Jack (10yo) just wrote a 3-page story narrated by an anthropomorphic treehouse that was reminiscing about being built by a bunch of kids (“they lifted the planks of wood onto my shoulders”), but now it’s decrepit and falling apart, and one of the kids returned as an adult to repair it, and laid his hand on the wood and said “you’ve always been a part of my life”, and he told me that he started crying when he wrote it, and I told Eliza and she started crying, and now I’m crying.
Great end to the week; fast progress on building new tech at work. Out with Matthew and Paul, chats over beers at PICA Bar then dinner at Long Chim. Kids at mum and dad’s for a sleepover.
Just finished reading “The Passionate Programmer” by Chad Fowler, which I discovered after writing a program to find great people on GitHub to try to fill an engineering position at my day job. That book talks about marketing yourself, and, combined with some other advice on that topic that I’d heard recently (although I can’t remember where), I was motivated last night to rebuild my vanity website to do a better job of that.
This lead to me rebuilding my blog, which lead to me subscribing to Medium and finding an unpublished article entitled “Your Password is Terrible”, which I published and received a clap for before my hands had left the keyboard.
I really should become more involved in the local scene here in Perth, so will look for a conference of a meetup that I can attend.
Right. I’m slack.
Second week of school holidays. We’ve been keeping busy. Had a great hike around Lesmurdie Falls last week, which culminated with a splendid lunch at Core Cider. Visited Wil’s family for dinner, Brewski over last night for some VR action, watched Yesterday on Monday with Dzungy, visits to the dog park with Bailey, caught up with Petr at Palace Arcade, where I became a gold member, lots of reading, not so much exercise.
Limited myself to 6 drinks per week, which was hard, so reneged and made it 9 instead, which is also proving hard. Nine is around 14 “standard drinks” which is pretty much the definition of a moderate drinker, so not all that bad. Will keep counting, which is the main thing.
No progress on hobby projects, but have been working very hard on RailRoad, which is my home-spun omakase web framework, using Sequel and Roda and a bunch of other stuff. It’s exciting and good.
Will try to keep updating this thing. For sure, this time.
Stayed up to watch the Ninty E3 direct. Nothing outstanding but fun nonetheless, and the kids get a rare treat of watching it over brekky before school. Walked the dog with D. in wintery weather; good opportunity to talk about life after finding out that a brother of a close friend passed away suddenly. It can happen at any time. Out to a laksa lunch in the cold weather. No progress on personal projects, which is unfortunate. Time is slipping away. Need to limit the work I do on my day job so I don’t get distracted by it when I should have free time for my own things.
Was well-rested yesterday, so spent some time after dinner dusting off HackTile. Got distracted by Refrax somehow. Built it to get the same blank screen error that I’d been getting with HackTile; some incompatibility after upgrading OSX to Mojave. Down a garden path of getting to to build with Emscripten so I could publish a web version. Finally got a clean build only to find that the web version doesn’t run. Not in the mood for debugging it. So moved on to HackTile, which works after updating the XCode command-line tools and upgrading to the latest version of SDL2. Keen to get back into it, but should wrap up Sesame first. Need to finish projects. Always go back to my half-finished work to be impressed with the potential, which sucks. Could have finished HackTile in the time it’s been on ice!
Spent the remainder of the evening readling the new Neal Stephenson: Fall, or Dodge in Hell. And watched a few episodes of Season 3 of Handmaid’s Tale. Late to bed, which meant I awoke tired and unmotivated. Must get better sleep!
Tom Yum hotpot for lunch at Van’s, and took Bailey for a walk at the dog park. Plan to have an early night after a simple supper of seafood chowder and garlic bread. Not looking forward to a stormy Monday and going back to work.
Well. Hasn’t it been a long time? A summary:
- Eliza is a teenager. Gosh.
- Work is much the same.
- No progress on HackTile.
- No progress on Sesame.
- I actually completed NaNoGenMo: Angela’s Claustrum
Maybe I’ll hop back on the horse? Or whatever the expression is?