Some significant lifting of restrictions here in Melbourne. Still unable to visit family at their homes, which is a shame. But at least I’ll be able to get out of the city for a few day-trips during my break between jobs.
Second last day at my current job. Most of the coding work was finished about a week ago, and now it’s just making the last few touchups in documentation, and a few final catch-up meetings. Other than that, it’s mostly just counting down the hours.
I don’t know if it’s a weird quirk of mine, but whenever I’m working on a software project, I get more excited about building the supporting tools to aid development than I do working on the actual software product itself.
Seeking Out Bad News
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just going out of the way to seek bad news. Maybe it’s because I think that if I don’t, then a problem will go unaddressed as no-one else is aware of it.
There’s probably some evolutionary trait to this. Being the one that hears a predator, and reacts to it before anyone else, is an advantage. But in this day and age, many of the problems that I have anxiety about is pretty much known by everyone, and addressing it in any meaningful way is beyond my direct control.
So in the interest for my own mental health, I should cut down on seeking out these stories, do what I can to help with the problem, and just hope that someone who does have the ability to do something substantial knows about it, and can address it in some way.
While total ignorance is probably not ideal, being up to speed with the woes of the world is probably not healthy either.
It seems like every time I’m working on something where time is of the essence, a device or operating system decides that now is the perfect time to update. Looking at you, Windows.
There’s exactly one week left in my current job before I leave. An email, which seems to have marked the occasion, has notified me that the induction Trello board, opened when I joined, has just been closed.
I can’t understand how people post to Medium. I’m sure they have nice authoring tools, and you’ll get readers for your work, but the actual reading experience is awful. It’s slow, it’s janky, and just now the page I was reading errored out without me interacting with it.
Wow, fresh off the acquisition of Day One, it looks like Automattic is acquiring Pocket Casts. That makes two aquisitions of apps that I use on a daily basis. Not entirely sure how I feel about this.
In today’s crazy ideas to get out of things I rather not do: as part of getting solar panels, I have to get a photo of part of my roof. I’d rather not get on a ladder and I don’t have a drone. But I do have a Raspberry Pi with a camera module. I’m wondering if doing something with that, along with a battery, duck tape, and a couple of broomsticks would work.
Update: well, this idea hit a roadblock quickly. I booted up the Raspberry Pi and tried the camera, and I got an error suggesting that the camera module is not connected. The Raspberry Pi is inside a case, meaning that if I wanted to check the camera module connection, I’d have to open it. The annoying thing is that when I first got it (it was several years ago), the camera was working fine. It must have come loose while I was moving it around or something.
So now I need to open the case without breaking it. Not sure how easy that would be to do.
It seems to be that the general advice for those under 50 looking at the AstraZenica vaccine is to speak with your doctor. I don’t know how it is with others, but I don’t actually have a doctor to speak with. Most of my experience with GPs are with bulk billing clinics, with doctors coming and going, that deal with routine matters like prescription renewals and doctor certificates for colds. I’m not sure if there is anyone there that I could turn to for advice like this.
I wonder if I’m an outlier here. Maybe it’s time I got one.
There’s no worst combination that anxiety and boredom. Having something on your mind, while also having very little to do, there isn’t many avenues for distraction, and all you have left is refreshing various news site for updates.
Washing sheets in winter is the worst. You are so reliant on the forecast being perfect and you have to make the call early in the morning. And of course forecasts can be wrong, and you find yourself having a better day to do them on the day you decided to do it tomorrow.
A Year On Micro.blog
It’s been a year since I’ve signed up to Micro.blog and written my first post, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it sooner.
The reason for joining was to write more; to focus less on the blogging engine and more on the blog itself. At the time I have only posted seven times over a period of 9 months. In the last year, that post count has risen to 222. I guess I can call that objective achieved.
But the biggest reason for staying, and one I wish I knew sooner, is the fantastic community here. Having such a great bunch of people online is quite rare now, and this has quickly been my favourite place on the internet. We truly have something special here.
Thank you all for being such awesome people.
I’ve got to get into the habit of writing more about what I’m doing. I never think about it at the time because it always seems like a distraction. But I always regret it later when I want to revisit something, and nothing about it is written down, and all I have to go on is my memory. Conversely, on those rare occasions when I actually had something about it written down, I’m always happy that I did.
Trying my hand at logo design for something I’m working on. I’m aiming for something that looks like a mix between a bookmark, the letter D, and something to suggest synchronising stuff. This is probably the best I’ve got so far.
Start of new project: organising solar panels for my house.
Finished reading: The Sentinel by Lee Child (yep, I’m a Jack Reacher fan). 📚
Genius me set myself a reminder on Friday to “update the doco”. The reminder has just shown up, and I have no idea what “doco” I was referring to.
Why I like developing in Go vs. something like NodeJS: my development setup doesn’t randomly break for some weird reason. When it does break, it’s because of something I did explicitly.
Credit to Vic. DHHS for including more information about the origin of new Covid-19 cases alongside the daily tally. I appreciate that this feedback from the public has been taken onboard. I can imagine it means more work, but it really helps with peace of mind.