personal

Another week of work in the Netherlands is wrapping up. I’m publishing today’s weeknotes a bit early as I’m about to board a flight on my way back the US, and I strongly doubt I’ll have the energy to write this up after two flights and a long layover at LHR.

This week I’ve been in the Netherlands for work, so between jet lag and meetings I’ve been pretty wiped out. Still, I’ve managed to get a few non-work related things done as well.

Back in the saddle, baby. This week was incredibly busy with work, but I still managed to get a bunch of other things done too. Deployed a fresh and shiny new version of this site that is run on Hugo.

I feel like “migrating to a different static site generator” is the new “installing a new Linux distro.” It’s something nerds do for almost no reason besides curiosity, boredom, and perhaps no small amount of masochism.

This week in the world of Daniel: Released two new versions of django-quotes. Those are focused around making the app more flexible for lots of users, and some developer help with typing annotations.

This week in the world of Daniel: I updated my quote service project to use my reusable django-quotes app. This should make maintenance easier. Since this is a backwards-incompatible change, I also updated ewdiscordbot and ewtwitterbot to use the new API endpoints.

This week in DanielVision: I ran a game of Monster Care Squad for my daughter and wrote down my thoughts. Sent a number of additional job applications out the door. And hey, if your company is doing cool things and looking for seasoned product executive, let me know.

This week I: Released django-quotes, the reusable Django app version of my quote service project. It’s available on PyPi, and you can find documentation on adding it to your Django project here.

This Week In, Well Everything: I have been horrified by the news coming out of Texas and Alabama, and strongly encourage you to donate to organizations that help trans youth and combat the hate in those places.

I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing more regularly here, and taking some inspiration from Quentin I’m going to start doing brief weekly updates. My hope is that doing these short posts will get me back in the groove and lead me to resuming more detailed write-ups.

It isn’t news to anyone that I’m a big fan of Numenera. It is my favorite game to run and I will shamelessly hype for it to anyone who will listen.

One of my favorite places to visit is Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. Exhausted from the gray and brown of winter, today my family made the trek out there for their Orchid Extravaganza.

It’s the January of 2018, and the sickness is upon me again. Sometimes you can feel it coming, like that first head fog that warns of a coming cold, or the klaxon of a stomach churn that alerts you to an impending flu.

Yay, the obligatory retrospective post! Let’s face it, in many ways, 2017 was a dumpster fire of a year. The political and social climate has been toxic and frankly it’s hard to be effective in this kind of environment.

Reader, I did it again. I joined another social network. I know, I know. I should know better, right? But this time feels different. There’s something special about this one. Maybe it’s simply the contrast from Facebook and Twitter that makes it so appealing, but I can’t help but feel there is great promise in Mastodon.

About a month ago, on a whim, I started an experiment where I stopped checking my personal email on my phone, or via the web. Instead, I moved all my personal email activity over to Mutt.

Get Pelican: it’s good! There comes a time in every young man’s life when he begins to neglect his digital lawn, and the weeds grow so thick you wouldn’t think there was any home there at all.

It’s easy to forget what’s important to you. It shouldn’t be. It should be easy to say “no” to the unimportant. It’s counterintuitive that we so easily set aside our priorities in the wake of the new shiny.

One thing that parents can always bond over is irritation over children’s programming on television. For my wife and I, the primary focus of our irritation is the cartoon adaptation of Curious George in all of its incarnations, but we each hate it for different reasons.

Let’s talk about regrets, shall we? They tend to haunt us through the years. Sometimes they are the things we wish we had said (or could be unsaid), and sometimes they are bigger than that, a path you didn’t take, or one you abandoned only a few steps along the way.