tecznotes

Today was the first full day of my planned winter sabbatical, and I'm mostly just getting used to the idea of having six weeks of open time in front of me. My plans so far are amorphous, but I know these things:

• I have a pile of small-to-medium-sized experimental, research, and development work I've been anxious to think about. Most of it is in some way connected to geography or cartography, right now I'm arranging pieces to figure out how they might fit together.
• I'll be visiting people. In January, Matt Ericson at the New York Times has graciously offered the use of a desk for a week. Until then, I've got a few other multiple-day visits I'm arranging with other folks I know. Partially I'm looking to vary my surroundings, but I'm also interesting in being around people whose work I like to get a sense for how they get it done. I'm thinking of simple things here: furniture layout, how close people are to one another, do they move around a lot or use headphones, is it chatty and friendly?
• My daily schedule will be broken up into chunks for making/doing (mornings, evenings) and chunks for talking/moving (afternoons).
• I haven't gone to the gym or ridden my bike in a very long time.

Today, I fixed the way that Reblog was talking to Delicious and Twitter, so that my public Twitter feed, Delicious account and links feed could all be synchronized again. I used to publish a regular stream of links, but stopped around the time that Twitter upgraded to OAuth and everything broke. It made me feel mute and disconnected, not having access to my normal means of publishing tiny things. Pinterest helped somewhat. I also pushed a new version of TileStache, focused on the vector tiling needs of Polymaps. See this GIS Stack Exchange thread for a bit of context. Then I had a steaming bowl of amazing Pho from Ba Le in downtown Oakland, walked the dog, and caught up on some reading courtesy of Aaron.

Also, I found these 3" x 4" post-it labels that fit perfectly on my wrist rest for notes: