Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
I’ve been to thousands of hours of math lectures and tonight was the first time I saw an honest to goodness math accident! There weren’t buckets of blood, but there was quite a bit. Fortunately I came prepared with band-aids.

The injury was to the professor’s hand, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t due to excessive hand-waiving…

I haven’t been forced to use it in a while, but I just noticed that six of the last seven comments I’ve left on blogs using Disqus have been marked as spam. Typically they’re well reasoned, thoughtful, and very un-spammy. The one that wasn’t marked as spam was apparently done so by the site owner them self that ultimately noticed the issue and unmarked it.

I’m at a loss as to why the system would be marking them this way, particularly given my experience with how other systems flag things as spam. I feel like I’m being moderated out of existence by a poorly written algorithm.

I wonder if the blog owners are aware of what they’re missing out on by using such a painfully dreadful system?

In honor of Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 this week, for free (hosting and domain registration not included) I’ll offer to build one journalist or academic a basic IndieWeb-capable WordPress-based portfolio website to display and archive their personal work.

Preference will be given to those in attendance at the conference, but any who need an “author platform” for their work are welcome. Comment or reply below by 11/25/17 to enter.

 

Spent a chunk of the afternoon working on the book for NaNoWriMo. I’ve pushed out 1,214 words in sections on rel-me, themes, and added some additional outline material. It’s coming along at a nice clip. I’ve also worked on \label{key} and \ref{keys} for cross referencing things a bit more nicely to make the editing portion next month go more smoothly.

It dawns on me I ought to update my totals to date on the NaNoWriMo website. (Oops!)

I’ll come back later tonight to (hopefully) add some additional material, but here’s the count:

Currently: 1,214 words.
Total: 18,528 words

I did manage to eek out about a thousand words today somewhat related to the book for NaNoWriMo, but since none of them will actually end up in it in the end, I’m going to count it as a zero. I did manage to do a good bit of additional reading, research, and thinking however, so it felt like a good day despite the low number.

I am still at 1,574 words per day on average for the month, so I am relatively close to the 1,667 average I’m supposed to be keeping up. This doesn’t seem bad to me given the amount of time I’m putting into testing out some pieces and research I’m doing along the way. I think is only the third day with a total of zero words for the day too, so I don’t feel as bad.

Today: 0 words
Total: 17,314 words

Blarg!! It would have been a much better day, but somehow, after listening to a podcast this very morning in which they dispensed the advice “Don’t write in the CMS” I managed to do just that and lose about 1,500 words! I bounced back after wasting an hour trying to do some recover and churned it all out again–this time in my editor as is fitting and proper.

Today: 1,607 words
Total: 17,314 words

And Shazam! Take that NaNoWriMo! This is the kind of day I need to be doing more of… The research and work is paying off. I once heard a quote in which Mozart described how he wrote music. It entailed something along the lines that he worked on it in his head and then dumped it all out on the page much like a cow urinates. Today I know how that feels.

Today: 3,667 words
Total: 15,707 words

A meh day for my NaNoWriMo project as I’m turning in a goose-egg for the day. I feel a bit bad that this update post is more words than I manufactured for the main project. I did do a bit of reading/research and fixed a relatively large \LaTeX error I was having for the last two days, so that is something I suppose.

Some of the research and work will actually result in some physical changes to my site later this week to, so that’s a bonus I suppose! (I’m not counting any lines of code toward the book though.)

Today: 0 words
Total: 12,040 words

An okay NaNoWriMo day, but I’m falling behind on word count as I occasionally stop for some research and reading. I suppose I should be glad that I’m typesetting most of this as I go, so when the editing portion is done, I’ll physically have a book! The number of chapters and material I want to add is growing as I write too which makes the finish line continue moving as I write.

Today: 909 words
Total: 12,040 words