -- that's a one-liner.

 ls ~/.ljarchive/2018/10 | wc 

So here I am, staring at a mostly-blank page in Emacs, writing down a very vague plan in hopes that it will become more specific as I go on.

I do have a goal. I recently added a couple of donation buttons to my Dreamwidth profile page; the goal is to make this blog into something that people feel is worth supporting.

I have a few ongoing series of posts -- not all of them are things I'd consider worthy of being paid for, and in fact most of them aren't, but all of them are important for maintaining audience engagement. That's my excuse, anyway.

The ongoing series at present are:

• Done Since... -- posted every Sunday (sometimes delayed or advanced depending on conventions and where the end of the month falls), this contains my summary of the week followed by (under a cut tag) the week's worth of to.do file entries. This is currently the only thing that's posted consistently.
• Thankful Thursday -- my weekly gratitude post. These have been mostly fairly consistent recently.
• Songs for Saturday -- pretty much what it says on the tin. I haven't been all that consistent about these. There's (almost) always one on (American) Thanksgiving. Of course.
• The Computer Curmudgeon -- these are a combination of public service announcements, mostly about security- and privacy-related events, and longer informational pieces. These posts are cross-posted onto computer-curmudgeon.com. If people think these are worthy of support, I'd be delighted.
• The River -- These are posts about, ... Hmm. What are they about? Love, friendship, grieving, ... I guess the overall theme is emotions. There were a lot of these in 2008 and 2009, to the point where I was considering publishing a collection tentatively titled Two Years on the River. Didn't happen. Should it? It would take a lot of editing.

Okay, when you get down to it only The Computer Curmudgeon has the potential for being donation-worthy, and that only if I post to it more often. Poetry could if I wrote more of it. Anyway.

It's November 1^st Posts: 1; days with a post: 1.

It's time to do a little planning. As you may remember from the previous post in this series, there are some projects I want to work on. (I also need to find a job, but that's a not completely separate issue. If anyone needs an expert Java programmer or a git expert, let me know.) The ones I want to concentrate on today are the apps, specifically the checklist app and the setlist app. The first major decision about each of them is which framework to base them on.

I really want to learn both React (with React Native on the back end), and Elm (with Electron on the back end), and I think it makes the most sense to write -- or at least start -- the checklist app first, and use React for it.

Here's my reasoning:

1. React: React is by far the more popular of the two frameworks, so a lot of jobs ask for React experience. One reason it's more popular is that it's basically just a Javascript library -- programs look like Javascript with a little bit of HTML and HTML-like tags embedded in it. It's easy to learn (not that that's really a problem for me -- see below), and there are a lot of starter kits and tutorials around.
2. Checklist app: It's pretty clear that the Checklist app will have a much wider audience, so it makes sense to do that first. It will also be easier to monetize (possibly as a freemium app, with the free version stand-alone and the premium version tied to a back-end service).
3. The Setlist app, which includes a lyrics viewer and playlist generator as well, is likely to start out using my rather unusual music toolchain, and would actually be more useful (and get a lot more traffic) as a front end to the lookingglassfolk.com and steve.savitzky.net Song pages. It makes sense for it to start out as part of a website rather than as a stand-alone app.
4. Elm is a pure functional language (I love functional languages, which is why it would be easy for me) that is closer to Haskell than to Javascript.

Next steps:

1. Make a place in my working tree for projects. Try not to give in to the temptation to completely refactor the whole hierarchy.
2. Pull down and install a React starter kit and some kind of Elm starter kit.
3. Set up the projects' git repos and working trees.

This is the start of an experiment.

Last night, N took me to task for wasting my retirement time puttering around the house, reading blogs, doing things for Colleen, and not doing any of the things I retired in order to have time for: recording, writing, and programming in particular, with a side of woodworking. She pointed out that if I'm going to spend my time doing stuff that we could hire a housekeeper or caregiver to do, the family would be better off if I went back to work and we hired people to do those things. (Or increased their hours, since in fact we already have a housekeeper and caregiver.)

So.

I realized that Colleen doesn't really need all that much help these days. Normally I've been teaching on the days when Colleen has a caregiver around, and spending more time with her on the days when she doesn't. But in fact, when I've switched (for whatever reason), Colleen does perfectly well with a little help around lunchtime and in the late afternoon. So if I switched, I'd have two large blocks of time completely to myself: 8:30 to 11:30 (my teaching time, but potentially expanded to 8:00 to noon) and 1:00 to 4:00. That's six or seven hours, at least two days a week and potentially three on weeks when I'm not needed Friday.

