I live near a one-way street, and drivers keep turning into it the wrong way by mistake. Most react by getting flustered and backing dangerously into the arterial, perhaps following an instinct to “undo” the error. The safer solution (in my eyes) is to park the car, wait for traffic to clear, then use a driveway to point yourself in the right direction.

Unfortunately, driver’s ed doesn’t teach you how to recover from mistakes like this—at least, mine didn’t. Instead, driver’s ed teaches the rules of the road and how to follow them. Once you have violated the law, even if by accident, you are in undefined territory. Hence, drivers develop a strong impulse to immediately “reverse” errors rather than identify a safe course of action.

A footrace, but the objective is to run as far as possible in a fixed amount of time rather than speeding through a fixed distance. The catch is that the time limit is drawn randomly at the start of the race, so you cannot strategize around it being a sprint or distance event.

I think a good choice of distribution would be an log-normal distribution with a mean of around four or five minutes and a fairly high variance. Perhaps we could clamp the maximum time at eight hours, out of respect for the athletes’ work-life balance.

I ran (ha) this idea by a friend who is a competitive marathoner and he said, “That sounds like hell.” This makes me think I am really onto something, because many popular sports sound like hell to those who are not yet good at them.

I created a new logo for the site today:

The old one was just a square with my initials, MK, which seemed a little too self-indulgent (not to mention that I share these initials with half of my extended family, so I can hardly claim them as my own):

The new logo still kind of forms a stylized letter m, if you imagine the three theme-colored vertical segments as hanging from the horizontal segment on top. It also kind of recalls the shape of the word Ill, which spells the start of the blog title and doubles as a fun bit of retro slang.

The best thing about fish is probably the lateral line, which sort of like ears for underwater that enable fish to sense and locate predators even in dark or murky conditions.

The best thing about the fish command-line shell, on the other hand, has to be its “fuzzy” completions. In most other shells (like Microsoft PowerShell, which I use every day at work), you can tab-complete a filename like blog_post_idea.md by typing blog (the first part of the filename) and pressing Tab. If there are multiple matches, you use the arrow keys to scroll through them until you get the one you want.

This works fine if you put the most-unique part of your filenames at the beginning. But I like to begin my filenames with ISO dates, so to tab-complete 2024-03-06_blog_post_idea.md in PowerShell, I have to type 2024 and then jab the arrow key a bunch of times, which is like using a phone book that is sorted by phone number. In fish, I can just type blogpost (even without the underscore) and it will autocomplete to 2024-03-06_blog_post_idea.md.

Similar completions work for the options of most command-line programs, and it’s (relatively) easy to extend the built-in completions with your own configuration files (but I’ve never needed to).

I am one of those obnoxious people who begins his filenames with an ISO date, like 2024-03-06_blog_post_idea.md. I know that file metadata already tracks creation and revision dates, but I don’t like those: The creation date is misleading when you duplicate a file to reuse its format or content, and the revision date is all but meaningless because modern software modifies files on disk in all kinds of spurious ways. I put an ISO date in my filenames to assign them a canonical date. The canonical date means something like “the last date at which this file underwent a significant change,” and I alone (not software) can determine what that means.