Website
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I finally fixed my wiki. The summary version is I installed it on my local computer, upgraded it to the latest version, and copied that installation back to the web host. One of my upcoming tasks is to submit everything on my site to the Wayback Machine so I’ll have a browsable backup in case this happens again. I’ve learned you have to help web crawlers along or else their copies have large extra holes.
Productivity
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This week I’m back to planning my productivity system improvements. One of my goals is to make improvements that don’t take a lot of work. After all this time I’m still grabbing low-hanging fruit. Last week I added back into my schedule a regular block for side projects so I’d have less of a mental obstacle to doing miscellaneous lengthy tasks.
Programming
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Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory is a treasure trove of advice for fully integrating testing into the development process. Instead of throwing the code to the testing team at the end of the release cycle when there’s no time to fix the problems, the authors recommend involving them throughout the process. Since testers are attuned to what can go wrong in software, they can even help in the design stage by bringing up situations the software may need to handle.
I discovered this book in the citations of other software books, and I worried it would just be a repeat of the others’ advice, but that was not the case. It had a lot to offer on its own, and it’ll be one I go back and study. I especially appreciated the examples from various software teams, which (like Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers) made the book feel like a community effort.
Food
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I’m starting the skillets section of Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals. For the salads and soups I tried to make every recipe with few exceptions, but I ended up wasting food when ingredients weren’t shared between recipes. This time I’m being more selective based on the recipe’s taste, nutrition, and effort. Ideally I want to get my cooking down to half an hour.
Nature
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I’ve been having a fun time identifying birds with the Merlin Bird ID app. I’m mainly using the Sound ID feature, because I hear more birds than I see. Birds I’ve “spotted” this way are Northern Cardinal, Red-winged Blackbird, American Robin, Blue Jay, House Sparrow, Chimney Swift, Common Grackle, and Yellow Warbler. And with the Photo ID I learned there’s such a bird as a Scarlet Tanager.
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Games
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I may be wading back into Minecraft and perhaps other games. Since I finished fixing my website a day early, I decided to give myself a break from my serious projects and get back to Minecraft, which has been on my mind for, well, the past year at least. Alas, a nap got in my way, so I only had time to write some general plans. I’m thinking I’ll set aside some regular time on the weekends for gaming. And I want to see how well my new practice of journaling everything works with it.
