The Blog - 2024

Um hello! I'd wish you a Happy Belated Blog End and Start day, but that was a while ago... Did anyone one get the licence plate of that August? I'll be picking calendar shrapnel out of my brain for weeks!

If you're new here, welcome, good timing. The next sentence I'm going to write is weird, but it'll be a whole year now before I write again. My rule is to never start a project without an idea of how it ends, so I never set out to blog for more than a year at a time and the beginning of August -- actually mid July, but honestly nothing here makes that much sense -- marks the end of the last year of blogging, and, since I feel like continuing on, the start of the next year.

I noted last year that I wanted to cut back on quantity in favour of quality. I've certainly achieved reduced quantity, quality isn't quite where I want it but you know, things are coming along. I guess my goal of this year is now to increase the quantity of the quality.

I'm proud of the two "Things about Games" posts I wrote (Sea of Stars and Unicorn Overlord) and I enjoyed the things I wrote about reading and rereading. I also had fun rebuilding the way I record the books I read and the games I play. Games especially aren't quite there yet, but my over engineered mail merge is fun. 

Do I know what I'm doing next? Nope. I might blog more. I might finally move off blogger/blogspot. I might just hang out and write another August post here next year feeling like I'm almost where I want to be. Still I'm working on getting the "shoulds" out of my life and just doing. 

I'll see ya'll for the New Year's navelgazing. In the mean time I hope we can have a little adventure. Hope you've found a nice seat. 

Project 24: Blog HTML Generator - Introduction

 I’ve been having a lot of fun with my new book tracking infographic. Doing things like making a word cloud of authors and a grid of titles is just interesting enough that it’s a great job to have on hand when I don’t want to do anything that needs more thinking. And more, or less, I like the look of what I’ve put together. I’m sure I could make it more … infographicy … but for now I still like it and that’s all been an easy amount of tracking.

What frustrates me (or at least leaves me squinting over a screen) is that I like the look for two columns of data for books and authors and other things, but it is hard to manually transcribe and update that information correctly. While I’m enjoying making some parts of the infographic by hand there’s no reason not to automate the parts I don’t want to do by hand.

The data that I track for books isn’t terribly complicated, and my display isn’t all that complicated either. My first thought was that I could probably just build a table manually in Python. Then I started looking around and while Python has an HTML library that I could possibly use I also discovered Jinja, which is a template generator you can call from Python and which lets you build structured text with your own data added in.

I thought Jinja looked fun, possibly having old timey Mail Merge nostalgia, and I really enjoyed the bit where it just takes a template and adds your data where you put in a marker. It has some fairly functional concepts of conditionals and loops and didn’t rely on much else. You can use it for a bunch of different things, and it’s probably overkill for me, but I’m a sucker for accessing data in double braces. {{ humour }}

Getting Set Up

Documentation for Jinja is a little spotty, but not too bad. The big thing to keep in mind is that you need to install Jinja2 using pip. (Also then that you have to call it as jinja2 in code. I found the Geeks for Geeks tutorial pretty good to get started. I went through the tutorial a couple of times and once I knocked all the rust off my Python knowledge I was able to pass lists of dictionaries to the Jinja renderer and get a basic version out.

On the note of Python rust, the thing that really got me the connection of Python keyword arguments to Jinja’s variables, but once I remember and got comfortable with method keywords (template.render(authors=authors)) things got better. (I guess by convention for Jinja I should be calling that context, but I’m very bad at using libraries conventionally).

But the left and right!

I’ve maybe given too many introductory programming questions in my life, but when I looked at trying to neatly organise data into two columns, my first thought is to check if we’re on an even or odd iteration of the loop.

Jinja, does not do that.

There might be a way, but when I made a variable and counted to it, it turned out it was being reset at the beginning for every loop (or possibly just never being changed). That was fairly disheartening, until I stopped and actually read the weird little blurb in the Jinja Tips and Tricks page, which I’d skimmed past a dozen times.

The loop.cycle() method is pretty neat. When you call it in a loop, it returns the 1st argument in the array passed in, every time it’s called. When you call it on the next iteration, it returns the second argument and so on until it runs out of arguments then it loops around in the arguments again.

The way to use this took me a little while to process, since in that example there, they’re changing on each row, but the thing I needed to konw is that can call the method again with different arguments, and the nth argument will always be returned. So I was able to update my template to either added the row start, or nothing, and then added nothing or the row ending.

This is how that ends up looking:

  {{ loop.cycle('<tr>','') }}<td>...</td>{{ loop.cycle('', '</tr>') }}

I also had to add a check at the end to add an empty table element if there was an odd number.

  {% if books|length % 2 == 1 %}<td></td></tr>{% endif %}

I also added a set of conditional tests to add bold <b> tags. Which really catches the thing that I struggled most to do when I was building these tables manually.

Other cleanup

I finally broke down and thought I’d ask ChatGPT a programming question. Unsurprisingly, if you were look at my search history (or listen to me grumble about files), I asked it how to open a csv file in Python. The answer was about as good as Stack Overflow would have done for me. (that's gotten more complicated since I asked, I guess). The answer was wrong (or more correctly missing a very important detail, but good enough.

I did get to learn that when you open a csv file, you can include the field names in the arguments to csv.DictReader, which is very helpful.

reader = csv.DictReader(file, fieldnames = ('name', 
'books_read_month', 
'pages_read_month', 
'books_read_year', 
'pages_read_year'))

At this point things bogged down, I did not expect Excel to ambush me with “I now show all data upside down” (like, no seriously, it shows all of the text upside down and the rows upside down) so that obscured some issues I was having with getting the data arranged properly. (I’m blaming excel for reordering the CSV, … see the upside down thing above). But with a little manual work I’m now able to get data out of my tracking spreadsheet and into some template HTML files which I can then put into my blog posts.

The thing that made me happiest was as I was working I realised how much duplicate code I was generating between the template and the CSV loader for most of the tables. The books and the authors are unique but all of the other tables share a format, and so first I was able to use the same template. Then I was able to tidy up more and just pass the file name to the one method and process all three tables with the same method and template combo. That nicely reduced the size of the generator script and made me feel like a proper computer scientist.

