Blog

At the beginning of the month, I started East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I'm now about a quarter of the way through and can't decide whether I should push through and finish, or just call it and move on.

It was a mostly good month. Still can't believe there was a stretch of 90° weather mid-month, but here we are.

One of the things I sometimes deal with on my media repository is my NAS waking up. It means that sometimes actions taken like saving an item or updating progress take a little bit more time than normal. It's a minor annoyance, but I wanted something that could indicate to me that I did indeed click the button and the form is processing. To do this, I added a loading indicator to the button and turned it into a web component.

This was originally going to be a note after reading Mauro Bieg's piece, Is AI causing a repeat of Frontend’s Lost Decade?, but I think I have more thoughts than what generally fits for a note here.

I've been working on my photography site of late, trying to get it back online since I took it offline however many years ago. One thing I knew I wanted was a way to view a larger version when clicking an image. I've used several JavaScript libraries over the years to handle these lightboxes, but this time around I wanted to see how I could do with using the <dialog /> element and a little bit of JavaScript.

I know Obsidian added Bases almost a year ago, but I recently started using them at work and for my blogging, and wow. They're far more powerful and useful than I originally thought they were. Even as I begin writing this, I'm finding new things I can do with them.

I recently wrote about how I was building out my data repository using React rather than what my media repository’s current stack is, HTML/CSS/VanillaJS/Web Components. Part of my original decision was a little bit of laziness, but at the end of the day, I think I want to have a platform that is built without frameworks, and without too many dependencies I have to worry about. The backend will still be Node, TypeScript, with dependencies, I’ll have to maintain, why not lessen the burden on the frontend.

I have two projects under way right now. The first is my photography site. I set it as an aspiration this year and I’ve been making good progress. The second is an evolution of my media repository into a data repository for me to track my media, and a lot more.

I recently wrote about wishing book clubs would work for me. I’m still not entirely sure they will, but I happened to notice that my local independent bookstore has a sci-fi book club and that they recently read Children of Time. I was actually kind of sad missed that one as I loved that book, and the series as a whole so far as I’m reading the fourth book in the series, Children of Strife. I happened to notice that May’s book is Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View. Being a Star Wars fan, it piqued my interest and since the library had it, I figured why not?

Towards the end of 2019 I started playing goalie in ice hockey. I picked up the sport in 2013 but always played as a skater. I thought playing goalie looked like fun, but there was a high price point to it, and my wife didn't particularly like the idea of people shooting pucks at me. She thinks I'd have to be nuts to want to play goalie, and she might be right.

April was a busy month. It seemed like every weekend something was going on. It wasn't necessarily bad, just felt like I hardly got time to rest. The weather has also been all sorts of crazy jumping between freezing and almost 90ºF. Where's my spring weather where I can sit out on the porch in the evening.

Baseball is in an interesting place right now. The changes they've implemented over the last few years to speed up the game and produce more offense have been generally successful. Games don't feel like quite the slog they used to and viewership is back on the rise. My team, the Philadelphia Phillies have been competitive. We've been to the playoffs the last 4 seasons, were in the 2022 World Series and are back-to-back NL East champs. This season however, while still early, is looking, well, to put it charitably, not looking good.