tech

But first, a few silly & not-so-silly updates. I have made a critical change in how I manage my stuff between my work desk and my couch. I bought an inexpensive but nice-looking bag. An upgraded tote bag, if you will. Right now it has my pen case (which holds 6 fountain pens and 4 highlighters and that’s pushing it), my personal planner, my medical/health planner (more on that in a minute), my commonplace book, and a book I might want to take a break with if I feel the need to do so....

It’s been a busy month around here. Day job is pretty busy and I’m building some cool stuff. It’s not all technical debt! I’m doing some more formal learning about the different kinds of code I write and have learned that I have the fundamentals of Vue.js down pretty good. Now, when it gets complicated I kind of flail a bit. Google also decided to eat my medical appointments calendar which is the exact reason I keep a paper backup....

I’m going to try something new–I mean, a resurrection. I can’t do a links post weekly like I used to, but I can certainly do something monthly. I think. 😄 So here’s a handful of things I read last month that I found interesting, thought-provoking, or that I just plain liked: Peanuts and the Quiet Pain of Childhood: How Charles M. Schulz Made an Art of Difficult Emotions Maria Popova reposted a couple of links a few days ago on Mastodon in celebration of the centenary of Schulz’s birth and this passage really hit me....

God, could Apple Music/iTunes be any more terrible than it actually is? I’m trying to get my library to sync because I literally bought ONE album from Bandcamp and I’ve had to subscribe to iTunes Match and turn on the Cloud Library and now nothing’s freaking downloading and I don’t know why the user experience is so fucking terrible. I should be able to plug my phone into the computer and drag the songs I want onto it....

Me: Oh, let me change the theme, it won’t that big of a deal. time passes Me: Six hours isn’t bad, right? So, yes: I did change a few colors. And the font, and the entire theme. And I made a colophon page and managed to actually code it in properly. Which is pretty exciting, not gonna lie. Anyhow. I’m sure some things look funky and I didn’t notice....

It has been a week here. I have: successfully wrangled custom radio button hover and focus states the html radio buttons were offset from the custom ones and moving them helped the hover happen in the right places I am still mad at whoever originally coded the component, though got a chunk of coding done for the mobile version of the site footer the desktop version is good to go, but I have a few more bootstrap/flexbox things to figure out helped a user regain access to their account using nothing more than an old photograph of their phone’s screen and a vague list of tasks....

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last week falling into various rabbit holes. So many. But one thing I keep coming back to is how, on my previous blog, I felt paralyzed by the weight of perfection. As if I were under so much scrutiny that the smallest mistake would cause a shitstorm. This feeling was only exacerbated by the fact that when I did say something stupid on Twitter, a group of leftier than thou folks who enjoy brigading other people for the tiniest of ideological differences decided to brigade me....

So here I am, in the wee hours of the morning, having frittered away the last 7 hours of my life on a few “quick” updates to the site. Except I kept thinking of new ways to do things or fixing errors with the style sheets to the point where, except for the general layout and the little cactus icon up there (which is going to be replaced soon, I swear), it’s basically a whole new theme....

Did you know that I have not one, but two kanban boards? One for getting this site set up as I want it to be, and another for mothballing my old site. They both have a LOT of things on them. It’s gonna be a lot of work. But this evening, I knocked out a fair number of backend things I wanted to fix on this site, primarily with the CSS....

Oof. I went in for my monthly-ish paracentesis yesterday morning. If you don’t know what this is, here’s a handy explainer from Wikipedia. First of all, I was up entirely too early for my own good. But it did mean I was able to take my meds and eat breakfast before having to leave for the hospital, so that’s something, yes? Normally, it’s not too bad, but the doctor doing them yesterday was a resident and while she was very nice and perfectly competent, she was also still a resident, which means that she wasn’t as skilled as some of the doctors who have been there for years....