Delete Your Drafts on Leap Day! or not!

As of this writing I have 8 drafts in WordPress.

Some of them are more than a year old.

Aaron Jorbin has a post called Leap Day is Delete Your Drafts Day!

Jeremy Felt replied with a post saying that he would be participating. He wrote something I identify with:

Some drafts are fun markers in time and are hard to delete, yet still somehow impossible to publish. Even just a flippant incomplete sentence can communicate a feeling I had 10 years ago. I think I’ll let some of those be.

I like it when drafts evoke a positive memory.

Sometimes they read to me like failure. Like technical debt. Unfinished manuscripts. Expired coupons. Overripe avocados.

Why didn’t I make that guacamole? What a failure I am!

I’m mostly kidding.

I don’t like a feeling bad about blog drafts. They are not hurting anyone. They take no real space. Just a few bytes of database storage in WordPress. Blogging has been positive and useful to me. It’s weird when aspects of it feel bad.

I don’t want it to feel like drudgery.

So a few years back I decided to fix this bad feeling. Remove the negative dynamic.

I needed a regular reminder.

I tried adding an item to my TODO text file.

I tried regularly sending myself an email reminder.

I didn’t heed either very much.

The avocados just kept sitting there.

After a lot of false starts I landed on a solution that has fixed it for me.

It’s a calendar event: “Revisit Blog Drafts”

Every 23 days is the interval that works for me.

When it was weekly or monthly I tuned it out. If it was always on a weekend there were better things to do. If it was always a weekday I could use work as an excuse. If it was weekly I would see it coming and sometimes would push it forward. Or delete it.

And so. Every 23 days assures it’s alway a on a new day of the week. It also assures that I’ve not thought about them in a while. It’s like I took a walk around the block. My head is cleared. My palate cleansed.

So to honor Aaron’s idea I’ve reset my weird every 23-day draft revisit event to fall on the 29th.

Leap Day Blog Draft Revisiting!

Ticket to Ride

I’ve never seen a computer player’s score go negative. Ticket to Ride is the example of a game I’ve never played on a physical board but feel like I could. I do love a train.

Tilde Club

It’s been 10 years since I signed up for an account on Tilde Club.

And it’s been 10 years since I added anything to my page at tilde.com/~artlung.

Paul Ford was responsible for the idea initially. And now it’s a new set of folks responsible. And when I asked them to add my SSH key and reset my password they did so lickity split. Wonderful.

I’ve been a big fan of #indieweb for a while now. Own your stuff! Feel free to experiment! I suspect Tilde Club was one of the earliest “return to the smaller innocent web” projects I ever heard of. Amazingly, I never blogged about it here. I think I mentioned it on Twitter but don’t go visit that site. It stinks.

Today I updated the page.

I wrote a little bit about using HTML 2.0, which is how I created the page. An antique page deserves an antique HTML specification! And HTML validation.

I also joined the Tilde Club Webring. I didn’t add a guestbook but I was this close to doing that.

Fun facts about HTML 2.0 I re-learned today:

No <ABBR> tag
No BORDER attribute on <IMG>
No client side image maps, so I rewrote the webring code as a server-side image map. (in PHP)
No TARGET attribute on an <A> tag.
The HTML 2.0 spec refers to the idea of style sheets, and that you would link to them in <LINK> tag, but doesn’t describe anything about what a style sheet might look like. Adding a stylesheet worked fine, and still validates.

You don’t have to use HTML 2 to make a web page. In fact, I encourage you NOT to do that. HTML5 is great. So make a page! Learn some web development over on MDN today!

Benji’s Maps with SVG

Benji has an article on Fun with Image Maps and SVGs that’s a bit technical but also really fun. At one time I could rattle off the code for an image map pretty easily. And a few months ago I put up a page in the lab about server-side image maps (best left in 1997). Lately I’ve been writing more code that’s spacial in nature–CSS gradients and backgrounds are 2-D canvases where we place items in position using numbers. He discovered the fact that image maps scale based on pixel width, and so they don’t quite work right when we have the capability to set images to scale based on device and screen width. His solution is novel and involves SVGs, which is terrific.

In talking about it today on the IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club I decided to play with another approach, using percentage based absolutely positioned elements. I’m not totally happy with the result. It feels brittle. And if the image changes to be a different aspect ratio or the styling on the page changes the container it’s possible what works now won’t work in the future.

Benji’s SVG approach feels a bit more robust. Something about having the code for the map refer to the image, all in the same markup, and without relying on CSS, makes me think that as long as you have that pair the code will work when the thing you made gets moved, copied, and repurposed.

Fun stuff!

Milk Carton ChatGPT

I’m pretty sure the first time I had my hands on a “computer” I made it myself. It was made from a milk carton and it was in the 1970s.

The way it worked was to write a question on one side of a card and the answer on the back. It was a fancy cardboard “flash card” viewer.

Even as a child I knew this was not really a computer. The question and answer was predetermined. It could not answer a new and interesting question.

Years later I encountered an Apple ][ in Mrs E’s 8th grade homeroom. The computer could make graphics and do calculations and make things to read on screen and send things to a printer. And whether it was a calculator or a clock or a game like Oregon Trail or a word processor it was all computer code written by people. I could write 10 PRINT "HELLO" and 20 GOTO 10 and make it do things.

But you put in INPUT and got out OUTPUT and in theory there is a sensible relationship between those two things.

Back in October I wrote Artificial Intelligence is not that.

