We don't have to shout any more

Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea.

Paul Ford, in God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

I am a Christian and Paul's analysis of the Tower of Babel story is a better interpretation than most. I'm not saying that the self-destruction of Twitter was divinely orchestrated (though, James 4:13-14 is appropriate), but the fact that a large centralized space is falling apart is indicative of the dangers of putting efforts and energies into those kinds of structures. Our social networks are normally small. Our families, neighbors, and work colleagues are a small group. We're built for small interactions and trying to replicate that up to the millions goes against the nature of people.

I left Twitter this year after nearly 12 years on the platform. I wasn't there from the start, but it was a long time. Honestly, it feels like when I left facebook almost 10 years ago. I don't miss it becuase for the most part, save a few unique examples, it wasn't relationship. It wasn't community. It was a bunch of people standing in the square just shouting.

Other interesting finds this week

• I've always felt weird about watching streamers and I think this post starts to capture why.
• I'm doing more code editing with Helix and I'm realizing that I need many, many more snippets and aliases to work efficiently. Hyde has a good roundup of his setup.

Community is on my mind today and I think it's because of three different, but related, experiences I've had in the last couple of days.

I'm reading Hannah Coulter for the first time and a large portion of this book is the idea of The Membership. We're members of our communities. Sometimes, this is by default (family). Other times, it's by adoption or in shared interests and goals. It's an allegory, but the point is that you are free to leave the community at the same rate it is possible to join others. There is loss when members of the community decide to leave and that's something my wife and I talk about a lot, especially raising our kids with an ethic of doing good work.

In academia, this is called situated cognition or situated learning. You have to be in the culture of the thing you're learning in order to fully appreciate the implications of that skill or behavior. We're teaching our children the value of good work by doing good work. It's part of how we live day to day. The fruits are starting to show in the older girls and our prayer is that the values we're living are kept in some way by the kids as they grow. Hannah has the same prayer.

The point is that these lived experiences can be learned. I didn't grow up as a beekeeper, coder, artist, or flower farmer. Those are all things I have pushed into intentionally. I want to know the culture of those activities and the only way to do that as a learner is to push in. I'm imitating behavior and learning to act within the norms of those communities.

The other day, I did a small sketch of the field out back. I was happy with that step and then decided to add some watercolor. I was not happy with that result. I made a small post comparing the two without expecting anything and I got encouragement and advice from the community. Wisdom comes through the lived experiences.

We're built for small communities. I'm appreciating the depth of experience you can find in smaller spaces.

What a headline

• The Jerusalem Post had one of the best headlines covering an astronomical event in Texas this week: Corgi-sized meteor as heavy as 4 baby elephants hit Texas - NASA
• Prepend an online recipe with "cooked.wiki" (cooked.wiki/https://...) to remove the life story from the kale and potato soup you want to make. (h/t Kai)
• This site lets you filter Google Fonts by stylistic tags (like "flared", "art deco") rather than the standard "serif", "display", etc. This can make finding fonts by theme much easier. It's also open source. (h/t Stef Walter)
• If you're a Mastodon post bookmarker, you should take a look at this little service by Markus Unterwaditzer to get an RSS feed for tracking. I use bookmarks constantly, so this is a big help for my workflow.

Another blog directory

I've made a specific effort to expand my RSS reading this year. I've subscribed to some new sites via Mastodon, which works well, but only as well as what I look at there.

I came across a directory of blogs at ooh.directory which has topically-categorized blogs from all over the Internet. There's a lot to go through but it's become a handy site to look at from time to time when I'm looking for something new. There are currently 1500+ sites with new ones being added regularly. It has a high proportion of arts & media, which is not a realm I'm connected to, so it's a good way to expand my influences.

Whatever you use, remember that these notes are necessarily only an intermediate form. They don’t become understanding or thoughts until you integrate them. You need to be able to review them, and storing them safely is always useful, but, paradoxically, notes aren’t the be all or end all of the notetaking process.

Source: The Different Kinds of Notes, found on https://www.eleanorkonik.com/2023-02-11/

Over the years, I've gone back and forth on how to efficiently and effectively take notes. I've tried plaintext, bullet journals (but one of those ugly, functional ones), Apple Notes, Obsidian, Bear, Joplin...if it's a notes thing, I've probably tried it. Currently, I'm using a digital notebook, Google Docs (while assigning tasks), and a todo.txt style to do list on my computer. I've always seen notes as a means to an end, putting my brain on paper so my actual brain has more space to do other stuff.

