Second vacation week, and I’m really getting into this Dolce Far Niente. I read a bit, watched TV, and triaged some side projects. It helped that there were fewer earth- and country-shattering moments in the last 7 days…
But I’m about to get back to work. Or, well, back to my job, at least. My last project ended rather abruptly – nothing insane, but we were expected to get another few months of work order, so my company has to land me another consulting job. And apparently that’s hard these days. Part of what that will entail is widening the criteria of acceptable jobs – or in other words, I might need to do some sysadminning (replace that with the more fashionable job terms). Getting some certificates for that beforehand.
I’m an old hand at Linux, but mostly for my personal usage, only a little bit of network admin stuff. And once we’re talking about Big Cloud Business, I’m mostly a user (if I can’t avoid that, mostly a sign of Architecture Astronauts). But, weirdly enough, I might even be looking forward to that. Might be worth writing a post about that…
Health #
Good. Got in a few 10k step days and finally got around to visiting an otorhinolaryngologist. Apparently my ear canals are tiny, which explains why I can’t fit in-ear headphones in there.
Gaming #
Did some Civilization 3 on my old PC system, but it’s one of those games where I start from fresh way too often.
One of my real-world RPG groups met, and we had some fun stealing back horses from a band of highway robbers, and then had to maneuver the fallout. I’m all in for those moral quandaries and so happy that it isn’t tied to anything mechanical in my game.
Virtual group also met, and boy, “quickly” exploring a dungeon with a virtual map is quite horrible for me. It’s not like drawing the newly discovered rooms on graph paper is any quicker than uncovering them on a map (the opposite, actually, often by a large degree), but there’s something odd about the urgency felt there. Might be just me, and I really need to have second look at that before I do more online gaming with such heavy use of maps (i.e. any “dungeon-crawling”)
Media #
For some kind of reason, I wanted to re-watch “The Good Wife”. And the first few episodes, starting with season 2, were actually quite good. The actors make it for me (Alan Cumming is such a delight), but it’s also a good mix of procedural plots (judicial case of the week) vs general series progress. It feels like in the last decade, the focus was too much on the latter. Which would be okay, but then ditch the procedural parts, as they only distract.
I’m listening to a bit more DungeonSynth, which is very good background music for the days when my activity levels don’t match the assumed Ferrari-driving of Synthwave, or dragon-slaying of Power Metal.
Consumerism #
I bought a SSD for the old gaming PC, as the first batch I bought is breaking down and I only had some tiny ones (meant for system drives or caches) lying around.
I’m feeling tempted to look at my monitor situation again, though. Mostly because my main screens turn out to be a bit meh (Not sure if I’m too happy with two 16:9 displays, and they both have scratches already).
Side Projects #
-
I’ve got a new RPG project on my plate, something that theoretically should be done quickly for the “get something out” effect, but I already find myself delving into feature creep here.
-
Stalling a bit on the Rust front . At least I’m not considering other languages already, but I’m just not that excited about it. I need to get something barely functional up as fast as possible, then I can at least focus on language-independent design issues, frontend work and documentation.
Links #
-
acmlmboard – A while ago, I looked at the “state of the art” of forum software, but what I completely missed was this whole branch of alternative PHP-based forums. The link goes to the current 2.x version, but there’s a plethora of forks, branches and rewrites, like lesbiaboard, jul or cirrusboard. Apart from the usual turn-of-the-century forum features, letting users have custom CSS/HTML styles for their posts seems to be a major part of this lineage. It seems very popular in “ROM hacking” and other fringe gaming circles. Code is, well, rather unstructured early PHP.
-
Incus – A container management solution for Linux that’s not a total cloud-based overkill and thus suitable for a “homelab” scenario, where it could potentially replace the much more complicated Proxmox.
-
Mac Mini News – No, not the current power-bottom version, but using an old model from 2010 as a dual-booting retro engine. I have a similar model, so that could be something I might want to do. On a similar note: I really need to sell a few PCs and laptops…
-
Postgres.app – Postgres for MacOS with a minimalistic launcher. Good alternative for running everything in a docker container.