weeknotes for w/c 28/10/24

yet another late set of weeknotes! i started writing this set of weeknotes from a train on the way back from Seven Sisters Country Park on Sunday. i'm finishing this update on a sofa in an apartment in Barcelona on Tuesday.

this past week's been very busy, but very fulfilling. i'm dreading November, as my calendar is chock full of professional and social events.

• work's been going pretty well. overall, i feel positive!
  • i tend to be all doom and gloom during my meetings with my manager on Monday, probably because I’m dreading the week ahead. I’d like to be more positive, so I made some notes about things I want to talk about it. It worked really well, and I’m trying it again this week 
  • designed and implemented a caching experiment, going to roll it out and make a call on the project next week
• i've found a couple of interesting articles this week
  • a fascinating essay on non-open code and its impact on the open source ecosystem, by Dan Brown
  • a long-form article about digital avatars for use in psychotherapy treatment, by the Guardian's Jenny Kleeman
  • got recommended On Anarchism by Noam Chompsky, by someone on the train
• i heavily dislike the piecemeal way Apple’s done Mac releases this year. watching each mini-keynote starts out fun, but there’s only so many times you can hear about the same claim about "industry leading privacy performance guarantees that are continually independently verified by external experts" before you go numb
  • i am tempted by the shiny new M4 MacBook Pro, but it’s so damn expensive at £3.8k. my current M1 MacBook Pro is chugging along just fine, thankfully.
• watched a few movies this week
  • went to see Terrifier 3 in a cinema on Wednesday with friends. it was a really weird movie, probably made weirder to me because didn’t have the context of Terrifier 1 and Terrifier 2. the gore did feel unnecessarily over-the-top at times, and some people even walked out halfway through.
  • watched The Substance with a friend on Saturday, and it was a truly visceral film. through the gory body horror, i picked up themes of body dysmorphia and image issues, eating disorders, the difficulty of aging gracefully and loss of fame and relevance over time. i'm considering writing up a review for it.
• preparing for my Barcelona trip, i'm excited for it but i know travelling takes a lot out of me
  • wanted to go tree planting in my local park on Saturday, but decided to stay in and do some laundry up ahead of my trip
  • got my hair cut on Saturday, and now I’m looking ffresh 
  • disappointingly, my Spanish learning has stalled
  • finally booked my flights and hotels to Barcelona this week
  • during the flight, i’m going to work on my talk for HalfStack. i've got a few pages of notes, but i'm yet to form them into a coherent half-hour talk
• need to do some more work on the homelab
  • started cooking up a media server blog post. i've been a bit busy over the past two weeks, but i'm working on it
  • need to start backing up sunset. i'm figuring out way to do that
• chucked some money on the US election through Polymarket
• got a new inhaler (Easi-Breathe, although its generic name is a "breath actuated metered dose inhaler"). it’s been really effective, although it tends to be really fiddly sometimes
• using Plane for project management has been going well, but I’ve been duplicating issues which already exist in the backlog. spend some time updating my n8n automation which creates new cycles, to also create a new issue in the current cycle to prune the backlog
• travelled to Seaford with David on Sunday, to go on a hike through Friston Forest and over Seven Sisters on the Sussex coast
  • we managed to run for our trains and catch them on time!
  • at the start of our 4 1/2 hour hike, i got given a stick by a stranger right at which served as a brilliant walking pole
  • we technically only hiked Six Sisters because of the route we took, but the view along the coast was beautiful
  • saw a lot of dogs, including a dog with a bowtie! everyone I met along the walk was really friendly
  • at the end of the walk, i gave my stick, sticky, a dignified burial in the Cuckmere River
  • David made some delectable sandwiches and delightful cornbread. he also made some rocky road treats, but i was regretfully unable to taste them
  • i'm so sore afterwards, muscles i never knew existed are aching.