N. suggested that I start each block with 15 minutes of guitar practice, to get my fingers back in shape without hurting, then pick something from the project list (I'll get back to that) and keep going with it as long as I'm sufficiently engaged. Then switch to something else. Lather, rinse, repeat (like the programmer who died in the shower:). I could do guitar practice at 8:00 on teaching days, and I should probably schedule time for walking as well, say 4:00-4:30 or so.

So I did that this morning, starting out with guitar at 8am and continuing on to writing. It is now 9:09. I missed breakfast; I can squeeze in some cottage cheese between now and the next sub-project. Which should include working on the project list.

A few days ago I got a comment on my weekly post that went Oohh, you're doing what looks to me like a bullet journal? Only online. So I wrote a quick explanation. And then I realized that I might be doing something unusual, that I ought to write up in more detail. So here you are:

The Legend

Let's start off with the file called Journals/Dog/legend.do:

			       ===legend.do===

= item flag notation for to.do and to.done files:

= notation for to.do and to.done items:
  = note: keep  o to do  * done  x abandoned  ~ modified  . in progress
  & added after completion  (recurring items get * when completed)
  $ financial transaction (flagged as  o before completion)
  ? query/decision...  - choice  + chosen  ->chosen
  @ link/research
  ! emotion noted at the time, or soon after.  NOT added the next morning; 
    I'm trying to pay more attention at the time
  | body sensation worthy of note: pain, noticable change...
    (more recently replaced by %; should maybe go back to |)
  : observation or external event.  Weather, news, etc
    + external observation with positive emotional content
    - external observation with negative emotional content
  % observation/insight about myself
  # meta - flags, flist, filters, ...
  <b>...something I feel good about...</b> (may be added next day)
  <i>...something I feel bad about...</i>
  [ ... ] delete from public posts
  ... ongoing items
  " quotation
  ' interior dialog

= Notation for meetings and conversations:
  <- point to bring up.  After meeting, point to bring up next time
  *- point brought up
  x- point not brought up
  ~- point partially brought up, or brought up in different form
  &- additional point raised  
  -> information/point raised by someone else/consequence/resolution
  => action item for me
  =* action item done
  <= action item for somebody else.

===

The History

My usage has shifted a little over the years. I first started posting "to.do" items around 2006, though I'd undoubtedly been using at least the o and * flags for years before that. At first, since I was part of a support group working on procrastination and avoidance, I used it as an accountability thing: I would post a list of open items, followed (hopefully) by the items as they got checked in. It was a little discouraging, until somebody suggested just posting about what I'd done. That led to &, and my expanded use of the file as more a log than a to-do list and calendar.

Whenever the list of "done" items got too long, I would move them into a ".done" file -- the first one I have is 2006.done. In 2009 I switched to quarterly archives; by 2009/q4.done the file had most of its present features. By 2011 I was archiving monthly. I don't remember offhand when I stopped making daily posts in LJ and switched to weekly.

Sometime in September of 2011 I decided that the set of unfinished and probably never-to-be-completed items had gotten too long, and moved it to wibnif.do, as in "Wouldn't It Be Nice If..." My present Makefile plugin reports the current number of unfinished items in to.do and wibnif.do; the current numbers are 70 and 126 respectively.

The Files

So there's that. The file is called to.do, and edited with emacs. There are a couple of important marker lines in it:

=========================================================================================+
Ongoing:                                                                             89->|
recurring items and long-term goals go here
=then===================================================================================>|
this contains entries from the first of the month to the present
=now===-^-===this-month-v-==============================================================>|
scheduled items for later this month
=later===-v-===this-month-^-============================================================>|
scheduled items after this month
=sometime===-V-===later-^-==============================================================>|
items with no specific due date
=Done-v-================================================================================>|

Dates, in the form mmddWw (e.g., 0122Su), start in the first column; flag characters are indented two spaces. The marker at column 89 makes it easy to properly size the editor window when I first open it after rebooting; it's where lines wrap.

I'll put approximately-scheduled items in the this-month and later sections after the dated entries, and a few of the more important ones above =now. That doesn't keep me from procrastinating them, but it does help keep them where they'll be noticed.

Note that, except for the breakpoint at =done, entries are in chronological order from top to bottom. That makes this a log, not a blog or feed. My to.do and its associated history (see below) are one of a handful of journal-like collections under my Journals directory; the to.Do lOG is kept in a a directory called Dog.

