This week Mabel celebrated her third birthday. The whole crew came out: friends, colleagues, and neighbours. I was keenly aware of the overlapping circles of community. We took everyone to the splash pad. Later, we enjoyed cake together at home.
A friend asked me, while out on a walk, what my hobbies are and the answer surprised me! Usually, I have a whole long list: juggling, african violets, journaling, string figures, etc. It goes on and on. And, like, I don’t usually think of writing as a hobby. My answer really surprised me. It’s totally apt though; I do a lot of writing and enjoy it very much. A lot of my writing is about hobby-related things. In this sense, I suppose that writing is a meta-hobby.
My colleague Jacob Tsimerman won the Fields medal. I am absolutely honoured and awed that I get to work at a place with people like Jacob. For a while, we worked on the same floor and saw each other around a lot. He is an absolute mensch.
I got my passport renewed. Woo-hoo! I needed to get in renewed for Bridges. To be honest, I sent in the renewal when it original expired back in 2024 but mixed up “birth place” with “birth date” and it got sent back to me just before the postal strike of 2024. Oh well! It’s renewed now.
One thing worth noting: government offices are special places. My hunch is that they form a fairly representative sample of the population. You see all kinds of ages, backgrounds, languages, and demeanors. I suppose this is because the “type of person who renews their passport on a Tuesday” is a fairly generic person, in contrast to, say, “people who take public transit” or “people who get fancy coffee.” The generic sampling thing seems to happen at Service Ontario, Drive Test Centers, and hospitals.
Chesterton, G. K. St. Thomas Aquinas. Dover Publications, 2012.
I picked this up after reading St Francis of Assissi. It sat on the shelf for years before I pulled it down because Brennan Day wrote a bit about Chesterton’s writing habit. And, like, the book is pretty alright, I guess? Chesteron quips brilliantly. You read it for the clever turns of phrase.
If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, “To be or not to be — that is the question,” then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, “To be — that is the answer.”
Unfortunately, the book is casually racist and downright unfair to non-Christian religions. This casts a pall over the more brilliant bits. One doubts the insights of the good bits because of the unreasonableness of the bad bits.
A friend asked me out to socialize. We decided to go on an walk instead of going to dinner or a bar. I hadn’t done an hour-plus long social walk in ages. The neighbourhood has some great routes, and I haven’t walked them in ages. I hope that we go for another serious walk together. Walking and talking is a great combo.
What the heck?! This section isn’t about esoteric string figure shenanigans or weaving this time. It is about actual board games.
Mira has been home all week while Mabel is at pre-school. Mira got deep in to playing board games with us. It turns out that six years old can handle some pretty complicated games.
The ctrl-c.club webpage jam has been scheduled.
It’ll take place Friday, 14 August – Monday, 24 August
- A hypertext tour of the neighbourhood
- A hypertext choose-your-own adventure thing
- An outliner-esque site
- Migrating all my micro-blog entries to pgadey.ca
- Migrating all my /notes/ to pgadey.ca
- Build out a /blog/ section theme on pgadey.ca
- Daily vlogs about learning music
- Bash/awk/sed based static site generator
The ideas (1)-(3) are expanding upon or mostly finishing up my previous webpage jam entries. I don’t especially like ideas (4)-(6) because they feel a little anti-community. They are boring “website maintenance” type tasks. I’d like to get them done, but they don’t feel like webpage jam material. Or, to put it another way, I wouldn’t be interested if someone else did (4)-(6) mutatis mutandis.
(7) is essentially just a challenge to myself. Not especially webpage jam-y.
(8) is exciting but might be above my coding skill level. I think it would be neat to have a hyper-simple SSG that does: RSS, tag, and transclusion.
IF YOU LIKE ANY OF THESE IDEAS MORE THAN ANOTHER, PLEASE LEMME KNOW! SHOOT ME AN E-MAIL, I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU
Previous jam contributions.
2023: https://ctrl-c.club/~pgadey/tour/ This is a hypertext tour of my home.
2024: https://ctrl-c.club/~pgadey/appreciations/ Little written appreciations of people’s websites. It was a lot of fun to write these; but doing them daily was a bit of a scramble.
2025: https://ctrl-c.club/~pgadey/notes/computers/#multi-timer This is a physical gizmo for timing multiple tasks. It was a fun hack that totally distracted me from the 2025 jam.
2025: https://ctrl-c.club/~pgadey/outliner.html “Outliners” are a defunct software tool for writing mutli-layer documents. I thought it would be neat to make a website that’s based on the idea of outliners. The result was this “tree-view” site.
I started playing with Twine and it is a sort of weird world of software. There are several “story formats” which seem to be distinct programming languages. The application that I installed only does syntax highlighting and tab-completion for one of them. Moreover, the interface is really tied up with a visual representation of the connection graph of various “passages.” It’s ironic that the software for designing hypertext is is so visual.
Our garden continues to do well. Meg’s pumpking patch and gourds are doing great. As for me, I took out a couple black walnut saplings from near our plot. Now, I have my eyes set on the full-size trees that border our plot. They’re perhaps thirty feet tall, so I’m heading in the direction of amateur arborist. It turns out that I enjoy the maintenance aspect of gardening more than the usual gardening per se.
One thing I noticed while weeding. At the start of the season, we cut back a lot of the rapberries in the front half of the raspberry patch. It turns out that this totally changed the intra-weed competition in that half of the patch. Golden rod completely took over the part that we cleared. The raspberries had been inhibiting the golden rod’s growth somehow. Fascinating.
[44][22]3.(4x,4x)
Published: Jul 23, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Jul 24, 2026 @ 19:54.
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