Dispatch #13 (March 2024)

By David Eisinger · View original post

Highlights this month: a weekend in Wilmington, a successful 10K, and a solo dad weekend (including a rainy bike adventure followed by an incredible rainbow over Central Park). Plus some new music and a bunch of website improvements.

Here’s a new track called “Arcus” – smash play and read on.

Arcus.mp3

I’m really pleased with my result in the in the Wrightsville Beach Valentine Run 10K. You can see I’m still far from competitive, but that’s much faster than I ever thought I’d be when I started this journey in 2021. Running (at least at the level I’m at) is one of the few things you can get improve at just by showing up. Want to get better? Run more. Were all the other things I pursue so straightforward.

At the beginning of February, I updated the site to store encrypted photos and display them as black-and-white dithered images. I documented the process in some detail, and then put a link to it on the Hugo discussion forum. Imagine my suprise when, a few days later, one of the core contributers posted that the next version of Hugo would ship with native dithering functionality. I guess my post inspired him to add it, which echoed a post I’d read a few days earler, “Publishing Your Work”:

I don’t create or publish in the hopes of influencing others. I create things because I have an urge to create. But it sure is great to help others along the way, however small my contribution might be.

I stumbled on a retrospective of the HFStival, a DC-area music festival that was a big part of my adolescence. I remembered that I made fan sites for a few of them, and after a few minutes of trying to recall the domains, I discovered that the 1998 and 1999 editions are still online. Not bad, 15-year-old Dave. Funny how I’m still doing basically the same thing 25+ years later, though I guess we have CSS now and I write in Markdown rather than hand-editing HTML files on a server.

I made several website updates this month:

This month:

Reading:

Links: