Weeknotes 2025W02

A busy week with lots of moving means late weeknotes. The big news for the week is that I moved back to Oregon! It’s been two years and four months since I’ve been back and it feels so great to be somewhere ultra-familiar.

I’ve decided that I hate flying so I was looking forward to two short flights on the same day to get from Texas to Oregon. In Dallas, there was a two-hour delay for plane maintenance which made us late to our connecting flight in Phoenix. American Airlines got us a hotel for the night and the next flight out was around 9pm the following night. That meant we’d have to find something to do with all our bags and cat for an entire day. It also meant cancelling a “welcome home” function with all my friends. I was frustrated but it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

A seat opened up on an earlier flight so we switched it and got to Oregon at around 1pm the next day. The only problem was our checked bags didn’t make the plane and were still scheduled for the later one. After catching up and having dinner with everyone at home, we stayed up and went back to the airport to pick up our bags so that we had clothes for an important function the next day.

It felt so great and warm to see my friends again. My dog wasn’t that excited to see me but I suppose that’s a good thing—he was happy with his life on the farm for the past two years. It was also nice to get all of my stuff back. The first thing I did was set up my desk with my monitor and trackball that I have been missing. Working from my tiny laptop screen with no mouse sucked. All my books, Leatherman, clothes, knick-knacks, pins, and speaker were also nice to reunite with.

Before leaving Texas, I wrote a statement of work/contract for a project. Having never written one of these before, I found a bunch of examples online and called some friends who have done freelance work before. I took the parts I liked, cut out all the confusing¹ language, and stitched something together.

I’ve been learning some basic website design and user experience/usability skills since that is definitely the hardest part of building websites for me. I finished reading Don’t Make Me Think and got a lot of good info from it. I used my own website as a case study and I was pleasantly surprised that I already implemented most of the principles from the book.

A few days before leaving Texas, it snowed and we made a snowwoman with all the wet snow. It’s been a while since I’ve played in the snow and we had a lot of fun with it.

Links

• Stimulation Clicker by Neal Agarwal. Fun little clicker game with no apparent point.
• Coloring for Colorblindness by David Nichols. How to color things to include those with colorblindness. I didn’t know there was a word for what I’ve been calling “mildly colorblind” to describe myself—it’s deuteranomaly. I should change some colors on my website to avoid having red on green.
• biocubes—a visual story of the living and the built by Brice Ménard and Nikita Shtarkman. Really cool visualization of the biomass and “technomass” on the planet.
• How to Instantly Gamify Your Way to Productivity by Brian Duffy. Ignore the clickbait-y title but this sounds like a fun way to get stuff done. Instead of getting analysis paralysis, just let the dice tell you what to do!
• Rules for Writing Software Tutorials by Michael Lynch. Excited about this book coming out. This one is a sample chapter that was easy to read and full of useful bits.
• Editorial style & shrines progress by Sage. I linked to a design process by the same author and this one is excellent as well.
• How I’m trying to use BlueSky without getting burned again by Chris Holdgraf. Yet again, make things on platforms and spaces that you control. Like your own website or server. Don’t let social media companies hold that much dependence over you.

  My guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. It’ll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product.

• Useful things you can do with Rails console by Paweł Dąbrowski. Lots of really cool and useful tidbits that I had no idea existed.
• Flexoki by Steph Ango. A nice little color scheme/palette.
• Making space for a handmade web by Chia Amisola. As much as it seems like it, there isn’t just one type of website. People create unique and interesting websites but they are harder to find.

Created: 2025-01-14

Last modified: 2025-01-14