It is a minor to medium pain in the ass to have to manually create a new post in Jekyll with the format YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP and then remember what metadata should go in the YAML front matter.

For that matter, whether the front matter is YAML or TOML.

Or does it (front) matter? In any event, if for example you enter hugo new post/domingo.md in the project directory you get a file with basic front matter including date and time in content/post/domingo.md.

And Bob is your uncle.

You can add additional metadata to the default post template, too. Such as the name of a layout.

If only deploying Hugo were not still such a pain in the ass for me.

As above with the Netlify solution.

Because if you do hugo new theme <theme name> then Roberta is your aunt.

Step Away From the Infernal Machine

To be honest, however, I promised my legion of Brazilian readers that I would stop juggling a whole lot of balls at once and focus on two tasks today.

One is getting a real for true Hugo Web site up at gringolalia.github.io – possibly with Netlify – and the other is making adjustments to the Jekyll-Uno theme used for this blog.

I am picky. I do not like certain font colors or sizes. I would prefer a dark red headline for the posts as in the United theme, and I also want to know if I can add categories and archives to the template.

I am immediately distracted, of course. am also looking into theme generators from Yeoman, like the one for Hexo. Hexo I know I can easily host on Github Pages – hexo-deployer-git works! – but I want to learn to port different themes to it.

And so we will see if I get to those chores. Maybe by Monday dinner.

Now, I also promised that I would write my regular Sunday post about the joys and sorrows of Sambodian life in general rather than the infernal machine specifically. And you see how that is going.

Even so. Dogs must also be walked. Trash taken out. Netflix tuned in on. Rádio USP 937 FM listened to.

Only a Fool Has Himself for a Student?

This pandemonium of disorganization with respect to the infernal machine is why I am setting out myself a cheat sheet for each of the various tools I mean to use in my self-taught education in Web development.

These were the tools I managed to get running easily on my Arch Linux machine – unlike, say, Middleman or Roots or some but not all other apps built with npm i -g <app>.

Among the static site generators were the ones generating an intuitive scaffolding structure and grokkable CSS – needed for someone who learned CSS in the 1990s – and without JavaScript or any such thing to write or jigger or cut and paste.

And deployable to GitHub Pages, which is all I can afford right now.

As in $0.

Entia Sociābilia Non Multiplicanda Sunt

I am sure have noticed all the social coordinate buttons on the landing page of this site.

This is the current fashion of site designers: entia sociābilia multiplicanda sunt and William of Ockham be damned!

And the ass Buridan rode in on.

The fact is that I am probably less sociable in all those online forums than I am in actual life. And that is saying something.

StackOverflow? I Google it a lot for tech questions but I have no points.

LinkedIn? A stale profile at bretonio, which is the name of all my machines: bretonio@lowerarchy47. bretonio@mintconditional47.

(The number 47 has to do with Pomona College, which now the very best American college in its category, I am proud to say).

Facebook? If you want to know the truth, I actually do not really understand how it works! I have an easy twitting from a right click gizmo on Google Chrome but the things I twit are generally boring, I rarely retweet – I do not like the Linux Twitter clients because they get in my way – and I have almost no followers. I think some users are turned off by the portrait of (ex-)president Dilma beside Chairman Mao. I am just kidding, people!

And do you think I am really an active member of HackerNews?

I once had a YouTube account but I have forgotten where it is: I would produce these modest and surreal little Brasil para ingês ver V-logs in order to practice subtitling.

The same goes for LastFM: a few podcasts, years ago. Nostalgia for college radio days.

What I would really like to do is build a network of Brazilian open-source bloggers like this fellow Arch Linux enthusiast and hacktivista. I need to find out where they lurk on GitHub and elsewhere. A search on Brasil does not bring up many results.

Lectures & Conjectures

One of the things you learn from being raised by people born well before the First World War to large, severely Protestant Midwestern farming families is that you should always be doing something valuable, whether it is work for pay or learning some skill with a practical or social application.

Idle hands. The Devil’s toolbox.

6:30 to 7:15 every morning. Read and discuss the Los Angeles Times. Walter Cronkite every evening. The Vietnam body count? How can we be losing if we kill ten times what they do? Discuss. A subscription to National Geographic every Xmas before the days of Naked & Afraid. The Tom Swift novels on which your uncle was raised.

Learn about World War II by assembling models of vintage weapons systems. Your grandfather landed at Omaha Beach, road a bulldozer all the way to Berlin, and spent the long postwar as a DoD contractor of such systems, including space program components.

And above all, read read read.

A colleague of mine at the Cancer Ward asked me the other day, Colin, how many books do you read at one time?

At the moment?

I finally took to heart what Neuza says about my male chauvinism – Never read Kate Chopin? George Eliot? Always meant to! –and picked up a Brazilian writer named Lygia Fagundes Telles. She is quite an influence on my Mina de Letras.

In «The Naked Hours» the narrative voice shifts back and forth between a neurotic 50-something actress, lying drunk in the dark in a pile of her own literal dirty laundry, and … her cat.

And this I enjoy with pure pleasure.

What is torturing me at the moment is this masochistic urge to return to the 1990s and my doctoral studies by picking up Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia.

«Capitalism produces schizophrenics the same way that it produces Ford automobiles or [Whirlpool] refrigerators.»

I forget the brand they mention. Amana?

«Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution: No one agrees on when it started going bad».

This book presupposes an omnivorous re-reading – or first-time reading – of an enormous pile of references as well as a great deal of self-assembly.

It cannot be grokked by googling the Wikipedia article.

Yes, I did read David Ricardo once, and this might help make sense of the parallel drawn in the final chapter – on the positive tasks of schizoanalysis – between political economy and classical psychoanalysis.

Lately, then, henever I am waiting for a rehab session or a bus I pull it out and try to find a way in that I can understand in my own terms.

Codes and flows? Desiring machines and the body without organs, the latter a concept taken from Artaud? That bits about semantics and semiotics I do t think I might be able to get.

But was there ever a time when I was better equipped to make use of all this? Can Plato at Stanford lend me a shovel or backhoe? Or maybe my philospher friend might give me a private seminar in exchange for a nicer Web site than his current one?

And that is Sunday in Sambodia.