Actually left early enough to get in and have some time for myself! However, my rear shifter started acting up a bit on the ride home last night (shifted fine in one direction, shifted unsatisfyingly in the other), and it turns out I snapped a spring. Welp. Early => late. I tried. And tomorrow, I’ll have new bar-end shifters, which are not nearly as subject to the whims of “we don’t really make 9-speed things anymore” and haven’t changed in approximately ever. The bike shop dude also mentioned that they’re less prone to failure, easier to fix, and less appealing to thieves. Onward, then! That’s what my bike Goal within Simple is for, anyway.

Forgot I’d signed up for Mary’s “git from the inside out” talk/workshop, and while by the end of it I was a bit tired (and toasty; that room gets really warm really easily), it was really delightful to start digging into the guts of git, seeing what happens as one takes different actions. Really appreciated her way of explaining things and choosing clear examples, too. (She had two files, number.txt and letter.txt, each with one character inside, and the changes were a => b, 1=>2, 2=>3, etc.)

Headed back to my little weather utility after lunch, cleaned up some cosmetic stuff.

Oh! And last night, Nathan helped me figure out why I was getting this dang error with the “daily” summaries (which give the next week’s weather) from Dark Sky:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xb0' in position 70: ordinal not in range(128)

Turns out it’s the degree symbol that pops up in the weekly summaries:

Light rain on Sunday through Wednesday, with temperatures rising to 88°F on Sunday

Solved! I knew how to fix it (and had), but I didn’t know why the error had popped up in the first place, and this explained it.

Finally felt the pull of the emoji, too. I’ve temporarily got a little snake on my bash prompt. And a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

Before:

After:

For the curious and tentative like me, my PS1 variable in my .bashrc file, which sets your bash prompt, looks like this (googling “ps1 options” was super fruitful!):

PS1='\t \u@\h \w\n?  '

Broken down into pieces:

• \t adds the current time in HH:MM:SS format in 24 hour time, as is right and proper.
• \u is the current user’s username.
• @ is literally just itself here, not doing any wizard things at all.
• \h is the interesting part of the hostname (ugh, I don’t need a .local on my own machine — that’s what \H does).
• \w is the whooooole current working directory’s filepath, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde.
• \n is a plain ol’ newline, because this stuff is getting gnarly long and I still want to TYPE commands after my prompt!
• and then there’s the snake emoji, which can be rendered so many different ways. Look at it. Just snakin’ around. I love you, snake. Even if I later replace you with something else.

So much better.

Anyway the point is that I want to get emoji into my weather app, and I fell down a rabbit hole, and they ended up in my bash prompt instead (or in addition, as soon as I get them added).

SPOILER ALERT THIS HAPPENED

Um, so it’s kind of the best to ask my computer, from the command line, to go fetch the weather and then print appropriate emoji.

Also then I got SUPER WILD and decided to actually present my stuff? We have presentations at RC on Thursday nights, 3-5 minutes long, so I actually made slides and talked in brief about my project and omg. That’s the first presentation I’ve given since Open Source Bridge 2012 (!).

Aaaand it’s Tom the facilitator’s last day (mostly), and so we said nice things and toasted him! I will send him some nice words later (Inbox helpfully decided that the email asking for these nice comments could be auto-archived, which, ugh). Bummed that he won’t be around for our last four weeks, but so excited to see what he does next.