So it looks like I’ve not posted anything on the site for close to two years now. Obviously I haven’t been the best blogger in the world.

Writing

I have written stuff in the last couple years, just not for this blog. I’ve written a handful of informational pieces on some of the little utilities and applications that I’ve written over the years. Those can be found at my GitHub blog. Nothing special, but that is where most of my writing interest has been over the course of this year at least, and even then I haven’t done all that much writing.

Over the last month or two my writing related thoughts have mostly been focused on learning about ways to do documentation via some kind of plain text source file. The one I’ve spent most of my time on at this stage is AsciiDoc. It looks like it could do all that I’m ever likely to want a tool for documentation or book writing to do. The fact that there isn’t really any support for it on iOS is a bummer, especially when compared to Markdown, but it can do so much more than Markdown can. Plus, since it’s just plain text, I could still write it, I just wouldn’t have tools to preview it or generate the final product. Plain text FTW! I just need to find reasons to use it for documentation. I can (and have) put it to some use at work for small personal projects, but I suspect I’m not going to be able to really use it in anger any time soon.

Markdown will continue to be the most sensible thing to use when it comes to writing blog posts, and there are literally dozens of quality apps to choose from when it comes to writing in Markdown on iOS. I’ve written this document entirely on my iPad in Markdown. I started writing in Editorial, but part way through switched to using Byword, just to see if it was a better experience when it came to using an external keyboard. And there are plenty of other options, though I want to try and keep things simple. Some of those apps are a bit pricey (by iOS standards), though if you were to spend much of your time writing they would totally be worth it.

Reading

I’m still all about the Kindle when it comes to reading books. In addition to reading who knows how many articles this year, I’ve finished 31 books so far, beating out my (purposefully conservative) GoodReads Reading Challenge goal of 24 books. Happy with the progress on that front.

I’ve been enjoying the Kindle Voyage that I forked out $300 for, but then they had to go and release the Kindle Oasis, which is what I think I’d really like to be using. However, the Oasis is $450! The Voyage was already a bit of a stretch for feeling like it was good value.

The Oasis looks like it would be a great experience to have in the hand while reading, but it doesn’t really offer anything except a better, lighter feel in the hand. Combined with the eye watering price tag, I can’t see myself being willing to get one for a while. Hopefully the price will come down or something.

Work

Work continues to have plenty to do. With the big v4 Go Live for Queensland coming up in early 2017, there has been a goodly number of projects, both big and small, that needed to be done to get us ready for that. Based on what I know, it looks like that is going well. We’re already positioned well in the market, based on what I’ve been told, and if this goes well then we’ll hopefully be able to consolidate our position at the top of the market.

Apple Related Stuff

iPhone

I had a few cases of odd battery behaviour in the first part half of the year, and when iOS 10 came out around September/October, the battery went to crap. So I caught the train into Perth to visit the Apple Store and they ran some diagnostics and decided to replace the phone for me, which was cool.

What wasn’t cool, was that less than a week later the screen went funny on the replacement, and I had to go and get that phone replaced. It seemed to me that the phone was running, but the screen wouldn’t come on and it was completely unresponsive, and the Apple rep I dealt with said as much after running his diagnostics. Rather unusual behaviour, at least as far as I’m aware. On the plus side, none of this cost me anything, and I got what must be effectively a fresh battery for what was a 2 year old phone. I should be able to make it through till the new phones are out late next year, which is when I plan to get a new phone. I’ll have had this one (and it’s predecessors) for effectively 3 years at that point.

iPad

Noting much on the iPad front. I’ve still got the iPad Air 2 which I think I bought in October of 2015, as a refurb. I wanted something a bit newer than what I had, but didn’t see the value in getting an iPad Pro just yet, so I saved some money and got the Air 2, which was a year old at that stage. It’s held up pretty good. My typical iPad work load is mostly recreational stuff that shouldn’t push the machine too hard, so it’s still going fine even now. I don’t use the split screen feature much, but it’s handy to have at times.

I’m thinking about getting an iPad Pro when they do the next refresh, which will presumably be around March 2017. I hope they bring some cool new features to iOS to help make the iPad a more flexible device. I could already do much of my typical daily workflow on an iPad, and I do, but it would be nice if some of the things that are annoying or hard to do could become easier.

