2025

• 20th — Cut up one of Astrid’s silicone snack containers, salvaged a grip pad from a broken clamp to attach to another clamp, wrapped a towel to wick drips into a pan, and then emptied said pan every 5 minutes for 3 hours while I ran the pump for our cistern. That got us enough drinking water to make it through until next week. Roughed-in a now page.

• 19th — New puppy day! Per Astrid’s insistence, same breed and name as our previous pup who passed suddenly in October. It’s -25°C all week, and puppies need to pee every 20 minutes, so I’m enjoying the constant ~50° temperature shock.

  Spent the afternoon shooting the shit with rabbits and reeds and co. Worked a little bit on sparklines for that secret project I mentioned on the 12th.

• 18th — No coding today. No plumbing either. And no snow. And no puppy. And no computing pioneers. I read a modest proposal to revive/reimagine an old but influential graphical software environment, and it has further stoked my fire. My personal life is structured such that it is hard for me to do enough “computer” without consequences. This causes me no end of strife, self-loathing, doubt, physical pain… all the feelings. Maybe tomorrow it will be different. I wish I could just…

• 17th Today was:

  • call with computing pioneers who shall not be named
  • school cancelled midday due to — surprise — 25cm of snow
  • water leak in the basement, caught just before it did any permanent damage. wonder if we can get a plumber (snow, holidays)
  • rushing to finish some renovations (due to water leak one year ago that destroyed half our basement) and then clean up (been living out of boxes), so that
  • we can get a new puppy Friday?

• 16th — Can’t remember if I did anything more substantial than this.

• 15th — Worked on a mockup for a gestural notebook interface. If you want to see it, go to the FoC slack and check #two-minute-week before it disappears into the void.

• 14th — you want it? well then catch! strike. get ready for the big push! my spider sense is… is gone. i’ve got a picture to prove it. (Podcast editing.)

• 13th — I’ve got the house to myself today. Spent the morning feeling ennui. After a few hours, a thought occurred: “I could be working on Dry Garden.” That instantly made me feel motivated. I’m not actually going to work on Dry Garden — need to finished editing 2 FoC episodes — but it was enough to get me moving. (Dry Garden is a game I’m making with Elliot Evans. Might allocate some Dec Adv time to it, we’ll see.) Later: finished my remix of all the pastagang albums, and then streamed podcast editing.

• 12th — There’s a fun but still secret Ink & Switch project that I’m building tooling for. Completely and utterly unrelated to the previous sentence — cannot stress this enough: there’s no connection. don’t know why you’d think there is. seriously, look elsewhere, you won’t find anything here — I spent my afternoon learning how to write synthesizer patches using a weird sound programming language.

• 11th — Stayed up late editing the upcoming year-in-review episode, again. Pasta Gang released thr- eight albums this year? So I’m making another remix pulling together tracks from all of them. I also attempted a mashup of Radiohead’s Identikit’s broken hearts / make it rain and Wet Leg’s CPR’s I’m in love / you’re to blame, but it sucked so I deleted it.

• 10th — Stayed up late editing the upcoming year-in-review episode. Every one of the song/album picks is getting a little special remix, so that the song matches the pace of the conversation (and vice versa).

• 9th — Added an “orb” to the ganglion page, one of the long-losts turned up in last night’s Archive raid. I guess I didn’t mention it, but I also added a playable build of Refract to its page a few days ago. Later, I streamed myself editing the upcoming year-in-review episode of the Feeling off Computing podcast. The stream was fun! A few people tuned in, which I wasn’t expecting, to watch me be a little stinker and flagrantly disregard copyright. Because fuck copyright.

• 8th — The next few days will be dull — I’ll just be making lots of tiny tweaks to this website. For instance, you probably can’t tell, but I tweaked the params of the starfield on the home page. The colors are slightly more varied, and there are more star-streaks. I lost about an hour tonight down the vortex: I discovered one of my ~dozens of old personal sites in the wayback machine, one that I have no memory of creating. The about page is painful, but I definitely remember being that age. Here’s another one. I should archive what’s left of these, like I did with the first one. They’re all so lovably cringe. I could make a little effigy of deviantart…

• 7th — Rest day.

