December Adventure 2025

Item One: Some art.

I built and run a little "social media" site for my family. Here’s the repo: Famsite: A minimal social website for families (and friends).

One of my favorite parts of running that is being able to customize it with seasonal themes and holiday countdowns and that sort of thing.

I kicked off December with a colorful holiday CSS theme and this vector snowman drawn in Inkscape:

It’s a pretty generic snowman, but the specific design is based on a cute little holiday decoration I saw somewhere.

I really like making vector graphics with a few simple shapes. You could easily count the polygons and ovals in this graphic.

I spent pretty much literally every moment of free time in November doing "Crowvember" drawings (hashtag #crowvember over on Mastodon). I ended up with 20 of them. I won’t be doing semi-daily art this month, but I don’t want to give up on drawing entirely either. Not to worry, I have a couple art-specific things in mind.

Oh, very well, you’ve twisted my arm. Here’s the 20th Crowvember drawing:

(Posts on Mastodon are "Toots".)

Item Two: "The Hamming Book".

Moving on, I’m also typing up this massive book review for The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming. I’ve had my notes for the last five chapters written up in a paper notebook for at least a month now and I simply haven’t had the…​well, "spoons" is a good term for this.

Anyway, I’m typing up some of those tonight.

Item Three: This page!

And this page. This page exists! That’s a thing.

As I mentioned at the top, I currently have a very small amount of free time on any given day. It varies. Today’s was small and I mostly read a book, which I don’t regret. (Tomorrow is looking even more packed with obligations, so who knows.)

However, I did get a sudden burning itch for no particular reason to fix a long-standing bug in my ratlog web log parser. I’ve never been happy with any of the log summary tools - like the otherwise excellent GoAccess (goaccess.io), which I do use - because the stat summaries always frustrate me. For example, I’ve never cared about what time of day people hit my website. And user agent sniffing hasn’t been useful since the end of the early browser wars.

What I do want is to know if I’m getting a sudden spike of traffic on a particular page. I also like to see incoming HTTP referrer field (even though that’s often blank or spoofed) because it helps me understand where traffic is coming from, in a general sense.

I also want to tweak my results to make them more useful to me (I don’t need to know that my website logo is my most popular file or that people using Apple products send half a dozen different icon image requests that I stopped trying to fulfill long ago).

Anyway, I didn’t actually make any progress on the bug, but I did at least download a new copy of real sample data from my site and re-familiarized myself with the Ruby version of ratlog. (I say "Ruby version" because I was working on an extremely fast Zig version in 2023, which I abandoned for some reason or another.)

I might try to make some progress on that tomorrow. Or not. I’ll describe the program itself in more detail if I actually accomplish some work on it.

I’ve also started a list of things I might like to work on this December. Mostly small stuff like this log parser/summarizer.

Also, I thought I was going to write a short paragraph for today’s entry, but once I get going, it always turns into a whole brain dump, for better or worse.

As expected, no free time to speak of today. It was all work and other obligations.

Two years I’ve been wondering why ratlog (first mentioned Day 2 above) doesn’t show the right results.

But the answer was so silly the whole time:

…​wow, I didn’t mean to leave a cliffhanger yesterday, but that’s what my days look like now.

Let’s try that again.

But the answer was so silly the whole time:

should have been

Yup, for two years I’ve idly wondered why the ratlog httpd access_log summaries were so very wrong.

Now I can slowly improve the results.

For the result index page, I want one row per day with the total number of hits and then, say, the three pages with the most hits that day.

I try to ignore "metrics" for my website, but it is fun to see the spike and aftershocks of traffic as I post pages to the RSS feed.

Put up some chicken wire in the back yard.

Finished a book, read a big chunk of another one.

Computer projects are not happening right now.

I never regret using my time to read a book and listen to music. Truly relaxing and I feel good, sometimes even recharged, afterward.

Mostly family stuff today. Also made some cardboard barriers in the house.

Chicken wire outside yesterday, cardboard inside today. Whatever energy and free time would otherwise exist have been absorbed by a new critter in the home. It’ll be worth it, but it’s a lot.

Had about 45 minutes to myself at the end of the day (not including typing up this entry on the laptop in the dark) and spent it reading. No regrets.

At this rate, my "December Adventure" will be a journal of almost no computer touching at all (except for work). I’m wondering if I should turn to art instead.

Or mostly just read when I have some down time and not worry about it.

The schedule today was so packed. I think I end up with about 15 minutes to myself outside of work (again, not including typing up this entry on the laptop in the dark) and spent it reading. Again, no regrets with the reading.

This December is an adventure alright, just not like you’d expect.

At this point, even the book I’m reading is like my projects: I read 80% of it in one go on the weekend during a block of time I didn’t know I’d have, and then I’m finishing it a dozen pages at a time each day thereafter.

The book is Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young’s memoir. The chapters are short and it’s a page-turner. I’m also playing his albums while I read, so that’s fun.

Still zero time or energy for computer projects.

I had time for art or reading.

I chose art.

TODO: plop yak in a yugo here

(Hello, me from Day 16 here, back-filling entries! So that’s how this is going!)

Did a watercolor frog.

TODO: plop frog here

Then finished Children of Dune (1976, Dune book 3). This is now the furthest I’ve ever been in the series. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet.

Finished reading that Neil Young memoir. It has 68 little chapters, like blog entries. It’s hard to say that it’s a good book, but Young is a good writer. The last entry just ends and that’s the end of the book. It’s like reading somebody’s journal.

Speaking of journals, that’s basically what this "adventure" has become for me. Just a weird little journal that leaves out most of what I’ve been doing all day.

Goodness, what another hard day. Had some fun bits. Finished reading The Book of Flaming Hydra, a volume containing some of the more popular entries from the website. I started reading it when it came in after the Kickstarter was over.

Reading Doctorow’s "Picks and Shovels", the latest Martin Hench novel. Another Kickstarter, as it happens. My copy is personalized. :-)

Did literally nothing for myself. That’s not all bad or entirely a complaint. Just a fact.

Was planning on just reading, but ended up doing some art. :-)

TODO: plop seasonal warblers hacking a mainframe with a terminal here

Well, the rest of the month has been more of the same.

I’ve done exactly zero of the things I had written down as possible "Adventure" items. But I have done some art and I’ve done some reading.

I have done two project-like things probably worth mentioning:

First, I’ve been reading a little bit of C.J. Date’s An Introduction to Database Systems every day. It’s a slightly old edition that I got used for just $4. I’ve been using databases for years, but actually learning the relational model has been broadening my understanding greatly.

And I’ve been writing a little utility script to move some files around. I’ll probably use it occasionally, so it’s not quite a one-off. But it is the sort of thing I would normally dash of in a couple hours.

But these days, I’ve been forced to work on a tiny bit every night in little increments so small that you may have a hard time believing me. Like one night I got it to list files from a directory. Another night, I took a substring from a string. Tonight, the plan is to have it copy a file.

Out with a wimper.

TODO: my new year’s eve drawing goes here