Recent changes

(What is this?¹)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Palestine. I went to a local demonstration calling for a ceasefire on Saturday. On Sunday, the local paper ran a long story about a new Zimtschnecke shop but no mention of the thousand or so people calling for peace.

Books

I am nearly finished with Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza: An inquest into its martyrdom. I started on Ilan Pappé’s Ten Myths About Israel. If you have book suggestions on this topic, I am happy to accept them.

More books

I’m working through (poorly titled, as the author concedes) The explosive child. While I’ve been onboard with the “find a solution that works for everyone” and active listening approach to parenting for a while now, one thing it’s made me realize is that I’m too often trying to problem-solve in the crisis moment, and that’s quite difficult if not impossible. Better to proactively discuss problems (not behavior) and figure out how to solve them before it’s too late.

Up next: Gergely Orosz’s The Software Engineer’s Guidebook, which arrived in the post last week.

Music

I’ve started transcribing a taksim, an improvisation in the hicaz mode by Ömer Erdogdular. My ney teacher introduced me to the Transcribe! app. After using youtube-dl to download the video and convert to mp4, I can drop the video into Transcribe!, where I can adjust the pitch (my ney is slightly lower than Ömer’s in this video), slow down, chop the music into smaller pieces, and isolate individual tones. Much better than relying on YouTube’s built-in slow down feature!

Code

I’m trying to decide what to do with a few projects I started, but haven’t seen much traction. Early warning bot notifies you as soon as a job in a CI build fails; useful because our full CI suite takes 20 minutes to run for MediaWiki. Fix suggester bot generates Gerrit fix suggestions for phpcs violations. mw-metal is a simplified setup and maintenance script for host-based development environment for MW.

Other things

I’ve got a new, very comfortable office chair and a new-ish keyboard, both of which are conspiring to keep me at my desk much more than I’d like; I’m going to try to get back to my coffee shop visit work routines. (Typically that is 1-2 hours there a few days a week.) Having some time around real people is nice, as a remote worker. Especially now as we enter the dark days of winter in Germany.