Week 70 — Road Raging
- We've made it half way through the year. Happy tax time, finance lovers!
- My team at work has been at work has been plugging away at a strategic piece of re-platforming work for the last ~6 months or so, and last week we were able to prove out 2 of the most complex pieces end-to-end. Both pieces involved cleaning up a decade's worth of data, reconciling corruption left in stratospheres by bugs throughout the years. There will probably be bugs of our own that we need to address, but the pipeline is there now and we can work within it resolve issues as they come up, rather than balancing infrastructure and implementation details. I hope to be able to write up more about the process and techniques we used because I am super proud of what we have been able to pull off with the resources we have and with the hurdles we've had to overcome, that I feel it'll be valuable to other folks looking to pursue a similar goal. But maybe for another day.
- We had friend come stay with us from Melbourne over the weekend. Their partner is currently a locum at a hospital nearby so they popped over to say hi and hang out for a couple of days which was super lovely! We took them out to breakfast one morning and they were commenting how quiet the streets were in Canberra. And then as if by way of some kind of cosmic joke we were immediately road raged. We were driving at the back of a long line of cars behind a bus, and P-plater was right on our tail. Close enough that I (sitting in the back seat) could not see their numberplate. They honked us as if to say "speed up", but there was literally nowhere to go. As we crested a hill, we hoped they'd be able to see the bus ahead 4 cars ahead of us, but nope! They took the opportunity to drive in to oncoming traffic to overtake, while the passenger threw a can at us yelled something out their window. So now they were 2nd last in line, and still stuck behind a bus. It was a suuuper bizarre and somewhat hilarious experience, which left us with so many questions about what was even happening. It takes all sorts.
- I've also started packing my office up this weekend in anticipation for a move. We're still many months out, but packing absolutely sucks, so if I can space it out over a few months, it'll be much more manageable and bearable. While packing, I was reminded of a killer read from a few years ago. Stop Fixing Women — the answer to Lean In that was criminally underrated (though not surprisingly 🙃). The thesis is that rather than expect women to behave more like men, expect that the system can work for more than just one type of person. Some great bits of evidence and data in there too.
- My desktop speakers have given up the ghost after only ~7 years of operation. Which is disappointing, because it then means I can't use my gaming PC or my monitor as a Switch dock (without needing to wear headphones). I don't think I'll replace them until we move so I don't have to pack an additional thing. But, it has got me wondering how much I can replace with an M3 Mac (the builtin speakers are fine for now). The answer is quite a fair bit! I have been using CrossOver with Apple's Game Porting Toolkit 2.0 to get PC games that need DirectX 12 running at ~60 FPS (which is higher than what my PC with a dedicated GPU was able to achieve!). I haven't worked out if I can run HDMI in yet for the switch, but I had a bit of a play with some of the emulators out there, and if I can work out how to transfer saves back and forth, I could just use the Mac itself. The M-series chips continue to be incredibly impressive!
Movies watched for the first time this week
This week, years ago
2012
2013
2014
2023