I read Baldur's post very slowly and carefully because it's a much deeper dive into notetaking than I've done on my own. Granted, he's building a new app to handle some of the missing nuance in digital notetaking options and I've not really had to wrestle with the idea at that level on my own. That said, the post got me thinking about why I take notes and whether or not that was sufficient for effective and impactful work.

My notetaking is generally utility. There are sometimes I use my notebook to make sense of thoughts or to sketch out a side project idea. But, nine times out of ten, I'm offloading. I'm getting thoughts on paper that will remind me to do something else later. I don't usually take the time to make meaning on paper, and I think that's an aspect of notetaking I miss.

My work is dynamic - there are some technical problems my team solves, but much of our work is focused on making new meaning out of tools and systems our teachers have access to. We're helping paint the picture of how systems work together to support teaching and learning and while a lot happens in collaboration with the coaching team, there are times where I'm sitting and chewing on ideas on my own. But, because my notebook is a place for "things" rather than ideas, I don't reach for it as a method of building meaning. The idea of notes being the intermediate form stands out because it's someting I know but couldn't have verbalized. I know my notebook holds information, but it's not the final form nor is it even helpful when I'm working on building new meaning.

I'm not sure this means I'm going to change my systems, but I think there's a gap in my work that could be filled by a rethink of how I use the paper next to me.

Once upon a time, I made videos for my students using a sketchnote-style layout. I would have the notes diagrammed and then talk over them while making simple annotations. I would typically draw in Paper by 53, easily one of the best darwing apps for the iPad. Then, I would record in Explain just to keep my workflow to one device. In that time, I learned a super handy layout method which I just recently used to do a project for graduate school.

The key is in using background colors and pen ink. In my "shadow mode," I would prep the design. The background color would be my dark pen color and my pen would be the final white background. Here's a little animation showing the trick:

This is super handy becuase I can get proportions correct and swap between views while I'm drawing to keep everything spaced out correctly. The layout - and sometimes notes - are all hidden, but in the space on the page I wanted to use for that bit.

It's a small trick and I am definitely not the first one to come up with it, but it's a technique I found helpful for a task I had this week, so I decided to throw it up for posterity more than anything else.

Happy drawing!

Midwest is best

• YouTube recommended what is probably the most midwest video I've ever come across. It's the 2008 Roofball World Championships and is just as homey and midwestern as it sounds.
• Upon further research, Roofball was created in Oregon, which is even more hipster.
• Tesla recalls 362,000+ vehicles for safety issues like "driving straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane." 👀
• Chris O'Donnell posted about a great blog from Antarctica with an even more amazing domain: https://brr.fyi.

The Sweetness

My brother-in-law collectes maple sap each year to make maple syrup. This year's sugar flow was so early that it overlapped with a vacation they thought would be well ahead of the main flow. As a result, I spent most of a glorious weekend outside with the family managing sap collection and the initial boil. Some fun facts about maple syrup:

The fireplace has two evaporating pans. The lower is the full boil pan and the upper takes care of preheating. A float valve keeps the bottom pan full.

The main job - aside from collecting from the buckets attached to taps - is keeping that fire as hot as possible.

• It takes ~40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
• Early run syrup is lighter in color and taste while late sap is darker and much more sweet as the tree ramps up sugar production to come out of dormancy.
• Tea brewed in hot sap is delicious. So is bourbon added to a hot mug of sap.

We needed to do a survey at work that included some open ended questions. We don't have access to a survey platform like Qualtrics, so we have to use Google Forms (generally) and then roll our own stats dashboard. Getting charts is easy, but it's more difficult to summarize those open response items.

I came across a nice text analysis snippet for Google Apps Script which takes an input and ranks words based on parameters you set. In the end, you get list of terms by n-occurances and a relevance score calculated by the frequency of the text in relation to the entire sample. It's not Gospel but it's one of the better solutions I've found for quick text analysis in Google Forms surveys.

You'll need a Google Form and its results linked to a spreadsheet. Once you have that done, open your sheet and then click on Extensions > Apps Script.

Copy the script from the gist linked above and paste it into a file. I like to keep mine separate and since this is quick and dirty, we can use the global namespace to call the function.

