It was a bit chilly, and gorgeous, in New York this week.
Bring Your Child to Work Day is apparently a real thing? (I had no idea.) Anyway, I was @mentioned in this awesome tweet:
When Poppy comes to work with Dad... @brindelle
— sam havens (@sam_havens) April 28, 2016
Projects
I made my first attempts at both intarsia and double knitting, two different colorwork techniques. Nothing to show for it yet, just a bunch of swatches, but I’ve cast on my project and hopefully will have photo in the next couple of weeks.
I did a bit of Python scripting on Tuesday night because I wanted to calculate some stats regarding letter frequencies in Esperanto. There’s a project coming up there, too.
Oh, and I painted my nails (yeah, those are PCB stamps):
Maybe I’ll etch a new nail polish plate this week? Decisions, decisions.
Reading
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I finished Fading Scars by Corbett OToole. Would definitely recommend to anyone who’s interested in disability issues and history. I love the phrase “bodyminds” that she uses, and I need to think more about cognitively accessible language.
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How does knowledge get locked up in people’s heads? by Julia Evans. I think her point about “to make someone an expert, ask them questions” is spot on:
If everyone always asks Person A questions about the System, then that is itself an organizational investment in Person A’s knowledge. They’re constantly practicing answering questions and updating their knowledge and checking their understanding of the system.
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I watched this amazing production of The Wizard of Oz by Eyes Alive!, a performing group at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind. My ASL is very, very much beginner-level, so I missed a lot, but this was a treat to watch.
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Wired’s article on switch to HTTPS was interesting - I hadn’t really thought about the challenges of combining HTTPS with ads serving, external assets, etc as they applied to a media organization.
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Hackaday’s primer on how to read a datasheet, by Jenny List, was a solid read. I don’t have much of a formal EE background, with the exception of two tangentially related classes in college, and reading datasheets is something I’d like to get better at.
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Similarly, Jenny’s Hackaday post on intro to soldering workshops at hackerspaces made a strong argument for teaching soldering. NYC Resistor used to have soldering classes but we haven’t, lately, and I’d like to fix that. Plans for the future!