Next Steps

My current “hand crafting” set up is that I copy select data out of my main reading spreadsheet and export it as five CSVs, then I run the HTML generator over those and get five files with the tables. I then pull those tables into the blog post in blogger.

That really covers all of what I’m looking for and the data is simple enough that I don’t really need anything else for books. The original idea for the project was do stuff more or less by hand and I’ve automated the parts where I was frustrating myself. I might come back and mess around more, but for now I’m pretty happy with the book infographic.

The game infographic is a little more of a mess and the new format I’m thinking about needs a lot more data displayed and folded in different ways. So I think I am going to go on and play with Jinja to generate a monthly games infographic. I’ve done a little bit already so hopefully I’ll be able to pop out the March and April infographics before the end of May.

It’s been a fun project and was nice to take on something a reasonable size which I could finish in a reasonable amount of time. Jinja seems useful for a lot of other applications, so I’m glad I’ve at least had a chance to play around with it.

A Few Helpful Links

• Jinja2 Tutorial - Part 1 - Introduction and variable substitution
• Primer on Jinja Templating
• Basic Syntax of Jinja
• csv — CSV File Reading and Writing

What I Did About The Books I’m Reading and What I Should Do About the Games I’m Playing

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted about wanting to change up the way I was keeping track of the books I read. Previously I posted a book post every few days with the new books in a big list. I was inspired by Sharon Lee who does that and it seemed like fun.

I wanted to make the changes for a few reasons. First off as technical task it was surprisingly frustrating to maintain a list over a series of posts and it was a bit redundant as my GoodReads profile is public and you can see the list there. The other reason was that the book posts were inflating the number of posts I was making in a month and taking time away from working on other things. I though, as a next step, making a monthly “infographic” update might be fun and interesting and maybe teach me a few things at the same time.

As someone who has worked in post secondary education for a while now, I can assure you that nobody (including myself) has any idea what an infographic is. So I settled on an answer that was high on info and maybe a bit low on graphics.

All of the posts are under the Books in 2023 tag and they look more or less like this:

I’m pretty happy. As I said, it might not be as pretty as it might be, but at least for now I’m enjoying making it. I learned, for example that for some reason I haven’t read a single book published in 2023, which seems weird, but now I know.

More technically, I learned a bit about getting formatting to work properly. I also learned that books are almost never in a 2:3 ration. I mean, I shelved books for years, I knew this, but until I tried making a grid of book covers I hadn’t realised just how wacky the world of book cover sizes is. I also messed around with hand crafting a word cloud, mine is certainly not as pretty as some, but I kinda like it.

I’m doing a very simple translation where the author’s percentage of the books translates directly to the font size the author. So in the June example above, Tomohito Oda represented 26.4% of the books I’d read to that point in the year and her name is in 264 point font. Elizabeth Bear only accounted for 1.6% at the time and so she’s in 16 point font.

From a production point of view, it takes me about 3 hours to put together the post and certainly requires more hand done portions than it might. When I set out that was fine but as the year went on, I hand wrote more HTML than I really enjoyed, especially when it came to keeping the two column tables balanced. There’s also still some book keeping that’s duplicating Good Reads.

So eventually, I want to either automate the process or make it more manual. I still like the idea of hand building my infographic, but also creating fewer points where I can get in my way seems helpful too. For the time being I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because it’s fun enough and kind of meditative, without taking up all of my time.

I’m having enough fun with it that I’m thinking about how I can modernise my system of video game tracking. I think those posts are alright, but they have a few problems.

I’ve had a lot of trouble this year keeping track of what I’ve played and when and so the data going into the posts is a lot worse than it was. This has happened before and I might get better about it again, but I’m also a spot right now where games are less important to me than they were. I’m not sure I need to be quite as granular about it as I have been.

There’s also a problem that a lot of games show up every month. If you read those posts regularly you’ll know that my nuanced view of Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe) is “Vroom Vroom Beep Beep” because I really haven’t had that much to say about it in the … almost decade since it game out (the first time). I don’t mind doing a new review for something new or a point about something interesting, but I think those posts are some of my worst writing and I want to put that energy somewhere else.

One of the things I’ve always meant to do with game tracking is build one of those theme river diagrams. At the moment for me capturing the very large things about what I’m playing is important. For example: “The summer of 2023 was the the summer of Tears of the Kingdom” is the kind of insight I’d like to hang on to (and I’m not sure is even that apparent in what I’m doing).

I’d also like to make sure that I have a picture in my head of what I played in a year, new and old. Like right now I know I played Hollow Knight at some point in the last year, and apparently a lot of that was in the winter, and then I played a little bit of Breath of the Wild just before Tears of the Kingdom came out.

Overall, it’s time for a change, I’m just not totally sure what the change is going to be. Writing it out this way makes me think something similar to the book infographic might be the right way to go. Here’s what my 2024 in games looks like at a glance updated each month, with a few insights to spice up everything else.

I think I can also dial back the tracking. I’m not sure at this point that it’s doing me any good and while I don’t think it’s doing much harm if I can streamline to “Here are games I played a little and Here are games I played a lot” that might be what I need. That’s going to be weird and I might end up continuing just because it’s an ancient habit by this point (and imagine all the data I won’t have if I want it later!).

Anyway, those are my Updates updates. Making infographics is fun, if a little bit tedious and even I, after doing something for seven years, can make a change. I don’t know exactly what you can expect in terms of my media consumption nonsense in 2024, but I, at least, intend to have fun with it.

Ten and Three Years Blogging

Well, it’s August again and I get to wish you Happy Blog End and Start Day.

If this is your first Blog End and Start Day, welcome! This is the day when I “wrap up” my blog and then also the day when I start a “new” blog for a new year. This is the tradition because I always find it hard when long running projects fade away and so I don’t want to take on anything that doesn’t have a committed end date. So every August I start a new season (or edition, or volume) of the blog.

This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I tend to actually make changes to how I’m blogging in January, but I publish my first real post on … July 24, 2011… wait why do I write publish these these on August 1? Aaanyway, this is my yearly update to the Blog as Blog (writing about things, as opposed to project updates).