Then, start your own script file and paste the following:

``javascript // Set some globals to get your sheet data. // I created a new sheet calledCharts` to hold the results const ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet(); const sheet = ss.getSheetByName('Form Responses 1'); const stats = ss.getSheetByName('Charts');

// This function gets the text from the column as responses in an array. function programFreq() { const col = sheet.getRange(1, 7, sheet.getLastRow(), 1).getValues()

// The ngram script is called directly because the function is in the global namespace. // Param 1 is your input text. Params 2 - 4 set options for results: // - minimum number of occurrences // - word groupings length (from 1 - 3 words in this example) // - remove stop words (see line 100 of the ngram script) let table = KEYWORD_FREQUENCY_TABLE(col, 3, 3, true);

// clear the original table location stats.getRange(1,1,stats.getLastRow(),3).clear();

// Set a header stats.getRange(1, 1).setValue('Program Use Frequency')

// Write the new table to the sheet. stats.getRange(2, 1, table.length, table[0].length).setValues(table) }

```

After the script runs, you get a table similar to this:

| 1 word | Count | Relativity | |--------|-------|------------| | dog | 26 | 5.43 | | cat | 20 | 4.18 | | bird | 12 | 2.51 |

| 2 words | Count | Relativity | |---------------|-------|------------| | big dog | 5 | 1.04 | | tropical bird | 3 | 0.63 | | gold fish | 3 | 0.63 |

Again, this could definitely be cleaned up, but it's a helpful method for quickly getting lists of common terms in those pesky free-response items.

Look at this

• I need to do more reading, but go look at Bonfire just for the illustrations.
• Flask is 13 years old and my web platform of choice. Here's a post with 13 tips for modern Flask development.
• My wife and I have had this same conversation about the benefits of owning physical copies of media recently. We're going to start looking at Goodwill and other thrift stores for copies of titles we want.
• I learned about Rowland Hilder this week. He was an American-born painter whose watercolor technique is something I want to imitate.

This book is not for you

The weirdest book I've ever read is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's a mystery/horror/memoir/research essay all rolled into one insane publication. Anywyas, I'm reading it again for funsies and I came across a great parody on Reddit from 2006. Someone found and scanned the original and the formatting of the pages give you an idea of what to expect if you pick up the book. If you've read the book, the parody is hilarious.

Doug Belshaw shared a post on team status meetings and why they're generally a waste of time. It got me thinking about two things I'm trying to improve with our (currently distributed) team at work:

1. Awareness. We all have different projects going and we want to be generally aware of what each other is doing.
2. Team identity. We're still new and forming our own identity within the school corporation. I want people to feel like we are a team, not just a collection of people with similar jobs.

The team identity piece comes in our dedicated time each week to meet together. I generally set the agenda and while I have updates to go over, I always try to build in time to go around the room. The problem is that we don't always need to hear the story behind the work. We're pretty good at talking with one another when we need help, so it's not a communication or coopoeration piece. It was just something team meetings always included, so we included it as well.

Given that we don't always need to know everything, I took Doug's suggestion from his post and put our own status board together. It's a shared space (similar to Trello, like Doug suggested) and each coach is able to keep their own to-do and priority workflows the way they want. Our commitment over the next three weeks is to have cards for our current big-ticket work as well as the next upcoming one. As projects are finished, cards are updated and we can celebrate the work we accomplish. Since we all have access, we can offer help where relevant. I can also see all the projects and make sure everything is within scope. There are two rules we'll keep:

1. We don't assign tasks to one another. This is a self-reporting mechanism to streamline communication, not project management.
2. You always have at least one card. It might not feel like a "project," but we always have tasks we're doing, even if they're short. Overcommunication is better than undercommunication.

We're going to try this for three weeks and then revisit as a team to see if it's helping fix the problems we identified and make adjustments to the expectations if necessary.

Last summer, I moved my phone to KISS Launcher. I use search across the board on my computer and I thought having the same toolset on my phone would be preferable. I used it as the main launcher for months before playing around with some others just to see if it was really the best fit. It seems like this year has seen a slew of new launchers focused a minimal, search-first approach.

After using KISS for nearly a year, I switched it back to Nova7 Prime tonight.

• UX consistency is a good thing. Whenever my wife needed to use my phone for something, she always struggled. I had KISS pretty minimal and while it worked (okay) for me, it didn't work for us.
