ℹ️ about bcj

cheat sheet
name bcj (it's short for bcj)
age 34
location Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
hobbies photography, music, movies, reading, hanging out with friends
web-dev experience Minimal! I do programming for a living but none of that involves web development. Basically all of the web stuff I've ever done has been on my own for fun.

Hi, I'm bcj. Like many people, I'm a person. Unlike most people, I'm this person Here are some of my hobbies and interests:

Photography

I first got into photography by taking pictures with my phone of birds and cool plans I saw while out on runs. Eventually, I got some nicer cameras and got more interest in photography generally. Having nicer equipment makes things a bit easier but I'd like to believe I take pretty nice photos.

I'm hoping to eventually put photos up on this website. As of this writing, that site only has photos from a photography game I've been playing but I think those are pretty nice too (it also links to my instagram).

Music

Y'all ever heard music? It's pretty good. I have a pretty big music collection and it's at least somewhat varied. Most of what I listen to is post rock, jazz, or folk music, but I probably like at least a few things in most genres. Recently, I've been trying to make time to actively listen to a different album every day. It's been a fun little project for myself.

I've also started learning how to play the piano. I played the trombone in school but haven't done any music playing in years. Me and beanboy both picked up keyboards at the same time and we're trying to keep each other motivated. It's slow going and I'm not spending as much time on it as I'd like, but I'm seeing improvements each time I practice and I'm having a lot of fun.

Learning to play an instrument is fun in its own right but the thing that got me interested in learning is that I want to understand music theory better. I learned some in school but I still have some pretty big gaps in myknowledge. Last year, I did some music programming and it really helped rekindle my interest in playing and making music.

Movies

Growing up, both my dad and one of my best friends were really into movies. I ended up watching them a lot without even realizing it was one of my big interests.

I don't tend to watch a lot of movies on my own (outside of October when I watch too many spooky movies), but I do have a fair number of movie nights with friends. beocijies actually spawned out of an ever-expanding static site generator project that I made to help make organizing online movie nights easier.

What are some of my favourite movies? Good question. My favourite movie is probably The Long Goodbye. Some of my other favourites are The Conversation, Face/Off, Pontypool, Rafifi, Sleuth, The Thing, and Videodrome. In general, I watch a lot of horror, noir, and heist movies.

As a Winnipeger, I would be somewhat remiss if I didn't recommend both My Winnipeg and Phantom of the Paradise.

Reading

I've been a voracious reader for my whole life. I used to read a few books a week—but that's dropped to a few a month now that I mostly work from home. If you come set up a beocijies page, you'll probably notice that I have a lot of books.

Some of my favourite authors are Italo Calvino, Ursula le Guin, Georges Perec, Ann Leckie, Meriam Toews, Kurt Vonnegut, and Banana Yoshimoto. The book I've read the most is An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.

Running

I've been a runner for years and have even run a few marathons but thanks to a string of injuries over the last year or two, this has been a somewhat lapsed hobby. Watch this space I guess

Friends

I'm in favour of them generally. They're fun to hang out with. Part of the reason I made beojicies was to have an excuse to invite friends over even though I don't especially like entertaining.

Programming

I love to make a computer do things but for fun and not work. I don't often make things for others to use or see but I have been spending too much time lately making silly little websites.

This page is a lot style-heavier (and gimmickier) than most things I make but overdesigning things feels like the right aesthetic for beocijies and I want a page with all the CSS stuff I know just in case I need to help someone else out with their site.

🅱️ blog

today my friend beanboy came over to set up his beocijies website. He doesn't have a lot of webdev experience either but he had a strong idea of what he wanted to do and together I think we muddled through it pretty well and made something nice. :)

We also watched the tv miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Langoliers. I hadn't read the novella before so half way through he made me pause it and guess what I thought was actually happening. Truly, there was no way I was going to guess exactly where it was going but I think I did pretty well all things considered. It was fun, even if that series does drag out about half an hour too long.


today, I met m4rk88 and beanboy for coffee and then they both came over to create/update their respective beocijies sites. Beocijies now has three (3!) whole users. It's pretty much bigger than twitter (but it's not for sale!). We also saw Gem while heading over so maybe user four coming soon.

bean(ish) update: I forgot that I was going to pick up coffee beans. Oops.


today, I'm updating my page by myself. I'm trying to only edit my page when others come over to edit theirs but I wanted to test some scripts I wrote that make setting up new users nicer and I wanted to update the main page to include additional instructions.


today, is the start of park week, so I worked from a park this afternoon. After I finished up with work, I spent some time designing my new beocijies page (don't worry, even though I designed it on another computer, I am retyping all this manually). Now that beocijies is launched, I thought it would probably be a good idea to have a bit more of a real page for myself.


today, I updated my live-update script to tweet whenever people are updating their beocijies. To test it out, I decided to update my page to make it a bit more screen-reader friendly. For now, that just meant using some aria parameters everywhere I use emoji. I thought the biggest offender was going to be 🅱️ and ℹ️ would be decently meaningful but "blood type b" is at least short to read and Apple's VoiceOver utility absolutely mangles the information symbol. If you have any advice on how to the :hover stuff in the cheat sheet, please let me know. I made it work more correctly with touch screens but I have no idea what a screen-reader-equivelent action might be.

Thanks to m4rk88 for both suggesting some accessibility improvements and some more-general formatting fixes.


today, beanboy came over for the second installment in our new project where we're watching everything (that is still possible to find) James Hong was ever in. For the next little while, these are movies where he shows up uncredited for a few seconds at best but it won't be long before we actually get to see him act.

Beanboy also brought over his dad's old film camera because we wanted to work out if it still worked. It looks like it's not quite ready for a test roll so we're saving that for another day. I did get a nice photo with (but not using) my hand-me-down film camera so be on the lookout for that (on Instagram I guess?).


today, beanboy, edwub2166, and I hung out at the Forks. After, the three of us came back to my place so Edwub could pick a bunch of things he lent me to fix a flooded basement, so he could set up his beocijies page, and so that beanboy and I could continue our James Hong Project. It was fun, even if the movie wasn't.


today, beanboy, and I hung out. We met up in a park and took photos using film cameras that belonged to our dads (we have different dads [and different cameras]). After, he came over to eat some food (don't believe his lies, I had wonton soup, not noodles) and watch the worst movie we've ever watched together. Instead of paying attention to the movie we both got distracted learning about various film technologies/techniques (for both pictures and movies). It was fun in spite of the terrible John Wayne movie playing in the background.

Welcome!

Hi, I'm bcj, the owner and operator of beocijies. Welcome to my page!

About me
My beocijies blog (last updated 2022-08-06)
Links ot my other websites