Now

At work, the school year is close to its end and it has gone quite well even though I have not been able to do everything I hoped I would. I have met some pedagogical challenges during the year as usual and it has taught me a few things. I realised a while ago that I needed to relax some of my ambitions for the school year since the vocational exam for my second year students, and therefore also their mock exam, is earlier this year than previous years. I also needed to put away some of my goals to get rid of some stress. There is a lot to learn about development, IT and pedagogy that could make me a better teacher, but I cannot learn everything at the same time.

Outside of work, I feel the need to get out more. I need to go for walks to prevent back pain and to stay somewhat in shape. Winter is cold and dark and there has been a lot of rain this year so I haven't been out as much as I wanted. But my camera is constantly nagging me to go for walks. When I walk with it, I appreciate my surroundings more. Often, I come home with no pictures worth sharing, but I still enjoy practising seeing, photography and walking around.

I also do some small programming projects for my own enjoyment in my spare time with irregular intervals. I have a calendar localisation framework for Emacs that is getting close to a state where I might show it to someone. I am also doing some minor tweaks here and there to add some useful functionality to Emacs. Since I am quite new to Emacs Lisp, I am learning the language while working on stuff, which works since it is so well documented and since the language is interpreted which means I can easily write something and try it out and then weed out mistakes or improve it further. It is very enjoyable and reminds me of how I used to play with HyperCard in the late 80s and 90s.

I also do some system crafting from time to time. David Wilson of System Crafters fame has been very inspirational. I have wanted to move to the functional package manager and GNU/Linux distribution Guix many times since the ideas underpinning it are really great, but when I have tried it in the past, I have had problems that stopped me from migrating to it on my main machine. I tried again in the start of this year and this time, it has worked much more smoothly.

(Maybe you are wondering what a now page is?)