This is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.

Apologies in advance if I have typos or worse writing than usual. I’m traveling right now and don’t have my laptop with me, meaning I have to use a different writing flow.

Right now, I’m typing on a iPad, using GitHub’s built in text editor. It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be. The touch keyboard does a decent job of approximating a real keyboard. Of course it’s a lot smaller, but it’s still loads better than a phone keyboard.

However, obviously I’m making do with a non-ideal situation by using the tools I have. Typing is much, much slower than an actual keyboard. Furthermore, I don’t have an easy way to check all the formatting works, besides launching the site and hoping for the best.

It’s funny. I’ve always seen tablets as a little extraneous. I thought you either wanted a phone size thing or a laptop size thing. A tablet size thing felt like a weird middle ground. But, now that I’m using one, I can understand why it feels qualitatively different from both. Still don’t think I’ll buy one though.

Anyways, this is a whole new experience for me. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to even try to make a blog post today. I was just going to take the $20 hit because of how little time I had. But, when there’s a will there’s a way.

I don’t think I’ve emphasized just how convoluted my process is right now, so let me explain.

  • I’m borrowing this iPad from my family, so no downloading apps. That means I have to edit through Github’s interface, which to be fair isn’t that bad.
  • To check the word count, I’ve been using vim’s built in word counters. I can’t get vim on this iPad so instead…
  • I save my work from Github’s interface, then use an SSH client on my personal smartphone.
  • Then I SSH to my school account on the Berkeley servers, which luckily isn’t deactivated yet.
  • Then I pull the updated text for my blog.
  • Then I open vim, which again - is accessed through SSHing from my freaking phone.
  • And I can then check my word count.

At last count I was over 230 words. Now…hey, 380! Not bad.

(I would put the Not Bad Obama meme here, but there’s no way I want to deal with setting up all of that on an iPad. Let your imagination fill in the dank meme.)

This is about the moment where you should realize I just spent about 400 words talking about nothing except the struggles I’m going through to type the post you’re reading. Truly, I have hit rock bottom for material. Or to be more precise, I’ve passed rock bottom, because I already used a similar concept in Shut Up And Write. I’m retreading my shitposting! Do you realize how incredibly disappointing that is, to me, a person trying to write semi-serious things?

Oh who am I kidding, this blog has always indulged in memeing about itself.

Time for a word count…

Hey, it’s over 500! (Not, unfortunately, over 9000.) I’ll stop this self-indulgent bullshit here. I think it’s likely I won’t make more posts, but if I do they’ll be back to whatever counts for normal around these parts.

Until next time.