It’s been a slower couple of weeks. M is back into her studies, so my own days are following a bit more of a pattern. I still regular events keeping me up until the wee hours with people back in Canada on Tuesday and Thursday nights, but I’m trying to get in and out of bed at reasonable times otherwise. I went through a few days where I was pretty into Slime Rancher, and now Newto is pulling me back into TIS-100 and Infinifactory. The end of the summer is visible. Days are slowly getting shorter; it’s dark before 22:00.
Cottage cleaning continued
With the cottage empty for a few days and a bit of better weather, I undertook to power wash the paving tiles around the cottage.
Satisfying results, for sure. Need to do around the house next.
Bubble waffles
A café in Aberlour has started serving bubble waffles, so of course we had to take a walk down to try them. Hard to measure up to Moo Shu, but it was pretty good. In my excitement, I neglected to take any photos; but I did get a couple on the walk back up to the house.
Employment and writing
It’s time to start thinking about the fall. M is planning on moving to Strathkinness for the winter, and I need to start looking for something to do – something which will look good on a rental application. “Occasional open source contributor” probably isn’t enough. And I’m struggling to push ahead on that work, anyway, without anyone else interested in me doing it. Guess it’s time to start looking for real work. I started poking around for contract opportunities on Upwork. Lots of people looking for lots of things I can’t do. Imposter syndrome hits hard and fast. It’s the sort of thing to make one dream of switching careers. Too bad my obvious backup, live sound, is still in such a overwhelming state of COVID-induced decline.
I wrote an exploratory article on the performance of a particular design decision I made in passing on a project years ago. I don’t really remember what I was doing which brought it to mind, but I’m glad it was did. It was fun to write up, especially because I hadn’t put much thought into the performance of the choice at the time: it was originally stylistically-motivated. While writing the code samples for the post, I found that the amount of material I wanted to provide was unpleasantly long to read casually. Rather than provide a condensed version of the code in the post and link to a longer form, I annotated the unimportant sections and wrote a plugin to control visibility. I’m still struggling with the language to use to describe this feature: is it expansion? Compression? “Squeezing” is the term I used in the plugin name, but that was mostly for the pun value. And what are the bits that get hidden? Layers? Blocks? Expansions? Would like to get back to it and give it a proper readme, a configuration interface, and release it to the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Cullen and the Knock
We spent most of yesterday afternoon in Cullen, sitting on a bench overlooking the harbour. We had lunch, and M read while I watched the goings-on and enjoyed the day. People watching isn’t usually my thing, but people don’t usually move about that much, either.
In the evening, we climbed the Knock and had a picnic supper. That’s Ben Rinnes in the background.
It’s been a beautiful couple of days here. Clear, bright and sunny, just enough of a breeze.
Next week
I’d like to land at least one contract on Upwork, even if just something small.
I’d like to beat (or at least match) Newto’s cycle count on Interrupt Handler.
I’d like to write two more sections for the library logging analysis project/post I started on months ago.
I’d like to at least look into building a universal macOS binary for NRJS to support both x86-64 and ARM64.
I’d like to go at least one whole day without having an existential crisis.