The biggest thing that’s different this year from last year is that the actual number of posts is way down. I’ve gone from averaging 5ish posts a month to more like 3. Most of that is changing how I keep track of the books I’ve been reading, and going from a list to a monthly infographic. This has generally made me happier because it cuts down on trying to keep track of the books and having a constant need to post and honestly making the monthly infographics has been fun. In light of all of the AI nonsense going on right now, doing things by hand feels worthwhile and entertaining and satisfying.

I’ve also been trying to put less stuff on the blog so that I can focus more on projects, be that [writing] or other stuff. I also want to write more better blog posts, I really want 2023 to be the year I set myself as a writer in my mind, and writing more meaningful posts is a part of that, so I’m trying to put less filler on the blog.

Since April I’ve given myself the objective of writing two meaningful blog posts each month. One is supposed to go on here, and the other is supposed to go on my professional blog Learning and Technology. I should be at eight posts so far, and I’m at five, but I feel like I’m moving in the correct direction. (It is the nature of blogging that all posts are made while moving in the correct direction because when you’re falling around not doing things, one of the things you don’t do is blog.)

I think I’m happy content wise with what’s up and I feel like I’m doing things I like doing in a way I like doing them.

What I’m increasingly less happy with is the platform. I’ve been on Blogger for a while and got very close to quitting a few years back when they suddenly modernised a bunch of stuff and it got easier to use. As a platform blogger is okay, but it isn’t exactly doing what I want. The biggest (and maybe dumbest) thing right now is that it still limits you to 200 characters of tags per post. That’s fewer characters than I generally need and it breaks the way I want to be using tags.

The other thing is it’s past time that I consolidated my digital footprint outside of Google’s infrastructure. Especially with issues coming up around AI, the time feels right to move on, but also just in general if I want to advocate for doing things the right way online I should probably do things the way I think they should be done.

So I’m going to start looking at moving the blog over to my own infrastructure. I’ll post lots of updates as I get things set up, but you may have to move your RSS feed when the change comes. A while back feedburner had a fit, so I took it off the blog, but then it started working again, so if you follow on RSS and have for a while, migration should happen automatically, but it may not. It’s 2023 never trust a corporation, or software, or anyone, or anything. Maybe move to the woods and help restrore the environment...

Cough. I’m not 100% sure what tech stack I’m going to go to, but figuring that out will give me more things to blog about, so it’s a win all around. At the moment, I might lean into wordpress, but I also think, given a lot of what I want out of the web, I may go towards Hugo and try to keep things as flat and dumb as possible.

Anyway, that’s your update for another Year of the Blog. Take care and I’ll see you in August 2024 (plus hopefully lots of days in between).

More on what to do about the books I'm reading

After my other post about what I wanted to do with tracking my reading, I spent a while thinking about what was most important to me and then put a post together as a starting point.

I figured details weren't that important since Good Reads tracks all of that, so I really wanted to take a high level view. The other things I wanted to keep was the enjoyment I get out of having the authors in the tags of the posts, but without the pain in the ass of fighting the blogger tag system. 

It turns out that it's not easy to get a report on books from Good Reads. The ,csv I downloaded was missing either a lot of books or a lot of information. I ended up building the stats by hand, which was fairly manageable with 8 books in January. That seems like it'll be more-or-less average for the year. I'm avoiding the urge for now to build a tracking tool. 

A collage of covers seems like a nice way to encapsulate the month and gives me something visual to hang on to. I also decided to build my own word cloud of authors. It's a spiral with authors being added in the order I read them, and then as I read more books of theirs I'll start enlarging the size. I think there are some things that could use adjusting -- I'm not that happy with the font for one thing -- but again my goal for this was to get something done. I do lose the tags in the blog tags, but I don't know how much I care in the long term.

I figured beyond titles and authors I'd keep track of when books where published. I'm surprised how much "new stuff" I'm reading, so it seems like that was worth while. I also already track where I got books from and formats (so I know if I want to re-read), so I tossed that in as well.

It's a start. I don't feel like the look is exactly what I'm looking for, but it'll do for now. And it's reconnecting me with I'm also not sure if it captures the right information, but I don't know that there's anything it *needs* to capture right now. I figure I'll add year-to-date in the February post and go from there. I would like it to have a little bit more of an "infographic" look, but I also want to stay fairly pure in terms of HTML and CSS (at least for now).

If you have any thoughts about tracking books, I'd love to hear them.

What to do about the books I'm reading

 I've spent the last several years tracking the books I've read on the blog. I started doing it more or less become Sharon Lee does it and it seems cool. I also may have some latent quantified selfer tendencies.

It's been fun to do, to some extent and it's something I can do to feel creative without really having to think (and knitting projects are also kinda nice). It also makes me revisit what I've read and keep the keeping track I'm doing on Goodreads organized. I'm not sure whether or not it helped me to read more, but it certainly didn't hurt.

On the other hand, there are some problems. Some of them are technical and then a few are more organization (and now one is ethical).

The first problem I have is that blogger limits the number of tags you have on a post. Actually that's not true. Blogger limits the number of characters you have in tags to 200. I have no idea why, but it means that if I have more than about 3 books in a post I have to leave things out and I really like having the authors and books and series show up in the cloud tag at the bottom of the blog. I suppose I could put one book per post, but that's always felt like too many extra posts.

The next is that it's hard to keep a numbered list in a table in HTML. It's not impossible (and I do actually intend to write up how I automated it) but it means that when I look at my blog on the web on a nice big computer screen it looks good, nice list of numbered lines with enough space for things like the title and the author. However if I look at it on my phone, or at the RSS feed it's messed up. The counting relies on javascript which isn't implemented the same everywhere and often it's a mess.

I used to manually number the table to keep that from happening, but manually numbering 120 rows of an HTML table is an invitation to duplication and mess. It also doesn't' help the inevitable problem that no matter how careful I am, the list I have on the blog never matches the list of have on good reads and I'm at a loss to fix it. I think it was pretty good in 2021, but more or less it's always been wrong.

Keeping the list on Goodreads and on my blog is also redundant, and aside the benefits I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure there's a lot of reason to keep two lists. I think putting the books on the blog also provided me with a good excuse for not writing on things. Oh, I should writing about automatically numbering rows in an HTML table, but I'll just update the books first. Blogging about books has certainly swamped the number of posts I've made about anything else for the last while.