The Archives

By now, I have a fairly well-established routine:

• I maintain the to.do file using emacs, of course.
• Sometime on Sunday, I move the last week's worth of entries from the working location near the top of the file, to the end.
• At this point I still have the week's entries in the Region (emacs terminology for the current selection). I move point down two lines to scoop up the HTML boilerplate that I'll need for my weekly post, and copy (M-w).
• Then I run lj-update, currently bound to M-L, and yank into the body. The boilerplate is arranged so that all I have to do is move back up two lines, cut, down one, and yank.
• From there it's an easy step to go back to the first line (which is invariably the start date) copy it, and yank it into the subject line.
• Write my summary. Edit out any [...] sections, if necessary.
• Post.

Then,

• Every month -- actually, on the first Sunday of the month, after making my weekly post -- I move the month's entries to yyyy/mm.done.
• Every so often I go through and pull out obsolete entries, marking them with * or x as appropriate, and put them after the preceeding week's entries at the end of the file.
• Every year, on New Year's Eve, I gather up my list of goals and make my end-of-the-year post.
• The next day, I cons up my new list of goals and make a New Year's post.

Variations

I keep other, project-specific, to.do files. Most of them are much simpler, with undated items above the =done line (which is usually just a line of equal signs), and dated items after it in what I now call a "work log". It's convenient, because I can just go to the end of the file and make an entry, but it wouldn't work nearly as well if I had to schedule things.

Short week, since I want to close out the year. Not a good year.

Not a particularly bad week, but not all that productive, either. Rather nice New Year's Eve with the Zoo -- four of Emmy's friends who have become friends with Colleen as well. Unfortunately, they live in Tacoma, so they can't come over all that often. Cheese boards for dinner.

More research and reading on tiny houses. This week the main focus was on shipping containers and bus conversions; I also finished reading Mud Ball: 6 weeks, $6000 and Plenty of Dirt. Fun. That was interesting in part because the author was 40 when she built it. Currently reading a blog, 40x28 | Building Our Shipping Container Home -- fun, but those people are a lot younger.

Last night I posted my Year-end Wrap-Up; I think there's more to be said there, but that's a start. A lot to regret, which doesn't come through, and needs more analysis.

Links in the notes, as usual.

From the Jargon File, Hacktown 2138 memorial edition:

History/Herstory/Doc

Originally consisting of only the titular rhyme, this document was added to the History/ section of the Hacktown wiki in 2039 by Lex Kalman and immediately became a repository for children's rhymes, teaching poems, short (usually humorous) scripts, and the like. Write access is restricted to human children aged 8-15, and it is traditional to make an entry on every birthday in that interval.

From History/Herstory/Doc

0

History Herstory Doc
Time overflowed the clock
Remember the date,
2038,
History Herstory Doc.
-- LexiKal@

52

if (age.base(8).size()==1 || age.base(16).size()!=1) deny(write)

The last week was dominated by the prep for my colonoscopy on Monday. This involved a week's worth of a low-fiber diet, which was highly annoying. The procedure itself went as well as could be expected, and I was able to have Naomi pick me up about the time they let me go. I understand perfectly why they don't allow people who have been drugged into unconsciousness to drive; after I got home I put the dirty laundry into the drier and came within a second or so of adding the soap.

Mom says that after 85 they don't bother, so assuming I don't need one more often than once every decade or so I only have two more to look "forward" to. The results will come back in a week or so.

Friday the stairlift arrived, and on Saturday I took Colleen down to check it out. She loved the master suite, especially the shower. I expected her to like it, but it was nice to have that confirmed.

The yard work was pretty much done by then except for the last of the planting -- it looks fantastic. Work inside the house is progressing; there's a lot of dust. It's going to be a bit dicey with credit until my tax refund comes in.

Lots of good links, many of them from the footnotes in ysabetwordsmith's latest serial fanfic, "Coming Around", and her (related) "three weeks for dreamwidth" posts.

More, as usual, in the notes.

Side note -- I'm considering putting my "done" posts somewhere else, in favor of somewhat irregular postings with more substance. Anyone not bored by the detailed notes? Inquiring minds need to know.

Because of the recent major increase in anonymous spam comments on LJ, I have disabled them there. Either register, or come on over to Dreamwidth where anonymous comments are still enabled. Besides, I can always use more comments on the DW side.

Also, I've pretty much stopped posting "hippo birdie" posts, in part because the LJ portal is going away, and in part because I've taken the LJ portal and home page off my "AM" list. They were pretty useless to begin with and have become more so. With the demise of birthday posts, I now have no unique content on LJ -- it's all cross-posted from DW.

