Silvereye Season Highlights 2019

Every November, the Silvereyes come to visit the bottlebrush right outside my window, putting on a show of daring acrobatics, cheerful chirping, and occasional clumsy antics. For the past decade, it's been one of the photographic highlights of the year for me (and a big reason why I got into photography in the first place).

Good Morning!

While this year, I couldn't spend the whole day plonked in front of the window keeping an eye of them, I was lucky that the times I was around (e.g. early morning, before rushing out the door to get to work, and when unwinding after a long day at work) turned out to be the times when some of the most interesting lighting/activities happened anyway ;)

Draft Feature List for Aligorith's Unnamed/Hypothetical Programming Language - 2019 Edition

Perhaps it is finally time to think about creating my own programming language? It would be that long-term passion project that I can truly have complete control over, with the potential for truly minimal dependencies, and in which I can finally build that proper "property system" + "node evaluation engine" + UI toolkit" that will fully work the way that I want it to, and then use this as the basis for all the projects in my backlog which will require similar structural/framework support.  (I could also formalise that documentation system I've been using on all personal projects - the one I documented here once many years ago).

I'm not that crazy yet...   yet!

Then again, I have been thinking about these matters more and more over the past year, so it's highly possible that this may still happen. If I can muster up enough time/energy away from everything else I'm working on (OR if external constraints expedite this process for whatever reason).

So, if I was to write my own programming language/environment, what can you expect it to have. Here is an incomplete list of the important things I'd do.

How (Busy) Software Engineers/Scientists Use Their Computers - A Datapoint

Having spent a few years doing HCI research, I know very well the importance and value that getting data points (any data points at all) about how people set up their workspaces and organise their work/workspaces is - especially for anyone involved in Operating System UX, Personal Information Management (PIM), File Systems, or Web Browser UX work.

Today, I thought I'd make a quick post outlining my personal workflow, in the hopes that this will be a useful datapoint for anyone out there designing these systems (*wink wink* Microsoft ;).  Admittedly, the way I work is probably a bit of an outlier, but I there are many elements here that should be of general value. Hopefully this will be of use to some people out there who study this stuff :)

So, without further ado, here is an overview of my typical working environment.

SOFIA Flying Observatory Visit

It was great getting the chance to tour NASA's SOFIA flying observatory this weekend on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing!

3 Pieces for Christchurch - March 2019 - #WeAreOne

A month ago today on 15 March 2019, a deadly terrorist attack was unleashed upon two mosques in my hometown, Christchurch NZ. Inspired by and in response to the outpouring of emotion in the wake of this horrific event, I wrote a whole bunch of music during this time - I guess partly as a coping mechanism in the wake of each day's events. From these pieces, I've picked the following three as they fit well together under the general theme of healing for a broken community.

Happy New Year 2019 (and a recap of 2018)

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here - May 2018 to be precise (!). Since then, a lot has been happening - so much so that I haven't really had time anymore to put together posts here. Some of these things I can't quite announce here publicly yet, but you'll no doubt find out in due course :) So, without further ado, here are some of my highlights of 2018.

In short, my 2018 was an epic year of travel, new experiences, and hanging out with many good friends old and new.