Finally I'm tempted to quit Goodreads. My partner and I have been trying to move a lot of our business away from Amazon, and since the business with Comixology, I've been pretty unhappy to let them be the automatic choice in our life. I've discovered Bookwyrm, which has the benefit of being part of the fediverse along with Mastodon, but on the other hand I really like seeing the handful of friends I'm friends with on Goodreads and I'd be sad to leave there right now.

So I'm not all that sure what I want to do. For the time being, I'm not blogging the books I've read this year. If you're interested then you're totally welcome to keep track of what I've been reading over on Goodreads. I think some kind of periodic data project might be the way to go, since there's a lot of fun visualization things that I could be doing and that would also keep me in touch with the books I've read the way blogging them did. 

There are other more general thoughts I've been having about blogging, none of which I'm all that ready to write about. For now, I think this is where I'm at, less book blogging and I'm going to have to find something else to do when I need a slightly brainless project. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

Project 1: Blog 12 - Update

Happy Blog End and Start Day (Belated)

I’m late. Later than usual, but I like to take the first of August as a day to wrap up what I’ve written on this blog in the year before and look ahead. One of my original ideas with the blog was that things shouldn’t go on forever, so this is my time to look at what I’m planning to do for the next year.

I suppose, as I always do, I should point out that I’m doing two things at once here (because I’m bad at being straightforward about things). The first thing is a project tracker, where I keep track of all the things I’ve worked on for myself. The second, one of those projects, is a blog where I … write … things.

This is my second attempt at writing this post. My first came out quite angry with myself and felt rather bilious when I looked back at it. In short, I’m a little frustrated that I haven’t been moving forward with creative projects, including the blog. I haven’t done a lot that’s really interesting with the blog this year, but I do have posts which I quite like on set similarity and Java Preferences. Also, while they may be deeply boring, I still enjoy posting the regular updates tracking the games I play and the books I read.

I want to do more creative things, and I want to give myself more grace that the things I do don’t have to be perfect. Maybe I'll write more here; maybe I won't. Maybe I'll write more somewhere else; maybe I won't. Maybe I'll dance the funky chicken; maybe I won't.

Thanks for following along and I’ll see you next August.

November 2021 Project Update

I recently watched Cathy Hey interview Jeff Walker about building a creative career. While I'm not planning to leave my day job any time soon, I've been sitting on a lot of creative projects without making much progress and this really inspired me to get moving on a lot of these things.

I decided as a starting point I wanted to dedicate a little bit of time each week to working on projects. I set an initial goal of 5 hours a week and I really haven't nailed it yet, but I've actually started to get a little bit of stuff done. 

As apparently has become my wont I set up a spreadsheet to track my time, and so now my life outside of work is filled with colourful bar charts. 

My focus for now has been on reviving some actual posts in the blog. Inspired by Julia Evans (@b0rk), I wanted to start including more about the things I know and the things I'm learning. The first of those is using Java's Preferences. I'm using preferences in the Game Tracker so thought I'd use it as an example and then I realized that a) it's a horrible mess and b) it's not available to the public. Now I'm updating that and my next post will be about that.

So, generally, you can expect to see a few more posts outside of me tracking books and games here. I've made some progress on Chrono Trigger Sprites and I have a backlog to post there. Plus you can also expect more posts about technology, learning and teaching. I'm not committing to any set rates, but "more".

I feel pretty happy approaching my projects this way, so I really appreciate that video. I think I've started on a good productivity groove right now and I'll take it.

I've been sketching more too!

Project 1: Blog11!! - Update

So, a decade of doing this blog thing huh. I may still not have any idea what I’m doing but I’m moving ahead so that’ll have to be good enough.

This year I’m not in the garden because 

• a) the smoke is in the garden and I’m tired of the smoke and 
• b) I’ve picked up a full time job and it does take up all those in the middle of the day hours. 

I may not have been out that much, but the rose is happy this year.

I started blogging in late July 2011 and usually take the first of August as Blog End and Start Day. I'm a little late, but I mentioned that full time job thing. You may also be looking at the list of posts (way down at the bottom of the page) and be thinking to yourself, but TJ, you started this in February and then sat on you butt for several months, and to that I would say, yes, but I’ve found a way to make it more complicated as that.

The “blog” is a project tracker where I’m supposed to keep “the world” updated on the things that I’m doing as a form of self-accountability. That doesn’t work as well as I’d like, but that’s the idea. The *trick* is that the first of those projects is a blog where I practice writing … and keep track of interesting metrics about my life, so Project 1 of the blog is a “Blog.” Other projects are updates, but for the “Blog” I also post the posts here.

If that’s not confusing enough, Blog End and Start day is the day where I finish writing the “Blog” for last year and start writing the “Blog” for this year. Clear as mud? Excellent. The basic idea stems from how frustrating it can be when a long-running project falls apart because the creator isn’t into doing it any more. This way if I decide I don’t want to blog any more, well you wouldn’t have expected me to do it past August anyway.  (If you were somehow sitting there with baited breath for a new blog post to come out.) Between now and next August is my 11th year of blogging.

By far, I’ve spent this last year using the blog to keep track of games I’ve played and books I’ve read. In fact, aside from last year’s Blog End and Start Day post and my new year resolutions posts I only wrote one in-depth post (on Paper Mario: The Origami King). This was more or less on purpose, because I wanted to focus my time on creating novel stuff (well, new stuff, not just the novel…), so I’m happy enough with the blog this year.

I like keeping track of what I’ve read and what I’ve played because it feels so easy at the end of the year to look back and have no idea where your time went. Instead I’ve felt like everything I’ve played and read this year has mattered. It’s helped me to read more and it’s helped me to enjoy the games I’ve played.

Looking forward, I want to write more. So, I’m going to try to write more. I’d also like to document more about my thoughts for teaching and the things I like about programming. My day job involves a lot of writing and not that much teaching, so this feels like a great way to build my writing skill while keeping in touch with my teaching. No guarantees, but I’d like to write two posts a month. I’ll update my other projects in a bit and I want to get some progress on them too (as I always do).

