飽きないなぁー

1. Tagged with
2. python
3. podcast
4. audio

First commit of 2021 done. Not sure what I'm gonna call it, but the architecture is solidifying a bit.

• The slugs for "The Week" posts are in the format "YYYY-WEEK_NUMBER". The idea being I'll be able to go back and see exactly what week #36 of each year was like. Nice and simple. I always thought there were 52 weeks and for the past few weeks I've been noticing that I was going to get 52 before January 1st. And indeed this post's slug is 2020-53. Surely I must have fudged the numbers. Double checking with Python's datetime seems to indicate that 53 is indeed, correct.

Python 3.8.2 (default, Aug 25 2020, 09:23:57) 
[Clang 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.2)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.now().isocalendar()
(2020, 53, 1)

The isocalendar documentation says that 53 is a valid value. I thought that maybe it was because this year was a leap year? Or had my teachers lied to me about the whole "always 52 weeks in a year" thing? They already lied to me about "i before e except after c" as a gospel of spelling which, turns out, is wrong just as much as it's right. Even something like "52 weeks except when January 1st falls on Wednesday" or something equally half-correct half-the-time would have been nice. But I digress. According to the docs:

The first week of an ISO year is the first (Gregorian) calendar week of a year containing a Thursday. This is called week number 1, and the ISO year of that Thursday is the same as its Gregorian year.

TIL

As videos circulated of rebellious Americans refusing the most basic of precautions under the pretense of freedom, Taiwan shook its collective head and nodded at what real freedom looked like: the ability to have a drink at a bar without fear of catching a deadly airborne illness.

1. Tagged with
2. pandemic
3. taiwan

I'm not sure how much of it was "father of a toddler" and how much of it was "global pandemic", but 2020 felt hard.

While I've been fortunate enough that work hasn't changed for me – instead of going in to the office once a week (by choice), I just don't go in to the office and I haven't been to Tokyo since mid-February. We already communicated entirely with Slack with the only change being that people now hop into voice/video calls more readily than before. BeProud continues to be a fun place sling Python.

I started running regularly midway through the year with small gaps here and there. Thus far I've managed 64 runs totaling 317.6km. There's still a week left and I'm 15km away from my 50km distance goal this month, so those numbers will increase a bit.

This year I started on a path for digital independence and to control my own data. I moved my email from a gmail account made a couple of months they opened to my own domain hosted with Fastmail. If Google were to lock me out of my account for whatever reason, I should be mostly unaffected.

After many years of having no blog and no home on the internet, last year I began experimenting with blogging/tweeting with micro.blog. I slowly remembered how much fun it is to have a home on the internet – somewhere that you can call your own. And this year I moved to a self-hosted Wordpress (for now) blog. The community on micro.blog is great, so I still post there with my blog's RSS feed.

I also started to try working in public more. I haven't release anything yet, but I began collecting my notes, thoughts, and learnings here and in my notebook.

2020 also marks when I became aware of the impact of digital waste. As a web developer I've known that websites have been bloated for a while and it frustrates me to no end. But until this year (and thanks to Gerry McGovern I hadn't connected was the link between data transfer and energy consumption. This led to me writing two articles: Designing Sustainable Digital Products and a guide for migrating your Digital Ocean droplets to sustainable regions powered by renewable energy.

This new awareness also led me to try and reduce the data-transfer and requirements from my own website. I made a custom theme that uses system fonts and minimal css (though there's still too much).

Looking forward to the new year I'd like to double-down on low-energy blogging and websites. Not just for my own blog, but potentially as a service. I've started collecting my thoughts about how such a system could work to maximize privacy and minimize energy consumption in my blogging engine notebook.

Blogging makes the internet fun again and in 2021 I'd like to help people re-discover and remember that fun.

• It's not everyday a man goes to war, but this week started my war with the crows. I usually try to keep on good terms with them because crows are smart, their beaks are ginormous and I stand out - they know where I live. They started razing the trash.

Like most trash areas in our neighborhood, ours is a collapsable green box made of green netting with an aluminum frame. Before we moved here a truck backend in to ours and broke / deformed our top. More over, most trash spots are on flat ground, our's is on a small decline. With the decline unless the sides are square crows and pick at the trash from the gap between the ground and the frame. Since the truck hit our trash, when the box is square there's a crow-size hole to let them come and go freely from the top.

The provisions that the neighborhood associated put on helped – the panels tied to the netting kept the crows at bay. But they were just thin styrofoam and degraded after a couple of months. Rather than get more thing styrofoam that looks temporary, I took matters into my own hands. I found some nice hard plastic (like you'd make a lawn sign out of, but thicker) and tie-wrapped it to the netting so that it extends a bit beyond the frame closing most of the gaps. I'm happy to report we won the first battle. Let's see how it continues to hold up.