Mad Times

Nate DiMeo’s the memory palace is pretty much always amazing, but I especially enjoyed his Lost Camels episode about an (incredibly naive) attempt to introduce camels to the American southwest.

Brett Terpstra interviewed Steve Harm on Systematic – 194: A Rock and Roll Family about The Warehouse, a non-profit youth center and concert venue in La Crosse Wisconsin. It sounds like an amazing place, and Steve’s work to keep it alive is inspiring.

Regular readers will recall that I was doing a “tiny challenge” for February that I dubbed “Clear the desk”. That actually went okay until the physical desk was clear and then things got abstract and difficult to share. And then all the kitty badness. But overall, I declare it a success since my desk has been and remains visible and useful.

For March, the community challenge is a doodle thing. I have no particular objection to that, but I’m not ready for something quite that whimsical. So for my March challenge I’m going to spend a little time each day refreshing my web development skills. I’m starting with a udemy.com course I got cheap in a bundle last month. The Complete Web Developer Course covers a whole bunch of web tech stuff, some of which I’ve known before at various levels of competence, and some of which I’ve never used.

As in February, I’ll tweet my progress, hopefully with links to samples of whatever nonsense websites flow from my fingers.

Today I upgraded my old iMac (20-inch Mid-2007) from Mavericks to El Capitan. I did that mostly because 1password wasn’t supporting what I had and not having it was seriously cramping my style. Then I went through the first four lectures of the course which included signing up for the included free hosting account (which I don’t really need since I’ve got a server, but decided to use so I don’t wander down compatibility and configuration ratholes.) Behold my not-a-web-site.

ETA: Oops, I need a hash tag. How about #webbing. Yep, that works. On twitter it’s all about climbing and upholstery.

We said goodbye to our boy Theo today. At almost 19 he did pretty well. As I said to the vet today, everything from his waist up was still working fine, but his back legs and digestive tract betrayed him in the end.

When we lost his sister in 2008 we learned that being an only cat suited him just fine. He’s always been a little neurotic, jealous of any attention lavished on other creatures that weren’t him. He was happy to have us to himself. He was a clingy cuddly furball. Always up for lap time to the point where we got him a heated bed so he would settle and not cry constantly when we weren’t doing his bidding.

We’ll miss him forever.

He was mostly either asleep or moving too fast for a camera, but here are some pictures.

Showing his personality even as a baby. All the way on the left, latched on.

His sister wasn’t so bad when they were little.

Hanging out

Sitting in boxes not big enough for him

Too fast for the camera

Just a few days ago in his heated window seat

I’ve been lurking in the Tiny Challenges community.

They’ve spent January on a variation of resolution setting where instead of spelling out a specific habit they select three words to serve as a kind of theme for the year.

After obsessing about how to pick and whether to use nouns or verbs or adjectives I came up with these.

clear

As in “clear the decks”. Focus on getting rid of stuff, eliminating unfulfilling activities, bad value expenses, worries, obsessions. It makes me happy that it’s both an adjective and a verb.

quiet

This one is similar, but more focused on things like meditation, getting outdoors, turning off podcasts once in a while, feeding my introvert self. Adjective, noun, verb trifecta!

next

Think President Bartlet’s “What’s next?” Stop faffing about and do the next thing. If it’s not clear what the next thing is then figuring out what the next thing is is the next thing.

All of which leads to my challenge for February: Clear the desk! I’ll be spending at least 15 minutes a day for all of February working through the piles of paper and non-paper open loops that make it hard to make progress on anything but maintenance. I’m going to tweet (@jeffy) my progress and see if that kickstarts a habit of writing on twitter (rather than just reading and retweeting). That’s not another challenge, just part of the same one.

To maintain this blog’s solid “not quite dead” status, here are links for my media consumption from 2015.

Movies are still on Letterboxd where they have a nice Year in Review page. 86 movies is pretty good for us. Shooting for 100 this year.

And books are over on Goodreads where they too have a fancy Year in Review page. Total of 87 books.

Got through 57 book-like objects this year. Details on Goodreads.

Watched something like 40 films. Details on Letterboxd.

Netflix tells me I watched significant numbers of episodes of lots of tv shows including Adventure Time, The Bletchley Circle, Bob’s Burgers, Criminal Minds (season 8 is so terrible), Gilmore Girls, The Killing, Leverage, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Orphan Black, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Probably some others from the library or Prime that I’m not remembering.

I shudder to think how many hours of podcasts I have consumed (mostly while cooking, bus riding, cycling or doing yard work, so not much mono-tasking time). I did a big post listing my subscriptions back at the beginning of the year and it’s changed a lot since then with my current list at 66 (up from 38 back then.)

Likewise with RSS reading. I have nearly 400 RSS feeds that I buzz through regularly.

What else? Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Livejournal, Google+, all get a slice of my attention.

I read some regularly-updated web comics: Questionable Content, Alice Grove, Three Panel Soul, xkcd, Unshelved, and Sinfest.

Yeah. Might try to skew the balance a little towards the production end of the dial in ’15.

A lot of the links in my old posts about the kids showing up in lolcat image macros have aged badly.

I’ve tried to replace the broken ones with copies of the originals. I can’t find the original post of the lol for the picture of Alice reading Return of the King so Becky doesn’t have to. This picture:

But that is, as far as I can tell, the most lolled picture of our cats ever. There are currently nearly 100 different captions for that picture. Be warned, some of them are in pretty bad taste.

That one even inspired some real world imitation. We found this block print in our local gallery:

We talked to the artist about it and amusingly she’d just found the picture on the internet and wasn’t aware the hidden human was someone she knew.

I keep talking to Becky about stuff I heard on various podcasts I listen to and she can’t keep them all straight. Here’s the rundown as of now:

Letterboxd has a nice summary page for our 2013 in movies.

What did you enjoy watching this year?