I spent the last day or so completely redesigning the Music page here on the blog. I took inspiration from the week view on Last FM. It’s not as colorful, and I still have some work to do (the background of the div containers are not right), but it’s pretty great.

LastFM provides quite a bit of info via their API. I hate relying on LastFM, so I’ll probably eventually grab the data from ListenBrainz (which I mirror to already), but I know the LastFM API better, so the redesign still works off of that.

I wrote a little while ago, that I planned to stop blogging every day. I stated in that post that it had started to feel like an obligation, and that it had stopped being fun because I was forcing it.

Since then, I’ve had a problem in that I’m not blogging at all. I’ve only posted 19 times since that post and that was three months ago. I’ve also felt like I’ve lost motivation to actually work on my blog, when that was one of my favorite things to do last year.

My sleeping habits are all over the place. This getting up early thing is going to take awhile to set in. Some days I do well, and I’m up and at ’em early. Other days, I still sleep until late morning and it feels like the day is over too early. But I’m working on it.

Programming and Scripting

I made a python script that adds metadata to the Manga I’ve been downloading, but the big thing I did this week was set up my own homeserver for Matrix and bridge my Matrix and Discord servers.

I’ve had a few days where I’ve been super productive. I’ve gotten up earlier, gone to bed earlier, and accomplished a lot of stuff. I even finally cleaned my desk and computer, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

But today, I have a list of things to do, and no interest in doing any of them. One of them was to make a blog post, so here I am, making a blog post about how much I really don’t want to do a blog post. I should evaluate this feeling.

This has been a very odd week. I’ve long been a night owl. I go to sleep sometime in the 3-4AM range, and then sleep until around 11AM. I’ve been working this last week to be a little more normal. To sleep before 2AM and then up around 9AM. It has been easier than I thought it would be.

Anyway, here’s this week’s newsletter.

Programming and Scripting

I worked on sonic-tui a bit yesterday. I fixed some lag and added the ability to shuffle through an entire artist’s discography.

So, on Mastodon last night, I saw someone say something along the line of “I couldn’t finish this book, I’m so sorry. No hate on the author, it’s a great book!”

This pissed me off.

I read a lot. I read many books that are good, many that are bad. I DNF books all the time because they’re not something I want to finish. Never, not a single time, did I think about putting out a public apology to the author because I couldn’t finish their book.

So, I’m a well known note taker. I’ve talked about it many times on this here blog. I will undoubtedly talk about it many more times. I’m a bit of a note taking junkie. But, I’ve moved between platforms so much over the years, my organization is a bloody mess.

For example, I have multiple folders titled a variation of “ideas”. These all have subfolders and untitled (but dated) notes inside them. And these are just the directories and files on my current machine. I also have years of backlogged notes on Google Keep, Notesnook, and many other platforms that I’ve tried throughout the years.

Okay, so I haven’t done one of these in almost two months. But it’s time to get back on the wagon.

Work

Yes. Work. I got a job. Well, I’m hired at least. I don’t actually start until this summer, but it’s a done deal. I start some online training in early March. What is the gig?

I’m going to be a teacher?

Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m going to be teaching two online courses at a local community college. One centering around Latin America during the Cold War and one general American History.

I hate everything.

I used to really love technology. And I guess I still do, but I hate what a lot of tech, especially software, has become. It used to be either an app was free or it wasn’t. Usually the free stuff came with some other way to monetize itself (remember the bars that used to be forced on you when you downloaded a Windows app?) The paid stuff, you paid for and that was it. Maybe legally you didn’t own it (EULAs were a bitch even back then), but you didn’t really have to worry about too much since you had a honest-to-God-CD you could use to re-install with if something fucked up.

Back in August, I took part in Blaugust along with a large community of bloggers. The idea is to write every day during the month of August. It was wonderful.

Perhaps the best part of that experience wasn’t the writing, but the discovery of so many new blogs to read. I wrote about the upsides and downsides of that here. At that point I had over 4000 unread blog posts to read. Obviously since then, many (many) more have been added to that list. After all, just because blaugust is over, doesn’t mean people stopped blogging.