Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Off Kilter

    So the gist of the above is that the use of gold is nonsense, just as much "arabian" music packaged for Western audiences is likewise. Both work, in that you can gate around Baldur or kick back with some fine Zimmerman, but neither are representative currencies nor music of the source cultures.

  • Buying Groceries During a Trade War

    This post is a two-for-one: first, a hot take on what Canada's response to Trump's tariff threats should look like, and second, a quick guide on how to 'buy Canadian' most effectively.

  • So Close, Yet So Far

    As much as I hoped to be done with the major repairs from the [[Derecho 2020|derecho]], we hit a few snags along the way that got in the way. Overall, they aren't major ones and my anxiety has dropped significantly with what they had done.

    The contractors finished with one room but it was too cold to finish the repairs on the porch (the derecho blew out windows, tore up wood, and soaked everything in rain). Repairing that is going to need a soffit and we hit some nasty cold weather, so they are going to wait until March to finish up.

    The repairs they did were… okay? I mean, after the amazing work they did on the basement, the upstairs felt more like a 80% job in terms of polish and quality. Some of it is that I'm really sensitive to the floor and I can feel it flexing, but in the end, I decided it was good enough for now.

• Politics and World Events

  • 2025-01-28

    among the many wacky executive orders that President Trump has issued in his first few days in office, one of them is straight up retro.

    I'm referring, of course, to the executive order directing the pentagon to develop a next-generation missile defense shield.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming

    • Devlog 5

      Today it's an early devlog. I've been awake for a few hours now applying for jobs and I realized that I've been massively overcomplicating a core feature of this app.

      [...]

      This morning I've mostly been thinking about data structures to get away from writing handler code. I've also done a little bit of research into unit testing and creating mocked information for my handlers so I can check my logic. Having discussed this with my friend previously, I suspect that writing too many unit tests isn't going to be that helpful and that end-to-end testing is going to be more important, but it never hurts to read!

      The realization I've come to relates to columns. I've been thinking about these data structures somewhat spatially, conceptualizing items in lists and boards. As part of this I've structured the database around boards, lists, items, and list <-> item pairings. The idea is that an item represents a film, and it can be included in multiple lists/have multiple reviews. Each board, then, represents a kanban board containing a list of films. Where my thinking was a bit diseased was in how the columns would function. I had initially conceived the mechanism of items being picked up and moved between lists, but this is entirely the wrong way to think about it. Instead, a column should represent only a "status" with a user-assigned label. When the user picks up the film and moves it to a new column, they're simply changing the status and having the frontend reflect this.