Weeknotes 2023 W43: Business cards

I publish the week­notes on Sunday morning usually, but this time it’s the late afternoon. Deal with it.

Quick bits:

• I have reached a new milestone in my ownership of an iPhone: Somebody approached me and said “Excuse me, your flashlight is turned on.”

• Another milestone is getting to a 100-day streak in Duolingo.

I ordered my personal business cards. The design is mostly the same as what I showed last week (see Week­notes 2023 W42: Fear of failure). Here’s what they look like:

The headshot is a bit old by now, but it’s still very good, and I haven’t changed all that much anyway.

I don’t think I’ll use the business cards often, but it’ll be so useful to have a few with me all the time. Too often have I walked away from first-time meetings without being able to properly share contact details. No more!

I found a neat way to create QR codes with contact data:

> qrencode -t png -o mecard.png 'MECARD:N:Smith,John;TEL:+4915731111111;URL:https://example.com;EMAIL:hello@example.com;;'

That’s in MeCard format, which I somehow hadn’t heard of, and uses the qrencode tool, which I somehow hadn’t heard of either. Nifty!

The image that it spits out is something like this:

I wish I had known this before I ordered my business cards. It would have been so neat to have a QR code with contact details on there!

I’ve been fleshing out a new story, and actually making progress with it. This time though, I’m planning out the story in much more detail beforehand, and I haven’t gotten to the writing part yet — at least not the part where I am writing down the story itself.

I’m not entirely sure what the format of the story will be — it could be a screenplay for a short film, or just a short story. I keep going back and forth between the two. I might write both!

Rather than working on writing, I procrastinated and built a tool for generating properly formatted manuscript PDFs from Markdown files. Here’s what it spits out:

I don’t actually need this, mind you. Not yet, at least — there’ll likely be a point in the future where I will need it, and it brings me peace of mind to know that I can create a manuscript without having to any nasty copy-paste anything into Word or Pages or Google Docs.

Anyway, you can find this tool on GitHub.

Entertainment:

• I somehow had memories of the book Groosham Grange by Anthony Horowitz stuck in my head, so I re-read it. It’s rather short. It’s still neat, though the writing style does not resonate with me, but perhaps that is because I am very much not a young adult anymore. Also: the Harry Potter books, which came later, are eerily similar — now I know where Rowling got her derivative ideas from.

• Cities Skylines II is out and it’s fun, though I feel like it’s a game that I don’t want to put too much time into, lest I lose myself.

• I finally saw the play Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead and it was most excellent. I’ve now seen the play twice and read the book (the source material) in between.

Links:

• McKinsey: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: McKinsey is icky, but I suppose so are the other big consulting firms.

• How Robins Got Their Name (via Kottke)

• Nisus Thesaurus: This is quite a nice thesaurus app!

• How Techno Shapes the Future (DW History)