Monthly review: November 2024
| monthly, review
This month, I experimented with doing my daily drawings on a calendar grid. Since that meant I had a nice neat one-page summary of the month right there, I figured I might as well resume writing these monthly reviews.
Most of my discretionary time was taken up by preparations for EmacsConf, which was a lot of fun. The main things were adding to our organizers notebook and figuring out our own BigBlueButton installation.
We still had plenty of time to get outside to the playground, go for walks and bike adventures, go skating, and make wontons. On indoor days, we mostly played Minecraft, Ni No Kuni, and Supermarket Together. Now that her usual playgroup's shifting mostly indoors (and tend to be pretty cough-y when they're outdoors), we've been going to the ice rink instead, and have even had a couple of playdates with new friends.
A+ definitely craves more stimulation during virtual school. The teacher suggested micro:bit programming, and we've been having fun making simple programs to run on actual hardware. A+ has also been learning turtle graphics via Python programming, and she's quite proud of programming by typing instead of using blocks. She passed the first stage of the gifted identifaction process in the public school board, so we had a couple of meetings and I scrambled to do some research. I don't think it'll change much. The Toronto District School Board doesn't offer virtual placements for gifted students even if they do identify an exceptionality, and there probably isn't anything in their budget for extra resources for the self-contained virtual school they're setting up next year. Ah well. We're planning to take a very chill, non-tiger-parenting approach to the whole thing, and we'll just have to see how things work out.
We set up a new desk for A+ near the window, which let her enjoy more sunlight during the day. In return, I got to have her old desk setup, so now I can sometimes get computer time with an extra monitor (at least when I'm not helping her stave off boredom).
It was the last month before W- retired, so we squeezed in a few dental and medical appointments to take advantage of the remaining coverage. Now we get to figure out what our days could be like!
Blog posts
- Emacs:
- Org Mode: Format Libby book highlights exported as JSON
- Emacs: Extract part of an image to another file
- Interactively recolor a sketch
- Excerpts from a conversation with John Wiegley (johnw) and Adam Porter (alphapapa) about personal information management
- Remove filler words at the start and upcase the next word
- EmacsConf backstage: Makefile targets
- Changing Org Mode underlines to the HTML mark element
- Yay Emacs 7: Using word timing in caption editing with subed-word-data
- Checking caption timing by skimming with Emacs Lisp or JS
- Other tech:
- Life:
- Weekly reviews:
- Emacs news:
Sketches
- 2024-11-02-03 Visual book notes: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals - Oliver Burkeman - 2021 #visual-book-notes #time #productivity #philosophy #life.png
- 2024-11-04-04 How do I want to get better at learning out loud? #kaizen #blogging #learning.png
- 2024-11-05-01 Idea flow #pkm #blogging #writing.png
- 2024-11-11-07 Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything - BJ Fogg, PhD - 2020 #visual-book-notes #book #habits #productivity.png
- 2024-11-23-01 While A+'s at Nature Club #walking #thinking #braindumping #time.png
- 2024-11-30-06 November 2024 daily #moments.png
Time
| Category | Previous month % | This month % | Diff % | h/wk | Diff h/wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A+ | 30.3 | 39.3 | 8.9 | 63.9 | 15.0 |
| Personal | 8.3 | 10.9 | 2.6 | 17.8 | 4.3 |
| Discretionary - Play | 0.2 | 0.0 | -0.2 | 0.0 | -0.3 |
| Unpaid work | 3.5 | 2.9 | -0.5 | 4.8 | -0.9 |
| Discretionary - Family | 1.0 | 0.2 | -0.8 | 0.3 | -1.3 |
| Sleep | 35.8 | 33.5 | -2.3 | 54.6 | -3.8 |
| Business | 4.1 | 0.3 | -3.7 | 0.5 | -6.3 |
| Discretionary - Productive | 16.9 | 12.9 | -4.0 | 21.0 | -6.7 |