April 2018

The end of another experiment.

Grapefruit has been great. And I still think I do not need more than this one HTML file to have a blog. But I do have a need for more to write.

It is not a secret that I have been tweaking my CV and have been communicating with a recruiter. What is a secret is which companies I have been in touch with, who the recruiter is, and my thoughts on the whole process.

Those are things I want to write about. (And maybe I did.) But they are not things public enough for me to blog about right at this moment. What I need are the unlisted posts I made use of in my old web system. But those do not exist in Grapefruit.

I would argue I only need the web server to put these “unlisted” writings on, but then I can no longer make use of Grapefruit to fix up my HTML. As such I should go back to a completely manual workflow, expand on Grapefruit’s capabilities, or look into going back to something just a bit more CMS-y.

Grapefruit was never built to go beyond a handful of HTML files, so that alternative is out. I also do not think I can get back to the writing flow I got into at the start of the month if every post needs to be a carefully handcrafted piece of HTML. Back on the CMS bandwagon I go.

I’ll be back when I have found something that works for me, works for writing.

Sebastiaan and I were on a philosophy bender, apparently. One of the concepts to come out of it is the head cache. When you have filed something in the back of your mind for future use.

The problem, just like with a computer cache, is that the data gets stale. When did you empty your internal memory last?

Recruiters are great. Thanks to them I might never have to go the the ground and actively lobby around for jobs. But what I don’t like? They mediate in all communications, even when we need to pin a time for the first face-to-face.

I can’t just grab a phone and compare calendars. Instead I propose a time, it gets forwarded, the company makes a counter proposal, it gets forwarded. I dislike phone calls, but they would have sped this up immensely.

I got to sit in at a local Rotary club’s meeting, as well as their board meeting, where they were discussing the material sent to them by the umbrella organisation SRS on GDPR compliance. It is interesting to see how a relatively small club is scrambling to make any sense of what they have to do.

There are simply too many papers in too many binders. Which of those contain personal information? The meeting notes start with an attendance list, that seems like a register, so what do we do with our archived notes when someone comes by and call on their right to erasure? If the members agree with SRS’ policies and have their information stored in the global Rotary register, does this mean the local club can also use that information? Say when they are sending the meeting notes to everyone? Maybe, but it might be better to ask everyone to specifically consent to the club using the data for its own purposes.

And of course several members around the table are just wondering why they have to go through all this trouble to give consent. They just want their little club to be.

Those people overlap with the people who, prior to the meeting, were discussing leaving Facebook because it all got a little too “scary”. And this might bother me the most. Finally the law is trying to protect you from companies collecting all they can, to make sure it doesn’t get “scary”, and then you are annoyed because it applies to your own club/company too. Take a stance already.

Remember how I said this would be a single HTML file on a server? It still is but I am cheating a little.

I wanted to try and add some microformats to enable parsing this file for its contents. And instead of manually adding all those elements there is a little script that does it for me.

I have a directory of HTML files, each containing a single <article> element. These get wrangled by the script and then appended to the correct month. Slightly more work on the publishing now, and I am not sure I like that. Less work on the authoring, which means I can get back to writing!

Have we officially left nice emails behind? I usually use an “interleaved posting” style when writing email. Today someone ended an email to me as follows, and my heart broke a little:

Btw, your replies are confusing me with replying underneath each paragraph!
Especially on my iPhone it’s going in a weird format 😉

Just had two people from NSI Fiber come by the house to do the installation of our internet. In the guest house. Even though no cables have been put in place to either the main nor the guest house.

They are going to contact the company and see if they can get it all sorted out. Just another delay on the stack.

I just finished playing Minit. That is, I defeated what I assume to be its final boss and was greeted by a screen with some statistics on the play-through:

142 runs
66% collected

This has unlocked a thing called “second run” (or “new game+”), which I will be trying next. But something I appreciate even more is how the game also allows me to “continue”. Continuing Puts me right before the final boss fight, meaning I can still go and try to get a 100% out of this!

On , I was playing around with listing all the books on my shelf in a single HTML file. This got me thinking about HTML as a language to author documents in. I wrote the following in a chat with Sven:

When I was creating that book list, I realised I would blog more just by FTPing plain HTML than by writing a Micropub backend…

This is just the truth. I am very comfortable editting HTML. I don’t really write content on platforms where I do not have an SSH client available. So why am I not just blogging in HTML while I tinker with Sink on the side? Why must I have a perfect Micropub implementation ready before blogging?

The answer is this subdomain, this HTML file, this post: I do not need anything to blog other than a server and a text editor.

Lets get back to writing!