The Column
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
The title of this Column is a reference to Scott Pilgrim vs the World, which my podcast covered in our latest episode. I love this movie. I don’t love Scott Pilgrim the character, nor really do I love all of the choices that were made in Michael Cera’s portrayal of the titular character, but the movie as a whole package is phenomenal. It’s funny, fast paced, well written, well shot, with great characters and a bunch of very famous people before they made it big. If you’re under 35 and haven’t seen it, I reckon Scott Pilgrim is a good old time.
Also I am reading the comic it’s based on. Turns out that is also great. Highly recommended as well.
The Intermediate Future
There are a LOT of things I’m looking forward to packed into the second half of 2021. Here it’s an incomplete chronologically ordered-ish list of things for which I am quite excited.
June
9th - The Loki series will debut on Disney+ - it’s the first of a theme of MCU releases you’ll see in this list.
20th - Rock and Morty session 5 debuts, which I hope to enjoy more than I did most of season 4 (which I found disappointing).
I am aiming to have my first legitimate use of the newly released Notion API. Not sure yet if I want to pull data FROM Notion or push data TO Notion to begin with. Ultimately both will happen.
We have a couple of much needed vacations lined up. A parents only vacation and a whole family one.
July
9th - Black Widow release date simultaneously on Disney+ and theaters.
August
I get to eat cake and feel no guilt for a day.
6th - The Suicide Squad releases on HBO Max.
My first born turns 3.
Melissa and I take possession of a lovely house in Lawrence, Kansas where we went to college, met, and fell in love.
Marvels “What If…?” series comes out sometime this month.
September
3rd - Shang Chi come out - one I’m very excited for Hopefully we sell our current house for a decent price and without any hiccups.
October
1st - Dune releases in theaters.
My younger dude turns 1.
November
5th - The Eternals comes out - the second new Marvel property in just over two months.
December
17th - the FOURTH MCU movie in the back half of this year debuts- and it is looking to be the biggest Spiderman movie of all time.
”Sometime”
Both the Hawkeye and Ms Marvel series are expected to debut this year, but the month is not yet announced.
Bennett, my younger son, will be crawling very soon, and crawling leads to walking.
We’ll sell our current house and hopefully have some money to throw at whatever needs it most.
Life Lessons You Learn Repeatedly
Do you have any things your brain simply refuses to learn? It happens to me from time to time. One thing that has cropped up a few times here in the recent few months is this lesson:
When you have a problem, and you can’t find the solution, and you’ve Googled potential solutions and found them to be unworkable… make sure you also Google the problem itself.
This is a pattern that’s hit over and over in my life. I have a problem. I think of possible solutions and try to implement them one by one. Each time I hit a snag in implementing the solution, I Google my solution idea. If that doesn’t work I move onto my next idea for solving the problem. Do this a few times, find no solutions that work, and eventually give up on solving the problem… come back to the problem months (or even years, in one case) later, and decide “you know, I should just type the problem into Google rather than solutions. Lo and behold, there’s some simple 2 minute fix I spent hours looking for, and months living without.
The example of this that just happened. My wife and I want to be able to see each other’s Google Calendars in the built-in Apple Calendars app on the iPhone. No matter how much we tried, though, the other person’s calendar just wasn’t showing up as an option. I investigated the obvious answers. I looked into sharing settings from both the Apple side and the Google side. I started thinking about workaround options, using a calendar forwarding system, or signing into each other’s phones. Eventually, I gave up. Nothing was seamless enough to use while being easy enough to implement.
Today, I thought to try again. Rather than Googling something like “Apple Calendar Shared Google settings” or “iPhone multiple Google Calendar accounts”, I just Googled:
"shared google calendar on iPhone not showing up"
Literally the first Google result pointed me to this page, which allows you to tick a box to enable sync on a per-calendar basis. Ugh.
New Gillespedia Article Posted
I just published this article about the concepts of “Analog” and “Digital”. It’s the first in a series of somewhat interconnected articles I’ve been adding to over the past many months.
Top 5: Gillespedia Articles I’ve Started, but Not Finished (Yet)
5. Triangles
All about three sided polygons and trigonometry.
4. Information Encoding
An extension onto #3 below, wherein I talk about some data structures and the bridge between data & the real world and whatnot.
3. Intro to Data
A basic overview of “data”. What it is. What it isn’t.
2. Databases
All about different types of databases and related concepts. Primary keys. Foreign keys. Facts vs Dimensions.
1. The Internet
Spoilers: not a series of tubes. I know enough about a lot of things to be dangerous. My application of the Feynman Technique, though, makes me want to dive further into the internet to wrap up an explanation in one awesome metaphor (about a library).
Quote:
I want candy. I want lots of candy. My son, one of my his first fully-articulated thoughts