Weeknotes 71

As foreshadowed, this week was the end of my first year at my job. My teammates wrote kind things in a card and I felt an emotion, which reminded me that it’ll be good to actually meet all these people one day.

A year into this weird remote technical leadership role in a different time zone during a pandemic I do of course continue to regularly worry that I’m not really helping. As long as everyone keeps being nice about it I suppose I’ll assume it’s not a problem.

I’m feeling better for being more active, but using the treadmill has absolutely wrecked my feet. A full year of being expected to walk no further than from bed to desk to couch and back again had lulled them into a supple complacency which has now been shattered by the relentless impact and friction of daily exercise. I’ve got blisters is what I’m saying. Thanks for coming to my pied talk.

The cable management situation at my standing desk was getting out of control so I decided to sort it out. The biggest problem was power: lots of the things on the desk need to be plugged into the mains, as does the desk itself, which meant many power cables dangling down and snaking around and generally making it dangerous to adjust between a sitting and standing position.

I bought an 8-way power strip, some Velcro® “coins” and some Velcro® cable ties. Then I Velcroed® the power strip to the underside of the desk, plugged everything into it, Velcro-tied® the resulting loops of cable out of the way, and ran a single power cable to the wall socket.

It’s not completely tidy yet, and there’s now quite a lot of Velcro®, but it’s a big improvement over the previous chaos. I think the next step is to actually shorten some of the power cables to remove the excess, although annoyingly they mostly have moulded plugs so I’ll need to buy some replacement plugs and also learn which coloured wire the electrons (and absence of electrons?) come out of.

I’m close to giving up on Returnal. There are occasional moments of excitement and novelty but boredom is rapidly becoming the dominant emotion as I’m forced to endlessly retread the dull early sections of the game for no reason.

Although it’s still fun and interesting when I’m discovering new places, that’s necessarily the minority of the time since I only manage to push a little further on each run before crashing back to the start. And as the cycle grows longer, the ratio of cool stuff to tedious stuff approaches zero. That’s just maths.

I wish it was more thoughtfully designed! The fun bits really are fun, it’s just way too likely you’ll have to keep repeating the boring bits over and over with no sense of progression or reward.

Never mind. I’ve probably got my money’s worth by now anyway. Er… three stars? Not Shit?

5.8kg down.