Weeknotes 93

I took the week off work and it was brilliant. I’ve been impatient and irritable for the last few weeks and the break has helped to reset my mood a bit. As usual I feel like I need at least another week off to properly unwind, but that’ll have to wait until the end of the year.

I also felt better after I spent Monday getting a rough draft of my RubyConf talk recorded and sent to a few friends for feedback. Although I’m unhappy about burning a day of my holiday, it was ultimately worth it for the psychological freedom to then not think about work at all for the rest of the week.

I’m not particularly satisfied with how the talk has turned out — it’s been such a slog that I’ve had to settle for something much scrappier and shallower than the perfect version I’d imagined — but it’s still a massive relief that it’s going to exist at all. I could easily work on it for another month and it’d be way better but also I’d be dead. Tomorrow’s the submission deadline so I expect I’ll be recording and editing up until the last minute, but then, gloriously, it’ll be over and I will be literally unable to work on it any more.

There is, of course, no reason at all for me to make such a meal out of this. Most (all?) people who speak at conferences spend at most a day or two putting a talk together and don’t let it ruin their life for a month. I think there’s probably something wrong with my brain and for that I apologise. Let’s move past it.

HINDSIGHT CORNER: it was the right decision to not even try to attend RubyConf in person because it turns out the US will officially not be opening the border in time. I’m bracing for the FOMO of not getting to hang out with my teammates and Ruby friends but I’m also very relieved to have dodged the travel chaos entirely.

We finished Squid Game. It was very watchable: a bit clunky and grating in places, but overall good fun even after the tone stopped bouncing from “wacky” to “tragic” and settled into a more consistent “grim”. I liked the direction the story took, and they made it to nine episodes without stretching the premise beyond what it could bear. It also occasionally reminded me of Cube which is, to be clear, a good thing.

A good joke is to say “yeah sorry, I’m actually vegan, what options do you have?” at the telly every time the characters have to queue for their miserable prison rations. 🥚🥔

Foundation’s improving slightly, even though its title sequence is still writing cheques that the rest of it can’t cash.

While things were quiet I took the opportunity to shut down my codon.com site and move its pages onto the tomstu.art domain I use for these weeknotes. I was embarrassed by the continued existence of the old site because I’m not doing consulting work at the moment but I’d got myself stuck in a stalemate: I couldn’t simply take the whole site offline because of the other content that lived there, but I couldn’t face the effort involved in rewriting and redesigning it all either.

So, yeah, I bit the bullet and dumped everything onto tomstu.art more or less verbatim, and I’ll clean up the whole transporter accident some other day. As a result this site is now a core sample through three sedimentary layers of content: 2020– weeknotes, 2013–2019 proper consultancy, and 2007–2012 half-baked consultancy.

Again, I’m not proud of what I’ve done here but it’s what I could achieve with the effort available and at least now I can stop thinking about it for a bit.

Earlier in the week I bought a pumpkin, cut it into cubes and roasted it with some olive oil and sea salt and rosemary and onion and garlic and other assorted vegetables. It was incredibly delicious. Autumn! 🎃

Tonight’s dinner: first baked potato of the season.