I decided that if I’m going to drop a bunch of money on an iPad Pro, then I really should try to start pushing my use case with the one that I have in order to make sure I’m not paying for power that I’ll not really be taking advantage of. So, I guess the goal between now and when the next iPad refresh happens is to try and stretch myself to do more and more with my iPad. Will be interesting to see how that goes.

On a side note, I’m typing this up on my iPad at the moment, with my regular Apple desktop keyboard attached. It works well enough, though it’s not a very portable configuration at the moment, because I have to provide power to the keyboard for it to function. If I was going to do this on a more regular basis, it would make sense to get an Apple Magic Keyboard, or some other portable Bluetooth keyboard.

This Site

Admittedly I don’t do much with this site, but I’m having vague thoughts about changing the mechanism by which its content is generated, with the primary goals of both simplifying it a bit and also making it something that could be more easily managed and posted to when using my iPad to do all the work. Not sure if it will happen, but it’s definitely a thought that keeps buzzing around in my head.

Tonight I wrote my first haiku for a looooong time (probably not since I was in school). I’ve never made a habit of writing them at any point in my life, but it’s definitely been quite some years since I last had reason to think of one. This one was written about the Miyazaki movie Porco Rosso as my entry into a competition. I feel mildly proud of this one, so I figured I might as well throw it up here on my blog.

moustachioed pig

shiny red plane in the sky

war time is a drag

I’ve recently moved my website from being hosted by Squarespace to a more minimal setup hosted on Hostgator, with the site itself now being created by the handy Statamic. While there is still a lot of stuff that I’d like to do to improve the appearance of the site and add more content, the upshot of these changes is that the content of the site now consists of little more than Markdown files and any images that might be associated with them. I like the idea of keeping my content in simple plaintext as much as possible, so the use of Markdown appeals to me. I didn’t really have any problem with using Squarespace, but it was really over kill given that I basically don’t use my website. Every now and then I get the urge to tinker with it or add some content, but it’s really rather more of a placeholder than an ongoing concern. With my vague plans to add some more fountain pen related content that may change in the future, but past experience tells me that noone should hold their breath waiting for that to happen.

Neat Tools

One of the cool tools I hope to use to help create more of the content for the site is a recently released iOS app called Editorial. It’s basically a text editor on steroids, providing a huge amout of flexibility for building custom workflows that can manipulate text and do a lot of other stuff besides. I’m using it to type this right now, but I’ve only just started to use the app so I’ve got a long way to go before I can take full advantage of it. One of the sources I’ll be using to learn some of what Editorial can do it an awesom (and length) review written by Federico Viticci. He’s been using the app for the last eight months and is big on iOS automation, so there is a lot to read and learn in that article. I’m going to be consuming it in small chunks I think, as there is just too much to take in all at once.

Conclusion

So hopefully there will be more content to come in the months ahead. I’ve got some learning and experimentation to do with Statamic, and more of the same when it comes to producing the content that I have in mind for the site. I doubt that anything will happen quickly, but I like to think that something will happen.

Update time!

Work

Work was a little unusual this week. I’ve been given the go ahead to work on getting the code base for Karisma to compile in Delphi XE, which is much newer than the roughly 14 year old Delphi 5 that we are currently using. Getting the application to compile is easy enough, but the real challnge is getting it to work with and properly support unicode strings. Initially I was thinking that it wouldn’t be a super hard task; sure, there would be challenges and bunch of stuff that needed to be done, but I figured it would be reasonably straight forward. I’ve gotten into it far enough now to realise that I was fairly wrong about that. There is certainly a lot of work to be done, that much I was right about, but while some of that work is easy, much of it will not be so easy. There are a goodly number of library routines that we rely on that need to be replaced or fixed to code with unicode. Fortunately Grahame is working on a bunch of it as well, so hopefully he will handle the stuff that I’m not familiar with.

There’s still a fair amount of work ahead of us, but once it’s all done it should be worth the effort. It will be really nice to start using the new IDE and to be able to take advantage of some of the language features that have been added in the last 14 years. Ranging from something simple like using For Each loops to make writing loops a little nicer, through to perhaps taking advantage of Generics in order to reduce the number of list classes that are largely boiler plate code and only exist so that we can have strongly typed list classes for our objects.

