#but I finished it on my iPad to relax in between classes :D

[kyurochurro]

they did the monster mash!! 😳 🎃it was a graveyard smash!! 🦇👻

[jostylr]

What a year: 2017

This year has been a long year. Much of it centered on the national news. The anger and threats. The crumbling of icons to harassment. The feeling of powerlessness as the majority is ignored in the country. The non-stop desire to see what other embarrassment or trauma was in the news. None of that was good, but good did come out of it.

It was a year of endings for me and, in that ending, hope of new beginnings.

Apple

The only apple device I currently use that I used at the start of 2017 is my iPad Pro. In the spring of 2017, my 2009 iMac died (hard drive failure). It was a slow death which held the promise of maybe keeping it as a display monitor. I tried to use just my Macbook air and either use a dedicated external monitor or the 2009 iMac screen. Both ultimately ended in failure (the dedicated ones never looked good with the MBA while the iMac had catastrophic heat failure).

I ordered a new iMac in May, but they released a brand new version at WWDC. It was just within my return window so I returned the old new one and got a new new one. Been happy with it ever since.

My MBA died in November. It was working fine one moment and then it was dead the next. The repair would have cost more than a new refurbished one at MicroCenter (Apple no longer makes my beloved 11" MBA) and so I got that. Looked briefly at the Macbook but the keyboard felt like pounding on concrete.

iPhoneX came out and I just had to get it despite getting a lot of flack for paying so much for a new phone. I love it. I love the FaceID login flow, the smoothness of it all, the screen, and the camera is just fantastic. Low light, no problem. Crystal clear video. Cool zooming. I am not that much into taking pictures anymore, but this makes me wish I were. I might explore Halide a bit with it to learn more about digital photography. My daughter inherited my iPhone6; she was another motivation as her iPhone4S (my old one) died suddenly.

I bought the iPhoneX and the iPhoneSE for my wife using a tradeoff of a new carrier: Xfinity Mobile. We were paying $90 a month for AT&T. After our first month, we paid $25 for Xfinity Mobile, $12 for 1GB usage level (we used 200Mb) and $13 in taxes. The taxes are non-negotiable, but the $12 could disappear if we used less than 100Mb -- seems unlikely).

So in one year, I got a new iMac, MBA, and iPhone. If FaceID comes to the iPad and they redesign the Apple Pencil to have an eraser part, then I would consider replacing the iPad Pro too.

I also bought AirPods and absolutely love them. They can be a little slow to switch between devices, but otherwise, I am very pleased with them. Being wireless is incredible, and pausing when I take them out is a fantastic feature. I don't use the taps very much. The quality is fine for me and the range is great. Also, when they run low on power, I can charge one at a time. I don't often run out of power, but in the times I do, it comes in handy. I also enjoy sharing them with my wife when we are watching something together that is not intended for our daughter.

Apps

While speaking of Apple, there are a few apps that I find amazing to use:

Mac

Yoink. Drag and drop files onto the side, then find where to put them, drag them out. I find this works very well for me as I like to segment out my process in exactly this way: First find it, then figure out where to put it.

Grand Perspective. This is blowing my mind away. It can scan any folder (or the whole drive) and show in nested blocks the storage area. As one mouses over the blocks, it shows how much space and what file it is. This is a great way to get an understanding for where the space goes. Pretty too.

Magnet. Still early days for me, but this is a windows manager for snapping to a few specified areas using the keyboard. It seems to do exactly what I want though having a few more options would be very useful for me.

The indispensable apps I use all the time are, of course, MacVim, SourceTree (git), Terminal (ssh, literate-programming), 1Password, and the browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Some storage programs and some math apps are listed below.

I also acquired AffinityDesigner. It looks awesome and I hope to use it, but I have not yet had an opportunity to really delve into it.

iOS

To be honest, I have tried a number of apps, but there are not that many that really captures my attention. I continue to use SafariBooksOnline, Reeder, Firefox Focus, all for consuming.

Love you to bits. This is a graphical game that reminds me strongly of text-based games. My daughter and I both enjoyed playing through it. It is the spiritual successor to the much beloved (and gone) Tiny Thief.

GrafnCalc83. A wonderful touch implementation of the TI-83. I have the actual calculator, but the iOS version is a joy to work with while being very faithful to what the TI-83 would produce.

Many of the apps I come across seem to demo nicely (IKEA furniture placement app, for example), but I simply do not use that many despite having a lot of them.

I do use Notability for writing out notes on my iPad. It was particularly useful in conjunction with Screenflow in doing videos of working out mathematics problems.

I have also used AstroPad for converting my iPad into a graphics tablet for my desktop.

Storage

With all the failures of my devices this year, backup has certainly been on my mind. I had pretty good luck with them all except for my daughter's iPhone4S though I am not sure that there was anything much lost on it. Right now, I am using iMazing to do backups to an external drive connected to my iMac. They do it wirelessly to all the devices and this seems to be working fine.

For the desktop and laptops, I use Carbon Copy Cloner 5 and back the laptops up once a month. I also have Arq which backs up the high use folders (desktop, downloads, documents, my repositories) to OneDrive. Additionally, I have a main external storage folder that keeps a bunch of stuff, such as the photo library and I back that up to another external drive.

I just finished sorting all the many "messy desktop" folders all around and consolidating all the materials. Saw some interesting memories along the way, including my Tiddlywiki experiments. I have my OneDrive sync folder with a variety of documents that I find useful. I hope to keep it in sync with the folders on the main Storage device, probably using rsync.

Storage is still a bit of a pain, but I am hoping to work at it.

Currently, I have Amazon Cloud Storage and OneDrive. They are both very nice. I opted to not go with iCloud because I could not understand how to control what was syncing where. It sounded like they try to stuff my hard drives full and manage it. I am a big fan of having control even if it does cause me headaches of organization.

Jobs

My jobs have certainly changed a bit this year. I quit one part-time online teaching gig because I did not like the direction it was heading. I also wanted to have more time for other efforts. But another of my part-time online teaching gigs has been going crazy with enrollment so instead of 2 semesters, it looks like I will be teaching 3 semesters in the year.

I also left the neighborhood association. I am quite pleased to no longer be going to meetings.

My Arts&Ideas job also expanded to include a summer camp for our students. It went well and we expect to continue it. It is a very different feel, much more relaxed, but it also takes up a lot of time. I did feel that having limited free time helped keep me focused on working on what I was concerned with.

Healthcare

We have used CareFirst since going on our own about five years ago. We initially had $300-500 in premiums per month, but last year it spiked to $900 and now this year it would be $1500. This is insane given our income levels. So we switched to KaiserPermanente for about $500 a month after subsidies. I worry about the stability of the health system, but I guess we'll take it one year at a time.

This year, none of us needed medical help, that I can recall. In previous years, I had sicknesses and a surgery, but this year was a healthy year.

I did get a FitBit which has helped me stay motivated to move around. My weight is not moving in the direction I want it to, but it does seem at least stable. My goal is to lose about 30 pounds from where I am now.

Shoes and Sandals

This is the year when my feet stopped wanting to wear shoes. Shoes I have worn for a long time became uncomfortable. Perhaps my feet have gotten wider, perhaps I just have transferred my claustorphobia to my feet.

In any event, I started wearing sandals. All the time. Even with socks. To deal with weather, I have overshoes. One pair ($10) is for rain and light cold or snow. Another pair is expensive ($100) but are built for heavy winter use.

I have used both of them, I find them amazing. They look a little dodgy, but I love to wear my sandals and this is a neat separation of the external needs. The foot size of these overshoes are very large, but my feet are securely placed inside thanks to the sandals.

Inside, I have the comfort of open-toed sandaling.

RPG

Pushed by the students at Arts&Idea, I have been working on a new role-playing system based off of D&D. I call it self-directed role-playing. It takes the classes and breaks them up into individual skills. The system is complicated for the assignment of experience points and requires a computer. I also revamped the magic system to open it up to characters in a more general way. The combat is largely opposed rolls of attack versus defense. The initiative system is also computerized to allow for a dynamic ordering based on trying to make everyone feel like they are participating more (the less well one does or the more minor the action, the sooner one gets to play again; also defending slows one down a little as defending is rolling dice).

