it's sunday night again, so i'll continue the pattern of documenting my weekend before going back to work tomorrow.
it has been very cold lately, in the low teens fahrenheit during the day, and windy. this has significantly lowered my motivation to go outside. however, i actually went out and about a decent amount, just slightly reluctantly at times. besides errands and visiting some specialty grocery stores on friday and saturday, we also went to an art opening today at ely center, for a group show that we had a piece in. it was the first public event in their new interim location, and andrei helped them a bit with the renovation project, so everyone was excited to see how the space came out. we saw some friends and gave out some flyers for two shows we have coming up, one andrei is organizing and one i am organizing.
in between things at home, i worked on some more computery projects. i installed this app called "grist" on my server which is like a self hosted, open source version of airtable. airtable is like either a spreadsheet on steroid, or a database with a decent gui, and i used to use it when i worked in tech, but i never wanted to use it for personal projects because it feels very corporate and not cozy. grist is a pretty great medium, and i was able to implement 2 things in it already that seem like they will be very useful. one of them is a database of all the videos i've uploaded to vimeo, youtube, and peertube, and their metadata (title, description, etc.) which i used to keep in a normal spreadsheet. but now that they are in grist, i can query the data directly through the api, so i expanded my video embed shortcode generator to have a little browser that lets me see all my videos with thumbnail images and stuff and then easily grab embed codes for them.
that was kind of the highlight of my weekend, which is pretty nerdy. here are some other things i did recently:
- finally sent out my first email newsletter in over half a year. the impetus was to share some events i had coming up, but i took the opportunity to look back and share some other stuff i did since my newsletter radio silence
- set up a tracker sheet and input form for shared household expenses (also in grist)
- set up automatic external backups of my yunohost server (because i wanted to keep my grist data backed up, but was probably overdue anyway)
- at work, started writing some detailed technical documentation that brought me a lot of satisfaction
- also at work, finished what i started with last week with optimizing the parametric design (grasshopper) patches; the ending optimization was more like 99%!!!
- watched 3 more ridiculous martial arts movies with andrei
- had my art shown at an exhibition opening in michigan
also, lots of people sent interesting images to txxt.club. i think the weekly digest i set up is helping serve as a gentle reminder that it exists, and to look at what others have shared.
oh, and i got a paper planner. i am still figuring out how i want to use it, since i have my to do lists and calendar digitally, but writing things out on paper at the beginning of the week seems to help me think, and i was tired of manually drawing a grid of days on blank paper.
feedback for myself in the near future: instead of working a little bit on lots of different things, i should focus more on fewer things. it's fun to follow shiny objects, but not a good strategy for all the time.
well, that's enough for now. i need to go to sleep!
