How is it the end of the standard week already?

Started in on LPTHW exercise 27, which starts with the darling phrase “Today is the day you start learning about logic.” It also includes the demand “I want you to do this exercise for an entire week. Do not falter,” which, again, I am gleefully ignoring.

Used Distract-O-Vision to get through all of several exercises. I can’t quite do them in my sleep anymore, but I’m not really getting tripped up by anything yet, which is a nice feeling.

Realized I was bored, and remembered that I’ve wanted to see how hard it is to make a Pebble app/watchface (I really, really love my Pebble Time, and I loved my first-gen Pebble before it, too). They’ve even got Cloudpebble, a Pebble development environment in the cloud, so I didn’t have to hassle with ANYTHING on my machine. They’ve also got a terrific tutorial, so I jumped right in.

Things that were true about this experience:

• By the time I got a blank screen successfully loading on my watch, I had an unstoppable grin stuck on my face.
• I have now technically written some C(++? I’m not sure which it is).
• That’s my first non-interpreted language code ever!
• I half-regret taking lunch partway through this — food is important to continue thinking, but it kinda wrecked my flow.
• I went way down the “look at fonts” rabbit hole, but eventually found some that I liked.
• I made silly art for the background.
• I now have a very simple watchface that I built myself: 
  

  hi nerds <3 look what I made with my hands and a computer and resources pic.twitter.com/ovI6fx8qad

  — Liene Verzemnieks (@li3n3) July 16, 2015

   

I kinda want to make it more awesome (unanswered questions: why does 20:00 appear as 20:□? Why does 20:40 do the same thing?), and I also want to keep up on my Python, so I’m thinking this might give me some productive things that can each distract from each other.

Whee! I would be surprised if the weekend goes by without any further play with this.

It’s Wednesday! Flash flood warning day, which came with the awesome supplementary note that follows:

Instructions: MOVE TO HIGHER GROUND NOW. ACT QUICKLY TO PROTECT YOUR LIFE. TURN AROUND…DONT DROWN WHEN ENCOUNTERING FLOODED ROADS. MOST FLOOD DEATHS OCCUR IN VEHICLES.

On the ride in, it was just muggy, though. An emergency-broadcast sound rippled through the office when the warning came in (on everyone’s devices).

Slow going on LPTHW, but maybe that’s because things are getting longer. I went back and found my old files from this: the first time, I apparently got through exercise 2 (?? did I do it on another computer, or did I just go over everything with an extremely fine-toothed comb), but the second, I got through exercise 21.

Had a quick brought-from-home lunch, then went to Alice’s tmux workshop,  where I went from “oh cool, I totally get this!” to “omg my brain is overflowing, and not only because Terminal is not keen on supporting mouse enabling.” Sam did teach me some things (apparently one has to “source” the .tmux.conf file to get it to do things?), and showed me z (a tool she uses a ton), which was all rad. And I learned how to set non-temporary non-git aliases (in my .bashrc file!).

The rest of the afternoon was peppered with distractions that I welcomed (perhaps unwisely), but I did indeed break through the previous furthest point on LPTHW: turns out exercises 22 and 23 are “make these lists, study these things, look at code, and come back in a week or two.” I made text files for those lessons instead and editorialized in them. It feels kinda awesome to be disobedient, suddenly.

Always remember, too:

AttributeError: ‘list’ object has no attribute ‘poop’

Finished off exercise 25 (“Let’s take a test,” which is where we get the above error), which was satisfying.  It’s basically just crushing someone else’s bugs. And you know what? Crushing bugs is satisfying!

Decided that was a fine point to stop for the day, since there’s this magic thing going on at Summerstage tonight, and April, one of my neighbor batchlings is going (& Nathan and I thought it sounded way too cool to miss). That is, assuming it’s not all rained out…

Got in even earlier and spent some time reading Learning Python. That book is a beast, but I don’t feel as threatened as I usually do by gigantic books.