Lately the idea of “AI” is that it is a magic conversationalist that knows everyone and can answer any question. Yesterday, it was not operating that way. People and news sites described it thus:

ChatGPT has meltdown
ChatGPT starts sending alarming messages to users
ChatGPT went berserk
ChatGPT spat out gibberish
ChatGPT going crazy
ChatGPT went haywire
ChatGPT starts spouting nonsens
ChatGPT off the rails
ChatGPT went full hallucination mode
ChatGPT has gone mad today
ChatGPT has gone berserk

The incident status page describes described it more dispassionately:

Feb 20, 2024 – 1547 PST: Investigating We are investigating reports of unexpected responses from ChatGPT.
Feb 20, 2024 – 1547 PST: Identified The issue has been identified and is being remediated now.
Feb 20, 2024 – 1659 PST: Monitoring We’re continuing to monitor the situation.
Feb 21, 2024 – 0814 PST: Resolved ChatGPT is operating normally.

It feels strange to read about code and algorithms as having a meltdown or going mad. That doesn’t sound like a machine. “Went berserk” reads like a mental health problem, not a computer malfunction.

ChatGPT seems more capable than that old milk carton computer, but when ChatGPT output reads like output from a hallucinating person–clearly it’s not better, and might be far worse.

I don’t have any final thoughts on this other than to be vaguely troubled about how we talk about these devices. I leave you with a quote from the writings of Alan Turing, the whole thing is worth a read to get the context of that famed Turing test that comes up often in discourse about advanced computation: em>Mind, Volume LIX, Issue 236, October 1950, Pages 433–460 [source]

An interesting variant on the idea of a digital computer is a ‘digital computer with a random element’. These have instructions involving the throwing of a die or some equivalent electronic process; one such instruction might for instance be, ‘Throw the die and put the resulting number into store 1000’. Sometimes such a machine is described as having free will (though I would not use this phrase myself). It is not normally possible to determine from observing a machine whether it has a random element, for a similar effect can be produced by such devices as making the choices depend on the digits of the decimal for π.

Most actual digital computers have only a finite store. There is no theoretical difficulty in the idea of a computer with an unlimited store. Of course only a finite part can have been used at any one time. Likewise only a finite amount can have been constructed, but we can imagine more and more being added as required. Such computers have special theoretical interest and will be called infinitive capacity computers.

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President’s Day at Scripps

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Morse High School Dedication, 1963

From The San Diego Union, Saturday, May 11, 1963:

600 At Dedication Of Morse School
Six-hundred spectators last night witnessed the dedication and open house of the city’s new Samuel F.B. Morse High School, 6905 Skyline Drive.

Lelia Morse, granddaughter of the inventor of the Morse code and the telegraph came here from Hollywood and told of a Morse College recently being dedicated at Yale University.

SCHOOL PRESENTED
“600 At Dedication Of Morse School,” San Diego Union, May 17, 1963. (San Diego Union)

Mrs. Marion Jessop, Board of Education member who presented the school to the community added:

“We are confident that with the cooperation of the staff of this school, parents, church and the community, this school will produce citizens with the same talents and attributes equal to those of the great artist, inventor and patriot for whom the school is named.”

Mrs. Ray J. Mortier, Parent-Teacher Association president, and the student body president. Robert Lushbaugh, accepted the school for community and students.

PANEL GIVEN

Miss Morse gave the school a three-pictured panel depicting Morse as artist, inventor and patriot. Students John Kling, Phyllis Silva, Linda Miller and Robert Breedlove eulogized Morse. Dr. George V. Hall, an associate superintendent of schools, introduced guest.

The 1,200-student $2.37 million school was opened in September for students in grades 9 through 11. Next fall, it will admit students only in grades 10 through 12.

Morse High has 52 classrooms, a gymnasium, an athletic field, a 1,500-seat cafetorium. It is designed to accommodate 2,700 students.

The SDUT posted this story as a throwback in May 2023.

10 more things you can do on your personal website

James‘ List of 100 things you can do on your personal website is super-duper terrific. He asked for more things! I’ve been website-doing for 28 years. I ideas!

Create a unique header image or banner for your website.
And plan on making another banner in the future, if you save the headers by date you can see what you were making in the past.
In March, make a M.O.D.O.K. and submit it to March MODOK Madness. Post it to your site too!
Learn something new on MDN about HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript, or another site about drawing or painting or making images or pottery or video, and post the thing or what you learned.
Share a list of charities that mean a lot to you
Learn something new about an ancestor from old newspapers, write about it
If you use a website tool that allows it, write something to yourself that will be published a week or more into the future
And when it publishes, write about what happened between then and now
Put up a photo of something that evokes a memory, write about that memory
Share a list of books (or videos, or tools) that helped you get good at what you love to do

Today marks 23 Years Blogging

I started blogging 23 years ago today, with this post.

What’s different from then to now?

My mother is no longer alive.

I’m not married, I’m divorced. Twice since then. Much happier.
I’m more likely to admit to being a artist than I was then.
I am not ashamed to collect toy robots.
I swim more.
More gray hair.
I still love working on neat stuff.
I love learning new stuff.
Happier overall.

What’s the same?

I live in San Diego.
I have great friends.
I have great family.
I’m probably a lot luckier than I understand.
Life is good.

Before posting this, according to my about page: “This blog has 8,754 posts, 2,503 comments, 6,092 embedded images, and 3,361 outbound links.”

Thank you for visiting and for reading, however you got here!

You might try: searching, most commented posts, posts with the most links, posts with the most images, longest posts, most used tags, or the visualization of blog posts by date.

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“The water is weird today” one surfer mentioned to me as she paddled by. “Many rip currents to choose from,” I replied. A good morning.

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President’s Day at Scripps

“The water is weird today” one surfer mentioned to me as she paddled by. “Many rip currents to choose from,” I replied. A good morning.

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