❝ What am I working on now?
A NowNow page, or Now page as most people refer to it, is a list of what you are currently working on. Inspired by Derek Sivers. A quicker way to find this page is seldomlogical.com/now
Learning
Rust: still plodding my way through the book. There are holes in the way the book goes through exercises. I will write this up because it makes a difference in the learning trajectory.
D3JS: working through examples with D3. I really like how this language works. It is precise, so precise it can be difficult unless you have the latest references.
Perl 6 (learning Perl 6): Done a little bit, mostly ignoring this book.
Interesting CS topics on Computerphile: This youtube channel from lecturers from the University of Nottingham is fantastic. Very concise talks that are useful as starting points of more advanced topics.
Blog post
Time to push out some more stories:
2019
Now Now update
Black Wednesday: “It was blistering, windy weather on the first total fire ban day of the year. my most vivid memory of the fire? pulling up in the driveway, opening the car door and looking up to see all the tree—tops on fire.“
Black Saturday 10 Years On: “Black saturday is my third bushfire.“
A Year In Images: “This year has been no ordinary year. the images you see are selected from 2009 so far. unconsciously i've probably also indicated what things have occupied me.“
This Years Hardware Project: “I skipped the c=64, but i did dabble in machine code and the 6502.“
README: “Readme for my daily goto read, watch & listen.“
2018
The City Country Divide: When a city kids go bush, the city / country divide is broken.
The Happy Macintosh Face: So I'm going down a street and I see a Mac being thrown out :)
Should Programmers Learn Machine Code?: Poor choice of phrase: Latin, the language is a prereq for Natural Scientists describing phylum.
Created a Books page which kicks off book reviews. When everyone has their noses in their phone, I am sticking to books. So it is a natural progression to write about what I have read.
Primal Origins And Unleashed The first sentence from any book is hard fought. It should ring true. That's what I see in first two PRIMAL books.
updated my Now Now page.
potential future posts
Techweenies: the rise and fall of the tech weenie.
Technology flip: going distributed and going offline.
Swiping to the right: normalisation of right wing politics.
The thought police: discussion of the Austalian AABill.
Books: write review of books in book list.
Music
❝ live music is better, bumper stickers should be issued. -- Neil Young
Big year for music, here are some events I've attended:
- 2019, March: Going to see Julia Jacklin and Olympia in Melbourne for the Crushing Tour.
- December 16th: went to see Tracy McNeil and the Goodlife at the Post Office Hotel for the ‘Stars’/Christmas concert.
- Signed up to Neil Young Archives
- October 18th: went to see Olympia at the Brunswick Social Club, ‘Star City’ release concert.
Code
Nextgen: Did a lot of work on my NG blog engine. An idea that I have been working on since 2002. The latest blog Colophon was written in 2008 so I have to update the page. The latest work was to make sure all output is valid HTML5. Also thinking about re—writing the engine in Rust or Perl6.
Working on the below projects off/on daily. The code online is a fraction of what I use, so you only see the toy projects online.
WSD: Some simple work with D3, Python and JS.
Search: A quick play with Rust and the CLI
JFK Spoken: Working on tweeting engine for JFK speeches on twitter.
PureAusten: Working on tweeting engine for Jane Austen books on twitter.
Hardware
Typewriter: Picked up a 1967, Olympia Splendid portable typewriter. Spent some time on youtube looking for operations information.
Bike
Done a lot of riding this year. Found and exploring two new tracks.
The bike needs to go back to the shop:
requires a service
rear new tyre
chain resize
broken spoke on rear wheel
Lists
I'm still working on a list of sites I visit. Packed them all into a URL, so now I have a /README page
Regular
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/
https://hacks.mozilla.org
https://twitter.com
https://neilyoungarchives.com
http://neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org
https://ilovetypography.com
https://www.redblobgames.com
https://www.redblobgames.com
Occasionally
https://ultimate64.com
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-21/rn-presenters-summer-podcast-picks/10403740
listening to the BBC podcast The Assasin by Journalist Owen Bennett Jones
listening to the BBC Turntable Tales
listening to The value of everything podcast.
http://scripting.com
https://rework.fm
https://www.historyhit.com/
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/
What I am not working on
This is a page of things I am currently working on. I should probably also make a list of things I avoid.
I killed Facebook over a year now. So I do not do anything on Facebook. This is problematic because my friends from my old hometown, school and past are all there.
I stopped reading Hacker News for news. I was on HN since the early days of 2005 and lived in the top 100 and highest, top 40 for most of the time. However it is toxic for new comers and minorities. So I stopped going there.
I killed my Reddit acount in 2015 (nine year user) because it is also a black hole of negative Internet.
History
Previous Now update.
2019
- 2018JAN18 - update
2018
- 2018DEC
- DEC28 - update
- 2018JUN
- JUN25 - update
- 2018DEC
2016
- 2016DEC
- DEC15 - update
- 2015FEB
- FEB02 - update
- FEB01 - update
- 2016JAN
- JAN28 - change
- JAN07 - change
- JAN02 - organised
- JAN01 - more
- 2016DEC
Reference
My Now mascot is the Echidna. A reminder of how I go about things.
Credit and inspiration by Derek Sivers.