Meditation group is the best.

I think I spent almost an hour post-check-in spinning my wheels, but I did make a couple cups of green tea & got my Pinhead key registered (that kind of “important, not urgent” thing that’s so easy to put off forever). I’m blaming this on my check-in statement that “yesterday was a day of really good focus, so I want to just continue that today.” Welp.

Went back to LPTHW (went through exercise 3 yesterday), got interrupted by (i.e. interrupted myself with) everything (including this excellent article that came up in chat: https://medium.com/@noahbradley/how-i-became-an-artist-4390c6b6656c).

Had a short lunch (I had leftovers! I brought bonus food from home!) followed by an unintentionally long visit to Muji downstairs, which is downright magical. Whoops! On the plus side, I finally have some good little paper flags, which was what I originally went in for. On the downside, I now covet a bunch of beautiful functional things I don’t technically need…

Went to Tom’s terminal whispering talk, and took several moments to notice that something seemed familiar, and a lot longer to realize I had actually literally been to his talk at PyCon on, uh, terminal whispering. Regrettably, this meant I spent most of his talk falling down internet rabbit holes, but I did ask for some help resolving an error afterwards. Turns out something has to be running for a socket to connect to it.

Described a whole lot of Trip Island to Sam after she, well, tripped on a bunch of cords that are around the couches/one of the standing tables. It’s actually a metaphor that extends beautifully. There’s a beach. There’s a snake meadow.

Got through LPTHW exercise 14, swapping in `.format` stuff (still) instead of the older %s or %r formatters. (If you’re curious, you can dig around here: https://github.com/li3n3/snake-quest/tree/master/hardwayrc)

Then headed out to Puzzled Pint in Brooklyn, which I knew sounded familiar, and it turns out it was because a friend used to be involved (see the very bottom). Of course Matthew was the puzzler. I will always wish I’d gotten to know him better, but I like doing little things to keep people’s spirits close at hand.

Got to RC in time for late-kinda-reading-Learning-Python, but that’s the earliest I’ve ever made it in so far. Practice.

This DID mean, however, that I was here in plenty of time for morning sitting!

Dove right into Learn CLI the Hard Way, for the second time (I did a bit last week, but didn’t feel focused about it). Amazing how much faster it goes when I already know most of it. There are still a few things I want to really drill so they’re just available in my brain if I think about them, but there aren’t many. Rad.

Spent too long looking for where to get lunch today (got a bunch of awesome food this weekend and planned some lunches; left it all at home). But settled on Wild Ginger, which has the advantage of being SUPER close.

`find` is the freaking coolest thing I have learned about on the command line. Also, using our friend `>`, I made a list of all the photos on my hard drive containing the word “soon” as part of their name. Eee.

Too much post-lunch time yakking, but I made more tea (becoming a daily habit here) and talked about the generalities of What Is Agile Even (among many other things) with Wes and Panya.

Broke my brain reading man-pages for things like `find` and `less` (which 1) is huge, 2) has all kinds of hilarity to me, like the environment variable LESSSECURE, and the env variable LESS_IS_MORE, which makes `less` behave more like `more`, which just sounds giggle-worthy)).

Actually finished running through LCLItHW (or however it’s abbreviated), which felt good. I finished a thing! Even if it was going through a thing, and that feels like a cheating version of “finishing” something to me.

Finally got my system-wide (i.e. “not virtualenv”) IPython updated, which is something I’ve been putting off for months, if not longer (I went from v. 2.1.0 => 3.2.1). Got an error that I tried to google:

OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/IPython/__init__.py'

And TRIED to avoid sudo-ing the upgrade of IPython, but I eventually gave in. And the upgrade worked beautifully.

Picked up Learn Python the Hard Way again. I’ve worked on it a couple times before, but never finished it. I am going to finish it this time, and then see where I’m going from there.

The less I focus on what other people might think of what I’m choosing to work on, the more I get done.