February 2020

There were 2 posts published in February 2020.

Oliver Leonardo Byler

“Oh, my baby!” –Olivia

“Congratulations!” –Dr. Yaowaluk

With these words and at just the right time, Olivia concluded the great ritual of Childbirth, practiced by billions of powerful women since the birth of humanity, and welcomed Oliver Leonardo Byler into the world.

Date and time of birth: 2020–02–20 02:22 ICT (UTC+7)

We are incredibly grateful for a safe VBAC and a healthy, vibrant child.

Place of birth: 13.7348° N, 100.5761° E (Bangkok, Thailand)

Oliver, which derives from the Latin word for the olive tree, bears strong associations with the ancient symbol of peace.

(Question: do you like peace? Subquestion: how many boys get to be named after their mom?)

Weight at birth: 2,685 g (approx. 5 lb 14.7 oz)

Leonardo means brave lion. Sometimes, as history tells us, peace requires courage and strength – of resolve, character, and facility.

(One of the more well-known Leonardos of history is remembered for his scientific, engineering, design, and artistic endeavors. We endorse these pursuits.)

Length at birth: 0.505 m (approx. 20 inches)

Byler is the surname shared by Oliver’s parents and sister. It traveled to the United States in 1737 with Jacob Beyeler aboard the Charming Nancy steamer, and, for Iris’s birth in 2017, to Thailand on Bangkok Airways flight 934.

“Can I see the baby? Can I hold him? Is he gonna say goo-gaa gaa? Bayybee! Can I hold him?” –Iris’s first delighted exclamations upon meeting her brother

We don’t know what kind of world Oliver will inherit, but our hope is that he will grow to embody some of the qualities represented by both the literal meaning and contextual legacy of his names.

Welcome to the world, little Oliver! ❤️

1 Oliver 2 Leonardo3 Byler

See also: Iris Eleanor Byler

Scripts updated for OmniFocus 3

OmniFocus 3 gave users a long-awaited feature: the ability to assign a task to multiple contexts. But the transition also came with a nomenclature change: the old contexts now became tags, a change that was reflected both in the UI and the underlying AppleScript dictionary.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a graceful transition for scripts: OmniFocus 3 doesn’t know what a context is, so older scripts that referred to them needed to be updated to reflect the new world order.

Of course I’ve updated all the scripts that I use with OmniFocus on a daily basis – many of these updates were made when OmniFocus 3 was in beta early last year.

But after receiving a steady trickle of emails from people wondering how to fix some of my OmniFocus AppleScripts (the answer always being some variant of “search for context and replace it with tag), I came to the embarrassing realization that I never actually pushed the updates back to Github.

Sorry, everyone!

I took some time this weekend to update all my scripts on Github. Here’s what’s changed:

  • I took the opportunity to scrape out lots of unnecessary code related to Growl, since 100% of respondents to my Twitter survey (n=3) no longer use Growl. So the scripts are all leaner and cleaner.
  • A couple other minor changes, like cleaning up the text of notifications. For example, the Total Time script used to waste the script headline (“title”) telling you “Script complete”: Now the key information gets top billing:
  • And yes, the scripts are all updated for OmniFocus 3. (Still shaking my head that it took this long for me to notice.)