Better Late Than Never, right?

Great blog-posts / articles read or videos watched

GPS: Everything I’ve seen from Bartosz Ciechanowski is gold, and this is no exception. The page offers a great intro to how GPS works, with some really cool explorable animations that help visualize complicated concepts.

GPS jamming map

Evolution of Depictions of Elephants, from Uli Westphal’s masters thesis. It’s fascinating to see the game of telephone, as eventually elephants are drawn by people who have clearly never seen one. The line drawings on the web page are mostly based historic artworks (unfortunately many of the links are broken. Some but not all are viewable via archive.org).

Don’t Worry If You Lose Your CPU Sticker, Intel Will Send You One For Free

3 arrested in London over unofficial Club Penguin site

You’re Not Allowed to Have the Best Sunscreens in the World

Absurd Trolley Problems

My Dad and Kurt Cobain

Taipei 101 Mass Damper

Pimp My Casio

Lawyer. Passport. Locksmith. Gun. (A Talk About Risk & Preparedness). The title is a bit melodramatic, but the video had some good tips for commonplace situations like getting locked out, and some more unusual tips like how to legally have multiple US passports.

Welcome to the land that no country wants

Most viewed blog posts by me

Drumroll please… it’s Best Things And Stuff of 2021

Favorite books read

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. This was my introduction to “cozy fantasy”, which was much appreciated during COVID lockdowns. I also read Hands of The Emperor which is arguably cozier, but it’s cozy to the point where it feels like nothing happens for hundreds of pages.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by KJ Parker

Number of books read

18

Number of blog posts written

1!

Miles ridden on my bike

1478, more than triple last year! Around 950 of those miles were from my ~80 days of bike commuting.

I’ve updated the script from last year to be less manual. Instead of having to manually click through pages, it’ll auto-advance throughout all of the available data. Just go to the Strava activity page, preselect the filters (e.g. bike rides, commute), and run this:

function getPerPageTotalMiles(year) {
	return Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('training-activity-row'))
	  .filter(e =>
	    e.getElementsByClassName('col-date')[0].innerHTML.endsWith(String(year)))
	  .map(e =>
	    parseFloat(e.getElementsByClassName('col-dist')[0].textContent))
	  .reduce((sum, dist) => sum + dist, 0)
}
function iterate(mileage_total) {
	console.log("Staring a new page. The total so far is " + mileage_total)
	mileage_total += getPerPageTotalMiles(2022) // Update year if necessary!
	var next_button = document.querySelector('.next_page')
	if (next_button && !next_button.classList.contains('disabled')) {
		next_button.click()
		setTimeout(iterate, 2000, mileage_total)
	} else {
		console.log("All done!")
		console.log("Total mileage: " + mileage_total)
	}
}
iterate(0)

(coincidentally this might be the only Javascript I’ve written all year)

Money spent on gas

$1,288, up from $687 in 20211. I guess that’s the downside of having to leave my hermitage as the pandemic winds down.

Miles driven in my car

4,467¹. Almost the same as last year!

Miles driven in other people’s cars

Sadly don’t have this data handy.

Favorite films/shows

Severance: I don’t remember the last time I watched a TV show this good

Top Gun: Maverick: Honestly a better movie than it had any right to be.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Favorite programming languages (or related) I hacked on/with

Ruby, as always :)

Programming languages used for work-related projects

SQL, Java, Kotlin, Go, Dart, as well as some text configuration languages

Still haven’t read…

The copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach I’ve had for years.

Life-changing technology “discovered”

State of plans from 2022

✅ Commute to work regularly via bike (if I have to go to the office regularly…): It was my most common mode of commute!

✅ More travel: Kept it domestic, but had great trips skiing in Utah and visiting Hawaii.

✅ Reintegrate with post-COVID society

❌ 6 blog posts for the year

Plans for 2023

Because of how late I am with writing this blog post (hence the red X above), I think at this point it would be cheating to finally put my 2023 plans in writing.