Hola, peeps!
Busy brain day! I spent a little time in the morning working on financial/tax stuff for 2021, finishing up the particular step I had been working on last night. I wanted to just get that part done and finished. I’ve learned how problematic it can be to leave in the middle of a step, only to come back later and realize I’ve forgotten what I’ve done, often times resulting in having to start over or nearly over.
Anyway, so I finished that up. It didn’t take very long. Then I made an order-of-operations to-do list for what I have to complete to get 2021 ready to submit. That’ll help me stay focused and on task, I think. I hope. 🙃
Getting so so so close!
I chatted with one of my sisters for a good long while in the morning, and we spent a good chunk of our chat working on naming the characters in my alphabet, as well as choosing an order for the alphabet. I have been trying to create it with a few simple rules. For example, I want to maintain the letters A and Z as the first and the last letters of the alphabet. I want to keep as many of the names of the original letters as I can and that actually makes sense to keep. I’m probably going to change some because their names don’t represent their sounds at all. For example, the current name we give to the letter H doesn’t make the H sound at all. So… that’s kind of dumb. So there are a couple of current letters I might change the names to, but I have to realize that the more changes I make, the harder it will be to sell the idea to the public. So… it’s a balancing act. Another rule I’ve been trying to follow is that I want the names of the letters to seem like they belong with the others, nothing whacky, and I want the order of the letters to flow, so when kids are reciting their ABCs or singing their alphabet song, the names flow together and aren’t awkward to say one after the other.
After tentatively choosing both the names and order for the characters of the alphabet, I started thinking about how on earth one alphabetizes characters that aren’t part of our normal set. So I tried the sort by A-Z function, and it certainly sorted them, but not in the order that I wanted them to appear. So that… complicated things.
So I called one of my brothers who, though not a programmer by trade has done some programming, and I asked him, and he said that alphabetical order was based on the unicode character codes and the reason they sort easily in alphabetical order is that the actual character set in unicode is in hexadecimal order. So… that… complicated things for me. It appeared that I’d either have to change the order of my alphabet (destroying my hoped for starting-with-A-and-ending-with-Z formula), or I’d have to create an open-sourced array that every application would need to incorporate into their software to be able to alphabetize my modern English alphabet and dictionary.
Lovely.
My brother wasn’t 100% sure that’s how it worked (alphabetization based on the hexadecimal unicode… codes [not sure the correct word here]), so I called my nephew in California who’s a programmer and will be graduating this year from the university there, and he confirmed what my brother had said.
So that was a bummer and a hiccup/hurdle/challenge/wrench/thingy.
So I started playing around with it a bit, and I plugged my alphabet into four different programs–Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and into the alphabetization GUIs that were provided by two different websites. The results?
4 platforms, four different alphabetical order displays. Excel and Google Sheets were almost identical, only differing by one character location. The two websites that had alphabetization tools were also similar to each other, varying by a few character locations within the order but varying dramatically from the results in Excel and Google Sheets.
So… my takeaway was that perhaps each software designer creates their own personal array for how words/letters should be alphabetized, as the handling of characters outside of the standard ascii set were treated very differently, whereas the characters within the standard ascii set were treated the same way (provided there weren’t non standard characters mixed in).
Thus, I might be right back at it being okay to create my own alphabet with my own desired order instead of having to follow the order unicode dictates, since it appears that the various applications don’t agree with each other anyway.
(breath)
Did you follow all that?
My brain as been lumbering around all this all day today, and my finding that the various applications treated the nonstandard characters rather differently prompted a second call to my brother asking his thoughts, and I think in the end, we both settled on just putting it all in the order I wanted it, and creating a proprietary array for my alphabet, and if it ever takes off, I can either apply for my own unicode character set based on my alphabet, or the various application designers/creators will likely accommodate my system in their applications.
(breath)
While talking to my nephew, he mentioned that he wanted to travel the world and hasn’t really done much of any traveling at all, so I said hey, how about this, the next time I go off on a trip, you go with me. So we agreed on that, and that should be fun. He graduates in June, so we’ll probably go off on some kind of adventure, either here in the states or abroad. I still haven’t been to the Land Down Under, and the great white continent is missing from the list, as well as sub-Saharan Africa.
And I’ve still never been to Mexico. 🙃 Barely been to Canada. My country tally at the moment is… let’s see… United States, Canada, England (including Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Hungry, (I’ve physically traversed most of Germany, but I was asleep, so that counteth not). Where else… Peru, Costa Rica, China, Egypt, Israel, and Jordan. Oh! And the Netherlands! How many is that? Umm… moment… 18 (not including the UK affiliates or Germany).
So… just a couple hundred plus countries to go, right? 🙃
I’m thinking about taking road trip from the States down to the tip of Argentina/Chile, going through all the countries between. That would be fun, though some would be harder than others (looking at you, Venezuela).
Anyway, whatever. Fun to travel, but it’s not really all that important and doesn’t really contribute to my most important life goals, but I do love to see the world and interact with people all over the world. We have a world full of such wonderful people everywhere.
What else… uh… so I spent gobs of time working on the alphabet stuff. I sent a gazillion messages off to my programming team in Pakistan, so we’ll see how things go from here. I’m trying to have the programming all built in such a way that I can change make adjustments and changes to the alphabet and dictionary without having to change the programming at all. That’s super important because I’m still a ways off in getting my alphabet–the biggest obstacle being the requirement of having no mirror characters. That requirement, which I don’t think is really negotiable, is an absolute killer. It’s what’s held this project up for years. But soon I’ll be focused on it relatively full time, and we’ll see what we might come up with, right?
Right.
Finally got my pictures and videos from my Costa Rica trip uploaded to Google Drive. Having a hard time seeing all of John’s pictures and videos though. Not sure what’s up there.
Well, I best be going to bed. Almost midnight, and it’s a busy busy day/week/month/year/life. No time for doddling. 🙃
Oh! I’ve taken some concrete steps toward getting my Spanish back up to snuff. My mom and I are speaking only in Spanish in the house now, and I’ve changed my computer and cell phone’s operating systems to default to Spanish with everything (except I’m using the English keyboard on my computer and not the latino one).
So… I’m making progress in improving my Spanish. I’m guessing it’ll get better fairly quickly with the steps I’m taking, if I can keep them up. I’ve also been watching the news in Spanish from Spanish channels and listening to a little bit of Spanish music. Anyway, there you go. Time for bed.
Love you all.
Lift the World.
~ stephen
Lift the World 