Weeknotes 256

Wotcha. It’s December. That can’t be right.

At the moment I feel like I’m playing chicken with the utter dearth of stuff I have to write about every week. I spend most of my time working and thinking about work and I can’t cover work here. That makes it difficult to summarise my week in any meaningful way.

Today, at least, I went for a proto-festive Sunday roast with Reema at The Spread Eagle. It was much quieter and the food & service were much better than last year’s visit. Maybe Sunday’s the secret.

I haven’t had any time off since July so I have a lot of annual leave still to take. I haven’t quite decided what to do but maybe I’ll just have, like, three weeks off over Christmas. But can I actually do it without spending the whole time worrying about all the work that isn’t getting done? Perhaps not.

I’ve made it to season three of Industry. It’s more intense than ever, which means it’s increasingly silly. Nothing anyone does makes any sense, nobody behaves like a real person would behave, and obviously the finance content itself is pure gibberish. Unlike Succession I never have a coherent mental model of the characters nor any insight into why they would possibly make the decisions they do. Drama is the only reason anyone does anything.

It’s sort of entertaining though? In a way? I did enjoy the thinly-veiled pisstake of Britain’s most morally and actually bankrupt energy provider despite the irritating reminder that none of the people responsible went to prison.

Today I followed the same Advent of Code procedure as every year:

1. think “oh, go on then, that might be fun to noodle with”

2. sign into the site and read the day 1 puzzle

3. ssh into my Raspberry Pi to download the day 1 puzzle input:

   $ curl https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/1/input
   Puzzle inputs differ by user.  Please log in to get your puzzle input.
   

4. sign out of the site again

Great. See you in a year for Advent of Code 2025!

Time to rewatch i’ll be home for quismoiss. I love Grand Foyer’s work.