It’s been a month and a half since I graduated college, and just about a month since I last wrote on the blog. It’s been, well, January. Regardless, I feel it’s worthwhile recapping what I’ve been up to this month. I was in a kinda meh mood today, so let’s try to alleviate that with some stuff I worked on and am admittedly pretty proud of. Kind of a big month!
Frankly, if there is a big focus I can point towards for this month, it has been the clean up and finishing of a few projects and shelved ideas. We’ll get to these shortly.
Arte
First things first, I was in an art high over the holidays and for a fair bit of January. Because I am a Fool, that was plushie art in particular. It is cute. I hope you think it’s cute. Tumblr seems to like it.
My priority for art going into the year has been more colored pieces, and so far, the output has been pretty strong. I’ll admit I haven’t whipped out the X230T for more in the last week or two, but we’ll yknow, start fresh in February. Follow the dcbdoodles page for moree.
Website updates
I’ve been doing more PHP stuff on my personal site. More details on my updates page, which has a new, dynamically generated RSS feed. No, seriously, it parses the html page. Goes crazy.
Lots of fixes to themes for mobile also, so try them if you haven’t. No new themes (I was thinking of making a PMD one earlier?) but the ones that are there work much nicer on your evil rectangle. Well overdue cleanup. I think the site could use more content (programming stuff, a la v4?) but I am quite happy with it.
My iPod subsite’s also had its own updates with a dynamically generated Last.fm playing feed; basically, whatever I’ve been listening to lately. Give it a try if you’re nosy (or ear-y?) I’m really quite satisfied with the result; it does trim down replays and limits artists to a few each, just cleaner, but I think it puts my web scrobbles to good use. That uses this PHP library, which happens to mark my first time using PHP’s Composer package manager.
App releases
I brushed up and released a couple projects on my GitHub. Both of these are Windows-based, but I hope you entertain me talk about them. The first is 09tray, the second is Hours. Both have been on the shelf for anywhere from a year to three but these are stable 😤 releases.
09tray
09tray is a fix for a long-standing issue with Windows Live Messenger 2009, the newest version offered by Escargot (and the new upstart, Crosstalk). It parks the program in your system’s notification area (colloquially, the system tray) like previous versions of Messenger, rather than leaving an extra hidden window in your taskbar. I wrote up a little more on this in the project readme, which you can check out on the repository. It adds a couple goodies too, fast links to common Messenger locations, as well as the ability to set a window title as your current activity status / personal message on it.
Promise it’s simple to set up too, and won’t cause any damage to your install! You can tick it to start up with Windows, and that’ll make Messenger easily accessible from your tray, whether you intend to start Messenger automatically or not (when you double click the icon and it’s not open, it’ll start Messenger for you).
This one I am really happy to have out in the world, a couple years late or not.
Hours
Hours is what I’d considered a more ambitious project, but at the core, it’s pretty simple. It lets you time yourself working on projects or other activities. It’s in a similar vain to setting a Pomodoro timer but just using that to start rather than breaking after 25 minutes is over. Just make an activity for what you’d like to time, perhaps getting through a difficult textbook, or working on something you’re otherwise unmotivated to work on, and it will keep track for you how long your session was when you finished, as well as let you write a brief memo.
That’s the simple description, if you think it’s cool and would rather me not ramble about it, please, skip over below, otherwise, watch out as I’m gonna get a little :feral: Snufkin.
I think the asterisk here, philosophically, is this works better for either stuff you feel you need the discipline to work on consistently anyway (and wouldn’t mind the bit of friction to start timing), or things close by you might be doing anyway such that it wouldn’t add too much effort to time (vidya games). Like if I’m reading Warrior Cats, I’ve decided I really don’t need or want to time that since it’s purely leisure reading (which I’ve started to do on the evil rectangle, before falling asleep; better than YouTube, I guess). But working on a project like 09tray, which I had already needed the final push to get 1.0 out and wanted the little points on my computer to get the ball rolling, I think it works quite nicely.
I think I’d recommend to use it for the things you feel that it would help you with, and if it doesn’t click with you, try it with something else. I know for some things, putting in a session and looking back at how much I got done in that session helps me equate time (some constant I put in) to some result I’m satisfied with, with more certainty. For others, I never really got it to work like that (or haven’t, yet). Then some things like art I just haven’t really tried it in a systematic way and don’t feel the “draw” to (at this time). But then also sometimes the added effort of timing the activity adds more effort to the task such that it’s more difficult to get started (on my -puter, particularly, a mobile version’s going to help with this).
Okay, so I really like this application I made, but it’s not a silver bullet to being 100% productive and awesome forever (during an earlier testing phase, I pushed it a lot, in some parts, to great success, others, less so). Or I’m overthinking it, um. But if it works for you, it’s a win, you know? And for the moment, I won’t be working on it, so that means it’s easier to test it out in practice. So yeah. I think it’s neat.
Parting thoughts
I really wanted to get a blog post out for this month, and I thought I’d carve it out to write it tonight (not timed or anything, but while it was fresh in my mind). Somewhat selfishly since I know things tend to get tuned out in the noise sometimes, and also because the harder to explain things I worked on don’t necessarily have universal appeal.
I kinda recognize my core audience is just me in some areas, namely with programming projects. I do (and hopefully have been) work[ing] to put more care into my hobby projects there, if none other than to stop leaving all this unfinished work on the ground, and try to build what would make my life easier, or sounds fun, like what drew me to programming in the first place. If people dig it, that’s hot, but also an extra. (Hopefully building some realistic experience for career stuff in this process, also, it isn’t particularly evident with VB stuff, maybe, but I’ve been poking at more modern C# GUI frameworks, so maybe we’ll see what comes of that.)
I didn’t want to be terribly rosy, but I don’t want to be nihilistic either, because well, that isn’t really me. At least personally, it can be tough to appreciate what you’ve accomplished when you aren’t seeking it out, and for the last couple days, I don’t think I have been, for how much I did work on this month. I think not having school, per se, albeit with a part time job, shakes up the perspective a lot. While I have my reservations, I think January was a fine month for me developmentally, and hopefully a few things stand out there to others as well. I’m gonna read a bunch, keep going with the applications and interviews as I have luck with them, and try to chillax heading into the next month.