• I really missed the swipe actions from Nova. I had those pretty dialed in to what I used the most. They make it super easy to thumb open a specific app - particularly while driving (shhh) - and I just never found a good way to do that with KISS. I know I can set favorites, but if I have all my apps on the home screen as favorites, it kind of defeats the search-first purpose.
• Folders. Folders folders folders. Grouping apps made me more efficient because I could find things quickly because they're categorized.
• I mistap with Nova less than with KISS. I don't know why, but I found myself opening the wrong thing a lot with KISS. Either because of a typo or a stray movement on the screen, it generally led to frustration.

I'm all for minimal - my phone background is flat gray and I use the Snow icon theme. And as nice as a search-based launcher sounds, it just doesn't work for my style of use most of the time.

Frankly, I'm still not thrilled with Nova's acquisition from 2022, but I'll cross that bridge when it comes. If you've got a launcher suggestion that hits those bullet points above, I'm all ears.

My time on Twitter has come to an end. It's been 12 years since I joined and this is - honestly - a sad decision for me.

When I created my account in 2011, I was still a new teacher and Twitter gave me connections to a vast network of other teachers I could learn from. These connections led me to at least one job and plenty of other opportunities to travel, meet people, and grow. Over time, and particularly in the last year, my use declined and I hesitated to recommend creating an account when people asked me how to connect with othes.

Over time, I felt frustrated with the shift away from genuine discussion toward posturing. It seemed like everyone had a position to defend and discussions weren't really possible. Tweets were on brand and written for the audience even when they were directed toward an individual. Reactions felt like the goal.

"EduTwitter" is a subculture of Global Twitter. I stayed around becuase it felt like much of the toxicity of the mainline themes stayed out of education. That's been changing. A few years ago, I stopped participating in formal EduTwitter. I would use the related hashtags if I needed some help, but what used to be a vibrant place had gone more and more quiet. I've stayed on because of the individual connections I'd made. Individuals always make the difference.

I was pretty indifferent to Elon Musk buying Twitter. I wasn't thrilled, but I didn't think it would get as bad - as fast - as it has.

Twitter is a private corporation run by an individual. There is no accountability and there is no indication that the single individual running the space cares for the people. When Twitter was a public entity, there were checks and balances in place to try and take care of the worst of the issues. Was it perfect? Of course not. But those checks existed.

The concern for the user - even if it was a facade of concern - has disappeared. The way in which the organization functions is chaotic and does more harm for people on the platform than good. Maybe it's always done harm, but the harms are more evident and consistent.

Since I have over a decade of my username spread across the Internet, I've decided to keep it active, but inert. That allows me to keep some kind of ownership over the name.

I added a pinned tweet with how to stay in touch then changed my password by mashing my keyboard. I could recover it if I ever needed to, but I'm not expecting to want to come back any time soon.

If you're from Twitter reading this, you can email me at brian@ohheybrian.com or find me on Mastodon at @brianb@fosstodon.org.

Interesting reads

• The hidden purple memorial in your browser - reddit link, the full backstory

• Dr. TJ Kendon - on what appears to be a new blog - has a wonderful essay on ChatGPT and its best use in schools. Particularly (my emphasis):

  By design, ChatGPT and LLMs are knowledge free. They’re designed to take a corpus of text and determine for any particular chunk of text what other text probabilistically comes next. This produces text, and as I keep arguing, if the probable answers are correct, then the text is probably correct, but the correctness is not inherent in the model and in fact isn’t a part of the model.
  "My perspective on ChatGPT and Learning"

• I'm trying to be a better project manager for my team. This video went over how to find the "critical path" for a project simply by using data. I'm going to give this a try.

• A great long essay on why going to Mars is a bad idea (coming from someone who likes space.)

In other news...

We've been fighting sickness at home. Our three-year-old also decided he wanted to sleep in his sisters' room, so we have all four packed into one space. It's fun to watch them all growing and wanting to just be around each other, even in sleep.

I've also decided this is the year I stop biting my nails.

I don't think there's a question in my mind about the stages we go through as we learn new things. Much learning seems to be rooted in habits and routines, sometimes without us realizing it. Charles Duhigg (2012) quotes psychologist William James: "All our life, so far as it has a definite form, is but a mass of habits." Later in the same chapter, Duhugg notes a Duke University study that showed up to 40% of our actions every day are driven by habits, not decisions. Habits are learned behaviors - they're developed over time. A habit is simply an automatic response to a stimulus of some kind in order to reach a reward.

