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Pretty Good Hat

A gloved hands holds a small bulb. The interior of a car wheel well is in the background.

I replaced headlight bulbs on the car yesterday. Compared to prior cars I’ve had it was a pretty good project: Required removing the wheel well cover and reaching into the back of the hard-to-see light assembly. Got it done!

A small orange coffee cup sits in a yellow metal patio table, beside a notebook and silver pen. The dawn light is gray due to clouds.

My morning routine of coffee and journaling on the front porch is pushed back a bit day by day as sunrise comes later and later. It rained a bit overnight and it’s lovely, cool and damp this particular morning.

Got nginx running on my MacBook today, as part of building some working-with-APIs-infrastructure for a small tutorial I want to write on working with oauth in Shiny. Good step!

Yesterday’s “on this day” links from my now page surfaced an old post I wrote on the twentieth anniversary of the first Microsoft home page. It’s a shame that Microsoft’s own pages marking that milestone are no longer available on their own servers. But they’re on the internet archive!

I’ve been on vacation and the last few days in particular really felt like River Time. What day is it? Doesn’t matter. Time stretches out and compresses at the same time, and every day feels like Sunday, somehow. Well, today really is Sunday and tomorrow I head back to work, so it’s time to start resetting my head space.

I’m happy to find that calibre worked overnight as I hoped: after a few days of tinkering with setting it up on my little Ubuntu NUC, it’s pulling a couple of news and reading sources into daily digests and sending them to my kindle via email. I wish that kindle were more flexible with ad hoc reading (and it’s one reason I’m thinking about a kobo), but this is a nice, effective step toward how I would like it to work.

I’m really taken by this line in Paul Ford’s newest essay at Wired:

What I’m going to work on, for the rest of my career in the tech industry, hand to God (OK, I’m an atheist and easily distracted, so caveat lector), is making nice little tutorials and tools—better sticks for kinder monkeys.

“better sticks for kinder monkeys” is such an admirable, and needed, call to center empathy and humanity in what we make.

a hand holds an orange dish containing a round graham cracker, brown-toasted marshmallow, and piece of chocolate on top. The chocolate is stamped with the brand Enjoy Life.

We rounded out our birthdays week here with s’mores of homemade, gluten free graham crackers and allergy-friendly chocolate!