Yesterday’s Wordle provided an opportunity to use a sacrificial word. After Guess #2 I knew what the last four letters were, but there were many possibilities for the first letter. To narrow it down, for Guess #3 I picked a word that used as many valid first letters as possible. This word was 100% guaranteed not to be the solution, but it immediately made the solution clear. Guess #3 was: PLUMB.
Question
Would a Saturday morning still feel like a Saturday morning if there were no more Monday mornings?
Tixy.land
Head over to http://tixy.land and play with it a bit. It’s fun. No, more than that. It’s sublime.
Kumquat and Leek Pizza
Kumquats are in season where I live. When they are, I like to make this pizza that we discovered at nearby restaurant.
Ingredients: pizza dough, crème fraîche (the base sauce), parmigiano reggiano, sautéed leeks, kumquat slices dusted with sugar (to taste; counteracts the tartness), shredded low moisture mozzarella, gorgonzola crumbles.
Habits
The notion of creating virtuous habits seems to come into vogue every so often. The idea is to identify something beneficial, endeavor to make a habit of it, and then sit back and watch as the wins accrue.
It’s also possible to acquire bad habits, which in turn generate their losses if not recognized and stopped.
But all habits imply a kind of mindlessness. When we act out of habit we are asleep.
I say: stay awake! Make a habit of breaking habits.
Commute View
While working from home has much to afford in the way of flexibility, freeing up of time that would have otherwise been spent getting from Point A to Point B, and reduced carbon emissions, there are some pluses to heading into the office.
Bullet-ahead technique for shared authoring
This post is about a workflow challenge when collaboratively editing an online document, say in Google Docs, and a fix for that challenge.
To set up the problem, imagine that Bob and Carol are editing a document containing an itemized list. Carol adds a bullet item and starts typing. Meanwhile, Bob gets an idea for a second item and places his cursor on the line Carol is typing:
While Carol continues to type, Bob hits Enter to add a new bullet item, breaking the line Carol is typing:
Now Carol’s line is broken and Bob is no closer to being able to start typing. Frustrating right?
If Carol notices that Bob is waiting to jump in, there’s a simple step she can take to make space: hit Enter, type an ellipsis (…), repeat a few times, and then place her cursor back where we was working, and continue on:
Now, Bob (and others!) can grab a list item and start typing. I call this the “bullet ahead” move. By the way, the ellipses are not strictly required, but Carol must type at least one non-whitespace character after each list item, in order to avoid breaking the list.
On Posting to Facebook
One of the interesting things about Facebook is that you can disappear for years and folks are still there when you come back. I try to visit on my birthday, since that’s when a lot of the activity happens. This year I posted a selfie with my wife and got so many nice notes from friends and family. Grateful!
Yesterday was two, two, twenty two
I noticed a few references in my peoplescape/mediascape noting that yesterday’s date had a lot of twos in it.
At some point I realized that the date was a kind of spiritual continuation of the first lines of the Morphine song French Fries With Pepper.
On six, six, sixty-six, I was little, I didn’t know shit about
Seven, seven, seventy-seven, eleven years later still don’t know any better ’bout
Eight, eight, eighty-eight, it’s way too late for me to change, and by
Nine, nine, ninety-nine, I hope I’m sittin’ on the back porch drinkin’ red wine
French Fries With Pepper, Morphine
Given the un-mellifluousness of “aught, aught, double-aught” and “one, one, eleven”, it’s been a long time coming.
OTA DVR Diagram
Here’s a diagram of our setup for recording and watching Over The Air broadcast television. It’s a bit complicated, but it works well! My favorite part? The central media library and tv tuner are accessible from multiple devices, making for a nice unified experience.