The good news is that these habits can be overridden. Bad habits can be replaces with good, but we need to be aware of what triggers those routines in the habit loop. When we're aware of our "normal" responses to situations, we're able to actively change our responses. So, where do our "normal" responses come from?

The idea of conditioning is that learning is based on the stimulus-response interaction (Resnick & Ford, 1981; Berkeley, n.d.). The more times the stimulus is associated with a behavior, the stronger the association becomes. The mechanism of conditioning depends on the situation. At times, we're responding to the stimulus (classical conditioning). Other times, we're more concerned with the result of the response (operant conditioning). The type helps us explain what is happening in the brain as part of the learning process but all forms of conditioning are deterministic. Simply put - the individual has no say in whether or not they are conditioned into learning a particular behavior (McLeod, 2012).

There are situations in which conditioning an individual to form an automatic response to a stimulus is appropriate - the military being a prime example of needing a workforce to act instantly and efficiently (see Duhigg, 2012, chap 3.1 for an example of classical conditioning in the NFL fo another example). With this in mind, habits are formed by conditioning. The habit loop, cue, routine, and reward (Duhigg, 2012), is a clear sequence of a stimulus causing some behavior to reach a goal. The routine - the habit itself - can be learned and conditioning can be the vehicle for learning.

I see Skinner and Thorndike's fingerprints in schools. Thorndike was convinced that learning was rooted in simply forming a strong enough stimulus-response bond in the subject's mind (Resnick & Ford, 1981). Strengthening those associations required practice. Lots of practice. So much so that he argued that schools simply needed to provide students the correct bonds, in the correct order, and in the correct quantity for them to learn the material. Skinner (1937) agreed that repeated interaction with a stimulus (or an idea) would form strong associations for learned behaviors, but he was more interested in the consequences of the behavior and its effect on learning (Cherry, 2020). Learning was a matter of finding the best reinforcement or punishment to form associations between a stimulus and desired response.

I work in technology and the great edtech promise of the last 15 years has been "technology will engage your students in learning." Audrey Watters (2021) notes Skinner's influence in educational technologies that persists today:

If behavior was controlled (and controllable) by the environment, then what better way to make adjustments to individuals — and, as Skinner imagined, to all of society — than by machine....And that is a legacy that is foundational for education technology. It’s not where the story of teaching machines begins, but it’s almost always how the story of teaching machines ends: deeply intertwined with Skinner and with his psycho-technologies. It is a foundation from which education technology has never entirely broken.

If life is a collection of habits acting out, where is there room for understanding? If our behaviors are driven by our own habits, we could infer that the end goal of schooling is to receive a passing grade. Students are given skills to practice and their performances on their tasks are rewarded. Students have learned that the grade is the desired end, not understanding.

But why? Particularly in the realm of learning, behaviorism and conditioning on their own are not enough to describe not only how we learn but why we're driven to learn. Moore (2011) asks why it is "that behavior should be explained without directly referring to mental processes." I want students to develop good habits, some of which are taught through content. At the same time, I want to have a learning environment where students are able to connect ideas to one another to truly form new knowledge.

Resources

Berkeley Graduate Division. (n.d.). Behaviorism. Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Resource Center. https://gsi.berkeley.edu/gsi-guide-contents/learning-theory-research/behaviorism/

Cherry, K. (2020, June 3). What is operant conditioning and how does it work?. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/operant-conditioning-a2-2794863.

Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Random House.

McLeod, S. (2018). Classical conditioning. Simple Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html

Moore, J. (2011). Behaviorism. The Psychological Record, 61(3), 449-463. http://dx.doi.org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/10.1007/BF03395771.

Resnick, L. B., & Ford, W. W. (1981). The psychology of mathematics for instruction. Routledge.

Watters, A. (2021). The Engineered Student: On B. F. Skinner’s Teaching Machine. The MIT Press Reader. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-engineered-student-on-b-f-skinners-teaching-machine/

This year, part of my job has taken on a functional team-leader role. I'm not a leader in the sense that I'm evaluating my team members, but my role has started to become more directive as I work to align professional devlopment across programs within the district. The Instructional Technology team has always been an active arm of PD within the district and the team looks to me to set direction, advocate at the district level, and assign tasks as needed.

