It was a really close game!

I’m demoting TweetBot to page 3 of Spingboard. I’m not sure how long that will last.

🎬 This article is the best thing I’ve ever read about Star Wars.

📚 “Ready Player One” looks promising. I’m one chapter in, and it’s fun.

The 2017 news cycle has worn me out. I am looking for something purely escapist to read. I’m considering “Ready Player One” and “The Last Unicorn”.

I am vacillating between being lazy and productive today. It is a vacation day, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.

🎬 I am finally seeing “The Last Jedi” tonight. Hope it is good!

After an eventful trip to see family, we are back at home. Today is a rebuilding day: unpacking, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, dishes, etc.

And when they say that all is lost All is not lost, all is not lost And when they say that all is lost All is not lost, no all is not lost at all

—OK Go “All Is Not Lost” Video

Merry Christmas everyone!

We are heading off to see family for Christmas today.

I made banana bread, too.

I baked Snickerdoodles for the family today. They are really, really good!

I bought Castro 2 this week because I like the design and it was on sale for a pittance. I am not sure I will switch to it from Overcast, though. Castro 2 has a better UI and better product focus, but Overcast has the better audio engine, which really is the most important thing.

I made a batch of Christmas cookies tonight with my daughter. Such fun! She pressed chocolate chips on top of sugar cookies that we rolled out together and cut—about 100 chips per cookie, I think.

A long lunch with the family was a great way to complete my work week.

So much of all programming, and really all work in general, is developing a common vocabulary, and after that, common goals. That is most of the work in a lot of the projects I work on.

I am up too late. What exactly is happening right now? 🙃

According to Dark Sky, a Christmas morning snowstorm may interfere with my holday travel plans. I am crossing my fingers that it doesn’t happen.

I’m relieved to have finished all my billable work for the week already. It was a tough week, and thankfully it is starting to wind down now. I am looking forward to a holiday break next week.

I wonder how many people still have to use VBA for Excel and Access automation at work, like I do. Googling for Office VBA how-tos feels like jumping in a time machine and going back 10 or 20 years. It is disappointing that Microsoft never added C#/.NET support to Office, but it is understandable.

I started a micro blog at mjdescy.micro.blog this week. It is not to replace this blog, but to supplement it with a more frequently updated stream of short comments and asides about my life, or about news items that directly affect my life in some way. I want it to be like Twitter was for me back when I first joined it: a stream of consciousness, and a window into my life. My plan is to keep this blog (my macro-blog?) free of micro blog posts and life blogging, and more focused on longer articles, bigger ideas, and more complete thoughts—as it has been from the very start.

I spent some time this evening starting to code something new for work in C#: a tool for comparing actual drug formularies to required ones. It should be a fun little project.

Twitter is abuzz about UIKit, perhaps, going to the Mac late next year. We’ll see. I would love to code a new version of my todo.txt app, SwiftoDo Desktop, in UIKit rather than AppKit. The different table view model is a big factor in that, though UIKit’s window and split view controls are, of course, different, too. WWDC will be especially interesting next year.

It’s the last work week of the year, and the busiest I’ve had in about six months. I had to work late tonight. (I’m still working, in fact.) It’s making me think of this bleak article I read earlier this evening: eand.co/what-do-y…