Holidays survived, with only minor pain from encounters with laundry detergents. I ought to acquire a real bedroll to spare complication in the future. Spent some nice time with Nate’s parents, acquired plastic plant pots. Got a few books for Christmas that I’d been interested in. We also got a third laptop – a white Asus Eee, which is a sub-notebook, about the size of an A5 book. In fact, it fits perfectly in the case from one of my old day planners. Despite having only a 7″ screen, it’s very usable, and has the advantage of having no disk platters. Its original OS had quirks, but Nate put Ubuntu Linux on it, so it’s happy now.
After we got back, I finished updating move_current.lua for the current version of Ion 3. I haven’t gone through the tedium of submitting it, because Ion’s author has some rather unique ideas about patch submission, but I’ll throw it somewhere findable if anyone cares. This was the first programming task I’d completed in a long time, a good feeling. The Lua features in Ion 3 are quite extensive at this point, and he’s improved the overall design a lot recently. I suspect that most of what I would like to see is implementable with scripts at this point, and would like to spend some time on that at some point, but not until I’ve got a firmer specification for it. “Shiny and awesome” is a little too vague.
In the meanwhile, I’m working on one of several related proofreading interface projects, which are going under the working name of Deske. The current one will hopefully be an XUL interface to PGDP.net. I’ve got first revision mockups made, and some general idea of how to proceed, but I need to learn a great deal more JavaScript before I can write the entire thing. Not a problem–programming languages are great to learn on a whim. The other Deske project, being standalone, would probably be easier for me, but also very different in its redeeming value.
I’ve also been working on cooking again, now that my health is together enough to allow it. Today’s stroganoff was more than passable, so perhaps this time it will work well. It’s being a lesson in how not to write recipes–most of my old cards, while not useless, require more deciphering than I’d like and leave too many measurements to intuition. On Sunday, we re-organized the front room completely. Moved furniture, re-arranged plants, used some of the pots I got over Christmas. The apartment feels much airier and more companionable now. I even managed to put one of the plants in the kitchen, which makes working in it far more pleasant. It seems that I don’t spend time in places unless I put plants in them.
Mmmmmm stroganoff. I did not have luck with that recipe, it always came out too tough, until I started using Cook’s Illustrated. They explained why things are done the way they are in recipes and then I actually did it right.