Home

Home life had been fairly uneventful this week. I can’t really say that all that much has happened. I finally got around to doing my tax return, paid my council rates and had to buy a new kettle.

The kettle was a slight adventure. I needed a new one because the old one, which I think is actually less than a year old, seems to have just up and died one day while I was at work and it was sitting idle. Now when I try to turn it on it trips my power. Given that this is the second kettle to die in this fashion since I moved in hear about two and a half years ago, I decided it might be worth getting a kettle that didn’t require power, which meant a stove top kettle. It’s not the kind of thing you see much these days, but they still make them and sell them, so I guess I’m not the only one buying them. I got one that will work on just about any stove top, so I should always be able to use it. It works just fine on my gas stove top (though it does take longer to boil than an electric kettle would) and I now have the added benefit of still being able to boil water during a power outage without having to resort to using a saucepan.

Oh, I nearly forgot. The pens I ordered on ebay finally arrived. After reading about some of the really fine tipped pens that were available from Japan I decided to get some and try them out. So I ordered five black pens with a 0.25mm tip. Looking at the writing produced from such a thin tip it really strange at first, an I’m still not used to it, but I think I like it. It kind of looks like the text was written with a really sharp pencil, an appearance that the black ink no doubt aids. The only slight drawback I’ve encountered so far is that, because of the fine tip, writing can feel (and sound) a little bit ‘scratchy’ depending on how you hold the pen and how hard you press. I’ve found that using the pen a little differently to how I’ve historically used a pend seems to mitigate the worst of it, so it’s probably something that I could train myself out of given a little time and effort.

I guess that’s about it for this week. This has gone on long enough writing about not much at all really, and I’m not quite in the mood to produce another epic like I did last week.

So I am once again, playing catch up for the last two or three weeks since I last wrote something for my blog. On the bright side this is probably the longest period of time that I’ve managed to keep a kind of semi-regular blogging behaviour going, so it’s not all that bad I guess.

As part of writing this entry I’ve just installed Byword and some markdown related TextExpander snippets, so we’ll see how they go. I’ve only just barely started using Byword but I have to say that, so far, it looks quite nice, but from an appearance point of view, and the nice simple functionality that it provides. Only time will tell, but I think I could totally see myself spending a decent amount of time in Byword if I continue to so much writing. I’ve just enabled the paragraph focus feature and it looks nice, though I’m going to need to spend some time experimenting to find out what really works for me. I’ve never really bothered trying to get into the “fullscreen, not distraction” kind of writing, but if my initial impressions are anything to go by, I think I’m going to like it.

Huh, what do you know? I just realised that some of the reviews that I’ve read must have been for older versions of Byword that had different functionality, as this version doesn’t seem to have the option, to configure the number of lines that are included in focus mode. Instead I only have access to Paragraph mode and Single Line mode. This isn’t a huge loss, but it would have been nice to have the flexibility to experiment and see which suited me best.

The Textexpander snippets I installed were developed by Brett Terpstra, and nifty dude who tends to make some quite useful stuff. You can find them at this url if you are so inclined.

Recent Goings On At Work

So what’s been going on at work? Well, we had our performance appraisals last week, and I seemed to get through that without any negative feedback, which is always nice. Granted out reviews are fairly informal, but still, it’s nice to think that you’ve performed well enough that your superiors don’t have anything negative that is worth mentioning. I’ve finally checked in the CIG work for sending request forms from Karisma to iSite via a combination of HL7 messages and DICOM messages, and it’s great to have that burden off my shoulders. Initial testing indicates that it works as expected, so hopefully the roll out will go smoothly.

Last friday was the first of our new HQ Friday’s, where the developers get to spend some time working with HQ and the new C# code base. It made for a nice diversion from the normal maintenance related tasks, and it’s something to look forward to each week. Also, now that CIG is (hopefully) out of the way, I have the opportunity to get started on some newer more interesting tasks, one of which is to spend some time getting the Karisma code up to snuff so that we can potentially move to using Delphi XE instead of being stuck with Delphi 5. D5 has served us well, but it’s around 14 years old now and I think everyone would be happy to be able to move to a newer IDE and the benefits that come from doing so. The main initial thrust of getting the code to work with the newer IDE and compiler will be making all of the string related code work safely with the new unicode strings. That won’t be too hard, hopefully, but there will definitely be a number of places in library code that will need to be fixed. On the up side, with access to some of the new language features such as Generics and (if memory serves) ForEach, it may well be possible to make a larger number of places in the code a bit simpler and easier to read. Generics especially should provide the option to get rid of a large number list classes that only exist in order to provide a strongly typed list for each type of object that we deal with. Not all list classes will be able to be cut because of Generics, but I’d be willing to be that at least 50% of them could probably go. I’m not sure that would affect the compiler performance in a positive manner, but it isn’t likely to hurt and less code to maintain is always a good thing.

