As I was playing with my kids in the snow last week, I remembered the brussels sprouts that I had planted in the garden. Last year we let the Brussels sprouts overwinter, but I was worried that the temperatures forecasted that week were just too cold, so I decided to harvest them.

Back in 2016, my wife had the idea to take a tasting plate with different varieties of apples and pears to a family gathering. It was a hit! People talked about the fruit and had fun comparing them. We had the following types:

I first heard about SRSs (Spaced Repetition Systems) many years ago when I was learning Mandarin and I was trying to find a reliable way of learning hanzi.

So an SRS is a computer program that helps you learn facts in flashcards efficiently over time by having an algorithm choose for you what to review based on when you are likely to forget it. This way, you don't waste time trying to study material that you already know pretty well. When you review a flashcard, the SRS prompts you to evaluate yourself on how well you know it so that it can calculate when to next schedule the flashcard.

The first SRS that I used was Supermemo. There were not as many decks (a collection of flashcards) available today compared to today, so for my first deck, I went through an entire Chinese dictionary and created a short flashcard for each (character in the front, pronunciation in pinyin in the back). Looking back, I was pretty hardcore.

Later on, I moved on to Anki, another SRS. Over time, more decks became available online and I started downloading them for the most part.

Last December, I tried creating a WordPress site on Digital Ocean. After setting it up, I was astounded that there were so many themes, and that there were whole industries that created sites and developed themes just for WordPress.

I learned that when you create a WordPress site, you had to make it secure so that people don't break in and take control of your server, like anything else on the internet. But then I saw in the logs that every minute people were randomly trying to log on to my account. The chances of them succeeding was low especially because I became concerned enough to add one of the available plugins for two-factor authentication.

It was all very cool, but I got busy and didn't pursue it any further.

Since then, I started hearing about static site generators. I eventually stumbled upon Docusaurus, and decided to go with this for now. I particularly like the sparse simplicity of writing in Markdown. I still want to try out Gatsby one of these days.

Late last year, I came across a reddit community called r/LiminalSpaces that showed subtly disquieting photos of deserted urban spaces.

A liminal space refers to eerie spaces that that feel "off" because they show places that should have many people that are deserted, seem particularly lonely or isolated, or because you don't know where it is or what time it is.

This is the best definition I could find. (It seems to be related to the academic concept of liminality).

When I stumble on a page in a software manual that describes something cryptic with no context, it's frustrating but also reminds me of these photos.

Back when I worked as a translator, I became slightly obsessed with uncountable nouns in English.

When translated Japanese nouns into English, I had to give the English a singular or plural form based on the context.

Example:

I think that the tiny but repeated mental effort of having to choose between the singular or plural changed me over time and gave me this preference.

It wasn't just at work. When I read something in my off time, words like "gravel" and "roughage" would jump off the page whenever I saw it in a newspaper or book. Reading them was slightly easier on my brain, and I preferred to use such nouns in my everyday speech whenever I could.

I recall the noun "moose" was something I pondered occasionally because even though it was countable, its plural form does not change from the singular.

I still notice these nouns, but they don't preoccupy me as much as before.