I’m accepting that I can write these whenever I want. Maybe next year I’ll change the title.
Or, the combination of pandemic and election is still making days seem like weeks and months seem like days, so maybe election day really is the week’s end.
If it is, here we are.
I’m trying to restrain any optimism but I’m also very much looking forward to the American public standing up and decisively showing Trump the door.
It snowed a couple weeks ago and got cold for a few days. It’s a shock to have winter before fall even has a chance to get going. But we’re back in the steady 50s until this weekend. Michelle mentioned that we should start tracking the number of days from first Junco sighting to snowfall.
The internet was all so much easier to grasp when the metric was the total number of users an online service had. It then became how many of those were active users. Now it’s about the average amount of time each user spends “engaged” with the platform. So of course it just gets worse.
The more time we spend with a platform, the less time we’re spending doing normal things that keep the world healthy.
What’s strange is we still call them “social networks” when they’ve become an algorithmic firehose.
I released a plugin to the WP plugin repo for the first time in a gazillion years. Self Sustaining Spam Stopper has been doing a good job on this site of stopping spam without relying on an external spam service and I wanted to use it on more sites. An easy way of deploying useful open source code to sites on multiple hosting platforms is to use wordpress.org. 😎
I’ve published 62 posts on this site in 2020. This is right about the same as the number of posts I posted in 2018 and 2019 combined or in 2015, 2016, and 2017 combined. So things are trending better if publishing more is my objective, which it mostly is.
There’s something therapeutic about writing notes like this throughout the week and shipping them off as a “posts”. I’m thinking more and more about how to use the rest of the site as my own repository of other stuff as well. So I guess at some point it’s not about how many posts are published, but how active and healthy the site is. Or—how much it helps my future self when reflecting, pondering, etc…
There is no way I will ever claim to write good code. I know for a fact that I have written bad code. One thing I used to think is that I could abstract things into pieces that could be understood by somebody who came along behind me because they were organized naturally. Nothing about code is natural, so of course this isn’t the case. IMO.
A spammy email came in a few weeks ago from someone who “noticed” a broken link on one of my posts and suggested that I replace it with a link to their write-up on the topic. It turned out to be a nice notification of a broken link, so I updated it to the Wikipedia article instead and then forgot about it until they followed up with me this week to check if I had seen their email. If only I wasn’t so jaded by this kind of non-contextual content marketing. Maybe I’ll send a thank you note anyway.
Okay, time to go all in and participate in the quadrennial ritual of binging election coverage and pretending that keeping track of maps and numbers will make everything better.
One scotch, one bourbon, one beer—but in reverse tonight. 🥃