System downtime

Topics/tags: Meta musings, short

There were many things I considered writing about this evening.

Since I was spending most of today working on a library to make it easier for the code campers to build Web pages in Racket [1], I considered musing on the design of that library. I even wrote some notes. Right now, I’m working on some randomized text generation in Racket [2]. That’s a fun topic. Both of those topics relate to our code camps. If I recall correctly, there are at least three outstanding musings on code camps, one on general issues, one on the detailed schedule for the language of code, and one reporting on the second week of the code camp.

I also considered musing about how well I met (or failed to meet) Friday’s weekend plans. I’ve made some progress on my path to inbox zero. I did promise to report on that progress regularly. I could muse about the progress I’ve made [3]. Oh, I really wanted to write an introduction to our work on Project Callisto. I need to do that soon.

As you can tell, I have a lot to write about. However, ITS [4] tells me that they are shutting down write access to our home directory server at 9:00 p.m. tonight. The aforementioned topics would not be short musings. Given that it is now 8:15 p.m., it is unlikely that I would finish any of them before the server goes down [5].

Does it matter? After all, if our home directory server is down, doesn’t that mean that our Web server will be down, too? No! They tell me that the Web server will continue to run using whatever was in our home directories at 9:00 p.m.

Will you be able to read this musing the night I post it? Fingers crossed.

Will I get those other musings done in the near future? Um … I just listed about seven or eight different musings, each of which appears non-trivial. And this week I’m frantically working on code camps and Callisto. I guess the answer is Probably not, but you never know. For now, I’ll just hope that you can read the musings I’ve already posted.

Postscript: In case I get the urge to muse, I’m trying to get any drafts of musings into the GitHub repo before our system goes down. It probably won’t make a difference, but better safe than sorry, as they say.

[1] Racket has a bunch of libraries; they aren’t particularly convenient for novices.

[2] Yes, that’s using the one-of macro that I’d written about earlier.

[3] And, more accurately, the lack of progress I’ve made.

[4] Information technology services.

[5] Arguably, I still have a lot of work to do tonight. That means that I also should not spend a long time musing. But musing on work I have to do can help me do that work.

Version 1.0 of 2018-07-15.