weeknotes 2

life nonsense

i have meds!

The sertraline finally arrived on Monday. After 13.5 days without, having the buzzing and hot flashes stop has been great. But that’s long enough that I now need to wait for the onboarding delay again, so I’m Anxious. And tired. So tired.

entertaining nonsense

video games

I’ve done my usual trick of sinking a lot of time into an RPG (FFXII on the Switch this time) then allowing myself to become distracted and losing most of the context and motivation to return. This is why I never finish anything! You can read into this for the rest of my life if you’d like.

roleplaying

The first Dungeons & Dragons session of 2021 is on Friday (today). As usual, I left all of my prep until far too late, so I’ll be mostly winging it. At least I came up with the intended narrative arc, so it will be less mindless winging.

Hopefully, we can speed through rejoining the split party that has persisted in one form or another for the past 3 or 4 sessions and finally have a full team again. I get hung up on not wanting to take control of player characters in any way, which usually means avoiding any kind of time skip where anything happens. I should be less precious about that.

I made a small tweak to the Powder Mage custom class I built for Dom. The action economy of stacked needs for bonus actions was getting in the way of being able to use an ability at all, so I removed the maintenance action.

babble

grammarly

I’ve installed the integration of Grammarly into VSCode (where I do a lot of writing) to see if it helps me write good¹. I already disagree with it a bunch (language is descriptive, not prescriptive), but I’m hoping I can train it.

seo

I made a start on converting that slide deck on SEO into a blog post. Might get it done next week. Working title: “SEO is a dark art”. I generally enjoy writing, but something about translating from one bit of writing to another is kind of tedious…

whitespace

I remembered about the blog post (talk?) I want to write about the significance of whitespace beyond indentation. I’ve told Louise about it for the dxw blog, so maybe that will help motivate me to write it.

technobabble

fonts

How does Android only ship with a single font?! I spent a lot of time on Saturday trying to find fallback fonts that felt good for the initial release of this site, without needing to resort to web fonts (and the performance and environmental hit they imply). I found good options (without actually trying to test on different clean operating systems), but this site looks rubbish on Android. Do I need to selectively fetch fonts if you’re on Android? Is that a thing? If you’re reading this on Android: I’m sorry. It should be nicer on the eyes on a desktop.

I’ve made headings bolder (semi-bold where a font has it), to at least make the difference between headings and body more pronounced than whether or not there are serifs. I learned about browser font-weight fallback logic in the process, which was interesting.

reader view

I had a bit of trouble diagnosing why Reader View wasn’t being enabled for posts on this site. Turns out that the page title wasn’t updating properly, and that was causing the browser to think the page hadn’t changed.

cross-posting from dxw

I spent a bunch of Sunday cross-posting my blog posts from the dxw blog. It was surprizingly painful to do. Most of that pain was in recreating the markup after a copy and paste. This site is coming together, though, and I’m enjoying working in Svelte. It’s like React but without all the boilerplate.

analytics

I’ve been meaning to try a non-Google analytics platform for a while. I don’t like that most of the web happily sells its users’ data to Google in exchange for understanding behaviour. I came across Plausible Analytics recently, which is privacy-preserving, open source analytics with the option of self-hosting. I’ve integrated it into this site as an experiment, and I’m already loving the UI. If you’re interested, I’ve made the stats public.

work miscellany

people will put up with a lot

I had a run-through of a piece of software for a client project, and it’s so awful. But somehow people are positive about it - even excited! Is vendor lock-in so bad that people experience a form of Stockholm syndrome?

gdpr

Does anyone actually understand what GDPR says? We’re currently struggling to find the right tool for the job because of a supposed requirement to not store data outside the EU (and what does Brexit mean for that?). Turns out all SaaS stores their data in the US because of AWS. This is a Problem.

The ICO have a guide, but whether that will trickle out to actual organizational policy is still to be seen, and it’s all slowing things down.

new macbook

I’ve finally given up on making do with my 12” MacBook’s (yes, no adjectives) slowness. Work is buying me a new MacBook Air instead, Apple silicon and all. My lack of gender appears to have confused Apple.

I resisted a larger model for a while because of speaker placement. I have a magnet embedded in my left ring finger, and my resting hand position hovers that finger over the space next to the tab key. Speakers also contain magnets, so placing them on the sides of the keyboard instead of above it can result in a bit of a surprize.

Fun fact, I used to put an old colleague’s laptop to sleep whenever I was driving it. Old MacBooks used a magnet in the lid to tell the laptop that it had closed, and the detector was right next to the tab key. It took me ages to work out what was going on.

Time to persist and update my config files in my dotfiles repository.

miscellaneous miscellany

blog migration

I migrated all of the blog posts from the old site to this site, which was a trip down memory lane. Both sites used markdown, so it was fairly simple. I can tell that I was younger when I wrote them, but they were amusing to reminisce over.

metababble

Are these too long? Does this structure work? Does anybody care?