How amazing that it has been so long since I last wrote here.
It's been about 115 days. That's 16 weeks. Or nearly four
months. A third of a year!
How did this happen? Well, never mind. It did and I won't apolo-
gize for it.
What's new? I've not been idle during that time. And yet (de-
spite keeping records on the day-to-day minutiae), I have a hard
time accounting for it. So I won't attempt a re-cap. Instead,
we shall look forward.
Here's what I'm up to now and in the near future:
1. Creating a touch-typing adventure game for my kids to play
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The title is "Keeb's Quest" in a nod to the old Sierra "King's
Quest" and "Space Quest" games. Keeb is the name of your charac-
ter (I think), and a (hopefully) cute phonetic shortening of
"keyboard".
The main idea is that you "type your own adventure". You start
in the Home Town, which represents the keyboard home row (asd-
fghjkl;) and learn those keys before venturing out to learn more
advanced spells (keys) and such. All interaction is with the
keyboard and you use only the keys you've learned so far. I'm
hoping to inject a lot of humor into conversations with charac-
ters in Home Town about how silly you sound when you first arrive
saying "ffff jjjj ffff jjjj" and such.
I've got all sorts of ideas like "Shifters" (think wizards who
can shift into animal form) who teach you to use the Shift key.
Stuff like that.
I plan to create SVG vector art (in Inkscape) to accompany all of
the text.
2. Started a new VimWiki "lite" clone called Vwlite
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So I've wanted to add AsciiDoc support to VimWiki for a long time
now. I actually made quite a bit of headway...but finally threw
in the towel as the workload reality of making _full_ support fi-
nally dawned on me. The worst part is that I don't actually pre-
fer most of the VimWiki features over external scripts anyway. So
I'd mostly be supporting features I don't personally use.
Making the core of Vwlite in vimscript has been surprisingly
rapid (I'm only on day 5), but then, I've been thinking about it
for a long time. Turning it into a proper, polished plugin is
taking longer than the core functionality, but that's okay. At
least now I can start using it (and converting my existing VimWi-
ki .wiki files to AsciiDoc .adoc).
Ultimately, both my website and Gopher (and eventually Gemini)
content will be authored as sub-sections under my main wiki and
exported/uploaded with custom scripts. That's the dream.
3. Have been honing a better TODO system (mostly pen and paper)
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I've described my paper notebook log and capture system before.
I've been really lagging behind on transcribing the entries.
It's no coincidence that my phlog posts ended right around the
time my log transcriptions ceased...
However, in the last month or so, I've been doing really well
with the TODO system I've been using. For some reason, it's just
clicking. As of last night, I've incorporated a larger stay-at-
home notebook into the system to keep track of larger
projects/goals. I feel good about it, but it will be interesting
to see how well it works over the next month or so.
4. Very slowly working on a massive website article
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When I finally worked up the will to work on my website's "Pkg-
Blog" (an exploration/review of all software packages that come
with Slackware Linux), I nearly cried when I saw where I'd left
that project: I'm right at the beginning of GNU coreutils!
There's like, over 100 utilities in there!
But I've been working on it as time (and other projects) permit.
I do believe I'll get through it. And after that, I can't imag-
ine any other package is going to be nearly as difficult to re-
view as this one.
5. Writing this phlog post!
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If you're reading this, I have overcome the immense hurdle of
restarting a phlog after leaving it idle for a third of a year.
Let's take a moment to celebrate that with a little cybercake.
I also finally decided how I'm going to manage having this burrow
on SDF and also the pressurized gopher dome on the Zaibatsu:
This (SDF) phlog will be for general updates of a personal na-
ture. I expect I'll mostly write about "self help" type topics,
but who knows?
The Zaibatsu (zaibatsu.circumlunar.space) phlog will be for tech
updates. I definitely predict some Vim-related content. Then
probably ramblings about text markup and authoring. That sort of
thing.
+++
And now a list of current interests (as they may have changed):
1. lightweight computing at the terminal
2. star trek: the next generation
3. boardgames (with wife and family)
4. cleaning out and organizing the house
5. pens, pencils, paper
6. watercolor and sketchbooking
7. programming computers (I also get paid to do this!)
8. reading fiction (particularly science fiction)
9. reading non-fiction (anything)
10. listening to music (particularly metal)
11. listening to podcasts ("the pen addict", "earl grey")
12. parenting (this is not really an optional interest)
13. visiting parks
14. looking at art (mostly online and in books)
15. making things in the garage (pretty rare these days,
but always feels good when I do)
I work to keep this list of interests short. I'm very easily
tempted by new hobbies. Having kids has helped me zero in on
what's important to me by forcing me to manage my limited time
better. I've been partially successful.
Until next time, I remain your pal in Gopherspace,