Yay! pocketnaomi is here visiting!

I have a new tag: "quest". It's intended to cover the job search, housing search, and moving. It's also intended to recognize that this is more than any of those separately, reframing it as a major life change. "Adventure" might have done, too, but I don't like adventures. Nasty, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner. Oh, wait.

Took a webinar about changing careers on on LHH's website, added "mentoring" and "technology transfer" to my lists of skills, and started to research green and ethical companies by chasing links from ricoh.com, which has received awards in both areas.

I've been waking up horribly early, mostly worrying about finances, and especially about the effect of the move on the YD. Monday I managed to get back to sleep, and slept through my alarm as a result. Yesterday I woke up somewhere around 4:30, and gave up and got out of bed around 5:15. Slept well last night, so maybe I'm more-or-less reset now. Hope so. Though I could do with a couple of hours less sleep.

Some good conversations last night about the move. Sort of encouraging.

A couple of links in the notes; nothing extremely noteworthy.

It doesn't look as though I got much done yesterday. That would, however, be somewhat misleading. I applied for Medicare (which should kick in next month), spent a lot of time talking with Naomi and Colleen (and a while on the phone with my Mom, who is very supportive and encouraging), and made some tough decisions largely as a result of those conversations. Not time wasted by any means.

On the other hand, my left wrist hurts. Don't know what I did there. And no walk. Self-care is going to be important over the next few months, so I'll have to work on that.

Oh, and I made up a new tag: 8.3% (which, in case you're wondering, is the current official unemployment rate). And several to-do sub-lists. And sent email asking which of several items in my office that I want have depreciated enough for me to just take home. And started going through my home directories on various systems, doing triage.

As Samuel Johnson said, "The knowledge that one is to be hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully."

It was a busy day, and a good one despite doing something unpleasant to my lower back and being sleepy enough to go to bed early. I had the house pretty much to myself all afternoon, with the YD up in her room (as usual) and Colleen up in San Francisco at the orchid show.

In the morning, I set up communities to discuss pocketnaomi's idea for a new Underground Railroad: you'll find them at underground_rail.dreamwidth.org and undergroundrail.livejournal.com. I also followed a link in a comment to Jane: An Abortion Service. There's a book, too, which I ordered.

I did quite a lot of puttering, including moving some fabric out of the former sewing room (now a combination pantry and guest room) into the "sewing corner" of the living room. That's probably what made my back unhappy.

I went out to REI and Fry's to look for a netbook sleeve, having decided that the Belkin netbook case I'm using now takes up too much room in my carry-on. In particular, there isn't quite enough room left over for my songbooks, which is very unhelpful. I ended up getting this one at Amazon instead.

moon_fox finished the picture of Rosie that I prompted for at her Character Art Jam. Very cool -- kinda grows on one, which is totally the Right Thing.

I started working on dinner, which consisted of split pea soup, chili (from scratch), and rice with garbanzos. Just as I was finishing up, Colleen came back from the orchid show with an enormous plant -- a green cymbidium that she had already dubbed Arabella (apparently so as not to have it confused with Audrey). She had been there at the very end of the show, so for the $25 she'd been planning to spend on a couple of stems to make corsages out of, she got a $200 plant from a vendor who didn't want to lug it back home.

I put up my S4S post about 8:30, and by 10pm was falling asleep in my chair. Splat.

My main accomplishment yesterday was my post about Trinh Cong Son. Maybe now I can go back to working on my songs?

I also created a new tag: nse, for "New Song Energy". And if "Songs for Saturday" turns into a series, I'll have to come up with a tag for that, too. Later, if it happens.

I spend too much time on LJ and DW. But I did go out for a 3-mile walk, and worked on learning chords. Fsus2 and Am6 are still kind of shaky.

And I did a fair amount of puttering in the office, ending up with a box being recycled and its contents put away. So that's a win, too.

Oh, and cooked dinner: chili and cornbread. Tasty.

Yeah, a pretty good day.

Lots of links, too, although most of them have already showed up in the previous post. The best, clearly, is haikujaguar's "A Definition of Success":

So, I am going to bookmark this post. And when I am feeling anchorless, I will come back to this. You should too. Because if you have ever made a single thing that touched another person, you too, have succeeded.

And I got replies to my comment, which made me feel happy and accomplished. And I noticed that. Maybe I'm getting better at this "being human" thing?