However, I'm not a district administrator. I'm essentially a teacher-leader with a seat at the admin table to bring perspective and help plan staff training opportunites with other district leadership. I've approached this position tentatively, which has led to some frustration. Given my non-admin role, I don't always feel like I have the station to speak as a peer with the leadership team. At the same time, there are programs and systems-level challenges I feel I can speak to as a problem solver and leader within the district.

Over the last several months, I've thought about how I can change my thinking and my working habits to takcle some of these challenges. I started by reading Leadership on the Line, which provides insight and perspective on how to effect change in large organizations without burning out or being forced out (systems resist change). I felt like I needed to find ways to confront problems and bring uncertainty forward so we could work to find solutions.

On paper, that sounds great. Leaders effect change. But it also made me feel like I was always in conflict, which hurt my job satisfaction and made me question whether or not I was really capable of taking on more leadership responsibility.

Last week, I had the chance to bring the instructional coaches to a team dynamic workshop where we looked at each of our own work habits and considered how those affect one another and how it affects our team as a whole. I've done these things in the past and I have to say, this one felt different. The facilitators made sure we all understood that people are complex and that patterns are simply indicators and not 100% accurate all of the time. It felt like we were people, not numbers or "types" to dissect.

I realized that my problem was that I wanted to make systems differences before I really understood how to work with the coaches I see day to day. I started to see that my focus on leadership as a way to change systems at the top came at the expense of making sure my team was as effective as possible.

We're early in the semster. I've already spent time digging into some of the tools I have access to as a result of the workshop and I'm considering how I can better facilitate relationships with the coaches as a team and not just as a group of people who do similar work. I want to make sure each of the coaches I'm leading - even if it feels "unofficial" - is equipped to do the best work they can when they're with administrators or teachers out in the buildings.

My lens was focused on the wrong place. I still need to bring challenges to the district level, but that's only half of the work. Taking on the "change-maker" attitude isolated me in my work and made it hard to see how the team I'm leading can be a part of the solution and not just highlighting problems.

Here are some interesting things and half-formed thoughts from this week:

Shorts

• I'm trying to use Helix as a main editor. There is some growing pain.
• My team did a workshop this week and I realized that I've been looking at my leadership role with a skewed lens. I need to do some more processing of what it looks like to lead a group of people.

A litte longer

I'm taking a graduate course this semester on the psychology of learning. The class just started, so we're doing some basic psych on methods of learning and some research background. Last night, I was reading on some of the early research, much of it focused on classical conditioning. In my notes, I wrote:

Conditioning is often presented as a way to achieve behaviors automatically. If those behaviors are things like self-regulation and awareness, is that a bad thing?

If we condition students to calm themselves at a sound (like the meditation bowl thing) have they learned self-regulation? Or are they simply responding to a stimulus out of habit?

Am I interested in forming habits which take over in specific situations or forming students who are aware of themselves and then choose the habits they want to develop?

I have a lot of thoughts floating around that I need to consolidate. This is a difficult subject. Here's the note in context.

I'm writing this blog post using Helx. This is the first time I've really committed to using a terminal-based text editor, focusing on keyboard commands for working in the file.

This is definitely a stretch for my brain, but here are a couple things I like about Helix:

• The command pallet has some auto-complete options. In Vim, you needed to memorize commands to get working. With Helix, I can type : to open the list of commands. It also has seaching built in, so I can poke around what I want to do.

• The command pallet text has help that shows the short commands (hotkeys or chords) to do that thing without needing to type out the whole command.

• Helpful commands pop up on the right. If I know the category of command, I can type the first letter and then look for the specific action. This feels similar to looking at hotkey hints in app menus.

• It's fast. Dang, it's fast. Now, I don't do any really intense work, but this thing runs like lightning compared to VS Code or others.
• It feels modern within the terminal. It's easy to open a file picker, open new files, and just work without ever moving my hands off they keyboard.

The hardest part, by far, is training my fingers to move around the editor with h, j, k, l instead of the arrow keys. I've started watching some YouTube channels on using terminal editors and it's incredible how fast experienced users move. I'm hoping to get there eventually.

Anyways, this is a really small chunk of what I've learned after a couple hours of use. I'll probably post an update after a week or two of more focused use with more learning.

