Posts
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It's not really leaving if you have somewhere better to be
2022 is proving to be a year of many profound changes. There are two big transitions going in my life: one professional, and one personal.
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On finishing what you started
In the best of times, “year in review”-style blog posts can be inspiring and provide an important sense of closure. When it’s not the best of times, they can be painful reminder of your own misgivings and missteps. Time has moved differently over the last two years, and the calendar itself no longer feels like a good marker of even the progression of days and months that have intervened. But here I am, wanting for the closure that such a review would provide. It feels dissatisfying not to remember that I have finished many things over the last 13 or 14 months, but the struggle to articulate them all has been incredibly real. While I may not touch on all of them, the goal is to describe some highlights to help me retain some perspective.
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Cons(train)ed music: a kit for the traveling ambient artist
After an intense year and a half (pandemic, work, other personal stuff) I needed a vacation. I booked a trip on the Amtrak Empire Builder to go from Seattle to Milwaukee and Chicago. Because of persistent low-grade burnout, I wanted to use the considerable time I’d have offline to work on creative projects including music and writing. This is a brief writeup inspired by The Setup that talks about what I brought with me in an effort to travel relatively light.
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On Sourcery, or the enclosure(?) of remote access
In this post, I try to unpack some of my concerns around Sourcery as raised in my Society of California Archivists keynote, and how they relate to the visibility of archival labor, austerity, and enclosure. -
IAH Forecast - Disquiet Junto Project 0476
An experiment with recording a new single using VCV Rack and REAPER based on a compositional prompt. I ended up recording two tracks. -
Perfecting a favorite: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
I have a horrible sweet tooth, and I absolutely love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I tend to bake as a means to cope with stress, and of course, more often then that means making these cookies. After making many iterations, I’ve settled upon this recipe as the ultimate version to which all compare.
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In Memoriam and Appreciation of Rob Casson (1974-2020)
The world lost one of its brightest and most charming lights earlier this week, Rob Casson. Many of us knew Rob through the Code4Lib community and conferences and his work at Miami University Libraries. We miss his generosity, patience, sense of humor, and genuine kindness. Those of us who got the chance to socialize with him also remember his passion for music, and some of us were even lucky to see live shows in the evenings between conference sessions and other social activities.
On Sunday, October 4 at 1:30 PM Pacific/4:30 PM Eastern, those of us who knew him through Code4Lib and the world of libraries are encouraged to gather to share our memories of him and to appreciate his life and work. Please join me and my co-organizers, Mike Giarlo and Declan Fleming on Zoom (registration required).
Robert Casson (robcaSSon), 30 Jan 1974 - 29 Sep 2020. Photo: Declan Fleming.
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First SOTA activation
About a month ago, I got my ham radio license, and soon after I got pretty curious about Summits on the Air (SOTA), an award scheme focused on safe and low impact portable operation from mountaintops. While I like to hike, I’m arguably a pretty casual hiker, and living in California provides a surprising number of options within 45 minutes driving time for SOTA newbies.
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Optimizing friction
Over and in response to the last few months, I’ve been reflecting about intentionality, and how I spend my time creating things. I have tried to improve the indiewebbiness of my site, and understanding what it means to “scratch my own itch”. This resonates particularly lately because it’s leading me to mull over which parts should be hard and easy. Unsurprisingly, much of that is personal preference, and figuring out how I want to optimize from the perspective of user experience. Friction in UX can be a powerful tool, part of what I’m trying to find is where I want to retain friction as it helps me remain intentional.
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A Hugo shortcode for embedding Mirador
I spent a little time over the last day or so trying to bodge together a shortcode for Hugo to embed an instance of Mirador. While it’s not quite as simple (or full-featured) as I’d like, it’s nonetheless a starting point. The shortcode generates a snippet of HTML that gets loaded into Hugo pages, but (unfortunately) most of the heavy lifting is done by a separate static page that gets included as an
<iframe/>
within the page. That page parses URL parameters to pass some of the parameters when Mirador gets instantiated.Getting a consistent way to load multiple IIIF manifests, either into comparison view or for populating a resource list also needs some work, which also led me to grapple with thinking through the IIIF Content State API spec, which will require some more attention, too.