Weeknotes: Week 26, 2023

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These are the highlights from the week of June 26 to July 2.

Worky Things

🎤 I presented at our company’s analytics and data expo on Wednesday. The event was well attended, and I met some new people and had a lot of interesting interactions. Being in the office and seeing other human beings in person is nice but it’s hard on introverts like me, especially after more than six years of working from home.
🏢 My feelings about the return to office craze may be mixed, but according to Entrepreneur magazine The Mandated Return to Office is even worse than we thought.

I’ve been trying to figure out an elegant way to add custom emoji (or more precisely, emoji-like images) into the unordered lists on my site. I successfully hacked together a custom icon font using the The SVG Font Machine and that’s working well for my Hello pages. However, it has been pointed out that we should be preferring other approaches. I figured out how to replace the bullets in unordered lists with encoded images, but the HTML involved breaks the markdown parser.
I made some CSS changes to my blog. The big one was to eliminate the dependency on default OMG.lol fonts that I’m not using. I also put my blog header and navigation content in flex boxes, which I’m still learning how to use.
I’m picky about my ~~fonts~~ typefaces so I’ve made some changes here yet again. I experimented with a couple of variable fonts called Oso Sans and Oso Serif, but they ~~looked like shit~~ were not well supported on iOS and iPadOS. I’m currently using Fira Sans for the text and a Gelica for headings.
🤖 I’m continuing to evolve my Now page generator, a serverless function that reads a YAML file to construct the list of things I’m reading, watching, listening to, and tinkering with. It’s not a fully-automated solution to be sure, but it is easy for me to use and it’s been fun to build.

My eldest daughter returned home after a short trip to Italy and France for a much-deserved break. She hung around at home for a day or so before leaving again for Cincinnati, but I was sure glad to have here at home for a bit.
⚾️ My other daughter started her new job at a sporting goods mega-retailer this week, on top of a couple of paid dog sitting gigs. She seems glad to be busy with something other than schoolwork, and I can’t blame her.
My wife and I have been playing a lot of pickleball this summer, especially now that we’ve joined a local club with 19 courts. They offer a lot of programming (clinics, drills, open play, and leagues) but I like it best when we reserve a court with our friends and just play. Did I mention the club also has a bar? 🍻🍷🍸

If you’ve ever been to Rome, you know how hard it can be to get good photos of the major attractions without a gazillion people everywhere. My daughter asked me to “clean up” a few pictures she took so she could impress her friends on the socials. I asked Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI engine, to help me out. It did a pretty good job with Trevi Fountain, but I was surprised and amused by what it did to the Spanish Steps. 😎 I look like I’m half asleep in the picture above so I decided to also ask Firefly to “adjust” my eyes. It did, and it also gave me a nose job. I suppose if you didn’t already know what I look like these might almost sorta work.

These items were new or updated on my NOW page this week: