Monday, July 8 2019

Good Morning!

I'm feeling refreshed today, and eager to get back to work. I took a pretty long nap yesterday, which allowed us to stay up a bit and knock out some episodes of Stranger Things. Speaking of Stranger Things, I couldn't be happier watching season 3 right now. I have some thoughts:

I love the contrast between how little the characters know about what's going on with how much the viewer knows what's going on, observing all the story lines. You can stay a few steps ahead of all the characters and draw conclusions before they do, which creates a lot of dramatic irony and suspense. I love the Dungeons and Dragons parallels. Last night I noticed that if you pay attention to Will's Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, they usually describe what's going on in the season, e.g. "the peaceful town is threatened by a dark force coming out of the swamp." I'm not that familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, but each of the characters in the show kind of plays out like a character with their own special skills. Winona Ryder is really good at playing a mom from Indiana who flips out over weird things happening to her appliances. This is the only spoiler I'll give, but magnets on her fridge are the new Christmas lights.

So yeah, I couldn't be happier with this season. Season 1 & 2 were good, but I just wasn't gaga over the show until now.

So what else is going on. Ah, yesterday I hacked on my blog code a bit. I added a generated feed.xml file. I set up an IFTTT service to post to my family's slack channel whenever I added a new entry, and I'm also thinking about hooking it into twitter. With another side project almost completely wrapped up, my head is filled with all kinds of fun ideas to work on. I think next I might hack some more on "edgar". The idea is pretty out there, but "edgar" is a home automation assistant that you talk to with consoles around the house. At first he'll have a very simple shell in which you can launch modules. I came up with something like this last night.

{.example} EDGAR> groceries Launching groceries module. Available commands: add delete show exit GROCERIES> show black garbage bags gallon ziploc bags sippies cups GROCERIES> add milk, eggs, butter Added milk, eggs, butter

I have plenty of ideas for modules, but a grocery list would be a good one to start with. If I get a chance to work on it tonight, I'll be sure to bring back some updates.

Alright, time to get going. Let's have a wonderful day!