It’s Thursday already, somehow! I don’t get it. How’d we get here already?

Linz came to me to hear about Our Entertainment and Awesomeness, the “Emoji in Your Bash Prompt” of my week 8. We learned some things, such as “Sublime Text won’t let you insert emoji from the usual special-character-and-emoji palette, BUT you can totally copy-paste emoji into Sublime Text.” I…I can’t believe that OS X’s default Terminal handles emoji better than Sublime. (Someone wrote a plugin, but come on.) I mean, vim handled this pretty okay mostly out-of-the-box. How cool!

So one of the lessons? +1, vim. You done good, kid.

Outside of the computer, I figured out how to put all of my hair up with four bobby pins. (Spoiler: it involves dividing my hair into four even-ish sections.) The humid summer heat of NYC has gotten me really good at learning how to keep ALL OF THE HAIR off of my neck for survival purposes.

I had intentions of learning more about EXIF today, but instead Steve (RC alums and RC alumni day <3 <3) and I ended up talking about traffic feelings and how to make the feelings into a thing.

Let me explain.

Coming from the northwest, I do not come from a car horn honking culture. Car horns are to be used only in times of imminent, scary danger. Any other usage is needlessly aggressive.

However, in New York, there is a whole vocabulary of honking. A honk can mean so, so many different things.

I have learned to tell the difference between different kind of honks. There is the “hey, just want to make sure you know I’m here, because I’m approaching the intersection where you’re jaywalking” chirp. There is the “hey, that was a bad decision you (other driver/pedestrian/bicyclist) made, and it made me scared/frustrated” longer honk.

And then there is the “no one can move, we will be stuck here forever, I haven’t budged in several traffic light cycles, and I have SO MANY FEELINGS” looooong, looooong honk. It is REGULARLY joined by many, many other similar honks. Just, like, five adult people hooooooooooooooooonking their car horns together. Like when one baby starts crying, but there are a bunch of other babies nearby, and now twelve babies are crying.

For reasons I can’t entirely explain, this stopped being irritating and became really hilarious to me, and I usually can’t help but laugh when I hear this phenomenon now. I also regularly say “feelings!” when I hear it. I told Steve about this the other day, and now we BOTH do this when we’re out walking and someone is having feelings in traffic.

Today, this happened again, and I remarked that it’d be awesome if there were just a button you could press to have the feelings for you. And I remembered that Ed built hambutton.com, and by the time we returned from lunch Steve and I had resolved to build Feelings Button.

There are still a lot of Internet Things I have to figure out, because there’s a lot I still don’t understand about hosting/DNS/etc., but I bought my second domain ever, Steve helped me set up a bare-bones webpage and is hosting the content until I figure it out (probably with more of his help), and you can go to feelingsbutton.com, press the steering wheel, and hear me and Steve having feelings so you don’t have to. (It’s also on GitHub!) Wholly in the Ann school of “you can learn a lot by doing things for sh!ts and giggles.”

I even presented! Holy cats.

Anyway. Plenty productive for one day.

HIGHLIGHTS: sitting quietly, being a responsible adult, super mega dream project and the Big Bad EXIF, small coloring projects to send to friends

Had some good sitting time again this morning. Was later than intended again, except it was just me, so maybe “we” just started later than anticipated. Reframing! I am in ridiculous love with the Muji “body-fit cushion,” which is basically what all decent beanbags dream of someday being someday. (Muji: Everything you never knew you wanted at Recurse Center, directly downstairs.) Except it exists now. Because Japan. It’s good for supported slouching, it’s good for meditation, it’s good for a half-body pillow, it’s…just lovely. It is the opposite of the (differently awesome) “dog bed for humans” style of beanbag (h/t to Liz for the name there).

Also doing some Stuff I Don’t Feel Like Doing, which is mostly Stuff I Want To Have Done like emailing cool people I met a few weeks ago, and also the insurance broker so I can get some health insurance again. Welp. ONWARD.

Emailed insurance broker (boring but responsible!). Emailed rad person from Dev Bootcamp that I met at Hack && Tell recently; she has Portland & biking & French connections and this is awesome. Emailed the two amazing women from Women You Should Know that I met at the JewelBots Kickstarter party even earlier; there are some women I think they should know about. EMAIL ALL THE WOMEN

EMAIL ALL THE EMAILS

Maybe there’ll even be code today. I’ve started worrying about jobs, which is an unpleasant feeling, but I’m going to channel it into Productive Conversations, and try to keep it out of my terminal for now.

Down, down, down the rabbit hole of reading image data from Python. Somehow, two and a half years ago, this was easier in Ruby than it is now. Or maybe I was missing something.

What am I learning?

I’m using ExifRead for now, because it came up high in the Googs, and also seems to be under active development. A+. This does, unfortunately, mean that I am learning how the EXIF sausage is made.

The GitHub page above makes reference to the difficult-to-google “IFD,” which appears to stand for “Image File Directory” (and not, say, International Floral Distributors).

Reminder to people who write about things with the intent of sharing knowledge: expand your acronyms the first time you use them. Just in case. It makes things so much easier for new people, and it takes very little effort! I’m now making an educated guess about a README. (Maybe I should file an issue.)

There appears to be a Canadian nerd who’s written a Perl library to handle/write EXIF data, and it turns out their description of EXIF tags generally, and GPS tags specifically, is about the most concise thing I’ve found so far [1].

(This all started because ExifRead returns a “ratio” rather than a decimal number for GPS coordinates. This is, apparently, the standard. Okay!)