• 6th — My daughter Astrid is six years old, nearly seven. Over the past few years her inclinations have wavered, as kids’ do, between adventuresome and… faithful. By “wavered”, I mean that she’s been clammed up, fists clenched, unwilling to do damn anything new! Okay, unfair, but that’s how it feels to me. I want adventure! She’s my bean. I want an Adventure Bean™! But… for the past month, she’s been down with a little ritual. A little adventurous ritual. Every week, on our way to art class, she and I pick a new restaurant that she’s never been to before. And we listen to a new album. And I ask her math questions, always some kind of math she’s never done before (we’ve dipped our toes into 3d geometry, symbolic algebra, complex numbers, and her favourite ‘I don’t know I give up’ answer is either “quadrillion”, “negative infinity”, or lately “undefined” in the divide-by-zero sense). Suffice to say: some adventure has crept in. And I’ve been feeling the spirit, myself. I’m trying to cook more different kinds of things, improvising with whatever we have in the house. I try to taste something newly different each day. (This will come up on the FoC bonus episode we record tomorrow morning.) Which brings us to today’s adventure. I did a bunch of le computer. But that’s not the thing. Today’s adventure is that I made a hot toddy. It’s basically honey and lemon in hot water, which I often have with ginger when I’m sick, but you add alcohol and then call it a “hot toddy” for some reason, I’ll be fucked. Why? Who knows. But, also, why? Well, one of my most cherished coworkers, Todd Matthews, designer extraordinaire, made an (unreleased) little website cataloging cocktail recipes. Seems only fitting to try the one that has his name on it. And I’ve heard of a “hot toddy” all my life and never knew what it was. Lemon and honey, hot water, and… bourbon or whatever? Give me a break! Tame. No tomato purée! No Old Bay seasoning. No simulated chicken stock! I don’t need to draw any of my own blood. Why am I getting out of bed for lemon and honey? Well, regretfully for my sense of adventure, which craves only the weirdest shit I can find… it’s actually kinda good. Regretfully, I might make it again.

• 5th — Today’s adventure wasn’t coding-related; rather, I stayed up distressingly late compiling predictions from previous Feeling of Computing end-of-year episodes. You see, every year, we release an episode with reflections on the previous year and predictions about the coming year… or years. Jimmy introduced the pattern of doing 1-year, 3-year and 6-year predictions. Naturally, I reject all patterns on sight… and I’m a lazy sod… so I haven’t done a good job tracking our predictions. Well, thanks to the mounting pressure of some of our longer-term predictions coming true this past year, I’ve done the dang thing and collected up all existing predictions in a useful format. I did this by hand! I put in the legwork! Well, I mean, I used Claude and GPT and Notebook LM and they all shat the bed. So yeah, I did it by hand… but I also learned a little bit about AI along the way 🌈. I learned that AI is unreliable as shit and I have “skill issues”, in that I’m too damned skilled to see AI as helpful for the things I do. On to the next one!

• 4th — I continued chipping away at my Cakefile. The hours melt away and nothing seems to happen. Now it’s after midnight — I could sleep and feel rested in the morning, and resign myself to accompishing nothing, or stay up and then, in an hour, sleep and feel less rested, and resign myself to accomplishing nothing. I feel this sort of neutral, numbing sadness every day. It’s not ennui, it’s something else. I am overflowing with ideas big and small, and I have the skills to do them. But I feel like I get —maybe— one solid productive day a month, at this rate. The rest of the time just evaporates. [some time passes] Okay, so I’ve stayed up a bit. I added a command to my cakefile — cake diff — which will compare the compiled output to a known-good copy, and another command — cake kiss — that will snapshot the current compiled output as the new known-good. I like that “diff” and “kiss” look similar but different, I like the “make them kiss” of it all, I like thinking about tasty cake and coffee when I program, and I really like this pattern of diffing compiler output against known-good output. And that… gives me a feeling of accomplishment.

