I’ve spent so much time working from this nice coffee shop close to me that I think they’re gonna start charging me for rent. The coffee is nice, I’m on a first name basis with most of the baristas and there is a park on the way where I can check on my crow friends and give them peanuts. Anyway, I’ve decided that time is not real. I’m somehow supposed to believe that it’s already been a month since I published my last post, but Trump has only been in power for less than 5 months?

As I mentioned in my last update, I spent a few days on Vancouver Island before my partner left on a road trip way way wayyyy up north to watch birds, bears and beautiful landscape. I was on my own for a little over 2 weeks, which had not happened in a while. I spent it working, trying to come up with new activities and watching movies. It felt a little like going on a vacation and packing 12 books but ending up buying a 13th book and reading that one instead. Speaking of…

… I just finished reading this beautiful edition of The Neverending Story that my sister gifted me. It’s always funny to watch a movie as a kid and not think much of it, then reading/watching it again as an adult and realize that it was about depression, loss or something deep all along. That’s the only book I’ve been reading lately though since I’ve spent most of my down time reading my RSS feeds. I’m struggling to find a healthy balance between the 2, but it’s nice to have a safe haven from depressing news.

Speaking of depression (IYKYK), I went to see Thunderbolts and really loved it, I think it got me excited about Marvel movies again, we’ll see how long this lasts. I also watched “It”, “It: Chapter 2”, “Nope”, “Smile 2”, “Sinners” and (for some reason, mostly Aaron Taylor-Johnson) “Kraven”. Finally, on Tuesday we watched “28 days later” and “28 weeks later” to get ready for “28 years later”. All of this to say that we should probably be friends on Letterboxd.

I also tried a few things, like going to the pool. Turns out I’m a pretty fast swimmer, just not a very good one. So I’m thinking of taking lessons soon to improve my form and not waste 80% or so of my energy. A friend took me to a shooting range, which was an interesting experience since I’d never shot a gun before, but I don’t think I’ll do it again. Finally, I went back for a very chill run after giving myself a few weeks to recover from those pesky shin splints and it went well. I’m very nervous about starting to run again and hurting myself, so I’m being extra careful.

Since it’s part of my job now (lol), I’ve spent a few hours playing 2 interesting video games. The first one is titled A Game About Digging A Hole and it was surprisingly fun to spend a few hours on my Steamdeck digging a hole, collecting resources and upgrading my shovel in the hope of finding the treasor buried under my virtual garden. My understanding is that the creator made this on their spare time, and I hope we get some upgrade eventually. Interestingly, the second game was part of a bundle about digging holes and is titled Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. The plot is fairly simple, you play a miner (4 or 5 classes are available) and you mine minerals and kill aliens. It’s not complicated at all but it gets really fun when you are surrounded by a swarm or slimy creatures and you have to fight your away out of it.

Work is still very interesting. I’m glad I spent the time to learn the basis of Terraform because it has completely changed the way I think about infrastructure. I mentioned in my last update that I used to manage Gitlab runner(s) on Digital Ocean, but I’ve recently had to spin up a few little dropplets for an experiment and it took me very little time. I think the next step is going to start thinking about using Terraform “as a team” and share the state, probably using HCP or something like that. I’ve also felt the need to gain more confidence in some of the code I’ve written, so I’ve invested some time in telemetry. It was a good opportunity to start using Honeycomb again, which I used a lot during my time at Apple but didn’t setup myself. I started working on a blog post about the whole journey.

I enjoyed a lot of stuff in these past few weeks, but this page showing title screens from old 8/18bits games really took the cake.