Sunset over Point Sainte Charles and Saint-Henri

Does anyone else imagine that the earworm currently ringing in their head as they walk on the sidewalk is actually part of the soundtrack in the movie of their life?

My cat is very photogenic

Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec

I was under the impression that a subpoena meant you... had to do something? Or be arrested? Trump is, apparently proving me wrong here.

A lagoon-like pool in Smalls Falls, Maine

I'm enjoying #Sandman so far, but I do wonder what people will make of it so haven't read the source material

From Height of Land, Maine

From the top of Quill Hill, Maine

A while back I started going through a phase where I would buy any reasonably well-reviewed bottle of Italian amaro I could find at my local liquor store, in a halfhearted and somewhat misguided attempt to reconnect with my Italian roots (my mother is from Sicily). I can't honestly say that it worked (what would that even look like? I already talk with my hands, I don't need to do it more) but it did result, as you might expect, in a small collection of Italian amari being added to my home bar.

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TIL that there is actually no abortion law in Canada, i.e. there's no law which explicitly allows or disallows an abortion. It's treated simply as a medical procedure, like a hip replacement (no law for that either) and is legal in the same sense.

Fifteen years ago today, I published my first blog post and I wanted to mark the occasion with - you guessed it! - a blog post. I didn't really have a strong sense of what I wanted to say but, anniversaries being a chance to reminisce, I found myself revisiting what I've written over the years.

It's definitely a mixed bag. The tone and content vary quite a bit. For this reason, when people ask me what this blog is "about", I don't usually have a ready answer, and this sometimes catches them off guard because common wisdom states that blogs typically have themes. People will manage a cooking blog, for example, or a programming blog, or a reading blog. Among other things, it's a way to collect followers - people seem to place greater trust in a blog when it focuses on one subject.

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Gorgeous day in Montreal

Tried my hand at buttermilk pie.

Tried my best. Lunar eclipse.

Ha! https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defence-of-the-single-page-application/

I don't believe I'm a person with seasonal depression or anything but I have to admit that my mood is better with the warm weather.

This is truly fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O28uSZxyEw

TIL that the term "through-composed" refers to a piece of music with no repeated parts (no refrains, etc.)

It always amazes me to think that Prohibition in the U.S. was implemented via a Constitutional amendment, as was its repeal.

In my head I think of a Constitution as a country's legal axioms - the foundation of its law system. From this perspective it makes sense that the prohibition of alcohol, having no Constitutional basis, had to be passed by adding another axiom. And when people realized that this was just a bad idea, it makes sense that getting rid of it required adding yet another axiom. It's funny, when you think about it, like a big legal "oops!" that you can't erase.

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Quite the shit show in the US today

These cuties showed up randomly in my yard

Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

To be clear, I'm talking about receiving and displaying webmentions here, not sending them. How I ended up sending them will be a separate topic, as it is tied into how I manage POSSE and backfeeding on my site.

The previous, pelican-based incarnation of my blog used a homegrown system involving a webmention listener that handed off data to a redis server and ultimately resulted in a new webmention being committed to my site's repo, causing the whole thing to be rebuilt. It certainly worked, but it required a fair bit of maintenance. It also failed to take into account certain edge cases that I hadn't previously considered (like a commentator's avatar image going missing).

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Out and about. Griffintown has changed a lot.

I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

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