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February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 9: Muddy.
It’s rare to find mud around here in February, along with grass this green. Usually everything is brown and dry. This summer has been a welcome exception.
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I have all these personal projects that I want to start, but I need to check myself as I’ve got a habit of starting them, getting bored and never actually finishing them. I really need to be more judicious of things I actually want to build.
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I watched Spirited Away last night. I really enjoyed it: it’s certainly a beautiful film.
It’s taken me a while to appreciate the works of Studio Ghibli. I remember first watching something from them around 10 years ago and finding it quite strange. Reflecting on this now, I think it’s because I was just not familiar with their style of storytelling. My palette for non-Western style films (that is, films from the West, not films set in the Wild West) was not well developed at the time.
I’m pleased that it’s now matured and that I can enjoy these sorts of films.
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February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 6: Sports.
This is probably the closest thing to sports you’ll see me do.
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February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 4: Layers.
This is a photo of the geological kind: an exposed cliff face of the coast of Sunderland Bay.
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February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 3: Comfort. POV shot of me sitting in a comfortable chair while holidaying in Phillip Island this week.
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Micro.blog Photo Challenge. Day 1: “Close Up”. Not the best close up but any closer and they would have flown away.
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Afternoon in the gardens just south of the Shrine Of Remembrance in Melbourne, taken yesterday.
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Well, that’s a little terrifying. Turns out that coronavirus was mutating during Victoria’s second wave last year along similar lines to those variants we’re seeing now. Had it not gone extinct from the lock-down, this “Australian variant” could have been more infectious and possibly more resistant to vaccines.
I’m certainly glad the state government decided to go for zero community spread. As hard as the lock-downs were, I could imagine maintaining suppression of this variant would have been even more difficult, and would have just worn everyone down, not to mention all the additional sickness and death we would have experienced.
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I gave Glitch a go for the first time today. I was sceptical that I would find any value in it, but it turns out to be a great environment for whipping up small apps really quickly. It only took a few hours to build a simple Finska Scorecard using Stimulus.
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I just spent an hour and a half building what I thought was a simplified version of the R-Tree algorithm, until I came across a test case that completely breaks it. The lesson: don’t take shortcuts and just learn the well-known algorithm first.
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In the summer months, if the outside air temperature gets warmer than 40°C, I treat myself to an ice latte as my afternoon beverage, in leau of a regular coffee. Well, it ticked over 40°C about half an hour ago, so…
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I was having a discussion with people at work about the approval process of the Covid-19 vaccines here in Australia.
One person was raising questions as to why the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the agency responsible for approving drugs and treatments, was taking its time with approving the vaccine when a number of other countries have already started rolling it out (he had good enough reasons for asking).
There was a bit of a back and forth about the merits of speeding up the approval process vs. giving the TGA time to do a full approval, since the virus has been suppressed moderately successfully here.
The conversation ended about 10 minutes later with the approval of the Pfizer vaccine.
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A Feature Request for Twitter, Free of Charge
It looks like Twitter’s product design team need some help. Their recent ideas, “inspired” by the features of other companies like Snap (Stories) and Club House (Audio Clips), don’t seem to be setting the world on fire. Well, here’s an idea for them to pursue, free of charge. A lot of people I follow seem to use Twitter threads for long-form writing. This might be intentional, or it might be because they had a fleeting thought that they developed on the spot. Continue reading →
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Adding Blog Posts to Day One using RSS
Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly for stuff that I keep to myself, but since starting the blog, I always wondered how I could get my posts in there as well. It would be nice to collect everything I’ve written in a single place. In fact, there was a time I was considering building something that used Day One’s email to entry feature, just so I could achieve this. Continue reading →
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It’s only just now that I realised I no longer need to brace myself whenever I see the headline “The President is tweeting”.
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A Simple Source IP Address Filter in Go
I’ve found that it’s occasionally useful to have something that allows through, or blocks, requests to your web application based on the source IP address. There are a number of reasons as to why you may want to do this: maybe it’s because you’d like to put something online that only you would have like access to, or it could be that you’re building something that is publicly available, but certain endpoints should only be accessible to certain machines for security or privacy reasons. Continue reading →
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Published two tracks last night: Taxonomy and Hazard. Both of these were made during the depths of the Melbourne Lockdown 2.0, although they’re not about the pandemic. Also, this whole self-promotion thing is new to me so apologies if this post looks a bit weird.
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It’s a little bit shocking, the minute you move to a position with a bit more leadership responsibility, how quickly your calendar fills with meeting requests.
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That feeling you get when you see a class or struct that was defined in another library that you’re using; and you wish you could change it, but doing so will triple the time it takes to complete your task.
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Working on an album cover for some music I’m hoping to publish soon. Who knew that one the skills required for publishing music online is graphic design?
