Jack Cheng's Blog, page 4

#420: April Odds and Ends

Some steps back this week. As in, perspective – not regress. Planted some shrubs. Went on walks in the woods. I’m learning to identify trees from petal and bark, and birds from song and flight. I feel the knowledge crowding out the patterns of my brain that would otherwise hold camera specs and football stats. It’s a good feeling, this slow recognition, like learning a new language and starting to pick out words in conversation. Might I one day be fluent?

Not much to report on new projects. I’m k...

#419: (Re)clipse

We’re driving into Ohio tomorrow to put ourselves in the path of totality for the solar eclipse. Detroit’s getting a 99% partial eclipse, but partial is not total, and believe me and the rest of the internet when we say: that extra percent is worth it.

The 2017 eclipse was, in hindsight, a major turning point in my life. See You in the Cosmos had come out that February, I’d just adopted Matisse, and Julia and I had met but not yet started dating. As I wrote then, I went in looking to cleave time ...

#418: Discovering the Story

You’re probably familiar with that fragile early stage of new projects, when talking about the project kills any momentum you have for it. But there also comes a time, I’ve discovered, when the energy flips, when telling people about it only gets you more excited to continue. The project goes from introverted to extraverted.

Maybe this happens in waves. There are multiple turns instead of just one. And if I’m not fully there yet with MAPS, I’m close: at book events in the past weeks, when asked w...

#417: Joining the Club

Julia and I hit a milestone: Our 20-week anatomy ultrasound was completely and utterly normal. We’re preparing for Baby’s arrival but also trying not to over-prepare, which I guess is the trick of doing anything new: You don’t want the idea of how it should go to override your responsiveness to how it is actually going.

We’re lucky to have support from folks around us. Most of our friends who were planning to have kids are already with child(ren), and we are the beneficiaries of their wisdom (and...

#416: Makers Mod Their Tools

Modern sewing machines have a number of knobs and dials that control thread length, thread width, tension, presser-foot pressure, so on. Different fabrics and stitch patterns call for different constellations of settings: Cotton is a baseline but twill wants higher tension and firmer foot pressure. Sheer curtains might need a looser tension and a shorter stitch. Zippers are their own matrix.

Some sewing machines, like the two we have in our house, come with built-in reference charts and memory ai...

#415: On Copiloting

I’ve been working on a simple iOS app in my spare time, partly for fun, and to try out Github Copilot. I’m a passable front-end developer, and if the code’s already there I can generally figure out what it does even if I’m new to the language. That makes me, I’d guess, a relatively common use case for an AI-assisted pair programmer (I picture this as a literal parrot on my shoulder, squawking at me about Bindings and State variables).

But I have to say, my biggest realization after a couple of we...

415: On Copiloting

I’ve been working on a simple iOS app in my spare time, partly for fun, and to try out Github Copilot. I’m a passable front-end developer, and if the code’s already there I can generally figure out what it does even if I’m new to the language. That makes me, I’d guess, a relatively common use case for an AI-assisted pair programmer (I picture this as a literal parrot on my shoulder, squawking at me about Bindings and State variables).

But I have to say, my biggest realization after a couple of we...

#414: All Work is Care Work

All work is care work. Not a statement of fact, more an outlook, a mindset. What if you asked, of your tasks and projects, “For whom am I caring?”

The answer can be yourself. That’s a valid answer. It’s often not only yourself but yourself and another – or more than one another. The reader of the published article or book. The neighborhood. The future children and grandchildren and/or your childhood self. The forest, the planet, all things living.

Sometimes the whom is your client. Again, a valid ...

#413: My Daily Routine, January 2024

The last one of these posts I did in 2020, but as with many things that year it’s been lost to the vortex. In most of my thirties my routine was built around acts in sequence, a Rube Goldberg machine I became wholly dependent on – to the point of rigidity. A single mis-spaced domino would threaten the whole system. I’m surprised it held up for as long as it did.

Since then I’ve been trying to become more adaptable. The analogy I used in a recent Dumpling Club newsletter was that of turning an oce...

#412: Makings Of

A holiday tradition of ours is an annual viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol. Though some years, like this past one, call for several. No other film is more quoted in the house; “Light the lamp, not the rat!” is a whole philosophy unto itself.

So I was thrilled to come across, in a Little Free Library, a copy of Jim Henson: The Works. The book’s more of a monograph of Henson’s studio than a typical biography, but you get a really sense of Henson’s eternal optimism, his tendency to scratch whate...