TIL

I was recently reading a little about Judith Cohen, an engineer who worked on the Apollo Program, the Hubble Space Telescope and more. She was involved in the development of the Abort-Guidance System in the Apollo Lunar Module which was key to the rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

She was pregnant with her fourth child at the height of the Apollo Program, apparently even taking work to the hospital when she gave birth shortly after Apollo 11. That child: Thomas Jacob “Jack” Black.

Germanic Philology

I’ve just finished up a wonderful Introduction to the Gothic Language course at Signum.

I’m getting very close to finishing the initial markup of .

It’s been over a year since my last newsletter but it’s also been almost a year since I’ve been home. Back in March 2020, I booked what was intended to be a short trip back to Australia. My wife needed to go back for a bit and I decided at the last minute to go with her in case the travel situation due to COVID made it difficult for her to return. As it turns out we were on one of the last flights Qantas flew from the US to Australia. And for almost a year, we’ve been living in Esperance, Western Australia—a lovely part of the world but I left the US in a hurry and a year is a long time to live out of a suitcase away from from all my stuff (books, especially, but also my wine collection, music and audio equipment, etc.)

It’s certainly been difficult and most of my goals for 2020 went out the window although I was able to achieve some things a pick up a few new projects I had not planned on starting.

I had to quit my second certificate at Berklee (in Film Composition). And without my recording gear, I gave up any hopes of doing any kind of instructional videos.

I decided to get back to my wine studies. Even though I was working towards my WSET Level 3 a number of years ago (before my mother got ill), I decided to go back and sit the Level 1 and then Level 2 which I passed with distinction.

Twitter

One reason I started this newsletter was to have a list of people interesedt in updates in case I quit social media all together. While I don’t yet have plans to quit Twitter, I was inspired by Anil Dash to basically restart my Twitter following. So I’ve gone from following 3,000 people to following 1 (my late mother who I can’t bear to unfollow). I’ve moved everyone I was previously following to (private) lists, though, so I’m still able to read the same tweets. I’ve created some topical lists for when I want to catch up on what, say, the classicists are tweeting about, or the cosmologists. I’ve also created some priority lists with the people whose tweets I don’t want to miss.

I’ve found that I no longer aimlessly refresh Twitter to see my timeline update. Instead I’m a lot more intensional in my Twitter reading. So far I’d say it’s been a success for me, although about 50 people seemed to unfollow me when I unfollowed them (despite the fact I still read them).

I haven't really stuck with writing this newsletter as regularly as I thought and I kept delaying writing another update until I felt I had something worth the delay. Of course, this is a common vicious circle for me. If I wait until I have an update worthy of a delay, then the extra delay in waiting ups the game, requiring an even more worthy update. This continues until no news can possible justify the delay. The solution, to borrow from C. S. Lewis's Screwtape, is to just laugh and go to bed.

And so here is a quick update on some highlights in 2019 without any attempt to justify the time since the last update.

I completed two qualifications in 2019 (both of which I've written about before):

• a Certificate in Germanic Philology from Signum University
• a Professional Certificate in Music Theory and Composition from Berklee Online

Journeyman of Some Issue #3

Graphical maths tutorials

One interesting find the last couple of weeks was Demo-Man's wonderful low-res interactive tutorial on trigonometry for games. It's very well done and particularly close to my heart because, when I was 11, I was motivated to learn trigonometry because of games: initially just to be able to draw circles on my Apple IIe but then how to do basic wireframe animation like I saw in the original Flight Simulator I played. (I got as far as rotating cubes but never hidden-line-removal).

It also made me want to get back to my in-progress Orbits Tutorial which I started back when SpaceX launched Starman into space and I was explaining some basic Kepler-model stuff to a friend.

Well, I’ve made it to two! Thanks for joining me on this little experiment.

A little Unicode fun

There was a fun thread on Twitter last week that started when a well-known web developer pointed out that if you set the maxlength on a web form input field to one, you can’t type emoji. They suggested it was to do with the number of bytes but this is not quite right.

Having just written a chapter on Unicode for a book for digital classicists, I thought I’d briefly explain on Twitter (and now here).

Welcome to Journeyman of Some

What's this all about?

When I started my Greek/linguistics/language blog at jktauber.com I included an Atom Feed (it comes with pinax-blog anyway) even though very few people seem to use feed readers any more. I then went looking for a service that would let people subscribe to get emails when something new appeared on the feed.

Last year, when I started Modelling Music and Digital Tolkien, I decided to produce them using VuePress, a Vue.js-based static-site generator. While there's work being done on more blog-like features in VuePress, it's really best for general content and I wanted that to be a big part of the two new sites (and I plan to port jktauber.com over at some point as well). VuePress doesn't have Atom/RSS feeds (yet) though and I've been relying on Twitter to announce new posts.