Weeknotes #17

The programming language Janet is taking over my life. This post should have been completed hours ago but I was engrossed this morning in trying to fix the parinfer-rust Vim plugin to properly support Janet’s long strings. I think I know how to make it work but I’m unsure how generalisable it will be. And if it’s something that’s very specific to how Janet works, I fear the parinfer-rust maintainer isn’t going to want to merge it.

It’s actually a little concerning how deeply and quickly I’ve fallen down the Janet rabbit hole. In the past week, I’ve released not one but two libraries: Testament and Documentarian. Testament is a testing library and Documentatian is a command line tool for generating documentation for library APIs. Both have been tremendously fun to work on.

One of the reasons I’ve been able to spend so much time programming this week is that I only had work on Thursday and Friday due to Golden Week. We of course didn’t go anywhere so there was plenty of time to code away. It’s still frustrating to be in the situation we’re in but I guess it’s good that I have something to show for it.

One of the other consequences of all the time spent on Janet is that my backlog of blog posts and podcasts has exploded. I’m still trying to work out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. A couple of years ago, I became troubled with the amount of time I spent ‘consuming’ (I hate that term) ‘content’ (also that one) online versus actually making things. Here I am now making things with gay abandon and I worry that I’m losing touch with… not reality but the zeitgeist. Such a big part of my identity is wrapped up in the ‘guy who knows a lot of stuff’ that I feel a little discombobulated as that slips away.

I finally got out into the backyard yesterday and cleared the worst of the weeds out. It still looks pretty terrible and for the umpteenth time, Eri and I regretted moving into a house that even had a backyard. It was supposed to be a little space we could really enjoy—possibly even lay down some actual grass—and yet it’s been nothing but trouble. Fortunately, the mosquitos that have plagued us for the past few years haven’t begun breeding in large numbers just yet but that seems like only a matter of time. It’s only mid-May and we’ve already got sustained daytime temperatures in the high 20s. The humidity was so bad a couple of days ago I had the dehumidifier on in the kids’ room.

Speaking of the kids’ room, it’s rapidly approaching untenable that we have Emma and John sleeping in the same bed. A year or so ago I bought a bunk bed that can function in different configurations and I only put together the base. It started as just a bed for Emma but once John outgrew his cot, there still was enough space that we put him at one end and Emma at the other. Emma’s now getting tall enough that that’s an uncomfortable arrangement for both of them.

One of the things about bunk beds that does give me pause is earthquakes. We had a brief scare early Wednesday morning when both Eri and I received emergency alerts on our phones. These are very loud warning sirens that indicate a large earthquake is likely imminent. We quickly grabbed the kids and got ready to exit the house but it ended up reaching us as only a minor tremor.

The number of cases of patients with COVID-19 continued to decline this week. I wrote about this last time as well but while this is good news, I worry about the consequences of it as social distancing measures are inevitably relaxed. I saw news this morning that there’s been an increase in cases in Germany and South Korea following relaxation steps there. It really does seem like the only real solution is a vaccine.

Westworld ended this week and it was a mostly satisfying conclusion to the season. Nothing changed my sense from last week that it’s a real disappointment Bernard wasn’t given more to do. I’ve greatly enjoyed Jeffrey Wright’s performance over the course of the show and his opportunity to stretch himself was wasted this season. The teaser at the end of the credits suggests he’ll have a lot to do next season but I fear that the way that it looks like it’ll work will mean that they’ll skip over showing us the development we should have been witnessing as he untangled Dolores’ plans.

One of the things I was looking forward to as a result of Westworld wrapping up for this year was the release of the soundtrack. I don’t like it as much as previous seasons but would still recommend giving it a listen (Apple Music) if you enjoyed the previous two albums.