Projects, et al

Projects and Updates, 2023Q4

Watering plants, updating websites, baking adventures.

C. Kennedy

Jan 1, 2024 • 4 min read

Playlist of music in this post: Spotify

Remembering To Water My Plants

I made some quick, clutch updates to my plant watering Power App.

One
The plants have been sorted by location/room. e.g. All the plants in my bedroom are clustered together in the app.

Two
There are now visual cues when plants are due for a watering. Here's the formula I used in Power Apps to make it happen:

If(ThisItem.NextWatering-Today() = 0, RGBA(195, 255, 255, 1), ThisItem.NextWatering-Today() < 0, RGBA(59,201,255,1), RGBA(255,255,255,1))

Website Updates
I made changes to the navigation bar, cleaned up some old posts, cleaned up some tags, etc.

Album of the Year
I also decided to reboot my Album of the Year project. I'm blowing it up and starting over because it stopped being fun to work on and I want it to be fun to work on.

Rather than separate review processes for nominated albums and non-nominated albums, I'm choosing Albums of the Year from all the interesting albums in a given calendar year.
I found a more thorough listing of yearly album releases, which the completionist in me loves.
My "do I actually wanna listen to this?" bar is much higher. Where I'd previously listen to whole albums at least once, in many cases I'm now moving on in 10 to 20 seconds.
While I love listening to music and recommending music, I hate writing about music. My comments on albums will be very brief.

Fun...

I've spent more time with friends, recently -- in person, on the phone, video messages.

In addition to the general goodness of it, I forget how much better I am after spending one-on-one time with my friends.

They're all very smart and they do interesting things. I regularly walk away with an immediate piece of wisdom I can integrate into my life right away. It's an automatic, tiny little level-up.

Zelda is fun!

The Best Science

I have an almond flour cookie recipe I've been experimenting with to great success.

This was a different recipe, and it was less successful.

I made a cheesecake and cookies on cookies for Thanksgiving. I tried oatmeal crasin cookies, and I didn't want the crasins to dry out the batter, so I soaked them in booze for about 20 minutes... I think I could have gone longer? Maybe I could try brushing the cookies, fresh out of the oven, with the boozy craisin juice?