Weeknotes 352

The mornings are dark and cool hooray, but the days are warming up again boo.

Three gyms. Eating my feelings this week (see below) so let’s not upset ourselves unduly by thinking about bodies.

I must admit Absolution Gap has engaged me much earlier than the previous two novels did. Maybe it’s just because I’ve become more familiar with the Revelation Space universe, but I somehow don’t feel as impatient for it to get going. In fact I think it’s already going.

My Mastodon instance stopped responding last Sunday, likely because its disk filled up. Usually when that happens I reboot the VM, free up space with a few tootctl … remove commands and get on with my life, but this time it didn’t come back up after rebooting, so I (irrationally) stopped it entirely and started it again in an attempt to somehow try harder. At that point it became completely unreachable in a way that suggested a more serious problem.

Anyway, it took me too long to realise that my VM has — for years apparently — had an ephemeral IP address, and me stopping & starting it caused a fresh one to be assigned, and thus the A record for social.tomstu.art stopped pointing anywhere useful. I’ve now actually reserved the IP address so this shouldn’t happen again, but it’s frankly amazing that the instance survived this long without me realising its address could change at any time.

I should really move it off Google Compute Engine. I only put it there in the first place because I believed I had hundreds of dollars of free GCP credit from codes collected at various meetups, but after I signed up it transpired that none of those worked, so I’m paying for it anyway and would be better off with a less byzantine hosting environment. Unfortunately inertia and laziness are powerful forces and it is no longer currently broken, so, welp.

I’ve worked harder and more intentionally over the last twelve months than in any previous year of my professional life: setting direction, communicating principles, guiding decisions, coaching others, giving patient honest feedback, advocating for what’s right, nipping nascent mistakes in the bud before they can blossom into calamity, lifting up my peers, persuading senior people, and yes, in the gaps, writing as much high-quality, well-tested, carefully-considered code as possible. Arriving early and leaving late, evenings and weekends, shower thoughts and gym thoughts, dinner thoughts and hypnagogia thoughts, focused and determined, sweating every detail, so the team could make the right thing and make the thing right, and finally ship what we’ve been working on for years, and so we did.

As a result I got the worst performance review, and biggest professional disappointment, of my career. Total waste of time. I give up on these people; they deserve less.

In their defence, I’m the mug.

I took some unplanned time off to try to get my head together and resist the siren song of going nut-nut. The upside is that I had an all-time record three lunches at Black Cat.

The comforting food, and the sunny bike rides there & back, made me feel human again.

I only managed one episode of Ludwig, featuring an incongruous Stephen Merchant as a smarmy snooker player. The whole thing feels like it’s running out of steam.

I’m enjoying the camp nonsense of The Celebrity Traitors so far. In particular I found Hannah Fry’s video about her intended strategy quite charming. I doubt she’ll get to make use of it but it’s still entertaining and she remains an inspirational communicator.

The uninhibited gleeful spite of A Reverse Angle of the James Corden Foot Lift really made me laugh.