Weeknotes #3

The week began on a somber note with news of the death of Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter and seven other people. Kobe’s career took place largely during what I call my ‘NBA coma’—the period of 20 or so years between 1994 and 2014 where I paid no attention to basketball—and while I didn’t feel any particular connection to him, the fact he was only 41 made his death resonate. I do remember reading about the incident in Colorado in 2003 and that forever left a stain on his reputation for me. Robbing the world of his daughter’s potential felt like an especially cruel twist of the knife (as was the death of the other people aboard).

While I’m on a somber note, the most powerful thing I read this week was this post by Kurt Johnson. Kurt’s a friend from high school who had a book published (!) a few years ago but things didn’t quite go as planned after that.

Despite giving it only a 20% chance of happening, I bought the Mac Mini! It was probably a mistake. My primary purpose is to use it to backup iCloud data and to do that properly it really needs to be running either macOS Mojave or Catalina. Neither of those releases are supported and while there is a tool that lets you upgrade anyway, it’s not recommended. I went ahead and did it but it’s felt like it could break at any moment. Not exactly the sense of rock-solid assurance that you’re looking for in your backup system.

I spent most of my free time over the past two weeks working on a new version of the website for the Rouge syntax highlighting library. The old site was built on Rails but I wanted to go with something I’m more familiar with so I rewrote it all as a Sinatra app. Initially, I was just going to offer the ability to highlight code with the current version of Rouge but eventually added the ability to: (1) switch versions of Rouge; (2) save snippets of code; and (3) display snippets saved using the previous website.

News of the coronavirus dominated discussion with colleagues at work. Japan has one of the highest number of detected cases outside mainland China. Eri wanted me to wear a mask on the train which I kept forgetting to do.

No music recommendation as such this week but in other aural updates, I’m pleased to report that the podcast Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green is incredible. Julie recommended it and I’ve greatly enjoyed the past couple of episodes. The one I listened to on ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was especially affecting.

We didn’t do much this weekend but that was a good opportunity to make a dent in my to-do list. I didn’t get all the tidying up done but I moved a bunch of Emma and John’s baby toys out of the playroom. I probably should throw them out but I couldn’t bring myself to do it and moved them to the attic instead. And by ‘the attic’ I mean ‘our bedroom in the hopes that I will move them to the attic this weekend’.

My to-do list didn’t change in length.