Weeknotes

Taking a ham radio course I’ve always loved the pictures of people sitting at a desk with a wall of their ham radio equipment in front of them. They look so cool, like they’re helping someone land a plane or giving guidance to astronauts as they navigate space. Search for “ham radio station” on your favorite search site and you’ll get hundreds of pictures like this of people with their gear.

I don’t think these count as weeknotes anymore. There’s been a lot going on. The biggest change for me is that I’ve taken a full time job that I start March 28th (tomorrow). I wasn’t planning on stopping my solo work, but a few opportunities popped up that I decided to consider. It wasn’t an easy choice to stop working for myself, and it was tough to pick between a few great opportunities, but I’m excited about what’s to come.

I’ve started taking a pottery class. It’s a much-welcomed escape from my digital working life that I don’t normally take. I read and write, but I don’t do much with my hands like this. I recently discovered Pandoc as a great tool for building nice-looking PDFs from Markdown. Murderville was ridiculous. I’m reading ‌How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. I’m also trying to finish Dune.

This is my first week back to writing weeknotes after taking a long time off. We’ve been locking ourselves down with the recent surges. Our area has been breaking daily numbers regularly and filling up our hospital with enough people to put it into crisis mode. But not everyone feels the crisis as our local schools removed the requirement for students to quarantine after exposure. I took off a few weeks at the end of the year that started with a nasty tornado that ripped through our area.

I’m writing this from a coffee shop. It’s the first time I’ve sat inside one since the pandemic started. I spent several mornings at a coffee shop writing Morning Pages before the pandemic. When you go regularly like that, you get to know the regulars and be known as a regular. They stop asking your name when you place your order. You get to know the staff and the regulars like it’s a little community.

It’s fall now. We have about 10-15 huge trees that are pouring out a steady stream of leaves into our yard. The leaves are beautiful to look at while they’re changing colors and still in the trees. But when they come down, they turn into a sloppy mess. I’ve been coding a lot lately, for experimenting, for building tools for work, and for my own tinkering. Friday, I wrote a Python library for fun called zzip that’s useful for traversing over data and making immutable changes.

I’m writing this again using GitHub Codespaces. I got Hugo working to be able to serve up the local server by setting up port forwarding for port 1313. Port forwarding is a feature in Codespaces, so it’s just a few clicks. Then I provided Hugo with the URL Codespaces created and told it to not append the port. It works, but LiveReload doesn’t because of some protocol issues. I’ll dig more into that later.

Our youngest kid had a birthday. It was a week full of unicorns, pizza, and cake. I created a landing page for my book. However, I think I’m going to move it away from the dedicated domain to this one. I’ve been reading This is Marketing by Seth Godin. I enjoy the way he writes. I’ve been tinkering with an idea. I’m thinking of adding a notes section on this site for shorter writing.

I’m coming down this week after a book release last Thursday. I didn’t realize how much different a book would be than a blog post. I know they’re different—obviously—but finalizing a PDF that people would download had a new level of finality to it. Lots of times with blog posts I fix things after I publish them. That’s not possible with a PDF. Once you put it out there, it’s out there.

It’s already October? This last part of the year always flies by for me. It’s so busy with holidays and birthday. I do love Fall weather, though, which we’re getting a glimpse of now. I didn’t write a weeknote for last week. I was too busy! First, I released my book API by Design. I’ve been researching the topic for several months and writing the content for a couple of them.