Summer 2012 in Tumblr posts

So I had a really awesome job over the summer! And I did fun stuff. And I didn’t write nearly enough because I’ve never had a full time job before. And then I went back to class in the fall, and I intended to write about how the summer went, and I didn’t. So now I’m doing that, in a series of posts about different things I wanted to do, things I actually did, and so on. Not sure how many there will be, but I’ll space them out. Once it’s done, I can move on to the fall.

        At the start of the summer, I created four different to-do lists and added very few items to them later. So my first few posts are going to be about how I did on finishing those tasks. I actually first did this for Reading Week last year, which I sort of mentioned in this post. Anyway, Reading Week is great because it’s totally unstructured time. So I set out a list of stuff I could do with my time, including productive stuff that needs to be done and fun stuff I’d like to do. Importantly, the list has more stuff than I could conceivably accomplish.

        At any given time, I pick whatever’s on the list that sounds like the most fun. By the end of the week, most everything is done, and it’s really relaxing because I’m always doing something on the list. It doesn’t matter if I don’t finish everything - I get through most of them, or I realize many were stupid, or whatever. So I made four lists like that last summer, and the first one I’m going to subject you to is posts I wanted to write. I set aside seven posts, and I wrote five of them (eventually), which is… eh for a four month period. The full list of posts I wrote:

1. PAX, socializing, and the party April 25th
2. Work with Mako + pictures
3. Keyboard and ErgoCanada
4. RSI (combined with above)
5. Light Table

        Then the two I didn’t write:

5. Why Emacs?
6. AutoHotKey practical examples (I know roughly how to do most of these, but haven’t written the code or record a macro)
   • Having ctrl+backspace and ctrl+delete work everywhere in Windows, rather than sometimes inserting unprintable characters (this presumes the text area supports ctrl+shift selection)
   • Firefox add unsorted bookmark with keyboard shortcut (the default ctrl+d puts them in Bookmarks Folder, unlike the default behaviour for clicking the star in the address bar, which places them in Unsorted Bookmarks - I think I recorded a macro for this)
   • Windows Explorer focus the address bar with keyboard (this I have done; there’s an existing shortcut, but modern browsers use a different key, so it’s just a simple remapping)
   • Explorer Ctrl+b to go to favourites folder (this is useful because then you can just start typing the name of the place you want to go to select it and hit enter, instead of mousing over to the side panel)
   • Console2 and WinActivate to send focus back to the previously selected window (I was using some slightly borked code to have a “dropdown” terminal as in PC games, and it didn’t return focus when you sent the window away)
   • Toss the lot on GitHub

        Now that I write it out, that AutoHotKey post wouldn’t be so hard now that I have a good macro creator. Hmm. Maybe it will happen after all. I don’t feel the need to blather about getting into Emacs anymore, though. There’s way too many of those out there.