Google has managed to clean up enough about blogger that I’m content to keep the blog here for now. I am still considering options (and the day job calls for more word press), but moving the blog feels like a ton of work if I don’t have to.

2021 is definitely bringing new and different things for me. I’m learning and growing and hopefully another year of blogging will help with that.

Once upon a time, the skies were blue and we were happy.

Projects Update: January 2021

I'm finding this particular project update a bit of a struggle. On the one hand I feel that I've been much more productive on my own projects than I've been in the past, but on the other hand I'm feeling a bit lost overall and like there's still a lot of things I'd like to do. 

At the beginning of January I started a new job and I'm finding balancing my energy difficult. I appreciate having my time better structured with a 9-5 position and the position itself has a lot of breadth for creativity, but I do find myself pretty tired at the end of a day. 

All in all I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to hit a balance that works for me. I probably need to relax and take to heart that I've only been working on this for a month. One thing I am trying to do is to reduce the number of things I'm trying to do at any point in time. For the first time in most of a decade I've reduced my daily to-do list down to just the absolutely must do things. Then I allow myself to decide what the best next thing for me to do is. 

As an AI researcher this gives me a real fear at getting stuck in a local-optima, but honestly I find that the landscape shifts and I'm able to get things moved forward here and there. Not as much as I'd *like*, but that's how life works. Beyond that, I'm trying to decouple my feeling of self-worth and happiness from productivity and completing projects, but that's a long journey to undertake.

At the moment, I've got 6 projects I'm providing updates for:

• The Blog, as ever, is ticking along. I actually wrote my first editorial piece in ages earlier in the month. I may write more, but my primary focus is to have fun keeping track of my reading and game playing.
• I left the Chrono Trigger Sprites without a deadline and I'm enjoying that. I've done a bit more and so there will be project updates about those eventually, but I'm not rushing and I'm kinda happy to have a hobby that just a hobby. 
• I haven't been writing  outside of the blog, so my project on The Roofs has been slow. I think if I do decide to carve out a little more time this will be the project I go to first. I'm definitely sitting on those first four thousand words I wrote and finding it a bit hard to accept the permission to write terribly, while pushing forward. If I don't carve that time out, then I'll let this go dormant for a bit.
• I want to put together a Google Drive backend the Game Tracker, but this has been complicated, because the documentation from Google is all built around accessing drive through a Gradle build. In my mind I'd just like a library I can link against, but that's not the way the (fairly limited) documentation works. This throws me off making any progress and even though I have other avenues I could work on, I keep getting stuck. I haven't put in a huge amount of time, but this is definitely a project I'm focusing on. 
• One of the ways I was able to justify taking the non-teaching job is to myself that I want to work on Code Click, building teaching resources and building up my experience for teaching. Code Click is a huge part of that, but for now it's also a project that can wait. I'll come back to this (I've spent quite a while thinking about what I would like Code Click to be like), but for now I'm not going to focus on it too much.
• My time on Infinite Acorn Adventure has mostly been spent trying to remember all of the linear algebra that I took (poorly) two decades ago. That's been fun in itself, especially with Daniel Shiffman's videos.

I'm not going to share any deadlines for things right now. None of these projects need to go anywhere in particular, so I'm going to work on them when I feel like working on them. Later if something needs a push to get *actually finished* then I might bring back the idea.

This was a lot of fun to build and definitely easier than some.

Projects Update: September 2020

My last general project update was in May and I was a bit surprised by how fast May went by. Now, it's September...

Honestly I struggled a bit with productivity over the summer and eventually gave myself permission to just take some time off. I also hit a bit of a complicated patch with finding post PhD employment and figuring out what I want to be when I "grow up".  

In short I'm finding myself myself drawn to a creative career as well as (or in favour of) an academic one. So I'm trying to balance both of those for the next while to see what's possible. I've set myself some goals for the next year to give myself some firmer deadlines and so that I can see what's possible with what I can create for myself.

I am finding it a bit rough teaching this semester. I had hoped to be able to take the semester to increase my creative output but ended up with more teaching duties than I'd expected. This is making it a bit rough to get things done, but I'm doing my best to plug along where I can. Remembering I can take the time for myself has been tough, but I think I'm learning.

Where I am right now:

The Blog (Project 1)

I did give an update as usual at the beginning of August. This trucks along and the reading and games updates are a fun task to take a break and do.

The Roofs (Project 11)

I didn't write nearly as much as I might have, but I did start writing and it felt pretty good. 

I finished around 4000 words in May/June, before getting distracted and wandering away from the project. I managed to get my focus back in August and started a rolling edit to revisit what I had and to tighten it up. I'm trying to avoid doing that again, since I need to keep moving forward, but I'm still feeling like I'm accomplishing something.  

Chrono Trigger Sprites (Project 12)

I finished the Robo sprite a while back. I was able to do it really quickly, but I've been slow to write the project post about it. I have it on my plate to get done in the next few days.

I'm enjoying working on these, but I'm thinking they're a lower priority than some of the other things I want to work on right now. I have 3 main characters left to do from the playable characters, but I think I'm going to tackle them when I have a quiet Sunday.

Robo In Action!

Game Tracker (Project 18)

I didn't get to work much on the Game Tracker at all. I'm feeling a bit conflicted about this because on the one hand it's not a priority for me. I want to focus on writing, making games, Code Click. On the other hand, it's beneficial to teaching and it's been the motivation for me to learn more about developing modern real world software. 

Infinite Acorn Adventure - Bubble Puzzler (Project 13)

As I said, I've spent a lot of the summer thinking about what I want to do and how I want it to sustain me (and also putting food on the table might be nice). One of the things that really came to the fore for me was that making games was a place I wanted to focus. I've also been thinking a lot about how I want to be able to tell stories through games and use games as a mechanism for supporting a good life.

As such, I've been a bit frustrated with myself about the fact that I'm not working on making games and I'm not learning about making games. So I think the solution to that is to make a game.

Code Click (Project 20)

I think one of the roles I fit very well is computer science communicator. I'm interested in making things easily understood and I think generally there's a problem in communicating about computer science. Given that I'm in a state of looking for full time work in some combination of technology and teaching, spending a bit of time working on my computer science communication skills seems worth while. 

