Today was the first truly bad commute in NYC. Train got stuck for at least fifteen minutes, so I ended up abandoning the G train and walking a bit, which was fine, because it was gorgeous out! During my walk and long commute, I listened to the latest Design Matters. Morley talked about how a mentor told her to look in the mirror and say "I love you" every day for a year. I found this concept frightening, which is very interesting to me. Her following point really hit the idea home, which was "if you can't love yourself, how can you expect others to love you" (paraphrased). Later in the day, I was watching Kendrick Lamar perform "i", and I realized he was saying the same thing, so I read through the lyrics. The annotations led me to this gem by Kendrick:
How can I have love for my partner next to me, or my city… if I don’t have love for myself?
That thought will probably bubble around in my head for a while.
Anyways, once I got in, I finished WalkBot v1. It just posts the weather so far, and needs some serious refactoring, but hey, I finished something!
In the afternoon, our walking group walked to the water. Let me reiterate: It was so beautiful and warm out. I wore a t-shirt!
One we got back, I read through some of the Kata seeds. These reminded me of "Conway's Game of Life", and I thought about building one in javascript. I read through the wikipedia page, but didn't go farther than that.
We then had our Thursday project presentation. A lot of cool projects, which was pretty inspiring. All these projects made me want to do cooler and doper stuff.
Afterwards, I started working on redesigning my blog. I first fixed how private posts are handled (made sure they wouldn't show up in RSS), and then went looking for inspiration. I found a few that I liked that matched what I think I wanted for this next version.
Then I coded it up! Thanks to @dmpatierno for the design critique.
Before and after:
I still need to fix the time display, and fix the "Archives" and "Stats" links. But progress is progress!
(After all this, I updated natwelch.com because the content was out of date)