Weeknotes 98

I’m feeling slightly more normal this week and getting back into the rhythm of post-RubyConf work. I expect this’ll be short-lived since next week is Thanksgiving (and, more significantly, Black Friday) and then begins the slow slide downhill towards Christmas, so work isn’t really going to be normal until January, but I can at least be at my desk with coffee at 9am finding useful things to do for my team.

Thank you to the readers who got in touch to say nice things about my talk. From this I assume I must’ve come across as more dejected than I actually felt, but hey, I’ll take the kind words and I appreciated hearing something echo back from the void.

I baked more good bread with the Challenger bread pan, or The Breadinator as Nat insists upon calling it. It’s great and I’m now satisfied it was worth the embarrassingly high price.

I’m tempted to try making pizza with it once I’ve worked out how & when to fit that into my normal dough-making routine.

I am, slowly but surely, getting legitimately addicted to Cracking The Cryptic. Knowing there’ll be a video every single day is a hell of a drug; it tickles the same part of my brain as the show with zefrank did in 2006.

I can’t actually solve any of the puzzles but Simon Anthony is so skilled at thinking aloud and explaining his reasoning that I can almost believe I’m the one who’s working it out. As the watch hours tick by I reassure myself that this mind-numbingly dull activity is probably teaching me to be better at pair programming or mentoring or something.

I was on a three-month free trial of Apple Arcade for some reason — I suppose it must’ve come with the Apple TV — which was due to start costing me money today. I cancelled it because I haven’t found a single game on Arcade that I want to play for more than a few minutes. Well, except Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, but now that I’ve seen the small amount of new content I’m happy to fall back to the version of Odyssey that I already owned.

In a similar vein, I’ve started not bothering to claim my monthly PS Plus games because they’re so uninteresting. I like the idea of “free” games but in practice so many of them are either multiplayer or sport-related or both that it’s barely even worth checking to see what’s included each month. I optimistically treated myself to a year’s membership when my PS5 arrived but I don’t think I’ll ever renew it unless they include a game I actually want to play.

The imminent expiration of the PS5’s one-year warranty prompted me to finally do something about the drifting analogue sticks on its controller. I phoned Sony last week and posted the controller back to them, and this week they sent me a brand new one which works perfectly. Pretty good!

Now that the UK government has dangled the tantalising prospect of a booster vaccination, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to book one tomorrow as long as the website works correctly. I have, believe it or not, become slightly more relaxed about COVID over the last few months, but this’d really help me to relax further for the winter.

I played through the winner of this year’s IFComp in the hope that it’d be good enough to talk about here, but it wasn’t so I won’t.