I aintn't dead!
And while this has been a rough week -- sickness is going through our family, and while I have had a handful of days where I had little to no energy to do anything, I can happily say I haven't had any days where I wondered if I was going to die. I've had colds (and other diseases) that have been worse than this.
Nonetheless, this little sickness has been severe enough for a daughter to be taken to the emergency room, for a cough that wouldn't let up, resulting in a lot of vomiting. It's under control now! And it while it didn't get to the level of "scary", it's nonetheless yet another thing eating up energy.
All this has been somewhat of a blow to my efforts to find the right rhythm for my blogging, but then again, it's also given me time to think of how I might want to approach things. In particular, I am trying to figure out how to balance limited energy with my desires to info-dump my thoughts (some of which have been maturing over a period of years, some of which are picked fresh from last week), and my desires to make and design things. My goal has been to throw out a blog post every day, and then work on a project for the rest of the day.
When the blog posts are complex, however, this doesn't work very well! (And it doesn't seem to matter that some of those things are things I've thought about for years!) I may have to limit those to one per week. If I want to post more often than that, I think I need to figure out how to get into the habit of throwing out an occasional pithy post.
Meanwhile, I've spent the last two or four days working on translating a cardboard "computer easel" into a FreeCAD model that can hopefully be sent to a manufacturer. While I want to design my own CAD system from the ground up, I have also been wanting to get familiar with FreeCAD, both because it may prove that my "vision" is redundant, and because I could take lessons from what I didn't like about my experience. This project has been very helpful to that end! (Albeit with more than one frustration along the way.)
I've also been thinking occasionally about how I ought to do another Identity Management post. The first "molecule" I want to discuss isn't necessarily an Identity Management thing, although it draws from the Elements: it's a data structure! But it illustrates what can be done with signing hashes.
And I've been pondering the Algebra series I've started. I intended to throw out a handful of rules and their explanations, with the (yet untested) notion that they'll be useful for getting comfortable with algebra ... but after I described the notion of "symbols", it occurred to me that if I'm going to say a certain symbol is a "number", it would be helpful (and daresay important) to lay a foundation for just how those darn things work, anyway! And, of course, there's always a balancing act between figuring out how deep a concept should be explored, and how many deep ideas ought to be separate concepts.
For example, when I introduce multiplication, I might have to resist the temptation to dive into the distributive law, because it may make more sense to wait a bit later, when I have a better place to bring up its motivation -- in particular, I'm coming around to thinking that it's weird to describe why you'd want to multiply "6" with "5+3" when it's pretty obvious that "5+3" should just be "8"! -- but the motivation becomes obvious when you want to multiply "6" by "x + 3", because now you don't have a nice means to "simplify" things -- it's as simple as you can get it, until you figure out what "x" might be!
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