selja@hepta

hello again friends and creatures

been busy the past... few weeks again. not with my responsibilities but with something else entirely. meeting friends, i suppose

something i'm going for this time is that i'm gonna be using third level headings instead of the horizontal rules i've used in the past because. because one of my own rss clients doesnt support those and it makes reading this blog a bit of a nightmare.

what happened to that thing about irc

last time i was talking about getting back on irc, and, well, i haven't got back on irc. but ill-advisedly enough, i've decided to make my own irc client. it's not really getting anywhere yet, but like, irc isn't conceptually very difficult. mostly i'm currently at the phase where i'm trying to think of where different kinds of things belong.

like, consider a WHOIS request, for instance. its reply consists of a variable number of numeric replies, ending with 401, 402, 431 or (when succesful) 318. if the messages always arrived in sequence there would be no trouble, but there's no guarantee of that. this seems to suggest that the correct way to handle these requests is some sort of state machine, perhaps in a thread that gets handed all the messages pertaining to a whois request, and only those messages. at a minimum you need to keep track of how far you are into reading the response. that's the kinda thing i'm thinking of.

that, and how to best parse messages without expending too much effort on it. the syntax is simple, i'm just thinking about implementation. maybe something will come of this.

related to this, perhaps i should put some sort of code hosting solution on this site so i could show off my projects when they're done? unclear. currently i'm only hosting pre-built static content, but it's not impossible to do that with infrequent source code pushes either. something to think about i suppose.

and since this is the software development section: no progress on that backup thing either. though i did discover in the meantime that someone's just straight up made a restic clone in rust, so i don't have to worry about making that one at least

wasn't there something about backpacks in the post title

mid-size backpack

now, backpacks are something that i think about regularly anyway, but something recently made me think about having a decent backpack for moderately heavy loads, without being the surplus british army plce rucksack that can take something like a hundred litres if you include the side pouches. that's just too much space. i don't need that much space. and therefore i need a mid-size backpack for all sorts of multi-day trips.

but, currently, my "mid-size" backpack is a 35 litre maxpedition assault pack clone. if you've seen those kinda rectangular ones with a large main compartment and two protruding external pockets (smaller one on top, larger one at the bottom) those are the ones i mean. and it's a perfectly acceptable backpack, don't get me wrong, it's just that it kind of sucks to carry heavy loads in. i've mostly used it in situations where i don't really need to walk around that much, in which case it's fine most of the time that it's heavy and puts all the weight on my shoulders since i'm just gonna drop it off in a few minutes, again. and if i'm just carrying something light, like spare clothes, it's not too bad. but i did in fact just carry it around for quite a bit longer than that over the weekend, with a somewhat heavy load, and i can't say my shoulders have recovered yet. it's got a waist belt, but the pack's just not rigid enough for that to transfer any load.

combined with a friend also looking at better backpacks for many of the same reasons, i ended up looking at the savotta jääkäri m. it's a 30 litre or so backpack that's got an internal frame - the default frame is just a rigid plastic sheet, but you can also get an aluminium tube frame - and that sounds like it could be just the thing i want? it's slightly smaller in total volume than the one i have, now, but i could always fix that by adding side pouches. also, it's got a floating lid, so it supports overfilling or putting a larger object like a foam sleeping pad or blåhaj. that seems like it could perfectly work for those trips where i can't just leave it lying around all day.

haven't decided on whether to buy it or not, yet, but i think i might end up doing so. i could do with something like that. as always, the main downside is that i don't have any damn space for it. perhaps i'll think of something

another bag

not strictly related to that, i've got a mil-tec "tanker sling bag" that i got a while ago. i don't know why it's called "tanker", but what it is is a 15-ish litre sling bag that has a zipper on both sides on the inside - against your back - that zips down all the way. once you open that you can move the padded lid out of the way and access the whole bag

and it's a pretty decent camera bag! i've got a tenba byob insert (don't remember which size) and it fits in perfectly, as does my camera, sideways, with the longest lens i currently have. i've been thinking of making a custom insert for the backpack, though, since the tenba insert isn't quite as wide as would be useful for the bag, and also has a zipper on the top that ends up being against one of the sides of the bag the way i use it here. if anyone has any ideas on what i should do about this, uh, (looks at my continuing lack of comments or even email) try to think really hard about it in my direction

but whats the thing in the title

god. so one thing you should know about me is that i'm the backpacks pervert. i'm a lot of things for life and backpacks are one of them. it speaks to my strong willpower, or more likely limited funds and space, that i haven't bought every damn cool backpack on the planet. in this way, backpacks are exactly like notebooks: i keep wanting to get them even when i can't think of a use for them.

this is a good time to talk about notebooks again isn't it

also last time i mentioned about having a journal at work, and i've been using it! it's pretty great still.

i've pretty much dropped off my normal diarying process that i did for years - because it sucked to do, as much as i liked it - and instead i'm now doing a few different kinds of things that might be called journaling.

first, i carry a little notebook with me, where i make diary type notes about my day, but also reminder notes about whatever. in a lot of journaling systems i think the small notebook would be the "inbox" notebook where stuff would be moved out of, but i've tried systems and i just can't get into them. instead, i just write whatever i feel like writing in there. nothing too long, but stuff i need to remember. this has proven very useful in the few years ive done it now

second, i have the work/project journals mentioned above. it's very useful in my experience to keep notes about what i'm working on, both because it allows me to remember what i was working on the last time and also because it involves thinking about what i'm doing. often it ends up being a sort of dialogue with my older notes.

third, instead of a diary i write in roughly daily, i have a bigger book that i write in every month or few weeks. it's a kind of longer term summary of What's Going On In My Life that works better than the diary because, honestly, a lot of days nothing's going on in my life and i can't be arsed to write because it's five hours past my bedtime and i need to sleep by the time i remember. having the big book allows me to just kinda take a more reflective look at what i've been up to in february, or whatever. it's pretty nice. the entries end up being rambly but that's okay.

that's... a summary of my journalling i guess. have fun? enjoy? maybe consider adapting parts of it?

music, books, etc

i've been meaning to work on my reading backlog but instead i haven't. that happens. i've been rereading some novels, though! most recent novel i finished was a reread of the group ibex fan-translation of a sacred and terrible air, which is a novel in the same setting as disco elysium but not really connected to it in many ways. it's interesting, though, and i kinda hope it got an official english release? currently i'm rereading detransition, baby, and i dunno what to say about that one. i guess i don't read a lot of novels like it, honestly, and i can't say what i get from it exactly, but i had the thought to reread my copy the other day and so i am doing that.

on the music front... last week or something i rediscovered the nz band the beths, and have been listening to their music a completely inappropriate amount. i wake up and expert in a dying field or knees deep (both from their 2022 album, expert in a dying field) is playing in my head. this is just a thing that happens sometimes. but unlike my book takes, my view on this music is clear - it's pretty good! i love listening to it. recommended, i suppose?

meta, housekeeping, comments? email??

well, there's still no email address, still no comments. i just need to get a subscription to fastmail or something. not much more to it than that. you might think however long it's been since last august is a long time to keep merely thinking about this instead of doing it, but i was thinking about this blog for like two years before i made it, too. it'll happen eventually, probably.

maybe if i wrote blog posts more often they'd be less big, too. but if once a month is the rate i'm ending up at, then so be it.

the now page should be up to date, looks like i'd fucked up the indents on some stuff there the last time.

uh... maybe that's all. i spent like a hour and a half writing this post. good grief and goodnight