Way back when when I first created this site (2004?), it made sense having a personal website. It was a place to tinker with code, show off what I was working on, show photos, put up a resume and so on. But today we have sites that are much better suited to those purposes: github, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. So when the domain expires next year I won’t be renewing it.
End of an era! But it means one less thing for me to do. Right on.
See you on the interwebs.
Doing open source is a funny thing. Even though in the back of my mind I know I have a choice to develop and release free software, it doesn’t always feel that way… I feel awful when I’m not busy supporting my projects and actively developing.
For the last few weeks I’ve hardly contributed anything at all – and it’s eating away at me! My weekdays have been busy with my day job and commuting, and my weekends have been packed with a continual stream of activities like doing up the house, visiting parents for their 50th wedding anniversary, helping a composer friend with a programming project and, okay yes, clambering up mountains and going on hikes in pursuit of unknown species of fauna and flora. (Hey, it’s addictive what can I say).
Anyway, I just wanted to write a quick note to say I ain’t dead, and I’m sorry if I’m shirking my responsibilities. For the next week or so I really want to get this home project done (building a wall so we have space to grow more veggies) and then try to spend more time back with the software. So bear with me.
On the positive side, since last week my company has allowed me to work from home full-time. This saves me 3-4 hours commuting time a day which is massive.
So! Fancying a change from Form Tools for a while, I thought I’d return to generatedata and do a few updates.
In the very short term (few days) I’ll be working on 3.3.1, which will include random data sets for the remaining top 20 countries that visit the site. Four to go, I think.
Following that I’m going to revamp the front-end. The backend code, although not awfully efficient, isn’t all that bad – but the FE is extremely dated and far too large. I’ll be moving away from ye olde requirejs and onto React.
To be honest I’ve been looking around for new designs for the site but nothing’s really struck a chord. So for now I’m just going to begin re-implementing the functionality and see what comes of it.
Good grief, February’s almost upon us and I haven’t written up a post about last year’s birding. Amazing how time time flies.
All in all, not a bad year. Not great, but not bad. I picked up 273 lifers in four countries, starting off with a trip to Hong Kong in early April and ending with a 2 1/2 week trip up the East coast of Australia.
Hong Kong isn’t exactly the first place you think about for birding, but since I’d never been to Asia before, flights were affordable and it’s easy for us honkies to get by there, I thought I’d take a week and go exploring. I won’t say it was the most idyllic of destinations, but there were certainly great spots when you looked for them – but admittedly it was hard to avoid the drone of cars. Mai Po and Tai Po Kau in particular stood out. The former is a migratory hotspot for birds found at the NW corner of Hong Kong (and a bureaucratic nightmare for birders to visit alone – trust me, get a local guide); Tai Po Kau is a quiet, macaque-ridden forest nature reserve where I picked up all manner of wonderful forest birds including orange-bellied leafbird, silver-eared mesia, scarlet and gray-chinned minivet and black-throated laughingthrush. Wow. I’d go back to Hong Kong for either of those locations alone.
Next up, in late June I spent a long weekend doing a roadtrip down to Oregon and California to target a few North American species I hadn’t yet seen. In retrospect it’s hard to believe I drove for over 40 hours that weekend, but worth every minute. I actually did extremely well, only missing out on two target species. I saw green-tailed towhee (my last north-of-mexico towhee species), tricolored blackbird (thank heavens they sound totally different to red-winged), sagebrush sparrow, ferruginous hawk, oak titmouse, wrentit and nuttall’s woodpecker. Memorable trip.
Lastly, in October my wife and I flew to Australia in pursuit of exciting birds and marsupials. We flew from Sydney to Brisbane to Cairns, then back through Sydney. Brilliant trip, we crammed a tremendous amount in there: from snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef to taking a pelagic from Sydney, visiting the Blue Mountains, heading up to Daintree for a boat trip up the river, and had a great few days in Lamington park, south of Brisbane communing with the leeches.
Gah, the birds were really too numerous to mention… I ended up seeing a whopping 244 species – and considering I was with a non-birder and didn’t do any actual birding tours (the exception being the pelagic off Sydney) it felt like a real coup. Still, I have to mention a few highlights:
Anyway, by the time Dec 31st rolled by I tallied my list and found I’d reached 1316 species on my life list.
So what’s up for 2019…? That’s the question! This year I’m shooting for 1700 species, but it’s a tough target. In March I’m heading back to Costa Rica with my dad, which should be enormous fun. I don’t have any great hopes to add a lot to my life list (I’ve been to the Mexico & Central America several times and seen a lot there) but perhaps I’ll pick up another 30 birds or so if I’m lucky (a scarlet macaw should count for 10!). In June I’m going to JSConf Asia in Singapore and will spend as much time as possible hunting down birds in Singapore and nearby Malaysia. If I pick up 75 species there I’ll be happy – it’s not the ideal time of year to visit. But I don’t care: I could see another bee-eater species and my very first hornbill…! Lastly I’d been planning to visit east Africa late in the year but it’s possible that my wife’s health may rule that out. Still, we’ll see…
Feature requests wanted! In a few months I’m going to look into an update to generatedata.com. Please see this post for more info.
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