§Sunlight, Fresh Air, Growth, and Sunlight

(yes, I said that twice)

Every winter it happens. I think it’s all good and I can deal with a few more weeks of cold and gray, then I realize that I want to get outside and see something green and fresh and alive. Maybe it’s vitamin D deficiency, maybe it’s cabin fever, or maybe I’m just dealing with something seasonal.

March was a rough month weather-wise. It seemed like we were going to be solidly into spring by now, but three snow days later and there’s still more to melt. At least the past few days have been warmer.

Once Spring starts, we’re one step closer to staying out on the screen porch until after dark, grilling without freezing, and opening the pool. I’m glad that the seasons change where I live (northeast US) so I can appreciate them in their own way. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t go somewhere else to enjoy nice weather more often…

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§Save, and Save Often

Now that I’ve been using Hexo for about nine months I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. Since I don’t post often it’s pretty easy to manage the content without needing something heavier (or DB-backed) to keep track of everything.

Luckily I’m also running this on GitLab and have been committing and pushing updates regularly. Everything had been running smoothly… up until March 1st. I thought I might be a little out-of-date with some of the packages I’m using in npm so I ran npm update in my site directory, committed the changes, and pushed up to my repo.

Build failed.

Sonofa. Check the logs and see this right at the end:

$ hexo deploy
ERROR Local hexo not found in   /builds/********/********  
ERROR Try running: 'npm install hexo --save'  
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

Ok, easy enough (or so I thought). Just roll back one commit and I should be set. Didn’t work, more because of my lack of git and npm knowledge than anything else. I ended up fixing it by merging an older version into the master, pulling changes, and pushing back up to the repo. This happened over the course of a few hours, working on it when I had a few minutes at a time. The quick(ish) version was something like this:

git pull
git checkout -b {branch}
{edits, install correct version}
git checkout master
git fetch
git merge {branch}
{resolve a couple of conflicts}
git pull
git push

At least I’ll remember to make a new branch before updating next time - I also have the Hexo version pinned in my CI configuration (to make sure it works with GitLab pages). This was a good learning experience, and hopefully something I won’t have to do again… for this project anyway.

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§It’s Like a Parking Lot in My Head

I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of good intentions to write them down and do something with them. The problem is that a lot of the time I can’t get them down in time or fast enough, and I end up with a bunch of noise in my head.

Yes, I use (or have used) these:

• Evernote
• Microsoft OneNote (at work)
• index cards (usually 3"x5" / 76.2mm x 127mm, blank)
• Google Docs (through Google Drive, I have a Spark File there)
• Google Keep (I use a spark tag there)

When I’m able to write down more I feel like my head is definitely clearer. The problem is capturing it and trying to keep it in roughly the same place so I remember to look at it again later. The irony is that writing more means that I’ll have more ideas to try and get some piece of before they disappear into the ether of my unconscious mind.

Another aspect to all of this is reading into the bits of my mental state over the past several years. I created my current spark file in October 2012, but it has some stuff from back in 2004 from another file I used to write down ideas. What happened in-between? I don’t know, unless I can find some notebook or stack of index cards to fill in the gaps. Five+ years of ideas ends up with a lot of snippets to go through.

Having all these basic ingredients isn’t enough though. Something needs to be done with them, preferably in a coherent way that other humans can understand - not in all cases, sometimes it’s really just for me to enjoy. As good as it feels to write them down, it’s better to read them later and have that “oh yeah!” moment. Even better is to connect some of the ideas together into a whole new idea. That can’t really happen without reviewing the ideas altogether.

What do you do to capture those ideas? How do you use them later?

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