For my classes this semester, I've obviously had to move my teaching on-line, so I'm already developing those skills in a university context. I think pushing the science communication skills makes sense, and I think trying to capitalize on Code Click is a good place to start.

Where to next?

My thinking for the next bit of projects is:

• Infinite Acorn Adventure - A prototype in Processing by October 31.
• Code Click - One post by October 31.
• Game Tracker - I'd like to have a google docs back end, working by November 31.
• The Roofs - I'd like to get a finished (but bad) draft by August 1, 2021.
• Chrono Trigger Sprites - If I get to them I get to them, I'm not going to give myself a deadline.
• The Blog - will keep travelling along.

Project 1: 10Blog - Update

Well, happy Blog End and Start Day again.

I've returned to my garden (actually I've been doing a thing called "vacation" for a few weeks so I've been here a lot of the time) and it's time for that annual end of the blog post. And as I usually do it's also time to start another year of blogging.

The garden does not look nearly as good as it did last year, but it's a learning activity.

I generally prefer things with a defined start and end date (much as I'm bad at hitting them a lot of the time), so I find breaking the blog up by yearly volumes (sessions, editions?) helps keep it from feeling like it goes on forever. This is also traditionally the time where I reenforce my distinction between the blog as blog and the blog as project tracker. Effectively, I created this to keep track of projects I'm working on, but one of those projects is to practice writing and getting this out.

The last volume(?) of the blog covered an odd period of my life (I mean it included spring of 2020, so it's been an odd period in everyone's lives). I was fairly stressed in the fall and winter semesters with my day job, and trying to figure out how to live life when not doing a PhD. I'm slowly making progress on that front but honestly it's been a rough year in general.

For the most part the blog itself has been ticking quietly along on series of posts about the games I've played and the books I've read. I've been enjoying tracking those, so I'm happy enough with that. Aside for that I've written a few project posts and I feel like for the first time in a while I'm getting much better traction on the projects I'm working on. (Look for a project update shortly).

I am interested that the only thoughts on post I wrote was for Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival.

Overall a quiet year for the blog, but as I wrote in my update last year I wanted to focus my energy elsewhere, so I guess I've done alright.

My total posts per year, highlighted by month. You can see more on my Blorgress Page

Over the last few months I've wanted to improve my writing and I think my project focus for the last half of 2020 will be on writing the novel I've been thinking about and on writing a manual of interesting coding. That could also include more writing here, but that depends a bit on what I want to write about. I definitely have thoughts in mind on Ocotopath Traveller and on Paper Mario: The Origami King.

I'm also considering moving the blog itself off of Blogger/Blogspot. I've been generally unhappy with outsourcing hosting to Google as a provider for a few years now, as we've seen power on the Internet being consolidated and algorithmic filtering affecting how people are able to access information. I'm also exceptionally unhappy with the recent interface update which has really increased the length of time it takes me to make a post. The tag system has always been bad as well and finding a solution that makes me happier is becoming more important.

I haven't made a decision about what I'm exactly I'm going to do yet, but things muttered on the internet sometimes come true. I am planning to look at Hugo for Code Click and if that goes well there might be a change.

In the mean time, generally, you can expect to see a continued series of updates on books and games, with an occasional update on other things or thoughts I feel like I want to share.

With that, I hope you have a good August, a better end of 2020 and a much, much better 2021.

Project Updates: April 2020

It’s pretty usual for me to get to April and realize that I’ve lost track of all the things I was excited about. I’m still working on balancing my teaching so that I can be creative and productive and a good responsible teacher as well. It’s less usual to have that April realization fall in the middle of a global pandemic where suddenly everything has gone weird and suddenly I’m stuck at home, as opposed to being a little out of work for the spring and stuck at home.

Anyway, once I finish marking I want to do … something, so I’m going to “circumwork¹” and see where my projects on this blog are at.

Projects I am "actually working on"

One of the problems with maintaining the blog is that I have a list of things I “should” be working on even if they’re not actually the things I want to be working on. I try to avoid that by keeping my timelies short and achievable (yes, I know I’m bad at that) and by keeping the number of projects I’m working on at once (yes, I’m not great at that either).

Currently I have on my list:

• The Blog (as Project)
• I’m not 100% sure where I’m at with the blog, I’m enjoying tracking games and books. I don’t know that it’s a really productive thing to be doing, but I’m enjoying it. I also find that I don’t really want to put that much out there in terms of thoughts, because I’d rather put my time towards making something.
• Covert Action in Space
• I got a little held up because it turns out that randomly generating meaningful floor plans is a little harder than I’d figured. I still love the idea, but this isn’t at the top of my list.
• Game Tracker
• I’ve been teaching first year Java again and I wanted to get things rolling here again. I also taught a senior programming course in the fall which involved using online services and mobile interfaces, both of which my project needs. I opened it up a few weeks ago and couldn’t quite figure out where I left off, but managed to get it mostly on the path again.
• Pong
• I wanted to be way further ahead on this and have my AtariST version done ahead of my students, I managed to work along side them, but then completely lost the thread when the “transition to on-line” teaching happened. Hopefully I’ll have cause to get back to it.
• Code Click
• I already spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to share that moment of joy I get out of coding, and while I haven’t got that much done, I still think about code click a bunch. Transitioning to on-line has also pushed me to think a lot more about how I want to teach and the resources I want available when I’m teaching.
• 
  

Projects I have “on hiatus”

There are a bunch of things I started out and then put aside, some of them are things I want to be working on so I think it's worth listing them all out too.