Welp, I've done it again. I decided to go back to static instead of using WordPress. I want to explain why I made that choice and go over what I'm doing now.

Earlier this year, I decided to move from managed hosting to a Linode VPS. I've been doing more app programming in Python and my shared hosting plan - while great - didn't let me use runtimes other than PHP. There are a couple projects I wanted to make publicly available, so moving to a new host was pretty much the option I was left with.

Instead of paying for two hosts, I've also cut down on the number of things I'm running, focusing instead of the important things. The Linode plan I can afford is very low powered and after experimenting for a little bit, WordPress is a little too heavy for my modest storage, RAM, and bandwidth limits.

Going Static

Several years ago, I wrote about using a static site generator and then about how I was moving back to WordPress. At the risk of losing the game by switching again, well...I'm switching again.

Last time didn't work well because I didn't have a good process for writing and deploying the site. This time around, I've gotten some great help from people I've found on Mastodon to get a workflow that works well for me. For example, last time required maintaining a full repository of writing on Github. Jekyll is also built in Ruby, which I don't know. It was difficult to know where things were in the publishing process and in the end, it was all hosted by Github, not me.

This time, I've decided to use Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. It was important to me to have a better idea of everything from the post creation to how to create my own template. It's quite simple - I write posts in Markdown and Pelican spits out a directory of HTML. No magic code repository required and no wondering where the HTML actually is.

Pushing to the server

In learning about how to manage a new workflow, I kept seeing reference to rsync. I didn't know what it was and hooo boy, now that I know, my life has changed. This is one of those truly magical pieces of software that you wish you'd known about years and years ago.

In short, I can do everything - all my writing, templating, and publishing - on my computer without having to push anything up to the server. I can see the generated site to make sure all is well before pushing. Once it's done, rsync can take the created files and push them to the server efficiently and quickly. Since it's all HTML, there isn't anything different here than on the server, so the result is a carbon-copy.

All this to say is that my site feels more resilient to change than it did with WordPress. When I migrated the WordPress version of my blog, I had to copy source files, copy directories, get a database dump, and then reset the nginx server to handle incoming requets to WordPress. With this, I can copy and paste the entire output directory here - or anywhere - and it'll Just Work.

Changes

Will this be my last blog switch? Who knows. I'm happy with this because it's easy to write and manage and requires next to no resources on the server, which means I have more space and resources to play with the fun stuff.

One side effect of static is that commenting isn't embedded anymore. I have copies of all the old comments from WordPress and I'm going to slowly move those back into the posts as text. If you have something you want to contribute or push back on, you can send an email any time to brian@ohheybrian.com and I'm happy to pick up a conversation.

Side note...

Many thanks to AlexMillerDB and Benjamin Hollon for helping to find some hidden wonk in the redesign. Some things are incremental fixes (link syntax, in particular) and a couple others were to improve usability, especially on mobile.

We got talking about ChatGPT yesterday at work and surprisingly, none of us have really been asked by teachers to block it from students. It could be because they haven't heard about it yet or because we're in final exam week and students aren't doing a whole lot of work aside from wrapping up for the semester.

Feelings among the coaches were mixed. We understand the anxiety that comes from the publicity that ChatGPT has drummed up and for some of the examples we've tried out. At the same time, if you actually try using it yourself (requires a login), you'll quickly discover that it isn't as scary as it sounds.

This is a story about one of those life events that seems routine that turns upside down real quick.

The Red Ranger herself

It started as a routine clutch replacement. Mine started rattling a little while idling, so I decided to go ahead and change it before it gave out entirely. This is the third or fourth clutch I've done, so I wasn't worried about it and went into the weekend expecting to take at least a full day of work, maybe a couple hours into the next.

All was going well until we started to remove the transmission. My brother in law was under the car and I heard a low, "Oh dear." That's when the adventure started.

You should not be able to see those bolt threads.

The casing where the transmission mounts to the body of the car had broken at some point. This is a Bad Thing to Happen because if the one remaining bolt had broken, the entire engine and transmission of the car could have rotated backwards and essentially torn itself apart.

There are two options in this situation: replace the car or replace the transmission. The benefit of replacing the transmission is that it is much less expensive than replacing the car, so we went for that option. And that's where another snag popped up.

