I took a break from ICML reviewing yesterday to go to an embroidery class. My goal is to get good enough to make my own patches to put on jackets and backpacks.

Embroidery is actually strangely addictive! I can see why embroidery is enjoying a revival in the crafting community.

The class was actually really great; having the chance to chat with a bunch of crafters and makers was a blast. It was also the first time in a long time that I've been at an event that's predominantly women that's not focused on tech and professional development.

Barbados Workshop 2019

Making more friends 🐒

Making friends 🐠

On my way to the barbados

On science communication and blogging.

I'm going back through my dive logbook after a three year diving hiatus. The software I use to track my dives has become an ungodly mess of company acquisitions and poor software support. Turns out the company that made my dive-computer was bought out by scuba-pro.

To even get my hands on the software to open my dive-log file, I had to scour old forums looking for a hidden link that would take me to the SmartTrak site. That wasn't even enough alone, I had to engage in browser witchcraft to coerce the site to not redirect me to scuba-pro's main site. The file is nowhere else, at least by my searching. Interesting that no one liked SmartTrak enough to keep a mirror of it.

Of course, finding the software didn't solve my problems. oh no. The dates were incorrect on some of my dives. An example malady of poor software support: I could turn the background of dive profiles gradient olive green, but I could not edit basic dive info---e.g., the date and location of a dive. For the first-time in my life, I'm actually experiencing the effects of deprecation in software that I depend on. It's not like I can just give up the logs for dives I've done; It's important that I keep the data I collect when I'm diving to keep track of dive habits and share with dive-shops.

After going through old dev-forums and dive-forums, I found a converter which takes shameful SmartTrack files and converts them into a modified XML for use with SubSurface. At least I can coerce the file into being read as XML, rather than proprietary nonsense. More than that, not only does sub-surface allow me to edit the date of a dive in increments greater than 7, I can edit multiple dives at the same time.

It's the future.

I can't help but feel that this is a sort of digital vagrancy. SubSurface seems great now, but what about in 3 years? 10 years? I know there's a trend of web-based dive-logs, but I don't want to have to shuffle around, converting what has no business being anything but XML or a CSV to bunch of proprietary, uninterpretable file formats.

Having been burnt by SmartTrack, I'm looking for robust export functionality in my next electronic dive-log. Lucky for me, it seems sub-surface is able to export as CSVs. This seems like a clear candidate to make a stand and own my own data.

The whole thing is just screaming to be added to the blog. Time for #indieweb scuba logs. Then if something breaks, it's my own damn fault.

My cousin was visiting Edmonton today, so the family got together to make tacos. It's a tasty way to keep warm, I guess.

Out in central Canada for my grandpa's 90th birthday.