(Wow, would you look at that. 788 words and I’ve not really gotten into the personal side of things just yet, or even finished with the work stuff. I guess I really do have a bunch of words bottled up inside me at times. Perhaps with some time and thought I really will be able to make a go of starting a blog at work.)

And speaking of blogs and works, Callan gave me the OK to make a start on a work blog, so I’ll have to spend some time trying to get that up and running at some point. Putting a blog in place is easy enough (I’ve already got a Wordpress installation up and running) but the real challenge will be getting people to pay attention to it and coming up with suitable content on a sufficiently frequent basis to keep people’s interest. I had some ideas on the type of content to post about, but I’m having doubts as to whether I’ll be able to have enough of right stuff to make it worth while. I’m going to have to sit down and have a serious thing about it at some point. I should probably also try to get at least one person from the support team involved. Having involvement from the two major teams will likely make it easier for everyone to take it seriously once it’s up and running.

Things In My Personal Life

As to the personal side of my life…hmm, what have I been up to?

Movie Night

I went and saw the finally Harry Potter movie with doug last Tuesday. We just saw regular session, no Imax or 3D, and it was fine, though the film had a rather noticeable set of “run lines” on screen for a good chunk of the movie. I’m guessing they are the result of the film having been shown a lot, and it wasn’t really a problem (they were restricted to running down the left of the screen, rather than in the middle), but it would have been nice if the screen was clean the whole way through. Since I shouted Doug for the meal and last movie that we saw (Transformers 3), he shouted me this one. We ate dinner at a sushi (kind of) place that have the conveyor belt of goodies. We ordered a main meal that didn’t involve the conveyor belt, but we did end up grabbing a few things from it. I hadn’t eaten at a place like that before and it made for an interesting change. I’d do it again, but if I was going to go back to the same place, I think I’d like to do so when the weather was a bit nicer. It was a cold and wet day, and the restuarant had had some issues with a leaky roof, and because it was kind of outside the cold breeze was a bit annoying. Still, a nice meal and a positive experience all in all.

(phew, and now I’m up to 1283 words and counting. That is quite probably a new record for words written in a single sitting. Maybe I’ve written more at some point in the past, but it isn’t likely. This would certainly be the most that I’ve written for a blog entry since I started back into the recent series of blog posts.)

Well, bugger it. I’ve just discovered that my TextExpander snippets seem to have disappeared at some point. If I had to guess, it was probably something to do with upgrading to Lion, though who knows, as I don’t use them that often. Hopefully if I start writing some more I’ll have an increased reason to use them, especially if I end up doing much writing for the work blog. There should be enough repetition and annoying to type words while doing that kind of writing, that I might finally have a real reason to take some shortcuts with the typing that I need to do.

Census

I filled out my census form today (2011-08-07). I did it online and it took less than 15 minutes. I think they really nailed it for this one. The presentation on the web site was fairly clean and easy to use, and it sure as hell beat having to do it on paper.

The End

It’s probably time to call it quits on this particular, as I’ve just crossed the 1500 word boundary. It looks like I’ve had a quite a ramble this time, so I might have a quick read over it and get it posted.

Until next time.

Again it’s been a while since I wrote anything for this journal/blog or whatever the hell it actually is turning out to be. What’s been going on in my life?

I’m older

Officially that is. Naturally I’m constantly ageing, but this past Thursday was my birthday. I’m now 32 years old, and still have no real idea in what direction I ultimately want my life to lead. Not that that really bothers me. As long as I can keep myself reasonably comfortable and off the streets, I’m not too worried about not inventing a cure for cancer or anything like that.