My car is sort of a chimera. The original transmission (5-speed manual) is well known for a bad bearing, which causes catastrophic failure. So, mine has a 6-speed, replaced by the previous owner. It's a more robust transmission and is highly sought after. I wanted to keep the six-speed, but we couldn't find an economical option (rebuilt transmissions can start at $1,800). And this is when we discovered - and ultimately went with - option three: find a five-speed transmission and take the portion with the engine mount and put it on the six-speed.

We headed off to the junkyard and - miraculously - found a wrecked car with an undamaged five-speed manual transmission still in the engine compartment. Jackpot.

Two days later, I was the proud owner of a junkyard transmission and a broken six speed. It was time to hybridize parts yet again.

As complex as these machines look, they're still simple enough to repair.

Problem three: get into the transmission. These are complicated machines that work so well, their overall design hasn't really changed since cars were invented. A series of levers slide collars over gears which send power to the wheels. The power of the Internet confirmed that we were on the right track and we even found a mechanic with a GoPro who showed exactly how to take the transmission apart. So, we set to work.

A couple hours and a broken tool later, we gave up for the night. I went home, questioning every decision I've made to this point. I woke up after a fitful night of sleep and decided it was time to just take the things somewhere. I called nearly every transmission shop and mechanic in the region, but no one wanted to take on such a daring project. Most transmission shops don't even touch manual shift vehicles anymore, which is a bummer. They're repairable! I'll save those comments on American replacement-ism for another day.

Late that morning, I caved and called the dealer service department. Their transmission engineer was willing to give it a shot. With a burst of hope, I loaded everything into the van and drove down to drop things off.

The next day, the shop called and the transmission tech decided it wasn't something he wanted to mess with, either. I asked that he simply remove those top gears so I could dive into the belly myself, which he agreed to. Back to square whatever-we-were-on-two-days-ago.

At this point, I had resolved myself to buckling down and doing the work. Several late evenings and a full Saturday with my brothers-in-law working with me, we had the transmission repaired and re-assembled. The most difficult part, frankly, is getting the thing (it weighs ~90 pounds [41kg] assembled, so it isn't small) back into the tight engine compartment. But we managed it and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Another late night, alone in the garage, and the car is nearly done. After I hook up the battery, I decided to start the engine before I put the wheels back on. All had gone well and I was looking forward to being home before 11PM.

But.

The car wouldn't start.

The good news is that a non-starting car is not usually do to the transmission. So, something was wrong, but it probably wasn't the big something that we just fixed. I started poking and prodding with a multimeter to find the culprit.

The battery was good. The starter was good. I had ground between the battery and the body of the car. The dashboard would light up and I could even get the radio going. So, there was a short somewhere, but I couldn't find it on my own. Generally, you need to be checking power while someone tries to start the car.

I got one of the brothers-in-law back over to help out and we found one ground wire that had a slight loose connecting, but it was slight enough that the starter couldn't pull enough power from the battery. Those connections matter a lot, especially in that high-current surge to turn the engine over cold.

At 10PM on Monday night, the car started for the first time in over a week. The clutch is smooth and the gear shifting feels like butter. It's driving well and I feel like we can easily get another 100K out of this little sprite.

I could write a trite thing about time and patience, both of which were stretched in this little party, but I won't. This was just one of those life things that will help me remember that big projects are doable when you break them down, rely on the expertise and wisdom of others, and get your hands dirty to solve a problem when one comes up.

The great Twitter Migration is causing all sorts of hype around Mastodon, but, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons.

People disillusioned with Twitter since Musk took over are flocking to Mastodon to the tune of hundreds of thousands of registrations per day. That is astronomical growth for what has been, for the last several years, niche communities of people around shared interests.

If you've never used it, the look and feel is very close to that of Twitter. Your timeline takes up the majority of the interface, you use "@" usernames to mention people, and you can follow topics using hashtags. There are some nuances in the differences between a singly-owned space like Twitter and the interconnectedness of individual Mastodon services (instances), but for the most part, the look and feel is similar.

I'm definitely not the first to say Mastodon is more comparable to email than it is to Twitter in terms of system structure. With email, you pick a home - @yahoo.com, @gmail.com, etc. Mastodon is similar - your username is linked to your home. For me, I'm brianb@fosstodon.org.