• SNES Coasters
  • I’d like more and bigger coasters and maybe to spend a bit more time working on perler stuff.
• Space Station Game
  • I keep thinking about this one. I’m still not ready to really set down and work on it, partly because I’d like to build up my skill working on some other projects first. I've been playing quite a bit of EU4 which has definitely provided some feeling for how the game should work when I actually get to it.
• Action RPG
  • This is another one I’m not ready to work on yet, but I have a lot of ideas and I’ve been developing my drawing skills.
• Sci-Fi Novel
  • The problem with having sat with a story in your head for 20 / 25 years is that when you think about writing it, it feels pretty trite. There’s a lot of things kicking around in my head from as far back as when I was a teenager. I don’t really know where to go with it, but it still might be fun to tackle at some point.
• The Roofs (Fantasy Novel)
  • This is the story that sits further in the front of my mind. I’m not sure it makes sense, and it might be missing a reasonable antagonist, but I guess I won’t know until I write it.
• Chrono Trigger Sprites
  • I have the first two sitting in the window over my desk and I love them. It’s time I got the rest finished.
• Bubble Puzzler
  • I think with Pong out of the way this is the place I want to focus building games. It’s a good learning opportunity and I think it’s a great place to get started.

Projects I actually want to work on now

So I’m not sure where I want to put myself for all of the time between now and September. Obviously working on code click is a good idea for professional growth, but the Game Tracker and the Bubble Puzzler also make sense.

I also want to work on more artistic things. A lot of that I don’t think I want to make projects for, but I think that both the SNES Coasters and the Chrono Trigger Sprites. I also really want to get the Roofs written.

In an effort to keep my goals small and my projects limited, these are my near, term projects:

• SNES Coasters
  • I want to finish a set of 4 large coasters, get them fused and backed and then I’ll see what’s next. I think I can get that all done by April 30.
• Game Tracker
  • I’d like to get this working with outside data, either my original plan of google sheets, or with something else (possibly firebase). Either way I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it, so I’m going to try to have some version of that working by April 30 too.
• The Roofs
  • I don’t know how long it is, or how I’ll feel actually trying to write, but I’m going to give it a shot and try to have a first draft finished by August 31. (And yes, I think I did just put write a novel on a list of “short achievable near term goals” no, I’m not great at planning things)

(and we’ll leave the blog rolling along as it is, since that’s fun).

¹ Circumwork: To do things that feel like work without actually being related to any task that needs to be done.

Project 1 & Project 11: Update I Didn't Write More

This post is just to finish off my updates for my summer of writing more. As it turns out, I didn't really want to write more, so I didn't.

As discussed in the yearly August post, I'm moving my focus elsewhere for now. That should mean more writing on the blog with more projects getting done. As for the fiction, I'm sure that will come again someday.

Updates:

Project	New Words	Total Words	Percent of Target
The Roofs	0	81	0.7%
Blogging	2645	6052	50%

Project 1: Blog x 9

Happy August! Also happy blog end and start day (belated)!

As of August 1, I've completed the latest year of blogging and I'm going to lay out my plans for another year of blogging. Now, it's time to update the Blog as Project and the Blog as Blog again. Also it's time to sit in my garden and enjoy August.

I finally finished my PhD in 2019, which I hope will open up my time to work on interesting projects and write about them here. The last year was a little thin on those with the bulk of the posts being reading updates, with a few other posts sprinkled in. I'm starting to get some momentum up though and trying to use that to carry through and get things done.

Back in May I set myself a goal of writing 4000 words a month for the blog. This has been pretty largely a failure, but I think the tracking has been good for me. I've probably written about 2000 words a month and I think for now that's ok. My primary focus has always been to try to be doing more things, which means I think I should be putting my time to working on projects rather than writing about stuff.

So for the Ninth Edition of the Blog, I'm planning to get at least one project post out a month (which ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution to finish a project a month). I'd also like to put in a few more video game thoughts posts, as I've been playing a lot of good games this year.

Let's go make something!

via GIPHY

Project 1 & Project 11: June Monthly Update

Well, I'm kinda giving up on this idea. I'll update more / better come August, but I've decided that these projects just aren't the priorities I want to focus on right now. I didn't write any on my creative writing project The Roofs at all. My blogging output was acceptable, but I'm not reaching to change it all that much in actuality right now.

Updates:

Project	New Words	Total Words	Percent of Target
The Roofs	0	81	1%
Blogging	1174	3407	43%

Project 1 & Project 11: Monthly Update

Woah. That was harder than I figured. A little bit because I've taking a sessional teaching gig for May/June, but more so just from the freedom to be able to sit down and write. Blogging wasn't too bad, mostly things I'd been thinking about for a while, but the fiction was really hard to start.

Updates:

Project	New Words	Total Words	Percent of Target (for Month)
The Roofs	81	81	2%
Blogging	2233	2233	55%

As far as the blogging goes, most of that was my Earthbound Post, I also counted my Games of April post, but I didn't count the book updates. For next month I'd like to produce at least 2 posts of the size of the Earthbound one.

For the fiction, I'm not sure I'm ready to dive in as much as I thought I was. I'm going to keep the goal where it is for now, but I'm working on a few other projects right now (more blog posts to write) and I'm not feeling like diving into a project the size of the the thing sitting in my brain right now.

Project 1 & Project 11: Write More

With my PhD winding down, I've been thinking about how I want to organize my time for the next while. I'll write about my thoughts in general in a bit, but at this point I think where ever I go I want to improve my communication, especially in writing.

via GIPHY

So to address that I'm (re)setting up to projects for myself, both to write more.

Project 1 is my already existing project for the blog, but I would like to increase my blog-as-blog output to at least 4000 words a month. I'm still working out exactly how I want to use those 4000 words, but the idea is to think about, write, edit and revise some non-fiction writing each month.

Project 11 is my already existing project to write a fantasy novel. At the moment I think I would like to try to put 4000 words a month there too. The core concept has been floating around in my head forever, and it seems like time to at least produce a trunk novel out of it. I also reserve the right to divert these words into some other fiction project, possibly some more short stories, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Job one is to actually write stuff consistently.

I'll put out a monthly update at least until August 1, 2019 and we'll see how it goes.

Project 1: Project Octoseason Blog*

Happy Blog End and Start Day!

via GIPHY

Yes, it’s time for that annual celebration where I remember that I started the Blog on August 1 (a long time ago) and should probably figure out what I’m doing with it. It’s also your annual reminder that not all things last forever, but this blog still might for another year.

Ahem, first, as tradition dictates, I’d like to remind you that the “Blog” here comes in two parts, the Blog as Project Report, and the Blog as Blog (which is itself a project). Effectively, my intention here has always been to get excited and make things - even if that’s not always as evident as I’d like it - and one of those things I’m excited to make, is a Blog where I talk about - well mostly the media I’ve consumed, but you get the idea.

