My meal arrived on the plane. I like airline food. I was served a chicken and pasta meal, coleslaw, an apple and custard crunch dessert, bread, and water. I should note that the proportions of chicken to pasta were heavily favoured toward pasta, but that was okay. For the best part of the meal is always the dessert. I was delightfully surprised by an apple and custard dessert. It even contained cinnamon, a spice whose scent and taste always make me happy. The water was by a brand called Rocwell. This got me thinking about the Rockwell Turbo Encabulator, a made-up tool on which there is a prese ..read more

Travel is a between space: the thing on which you want to focus is the future, but there are logistics in the moment that one must consider. I enjoy this liminality and the surprise moments of peace between the bustle. This morning, I woke up early -- before 5am -- and sprung to life, knowing that my waking up on time is essential to catching a flight. I arrived at the airport slightly earlier than required, giving me time to do some coding and writing. The first moment of peace. I could think about an idea I was working on the night prior: building a browser extension to report if a domain ha ..read more

One of the joys and the promise of developing programming languages is that you can develop your own way to interface with a computer. I have seen two opportunities to explore programming language design to fill gaps I have seen. I built an abstract language for computer vision tasks (VisionScript) that I designed with a young audience in mind. I am also working on a language for querying knowledge graphs (KGL) that is modeled on flows. In KGL data flows left to right in an individual query. You can merge queries together to allow for more powerful analyses of a graph. In both languages, I hav ..read more

Next time you make a cup of coffee, take a moment to reflect on the experience. Do you start drinking the coffee when it is a bit too hot? Do you wait until the temperature is just right? Do you forget about the coffee but drink it anyway? How does the cup feel against your lips? How does the coffee feel? Rich? Bold? Thin? I have spent countless hours learning how to make coffee, yet the best coffee I have is usually that made by others. The coffee need not be speciality: there is good coffee everywhere; it is the experience around a coffee that makes the drink great. A few years ago, I went t ..read more

I have been coding since I was eight or nine years old. I started with drag-and-drop programming, trying to figure out how to make a game in a tool called Microsoft TouchDevelop. I recall making one or two things, but I mostly tinkered with what was made by the community; there was a vast gallery of open programs with which you could play. I was curious about how I could make something new. At my computer, I could define a game. I never ended up being particularly good at game development. Still today, after having played many video games in my teens, I struggle to come up with any ideas for g ..read more

Today, sitting on a comfortable bed in a hotel room, I have been reading and watching videos about philosophy: existentialism, (optimistic) nihilism; Satre, Camus. Also, I have been watching videos on computer science. I was hoping to find a coding project on which to work, an activity that can occupy me easily for an afternoon. I found something else: progress on a thread of my recent (rather depressing) ponderings on from what I derive meaning. I set high standards for myself; a day where I do not feel engaged -- either intellectually, or in being with others -- begets worries of languishing ..read more

When I was young, in the mid 2000s, I used computers to navigate four websites: the BBC kids games, the PBS kids games, and, later, the NASA Hubble Telescope photographs and Club Penguin. I could sit on the family computer, a Windows machine about which I know nothing other than I could play games on it, and play games. And watch space. Earlier today, I saw a website that lets you watch the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Telescope. The web application lets you zoom in to incredible levels of detail. You can see the stars. Galaxies of distances I do not know. Comphensio ..read more

One of my graphic communication teachers in high school had an exercise that they would use, I think, to spark ideas: put your pen on the page, then start drawing. Go in circles. Let the pen flow. Pay no regard to trying to make anything in particular, instead embracing the randomness of what you are going to make. This was called "taking your pen for a walk." In this spirit, I will now take my metaphorical digital pen -- also known as a keyboard! -- on a walk. I have been thinking a lot about what I can write over the last few days. I have been feeling a bit down and looking for inspiration t ..read more

One of the things I love about poetry is you can set out with a theme in mind and, through the limitations of rhyme, end up on a completely different -- but equally delightful -- track than you expected. I thought to myself "I would love to have a poem to end my web pages!" so I started jotting down notes on what a poem could look like for my website. I decided to stick with the web theme, and came up with the following: i bring together some html and css then, with an awe-inspiring look on my face, I assess what topics I want to explore and process oh, how fine it is to have a website. Yes ..read more

One of my favourite pastimes is clicking around the blogosphere, exploring and reading personal websites. I especially love encountering blogrolls or link lists, wherein a site owner links to other websites that may be of interest. I have maintained a blogroll listing some of the blogs I follow for a few years, which you could find from my site navigation bar. This week, I started to think whether the "blogroll" classification and layout, where you list the blogs you follow, was right for my site. I want to link to more than blogs: YouTube channels I like, comics, pages on my website that I ca ..read more