Archive of posts from 2023/01 📝

I have read a lot of news about the US over the last few years. I learned that the term "table" (i.e. "to table a discussion") in politics refers to leaving a subject for later discussion. The use isn't exclusive to politics -- indeed, any discussion can be "tabled" -- but I heard the word used a lot in politics.

A few weeks ago, awaiting the arrival of a train, I stopped to play piano. While playing, someone left a hand-written note on top of the piano. I didn't get to look at them was I was immersed in the music. Thus, I shall perhaps never know who left the note. The note contained a quote:

I have been asking a few people what their favourite word is lately. The question "What is your favourite word?" fills me with excitement that I'm either about to learn a new word or a fact about someone that I previously didn't know. When I hear an obscure word, I'll likely ask why the other person finds it interesting. Or should I say intriguring. Or thought-provoking. Or [insert synonym here].

(Not in any way affiliated with the renowned Fun with Flags, hosted by Dr. Sheldon Cooper.)

I recently gave a talk for Codementor on Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention. A recording for the talk is available on archive.org, in case you are curious! In the 45 minute discussion, I walked through what Webmention is, how it works, and did a live demo of how to get started using Webmentions on your site.

This morning, on the final day of my holiday, I spent around two hours thinking through a way to auto-classify content on my blog, as part of a project to recommend tags to my posts. Most of my old posts don't have tags, and I wondered: could I build a system using embeddings and a classification algorithm to help recommend tags when I write a new post? It turns out that yes I can but the hours of work I put into "solving" this particular problem were not worth it. I got stressed and was anxious throughout my coding session.

I was walking around Edinburgh today. On my way down a street with a narrow pavement, I was in a position where it was unclear to me in what direction I should walk. The person in front of me shuffled one way and I did, too.

For the next 100 days, I am committing to ship something related to the IndieWeb each day. A "ship" could be anything that is seen publicly or could be used by someone else that pertains to the IndieWeb. For example, if I make a change to my personal website that other people can see, that would count. If I write a blog post about something related to the IndieWeb, that too would count. Changes could be made over multiple days, but I should write a short post summarizing what I did on a given day to hold myself accountable.

Image sourced from the BBC website.

I regularly read articles on The Guardian. As I am not a paying subscriber to their digital edition, I see banners that prompt me to support them. The banners almost always catch my eye because they say how many articles I have "read" on their website in the last year. I just opened The Guardian homepage to find I read over 400 articles on their site. I think "read" is a tad liberal because I know I didn't read all the words on all of those articles, but I like seeing the count go up over time.