There are some folks who’ve written about turning GPS ratios into decimals (like here), but that seems like a heck of a lot of work. I’m not even certain it’s what I need; it’s just what I’m (marginally) more familiar with. We also have two facilitators at RC who used to, uh, work at a photo-related company. It might be about time to talk to them.

After lunch, I headed back for Coloring Club (it’s my favorite thing that I have started in a long, long time), and worked on a couple postcards I’m going to send to friends. It’s fun! Postcards are a nice reasonable size for, say, a compliment.

Here is how to make a compliment postcard for your friends:

• Acquire blank postcards. If you are lucky, Muji is downstairs. you can also cut plain paper. Or get some from a paper or office supply store, I bet.
• Acquire stamp(s). In the US, it’s currently 49¢ for a US forever stamp (postcard stamps are cheaper), or $1.20 for a global forever stamp (those exist now!!).
• Write something nice (something you admire about someone, or some other compliment that is true about them) with the bubble letters you learned in junior high. They don’t have to look Good or Professional, because they’re an excuse for you to color something in.
• Color them in.
• Write on the back.
• Put it in the mail.

Easy, and real mail for your friends! Your friends will think you are a cool mix of old-fashioned and new-awesome, or at least you will.

The Summer Of Sad Times has made me think, quite often, about all the things that people are only brave enough to say after people are gone. In a nutshell, this makes me really sad, and I decided that I’m going to double down on telling my friends what I admire about them while they are alive. (Not with any expectation that any of them will die soon! I hope they will all be alive for a long, long time, and maybe sometimes they’ll think about the postcard and it will make them smile.)

I also talked to facilitator John about “oh god the EXIFs and the GPS and what is happening; am I the worst” and it turns out that it’s all just an awful mess of semi-standard rats’ nest. (Yes, the nest of many rats.) Apparently it’s Just A Beast, which is oddly encouraging. I’m not overwhelmed because I am clueless or unable; I am overwhelmed because I am Faced With A Beast.

The Beast, as it turns out, is an EXTRAORDINARY motivator for all the stuff I’ve spent all summer not-doing. Migrating my bonus (non-primary) photo album to an external hard drive? ALL OVER IT.

Somehow, this all took a whole day, and my parents just got into town, so I’m thinking it might be time to call it an evening.

---

Note 1: Also, welp, facilitator John tells me that Exiftool is pretty much industry standard, except a bunch of people have had such a sad time with it that they end up writing their OWN things. John is currently doing this.

It’s Tuesday! But yesterday was Labor Day, and instead of coming in (it was an optional day), apparently what I needed was to do Literally Nothing. (Actual conversation I had: Partner: “What would you like to do today?” Me: “Not sure. … What would you like to do today?” Partner: “Some computer stuff. Maybe something else.” *silence* Me: “Actually it turns out this is the most stressed I’ve been all day, and I think I want to read articles on the couch.” Partner: “okay!”)

Anyway. So it’s a day-1-on-Tuesday kind of week.

Had good conversations with Jess and Tom this weekend, wherein they both made clear that they were willing to be helpful in getting me going on Super Mega Dream Project. Something feels different. I think I’m actually going to do this.

To be honest, something feels different about this week in general. I’m having one of those Marlboro Moments that I had in college a number of times (I went to Marlboro College for a couple years, and realized quickly that if you want something to happen, you should do it yourself).

I missed meditation group, which vanished as soon as Jess never-graduated a few weeks ago, so last night I officially decided that I’m bringing it back for the rest of my batch. RCer? Come sit with me, any time between 9:45 – 10:15, in the library nook. You can do some guided meditation on your headphones, or something else that works for you, or you can do what I do and just “do nothing and see what happens.”

I also missed coffee-walk check-in group. I found that coffee-walk check-ins meant that I checked in with fewer people in more detail, and I think that works best for me. So I started it back up. I made a new column on the sign-up form and everything, which felt like some sort of rebellion. (It is DESPERATELY hard to rebel in a place that is built around “please do whatever it is that will help you to be your happiest and most fulfilled.” Also, I have just never been a very rebellious person, so it is a strange feeling to have. Maybe I mentioned this before? It still feels funny.)

Laïs and Mary joined me, so it’s even successful! I have happy feelings about check-ins for the first time in a few weeks, and it feels awesome.

Got back into my sidewalk repo (Mason). It’s even still on my computer and everything. Two and a half years ago, I started it up with my mentor (?) from Code Scouts on some day I had off from work. There were a lot of reasons I was excited about Code Scouts, and a number of reasons (some of which I can enumerate) about why it didn’t work for me, but I’ve had this half-sprouted Ruby seed code for a few years. Ruby isn’t my go-to language anymore. And this near-empty repo makes me feel sad every time I see it.

Gonna see how much I can get done in Python in the next three weeks, and I’ll make improvements to Weather Balloon when I get bored or tired. (At least, this is the plan, subject to change if I’m wrong.)

Way excited.

Also went to B&H for a couple new external hard drives (one for extra space, one for responsible backups like an adult), and omg that place is amazing. It’s overwhelming, but there are conveyor belts overhead and e-ink shelf tags and more yarmulkes than I could have conceived of. I could barely find my way out, but I did, and then I want to the extraordinary post office across from Penn Station, and there are amazing seals (including French ones!!) on the ceiling, and oh wow.

Off to Puzzled Pint for the evening. Tomorrow, I start building more things on the rubble of the old Mason.