• 3rd — Tiny update to Please Reload, my plucky little local web server library, to allow extending the set of supported MIME types and do a better job of managing websockets connections. It’s used by Sweetbread, my toolkit for crafting Cakefiles like the one that builds this very website. I came sooo close to rewriting Cake myself, perhaps as part of i, my personal cli, but that’ll have to wait. Yes, yes, welcome to my yak farm. Addendum: seems I broke the websockets.

• 2nd — Various housekeeping, including reviving my GOOD KNOB

• 1st — My 6yo is sick — can’t keep food down — and my partner is away, so today I was a dad and not a computer user. After she fell asleep, I sat beside her in bed and did a bit of pre-cleanup on this site. That’s my first adventure this month: attending to a long list of website desires.

• 0th — It’s weird that the first day of the month is the ordinal 1. Months are 1-indexed. “The 1st of the month”. So if the last day of the previous month is the predecessor, you either need to say “the zeroth of the month” or just skip zero and call it the “negative first”, which I like better except skipping zero feels like standing on top of a mountain in a storm, wearing copper armor, shouting ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS. Don’t toy with powers beyond your comprehension.

Preamble

Last year’s December Adventure started strong then promptly derailed.

I have no reason to imagine this year will be any different.

Except for the “started strong” part. I don’t have any ideas as good as the CSS feed.

The key is going to be setting low expectations and building up steam, I think.

2024

I’m currently doing my first December Adventure. Here’s my daily log.

• 16th — All my personal project time these days goes to the weaving website. At work, though, I made some really nice sparkline-esq debug visualizations, and used them to meticulously tune a gesture.
• 15th — More work on the weaving website.
• 14th — Took a break. Played with my daughter all day. She put up “have you seen my lost stuffie?” posters around the house. She made me some “all cake” of crackers, chocolate chips, goat cheese, and berries. She built a tent out of a sheet and some microphone stands. I was just, you know, present.
• 13th — Figured out how to make my Apple Pencil vibrate.
• 12th — Recorded some cheesy 80s-ass “computer stuff is happening” music. (Edit: now public)
• 11th — Made some digital paper wiggle around to verify that, yep, its paper.
• 10th — Thinking about coordinate systems.
• 9th — Wrote a bunch of Swift today. I quite like making mobile apps. It’s a novelty for me. I’m also, separately, testing out whether I can edit this site from my phone. If you’re reading this, it worked!!
• 8th — Did some voice acting and scoring for a little secret project. (Edit: now public)
• 7th — I’ve moved my website to a new host, and added a little page talking about the site.
• 6th — Worked on turning Tone Dome into a MIDI instrument.
• 5th — I’m taking a lil class called “Prototyping Programming Languages”, and the assignment this week is to implement unification for a lil Prolog-like lang, so I did some of that.
• 4th — No personal project today, just work programming: I made a camera out of a piece of paper.
• 3rd — Worked on a website for a local group of basket weavers.
• 2nd — BPS — Eli made a falling sand metronome. I made it keep getting faster.
• 1st — CSS feed — An RSS feed of my CSS rules.

Some ideas for things I might work on next:

• Fix Please Reload (using the stuff Keelan suggested)
• Visual Programming Codex needs an overhaul, probably using the same approach as the Future of Coding wiki.
• Speaking of: fix some bugs in the FoC Wiki
• Hest and/or Dust
• Get my Blog figured out
• Make some procedural creatures (I’ve got a particular tentacle monster from the Flash era that I’d love to revive, perhaps as an SVG)
• ZERO VOID page
• RakeBook (both the project and a webpage for it)
• general cleanup of this website — the various <canvas> JS files are a mess, and I could probably refactor them and make a shared std lib that they all build on.
• PPLs stuff! Oh no forgot about that.
• Did I ever make a page for Salamander?
• Tone Dome and FOUR FOUR need writeups (hey… that’s not coding!)
• Need to make music for Lu’s TORN LEAF thing (what is happening to this list?)
• Edit the two FoC Episodes (get the fuck out of here, non-coding stuff)
• Really need to watch The Thing at som- (okay, I’m cutting you off)