Whoops

Topics/tags: On musing, Miscellaneous, short

It’s the last day of the month. On the last day of the month, I typically write a long musing in which I reflect on what I mused about during the month and what I learned about writing. And I was planning to do so. But for some reason, I convinced myself that tomorrow was the last day of April, not today.

How does that saying go? Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November [1]. What month is it? April? Whoops.

I have a variety of notes about what I want to write about this month. But they are incomplete and likely incorrect in places [2]. It usually takes a bit more than an hour to turn those assorted notes into a coherent musing [3]. I’m behind on sleep and don’t really have that hour tonight.

I apologize, dear reader. It’s the end of the month and all you get is this rambly short musing [4]. Don’t worry, though. I’ll pretend that May 1 is the last day of the month.

Back tomorrow.

[1] There’s also a part about February, but I think it gets too long when you start to handle the century and millenium issues.

[2] For those who care, here are the unedited notes.

• Start adding topics/tags at the top.
• Added Hypothes.is. Broke things.
• Wrote a new introduction (?, I hope). About a month later than I’d planned.
• Status of list of forthcoming musings (rearranged, I hope; changes to total number? Added potential tags?)
• When I had to talk about CSC 321/22 recently, it was helpful to have spent some time writing about it. I think it made me more articulate. (Of course, I also talk about CSC 321/22 a lot. So perhaps not.)
• Tried planning a week in advance. Quickly got disrupted. Nights in which I needed short musings. One or two musings that needed external approval (those are rare).
• Writing the long rant on Getting requirements wrong ended up being a useful exercise. I explained to myself why I care about these issues. I learned that we’ve explicitly exempted some majors from the department limit. I began to think about the issue for Math/Stats. Of course, when I started writing it, I thought it would be a short rant.
• Kept trying to write short musings. But the short musings kept ending up being long musings. Bleh.
• Partially for that reason, most musings still don’t get posted until 10 p.m. But I did get one out before 7:00 p.m. one day. That’s one that I just felt I needed to write. (Which one was it? Damn. Oh, it was the mixed messages one.)
• Reached 600 musings. Chose that number to try to restart a long-defunct series of Grinnellians you should know (or know about). I remember why I wrote them. They make me feel good. I think they make other people feel good. They shouldn’t make anyone feel bad. That’s definitely a net positive. I have a few more in the soon queue, but seventeen days have passed and I haven’t made it to any yet.
• Technical readers are submitting pull requests.
• Realized that I don’t remember what I write. After yet another discussion in which people disparaged double majors, I had sketched a paragraph about them. A few days later, I realized that I’d already mused about the subject. I have new things to say (e.g., that eight-course majors make double majors much easier), but I think I’ll put it off a bit longer.

[3] Coherent may be generous for the end-of-month musings.

[4] Plus all of the assorted notes, so that you can discover a bit more of what happens behind the scenes.

Version 1.0 of 2018-04-30.