Weeknotes 2024 W11: Ideas Now

Quick bits:

• I made another loaf of bread. I did not take a photo this time. I can’t be taking photos of my bread all the time! Go take a look at the one I made two weeks ago, in Week­notes 2024 W09: Keyboard cleaning!

• Little progress on the job search. The market for software engineers is very much not great this year. Help me out? Get me a job in 2024! Use that referral bonus!

• The feeling of loneliness has struck again, and it is sticky. Not having a job (and thus no social contact via work) explains a chunk of that, but Berlin feels unusually dull and empty anyway.

• I had a near-accident with my bike, being nearly hit by a car turning right as I was going straight ahead. This sort of accident happens far too often in Berlin, sometimes with deadly results. I luckily got out of it with only psychological damage. It has only been a week since I had the last accident — see Week­notes 2024 W10: On personal web sites.

• There is a new Nanoc version (4.12.20). On top of that there is the release of nanoc-org-mode, so now you can write your web page content in Org Mode if you want.

I’ve expanded my web site, added an Ideas page and a Now page.

The Now page is a short list of what takes my focus now. I’m not the only one with such a page: there is quite a community around it. There is some overlap with my week­notes, but I think overall it complements them nicely.

The Ideas page, inspired by About Ideas Now, is a collection of my ideas. It is incomplete, in the sense that it only contains the ideas that I have been able to put into a reasonable string of words. I’ll endeavor to keep expanding the list!

I learnt two new Visual Studio Code keyboard shorts: ⌘⇧K for deleting the current line, and ⌘L for selecting the current line. Those are useful, but I still need to train my muscle memory.

Also, I have finally set up Ruby LSP, which is a decent improvement over the bare-bones Ruby support that I had before. It is not nearly as fully-featured as I would like it to be, though I imagine Ruby is generally not a programming language that is well-suited for use in an IDE.

I got so fed up with Xcode that I restarted work on my budgeting app prototype, this time in Ruby. Swift’s standard library feels remarkably small (compared to Ruby at least), and Xcode is a buggy mess.

The domain of a budgeting application is complex, so using a programming language and a development environment that I know through-and-through makes more sense anyway.

I don’t know yet where I will take this prototype to, but the basic functionality is there and usable, which is the furthest I’ve come with this project. I’d love to have a GUI app, but I’m rather dreading going back to Xcode and it’s, ehh, funkiness.

I had the first instance of short-story writing workshop earlier this week. With some luck, it’ll give me more structured approaches to writing and editing stories; I’ve always felt that the way I wrote my short fiction was “just write and see where I end up” with a strong sense of having no idea of what I was really doing.

There is also a chance (I hope) that this group of people could lead to a writers’ group. I’ve never been in one, and have had trouble finding any, but I believe they could be extremely valuable.

I’ve continued my attendance to Shut Up & Write. Once a week is perhaps not very much, but having a space and a block of time dedicated purely to writing is great.

I also picked up Bird By Bird,¹¹¹ Anne Lamott, Bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life (New York: Anchor Books, 1995).  which is a good read.

Entertainment:

• After finishing Baldur’s Gate 3,²²² Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), published by Larian Studios.  I felt the urge to pick up similar role-playing games, and so I restarted Pillars of Eternity.³³³ Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian Entertainment, 2015), published by Paradox Interactive.  It has been many years since I last played it.

• 50% through Attack Surface.⁴⁴⁴ Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021).  It gets a little slow and muddled down in the middle.

• I watched about 75% of Enter The Void⁵⁵⁵ Enter the Void, directed by Gaspar Noé, written by Gaspar Noé and Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Fidélité Films, Wild Bunch, BUF, 2010).  and then I gave up. It is rare that I drop a movie like this, but this one really didn’t click for me.

Links:

• The Mortimiser: This thing gave me the nickname Ronnie Ethernet, which sounds fantastic.

• Germany adds Berlin’s techno scene to Unesco cultural heritage list