2018-12-11
___M_i_s_c_e_l_l_a_n_e_o_u_s__u_p_d_a_t_e____________________________

Dear reader!

I have been silent for too long. But there has been a lot going on in
my life since the last posts. For one I have intensified my under-
standing of toki pona.

I even managed to get out some poetry, which I will collect at [0].
The current two poems are:

```
jan lili mi

jan lili mi utala.
jan lili mi pona.
jan lili mi pana sona.
sina tawa seme.
sina lukin ala lukin e ma pona.
sina kama lon ni.
jan lili mi o lape.
ali li pona.
		2018-12-10

	***

pipi lili

pipi lili li kama ni
ona li moku e kili
kili li ike
nanpa wan sike
la pipi lili li moli

   	     	2018-10-25
```

Also besides that I am in the process to translate the children's
book 'Lauren Ipsum' [1] into german. I will probably ask some of you
for advice and proof reading but since this is most likely a highly
illegal activity under copyright law and others I will do it in
private.

Another thing is that I have been keeping a looong reading list
waiting, so I will now take books and reading material to work and
use my lunch break to get done some reading. The work place features
some nice couch like reading spots and I should make use of them.

I meant to take part in the excellent scifi project of tomasino [2].
But I don't have the time and energy to do a lot for that
unfortunately.

Programming wise I have been further exploring and writing my
personal finance tracker in smalltalk. The working title for that is
'Muffin' and as soon as I learn how to publish monticello packages, I
will put them on this server so you can read along if you like.

It is based on a Morphic toolkit called Pheno[3] from the HPI SWA
group.  I like its looks so far and it is easily customizable.

I also seem to have groked the Dependency model and so one can see
transactions updating themselves life! It's magic!

Smalltalk is also the first environment where I have seen Test Driven
Development to actually work. I blame the tight integration of test
runner, debugger and editor for that.

On a personal note I am no longer an amazon customer. Amazon has forced
me out of their service. A couple of weeks ago all my orders have been
flagged as suspicious activity. Noone could tell me why this has happened.
The same payment method has been working since I first bought from Amazon in 2000.

They suggested using a credit card as payment method, which I refused
and so they told me I could get pre-paid vouchers in shops instead.
So after getting that poor proposal I immediately cancelled my
account.

The effects on that? Well I have found other resellers that will not
require any prepayments, bills upon delivery, package delivery
persons seem to handle packets with more care if they don't have
'amazon' written on it. My local bookstore gets books faster for me
than amazon. And for most stuff I don't pay shipping costs.

So thanks for that move Amazon, my money is probably spent better
elsewhere. And it is more comfortable too.

___References________________________________________________________

[0]: gopher://vernunftzentrum.de:70/0/ckeen/toki-musi.txt
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13073554-lauren-ipsum
[2]: gopher://cosmic.voyage:70/
[3]: https://github.com/tom95/Pheno