Charles Pence @pence@scholar.social

New post over at my development log! Go check it out: https://devlog.charlespence.net/

Moving my email to local Maildir + mutt + notmuch + maildrop + Bogofilter.

Going to be a bit of learning curve for a few weeks, but my old system (Thunderbird, three IMAP accounts with bad spam filtering) was just driving me batty.

Still not counting chickens until the ink is dry, but Big Academic Publishing Company is finalizing my book contract.

I'm a bit torn about it, honestly, because I'll be publishing with one of the Really Big Companies (instead of a smaller university press), but this will likely make the book more discoverable for scientific audiences, something I also was hoping for...

Good: up to 2C
Bad: this is a Lot Of Snow™️

Belgium really going the extra mile to shit on our first vacation in fifteen months

vacation dog vibes

New custom WASD Cherry Blue mechanical keyboard just got in for the home office.

(It's a press that tends to treat books like article collections, where each chapter has a separate abstract. Cool for the online version! But it makes your printed monograph feel... chintzy. Also please please please let me have Opinions about the cover design.)

Just started the "so you support the project, here's where I ask for a few nonstandard things" part of working with a potential press.

They're in for printing some color figures, let's see if they'll listen to a pitch for changing their standard layout...

(but anyway I *think* I have Large Academic Publishing House on the hook now, just have to finish the sales pitch... *holds breath*)

This should have been obvious, but I really hadn't counted on the fact that my nerves about publication would scale linearly with effort expended.

The nerves of negotiating publication for a book MS you've already finished are *huge* compared to getting an R&R on an article.

Hey, finally successfully removed Python2 from my daily machine after clobbering two old dependencies. Nice.

Notably:

- vscode-markdown-notes to start to rearrange my personal notes bucket: https://github.com/kortina/vscode-markdown-notes

- some fancy todo.md style todo listing in my notes on my students/advisees – now I need to parse it and build myself a dashboard...

- new ZSH config, new prompt (https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure), new editor & term color theme (https://citylights.xyz/)

Spent the last week going absolutely nuts running an online conference, so I've spent some time this week on some general friction-reduction in my daily workflows... Feels good to tidy up the (virtual) place.

Hope everybody's doing good out there in the Fedi.

Full program (and yesterday's talks on YT) available here: https://pencelab.be/events/ds2-2021/

New post over at my development log! Go check it out: https://devlog.charlespence.net/