This week I blame naps and procrastination because I felt I had too many thoughts to collect.
Project updates
- Nostalgia box – This seems to have been my major project last week, spending a few hours sorting through the old stuff I brought from my parents’ house and picking out things to put in each month’s folder. Each month I’ll open the matching folder, spend some time with what I put in there, and replace it with something else for the next year, probably something I make; and most months I’ll keep you posted about what I “find.” I’ll do January’s folder this week.
- Code console – This is the new name for what I called my Python console last time (my code manager that creates projects from templates), named more generically now since I want it to apply to other languages too. I want to focus on this project after the book feedback and nostalgia box because it’s the gateway to a bunch of other programming projects on my agenda.
- Media
- Books
- Area X – I finished this last week (awkwardly, since I waited too long to listen to the last 15 minutes and had to reborrow it), and my reaction to the series is ambivalent. I liked the philosophizing about knowledge and some of the character explorations, but the storytelling seemed to keep the mysteries even more confusing than the story required them to be. I think I’d appreciate the series more on a second reading, but I don’t know if I’ll get around to it. As for the audiobook narration, I had the same problem with Carolyn McCormick I had during The Hunger Games where half her sentences sound like pronouncements, I liked Bronson Pinchot for the most part and wouldn’t have recognized his voice at all if I hadn’t seen his name, and I’ll have to hear Xe Sands in something else before I decide if I like her style.
- Little House in the Big Woods – The Little House books had been crossing my mind lately as a depiction of life’s rhythms back in pioneer days, and I wanted to explore the rhythm idea and see if I could adapt it for my life, so I listened to the first book last week. I’d read some of that series when I was young, and it was interesting to come back to it as an adult and ask my grown-up questions about it to get an idea of its context, and I could see some of why the books are so popular. They’re an interesting and cozy window onto a healthy family living in a very different, simpler time. I might come back to it in a while and listen to the rest of the series.
- Experimental literature – I collected a few more links for my list. But this is on hold till I get through the code console.
- TV – I finished The OA, and it impressed me how seriously it took its very unusual subject matter. It got me thinking about my profound questions (such as, what do I mean by a profound question?) and about the times the profundities break through the banalities of life and make you rethink everything. It also reminded me of a genre I call therapy stories, which offer fairly direct opinions on the meaning of life and how it works, movies such as What Dreams May Come (which is also a book) and books like The Shack (which is about to be a movie). Maybe I’ll start a page on the wiki to collect a list of these.
- Books
- Firefox – As an example of the way I get completely sidetracked from my plans, on Saturday I opened Firefox and was greeted by a message from the developer of one of the Firefox add-ons I have installed (Tab Groups), saying he’s quitting his add-on development because major upcoming changes in Firefox would severely restrict what his add-ons could do and would require him to rewrite them in any case. This news pushed my buttons, so instead of the three other things I’d planned to do, I spent the next couple of hours reading about these changes and people’s reactions to them. But the time wasn’t completely wasted, because it made me aware of important issues to take into account when I eventually create the add-ons I have in mind and when I study Firefox for its add-on architecture.