One neat feature (I hope) is that instead of a d20 for everything, the skills start at d4 and work up to d20, gaining modifiers at each level. Since attack and defense are opposed, this should balance out, regardless of how it goes, but I am hoping to reduce some of the random swings of fortune while still giving the thrill of rolling. The damage is a multiplier based on weapon and other factors, multiplied by how well one does in succeeding in the attack.

The biggest question is whether we can run this at a fast speed.

I hope this deals with the problems I have with D&D. The material is very nice and thorough, but the system has always felt not quite right. I have done some playtesting with a brave group of guinea pigs. In a week, I hope to begin two groups working through the prepared D&D adventures of Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd.

Fifth Staff

We spent the year at school looking to hire a fifth staff. It was quite a journey. We learned a lot, had a lot of fun with the Hiring Committee, and we finally did find someone that we are all very excited to join us.

But it is tough to envision a fifth person. We have been a tight group of four, knowing each other quite well. We can anticipate how each reacts and we have the bonds to both care about the others while also being free to oppose one another.

I have confidence in the person we hired, but it will take time to adjust.

We also hired a professional cleaner for bi-weekly cleanings. This has also been an adjustment.

Development

I have found this year to be difficult to work on my projects. I have added some to literate programming. I entered this winter break with the intention of redoing it, using Promises or perhaps Observables. But on looking at the options, I realized I love my Event-When paradigm. So I have spent the vacation trying to improve that, which is still a work in progress, but I am pretty happy with some of the innovations. It strikes me as the mental model that works well for me: events happen, stuff reacts to it. This is a bit silly in terms of scientific or mathematical computations (maybe), but for user interaction stuff, it is perfect. Even in the realm of math and science, events can be a way to break problems into separate computations.

My goals are to finish the Event-When rewrite, incorporate that into Literate-Programming and update all of that. With luck, I could get that done by May.

Once that is done, or perhaps concurrently, I intend to finally get my own blog system going and MathPebbles. So much to do and I still need to do A&I internal web stuff.

I am captivated by the ideas of mathematics and physics. I have been taking breaks from programming this vacation and retreating to reading mathematics. There is so much to explore and understand. This is what I hope to bring to MathPebbles. I think one idea for the site is to thread some pebbles together as a kind of companion to some good math books. I used to think of writing a math book, but there are plenty of those in existence. What is needed is a platform for exploring mathematics in a way that is most helpful to those learning. I absolutely love GeoGebra, WolframAlpha, Desmos, but they all strike me as giving answers while skipping much of the journey. I want to remove the burden of the manual computations, but facilitate stepping through the process rather than shortcutting it.

Family

Family has been good. My daughter is growing up fast. While only six, she seems much older. She has just lost her two front teeth. She is into Legos this year, working diligently in following the instructions of the sets. While I always enjoyed the free form method, I have to admit it is pretty cool to see the constructions she makes.

My parents are definitely getting older. We have had some conversations in trying to prepare for the inevitable, but I get the sense that when disaster finally strikes, I will be completely unprepared. I can't help but continue to think that our society is most failing the young and the old. Our lack of neighborly community, shall we say, hurts them the most.

I do worry that I spend too much time working on my projects when I should spend more time with my daughter and my parents.

My wife is going through her own journey. The new year may see some significant changes to our lives as she takes on a new direction.

Future

I am hoping this year will be pretty stable in terms of my jobs, devices, and time usage. My hope is to get MathPebbles going full blast along with finishing up Literate Programming and Event When. There are some internal projects at A&I to do as well as the RPG to run.

Each year, I hope to get further into my many projects. There are books and other projects I want to do, but I think the biggest desire is MathPebbles. So let's hope this is the year for that!

Sunday will be a day to declutter, clean, and refocus each week on the upcoming week. Discipline is the call to action.