Upcoming Annual Review

Speaking of not having any plans for myself, my annual work review is on Wednesday. That should be interesting. I don’t think I’ve sucked too badly at much, but I guess we’ll see. As part of this years review we’ve been asked to provide an indication of goals and plans we might like to work on. Since I didn’t have anything big or specific in mind, I put down my interest in trying to write more and possibly doing some web or iOS related development. Who knows, maybe something will come of it. I’ve had the desire to try and write more for a while now (and this ‘blog’ is part of trying to make good on that), so having the opportunity to do so at work would make it a lot more likely that I’ll be able to get a feel for whether it’s something I really would like to do more of, and also whether or not it’s something I have much talent for. If the chance does come up I’m sure I’ll need to work on what skills I do have, but I think I can turn out a fairly readable bit of non-formal text when I want to. Whether or not I can do so on particular topics, which I may have little actual interest in may be a different matter though.

Anything Else?

Umm…no, not really. Not that I can think of anyway. It looks like I’m getting towards the end of my tasks for the CIG project at work, which will be good as the DICOM related task I’ve had hasn’t been something I’d describe at fun. Something of a learning experience for sure, but I’ll be happy to see the back of it.

So it’s obviously been a while since I posted anything to this blog, despite my intentions to try (once again) to get into making some kind of regular writing effort. I can’t say I’m surprised, as this is what happens every time I have the idea of writing a blog. Perhaps I need to find some way to force me to write on a regular basis, maybe something for work. I’ll have to keep that in mind and explore options if the opportunity presents itself.

What I Have been doing

In the numerous weeks since I last wrote something, what I’ve actually been filling my time with is much of the same old stuff. Work fills most of my time, and when I’m not at work there are RSS feeds, articles and manga to read, the occasional casual game to play on my iPad, and the odd TV or anime show to watch here and there. This weekend I’ve spent several hours playing a couple of new games that I scored for free due to the Sony PS3 hacking debacle. I got WipEout HD and inFamous, and I’ve found them both to be fairly entertaining so far. Neither is a game I would have bought on my own, but having now had a chance to experience them I can say that I’d recommend giving them a go if someone ever asked me about them. Slight mini reviews of both will be below, but since I’ve touched on the Sony hacking incident, I might try to put my ideas down in text.

The Hacking of Sony

As the result of a hacking incident the Sony Playstation Network (PSN) was taken offline by Sony for basically a full month (actually a little more than a month if memory serves). This is a pretty significant event, and I believe it’s the first time something with such a significant impact on the users of a console system has occurred since we entered the real of the modern console era, a time where the consoles are online and many games involve multiplayer aspects, with participants in a game often spread around the world. The PR of such significant downtime is obviously bad, but I think the real damage was probably done by the fact that various branches of Sony were hacked several times after the initial incident that resulted in the Sony deciding to take down the PSN until they could secure it. All these hacking events have no doubt greatly shaken faith in Sony, at least for those who care about such things. It has also shown that Sony apparently may not have put any where near enough effort and resource into securing their infrastructure. If these recent events haven’t shown them the error of their ways, then I don’t think anything is likely to do so. At least Sony have provided fairly decent compensation to the users, providing free games, free trials of their Plus membership (or extensions if you are already a member). It’s this compensation that allowed me to get WipEout HD and inFamous for free.

So now that the PSN is back up and running, hopefully it will continue to do so. I don’t tend to play games that require and online connection (to be honest, I don’t play console games much full stop) so the downtime didn’t really affect me all that much, and I’ve benefited by getting some free games. I imagine that Sony and beefed up their security systems and procedures, and will continue to do so, but given the large number of hacks in such a short period of time, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are more hacks announced at some point.

WipEout HD

WipEout HD is a futuristic racing game, where you fly a hovering ship around a track at high speed. It looks quite nice, and I’ve really liked the soundtrack so far. It really seems to fit the style of the game well. The tracks come in a variety of interesting and challenging designs, and I expect them to get even more exotic, as I’m still early in the game at this stage. I can see this game being one that I will return to off and on, even if my actual play time peters out (as it tends to do with nearly all games I play).

inFamous

inFamous is a game that I’d heard of a some time ago, so I think it’s been out for a while now. I think I’m perhaps still too early in the game to make a call on it’s longevity for me at this stage, but I’ve found it enjoyable so far. It puts you in charge of a character who has developed electricity based super powers, and you get to run and jump around a city, scaling building and taking out bad guys are you try to unravel the back story about some shadowy group that seems to be related to how you got your powers. The graphics look good, and the control mechanism is simple enough. I still haven’t mastered aiming when I shoot my lightning bolts, but I’m not the most dexterous of people when it comes to these things (I found I had such trouble controlling the character in Resident Evil 5 that I took the game back. The difficulty I had in doing even the most basic things totally killed what ever enthusiasm I had for the game).