Tradition further suggests that now is the time that I tell you I’m not done my PhD, but I’m close - and folks I’m getting ever closer to actually finishing the damn thing - and given that, that I haven’t done quite as much work on my own creations as I’d hoped last August. Still, here we are, I’m not going to beat myself up, I’m just going to celebrate what I have done.

In terms of projects in the last year, I’ve worked on four and I’m generally, pretty happy with how they came out. I started messing around generating floor plans for a game I’d like to make at some point. That only managed two posts, but I still had fun - and I’m still thinking about it, the Flurpins will be back “soon”. I pushed myself to read more, and set myself the goal of reading 12 books in 21 weeks. That was a nice project, in that it had a set end date, and ended at the end for 2017. I actually made it all the way to 18 books - what a stunner. I started on a program to help me with game tracking, and also to just get some general programming practice in. Finally I tackled #NaFYoFuThMo an effort to get me pushed across that finish line of that ever looming PhD.

A Flurpin ... an odd side effect of generating floor plans.

As far as the Blog as Blog goes, in the last year I’ve kept up with tracking my video game playing, which I continue to find interesting, even if it probably seems a bit repetitive. I dropped a little behind in the monthly posts, partly because I was fairly overwhelmed in the Winter managing teaching and the PhD. I’ve mostly caught up now, and you can expect to see the June and July posts in the next few days. 

Following on from the success I had in boosting my reading in 2017, I’ve tracked all of the books I’ve read so far in 2018. I think It’s been worthwhile, and I’ve boosted my goal for the year on Good Reads from 32 to 40 (but that’s mostly to accommodate the fact that I can read a volume of Saga in a morning, and I hadn’t planned to read Saga at such a rate).

I only wrote one “thoughts on” post this year. That was Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, last August. I haven’t really finished another game this year that I’ve had that many thoughts about - while I loved Into The Breach, I found I didn’t have a lot to say other than, It’s really good. I suspect that in the next little while I may write a “thoughts on” piece for Paper Mario: Colour Splash - where you can enjoy my chants of “The WiiU is not a 3D system!” - and I may write a follow up to Breath of the Wild, another hundred hours on.

It's ok, you just have to trust the game not to smack you in the face with a hammer ... which you can't.

For the first time I wrote a New Years Resolution post. I think it was good for me to write down what I wanted to do better, or differently, this year. Generally, I’ve been more successful than not: I’m *slightly* better at monotasking and much better if I don’t let stress build up. I think I’ve done an okay job of holding fewer opinions, although that also varies with stress. I do think it’s helped while teaching introductory computer science, where many people hold a number of *very* strong opinions which may not matter very much. I think I’ve also been better at acting and getting stuff done just by standing up and doing it - it’s easier than I think it is.

I’m going to finish my thesis, sooner rather than later. I think in a small way I’ve been better on Twitter and happier with how I’ve been on Twitter. I’ve definitely read more and enjoyed a lot of what I’ve read - and then there’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I’m not sure I’ve made more stuff, but I’ve done a lot of stuff around the house that feels similar. I’ve seen more things, but I’d like to see more and keep pushing past the boundaries of inertia. 

More or less, I’m happy with the Blog as Blog in its seventh season. It has mostly been bits of media I’ve consumed. I didn’t really mean for it to work out that way, but at the moment I’m feeling fairly happy with that. My favourite YouTube videos have fallen off, but I think given the state of that platform generally, I'm okay with that. I may bring them back in a different form in the future.

I’m going to do an Eighth Season of the Blog - surprise! I suspect it will look very similar to the seventh. Tracking media keeps me interested, and if I find I have something I want to write about in relation to that, then I’ll have a good space to do that. I am hoping that as I finally finish the PhD, I’ll be able to add in a few more projects - I have several in mind, which should be fun.

Thanks to all of you who read, I hope the fun I have here is at least a little fun for you as well.

via GIPHY

*Yes, yes I did make a stupid reference to Octopath Traveller in the title, what of it?

Project 1: The Blog - Season Seven

It’s August again. Which means it’s about that time that I decide what I’m going to do with the Blog again. So let me say “Happy (Belated) Blog Start and End Day”

As a quick reminder this blog comes in two parts, the Blog as Me Talking About Stuff, and the Blog as Project Report. Every year, on August 1, I wrap up a year’s blogging and decide if it’s worth doing it again next year. This way, there’s some concrete point where an ending can come if it needs to.

Last year, from August to the end of September, I blogged in what I’m thinking of as my “standard mode,” which means that I mostly posted Favourite Youtube posts, and kept track of my video game playing. In January I felt like I wanted to get further ahead on my PhD (yeah, I’m still working on it) as well as increase my focus on other projects, so I tried to reduce the amount of standard mode blogging I’m doing.

Each month since January, I’ve tried to keep up to date on my game tracking and then post a favourite youtube video if there’s some extra time. I’m roughly planning to continue the same way for the next year. Ideally two “non project posts” each month.

I have found the game tracking interesting. By the end of last year I felt overwhelmed, and tired, and didn’t want to do it any more. In particular, I had planned to do a few more posts than I did wrapping up the year. Then in January, I found it hard to stop tracking my play and then found that  if I got off my butt and posted the update post quickly each month, they were not too much extra effort.

For the next, I’m trying to get some more other things up and going. By this time next year my PhD needs to be finished. At the same time, I’m trying to take my other project time to get a few other things done. I’m working on same light game dev stuff, mostly teaching myself stuff I’d like to know how to do. I’m also working on some SciComm practice, I think the way my PhD has gone, I’d benefit from spending more time thinking about how we talk about computer science. Both of those should float up to posts in the next few weeks.

I should also mention that I turned ads on for the first time. I did this mostly as an experiment. I was curious how it would work. Additionally I’m hoping to spend more time communicating in a professional context in the future and it feels like if there’s any chance to offset the time I spend on this then I’d like to take it.

But there we go. Season seven, more of the same. Probably an episode where I put on some masks and pretend to be a bunch of different dead gods… wait, wrong season seven. I’ll check in again on August 1, 2018.