the blizzard that passed across the entire eastern half of the united states on sunday deposited about 18 inches of snow on us here in new haven, connecticut. this caused some logistical issues when shoveling our driveway, which is basically a car-width gap between our building and our neighbor's fence. the snow was piled so high everywhere around it that we literally ran out of places to put it. shoveling is one thing; scooping up snow, carrying it 15+ feet, and then hoisting it up on top of a pile that's approaching your own height is quite another. at least my employers didn't mind that i had to start my week two days later than usual; they were still waiting for their plow to show up on tuesday morning.
besides the whole snow debacle, here are some other things that happened since my last entry:
- i spent an evening dog sitting thor, which mostly consisted of sitting in a rocking chair next to the wood stove.
- i made a flyer for a show i'm helping organize next month. it has ascii art!
- jammed out with andrei and learned how to do latency-free live input monitoring, as well as measuring and compensating for latency when recording, via ableton and my motu interface.
- drank hot chocolate.
- made and shared a document about txxt.club with people on the fediverse. also (hopefully) fixed some bugs and improved error handling in the code of the serverless function that runs it.
- discovered that, due to the cold weather, there was a ton of condensation forming in our pantry, so had to empty everything out of there to get it dried out. the fun of living in a building from the 1800s...
i have some music and art events coming up next month, so i decided that i want to make an "events" section for my website. i want to have links i can use to share info about events i'm organizing and participating in without needing to rely on other people to put them on an actual webpage. (i'm putting my foot down: no more shall i link to instagram posts as the sole source of info about an event!) but, while sketching out the page design, i realized that i also really wanted people to be able to zoom in on images in my lightbox image viewer. (event flyers often have a lot of small text on them, so the lack of zoom was more of an issue.)
this resulted in me going down a rabbit hole of changing the lightbox of my site from a very basic 15 kilobyte one (simple-lightbox), which i had heavily customized the code of, to one just under 100kb in total (PhotoSwipe — although the full library doesn't load until the lightbox is opened). i try to be stingy about how much javascript is on my site, but in this case it felt like the trade off was worth it: the new library has support for gesture controls, zoom, and panning around in the zoomed-in image, and works equally well with mouse and touch screens. it also has a lot of customizability that i was shockingly able to do without modifying the main library code at all. in addition to creating custom icons and other UI tweaks, i also extended their video plugin to work with iframe video players. (so i can have video players that only load when opened, good for pages with a lot of videos on them, so you don't have to load like 20 iframes when you open the page.) it also still has the same "progressive enhancement" pattern of linking to the source file when javascript is disabled, so i didn't have to change that much about my HTML or shortcodes.
anyway, that took me like, most of a day, and then i spent another half a day fixing various little things on my website that no one else probably would have ever noticed. so even though i still haven't actually started making the new events section, i feel better about adding new things now that the site is more ship-shape.
now it's tuesday evening, the driveway is finally clear, and i'll be back to work tomorrow. so, i guess my extra-long, extra snowy, website-editing-filled weekend is drawing to a close. i did enjoy it, but i hope it doesn't snow this much again for a long time.
