The December is screaming over the horizon and in to view, and with it, the many plans and things that need to happen by the magical time of "the end of the year". One of the plans I am looking forward to is taking off to Melbourne in a couple of weeks to visit colleagues for an end of year party (as well as some family for an early pre-christmas hang). What I am not looking forward to over the next few weeks is my calendar as we try and cram in as many meetings as we can before the year's out and we have to take the January ramp-up hit.

I finished reading Neuromancer this weekend, it was such a solid story. So many of the themes and tropes feel relevant to so much of modern media. You've got your virtual self vs. a real fleshy body (from the likes of The Matrix and Ready Player One) — challenging the now blurry line between an avatar and reality. There are also some through lines to one of my favourite games ([Deus Ex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeusEx(videogame))) with its sibling AIs (Daedalus and Icarus) and _Neuromancer's sibling-yet-reluctant-to-merge AIs (Neuromancer and Wintermute). My plan was to pick up the second book in Gibson's trilogy, but I couldn't find it at my local bookstore, so on to the next one that I have been itching to read [Leviathan Wakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeviathanWakes)_ — the first of many in The Expanse series.

I have been in awe of Apple's M3 series laptops this week. The hobby iOS project I have been working on builds, and runs in a simulator in ~7 seconds. This is down from 2mins on my previous machine. The performance boost and not needing to emulate iOS (which is what I assume the simulator was doing on an x86 machine) brings an amazing efficiency to the build, run, test cycle and makes running SiwftUI previews an absolute joy! Not to mention it runs a couple of games at native resolution at 60fps (finally putting my 7 year old Nvidia 1080 to shame).

There are also approx. 9000 butterflies in the yard, which makes the trip to take the bins out feel like a Disney movie.