I worked from home for most of last week. After the rigid routine of going to teach every day, it is nice to have a break and make my own schedule a bit. I’m doing a couple hours of writing and a get-outside-and-move-around activity every day.
A highlight of the week was visiting the Lakeshore AVS Spring Sale. We went last year and enjoyed it very much. This year, we picked up two streptocarpus and a trailing violet.
I keep getting injured while parenting. A couple days ago, the kids and I were playing: “Let’s kick really high!” As we were playing, I said (out loud): “I’m going to regret this tomorrow.” And indeed, I do regret it. My lower back is deeply messed up. My right hip keeps yelling at me. I gotta stretch more, this is ridiculous.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum: I took the kids on a fourty1 minute bike-ride to visit some friends for a play date. That’s a long ride for a five year old. I’m hugely proud that they did it. Surprisingly, our friends were “only two or three more minutes” away for the whole ride there. On the way back, there were no worries about timing at all.
I’m reading more Kayla Miller graphic novels to Mira. Mira really enjoys them; she gets over the moon excited when a new one shows up from the library. Click is about the struggles of kids splitting off in to cliques around a talent show. Act is about Olive, the main character of the series, running for student council representative for her sixth-grade class. Of the series, so far, Camp is still my favourite.
Miller, Kayla. Click. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.
Miller, Kayla. Act. HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.
A lot of the writing this week has been fiddling with diagrams and edits for the
Bridges
paper.
So much time has gone in to fiddling with the diagrams.
It would be horrendous to write out the exact way the diagrams are made but it
involves a combination of
braids,
Inkscape, and pdftk.
In A Handbook for Scholars, Mary-Claire van Leunen suggests that it would be great to see a heat-map of all the edits to a manuscript. A computer could make the text brighter-larger-redder according to the number of edits to a word. This is right beside her brilliant comments that led to manuscript mode. I would love to see such a heat-map for the Bridges paper. There is one sentence that I keep changing back and forth:
This is the topological heart of the figure.
This is the algebraic heart of the figure.
This is the topological heart of the figure.
This is the algebraic heart of the figure.
It’s both and I can’t decide which!
Final grades are in! Once they’re approved and out to the students, the semester is really over. I’m writing up my semester notes for the semester. Next week, I’ll write up my official PTR documents.
As I said up top, I got pretty injured. Though, I did have a couple nice walks this week. On Friday, I walked in to the office to water the plants. A friend recommends that I start Foundation Training with Dr. Eric Goodman.
I’ve been monkeying around with my blog setup again. Monkey around is one of the true joys of having a blog, I suppose. It all got started when I realized that I use a houseplants group chat as a sort of blog. I send photos of my propagation setups, then look back in the conversation history when I re-pot the plants. A couple of amaryllises have had their “last live photos” posted there. Posting to the group chat is essentially instant; snap a pic, write a caption, and done. Anyway, all this to say, I got wondering: “Could my Hugo blog work like that?”
With a lot of help from ChatGPT,
I wrote a Discord bot that monitors a channel for messages with images.
It downloads the image, strips the meta-data, makes the Hugo post, and embeds the picture.
There’s a little domain specific language for text posts posting: $post, $tags, $content, $draft.
It can also update my bookmarks.
It’s too experimental to hook up to the main pgadey.ca site, but I will keep playing with it.
Another little website hack.
I added backlinks to the gather and dump transclusion mechanism.
Practically, this means that the bookmarks page now shows where things were bookmarked.
It is fun to play with hypertext.
Oh! I had a lovely meet-up with a new friend on Wednesday. We played a couple games: ZerosumZ and Dro Polter. The plan was just to meet-up for coffee but had a few hours of gaming. It has been a long time since I played board games for that long.
I really like ZeroSumZ. One is looking for sets of vectors that add up to zero in $\mathbb{Z}_2^6$. Those can be various different sizes, so the game feels less homogeneous than Set. It also feels a bit more “strategic” than Set. By strategic I mean things like: You can take the sum of the whole board and then remove cards until the sum goes to zero. You can cancel things out term by term and see if anything matches your “left over.” There are various “strategies” in this game, whereas Set feels like: “Stare hard.” Definitely worth printing and playing.
We continue to clean up the raspberry patch at the allotment. It now has a wide path to help us get in to the middle of the patch and munch.
Yes, yes, the correct spelling is forty. Be the change you want to see in the orthography. ↩︎
Published: Apr 28, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Apr 29, 2026 @ 09:42.
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