That’s it for now

Well, this is the most I’ve written in a long while. Maybe there is hope for my being able to produce more written pieces after all. I probably just need to try and sit down and put bits of my life into writing, just for the hell of it. Maybe I could try to do a weekly recap of my life. It probably wouldn’t be too interesting most of the time, but I’m guessing that the more I write the easier I’ll find it to come up with things to write about.

Lately I’ve read several articles/posts that have talked about the fact that in order to be creative, to be able to come up with ideas for things, you really need to allow your brain some quiet time. You need to give yourself some space, to keep the distractions, the world, at a distance. It’s not like this is a new idea, I’ve certainly read about this idea previously, but I’m just now starting to really feel that it’s something I should try to put more effort into actually doing.

What this means for people like myself is taking some time to “unplug”. If you’re anything like me then you are fairly constantly hooked into the Internet, in one way or another. Even when I go for my walks, I typically do so while listening to podcasts. Keeping my brain occupied in this fashion is both educational and entertaining but I’m starting to realise that I rarely allow myself any time to just let my brain wander, and I think people are right when they say that it is often during just such moments of idle thought, when the mind is free to do it’s thing, that it will be able to do some of it’s best work.

Sometimes that work will be to provide a solution to something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while, and sometimes it might be an idea that could potentially be the start of a new project. It’s these new ideas that I’m currently looking for, primarily with the aim of getting some inspiration to do some writing, so I think I really need to try and “make some space” for my mind to wander.

I intend to try and implement this today, or this week at the very least, by not listening to a podcast on one of my walks. Instead I’ll listen to some soothing background music and give my mind the better part of an hour to do what it will. Maybe I’ll get lucky and inspiration will hit!

So the plan was to try and write a bit more. It would be fair to say that I haven’t really made any progress on that at the moment, but it’s only been a few days, and two of those I didn’t have a web connection that was any good, so I can give myself a little leeway, yes?

No, I guess not. I’ve even got a couple of articles related to writing queued up waiting to be read. I really must try and get to them before too long.

On a side note, MarsEdit is a nifty app for writing blog posts in. It kind of feels like it doesn’t do much, but whenever I stop and think about what it provides, and the fact that it makes it easy to deal with drafts and post etc locally, and that it would make dealing with multiple blogs and multiple blog hosts fairly easy (thought I don’t make use of that feature, yet), I find myself realising that it’s really the mark of a well written piece of software that it seems like there isn’t much to it, but that it makes things so much easier than they might otherwise be. I may even have to get myself a license once I’m done with the trial period.

So here am, thinking, as I tend to do from time to time, that I want to write more. Once again the urge is upon me to produce, rather than to simply consume. I consume quite a bit of textual content from the web, mostly in article format, and every now and then the urge to create via writing comes to me. Looks like another of those times is here, and once again I’m stuck.

So I want to write. But what? That’s my problem. While I occasionally bang out a short piece of text to document my thoughts on a topic, none of that gives me the feeling of creating something. Sure, I feel like I’ve written something (because I, in fact, have) but it doesn’t scratch the itch to ‘write something’. So where does that leave me? I don’t know. This post is simply an attempt to try and shake some ideas loose and at the same time get at least some kind of writing done.

What I don’t want to create

• Long form fiction. I don’t want to write a novel.

What might I like to create

• Short stories. Really short that is, mainly because I don’t think I have the ideas or patience to do long form stories at the moment. Ficly might be a good way to get started, assuming I could manage to come up with any ideas. I seem to be pretty dry on those.
• Short to medium length ‘articles’. Not sure what these would really be about though, or where I’d have an audience for them. Probably technology or rational thinking and things that are related to frugality and/or minimalism.