Going to prep for a job interview, for what I think is a very cool role. The best part? They hire without whiteboard!

I’m going to write a Gemini server in POSIX awk/shell/make(?), all wrapped in a literate org file. It’s gonna be DOPE

EDIT: Oh, and I’m going to a Ren Faire Sunday, which will also be DOPE

I’m going climbing for a whole day with a great friend and I’m excited about it. Maybe I’ll also bake some bread with my revived sourdough starter.

Having published my book (Perl one-liners cookbook), hope to catch up a bit with ever growing TBR pile of fantasy books. Been reading “Exhalation: Stories” by Ted Chiang for the past week, it’s a well written collection of sci-fi short stories. But, leans too much towards philosophical questions for my liking. There’s one story left which I hope to finish tomorrow. And then I’ll probably read “How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps” for an easy, fast paced and entertaining read instead of existential questions.

Getting used to my new Moonlander keyboard

Not much really. Probably gonna relax and play video games. I’ve been burnt out by The Event.

I am prepping to interview Dan Lemire for my podcast. He has done some pretty cool work on performance optimization and he seems like a generally interesting person. https://lemire.me/blog/. Let me know if you have any questions for him.

Having reactivated my blog (https://www.0chris.com) I’m hoping to find the time to finish one of the draft posts I have on making a tiny ci/cd system with bash, git and redis.

programmery: I realized I’d only done the first third of 4clojure problems an age ago, so I’m cranking down those, as it’s a milestone I’d like to have behind me.

personal: Nccylvat gb cynprf. Zl ghaary bs shaqf vf jvaqvat qbja, naq V srne gur ubyvqnl frnfba vf n onq gvzr sbe gung gb unccra (ernyvfgvpnyyl V’z BX hagvy gur raq bs Wna, naq unir n cebonoyl snyyonpx V fubhyq uvg hc arkg jrrx). Pna’g yrg tb bs gur vqrn bs cvibgvat gb jbex ng n Pybwher fubc, ohg V srry greevoyr fryyvat zlfrys, rfcrpvnyyl ng gur fgneg bs fnvq cvibg, lbh srry?

Taking a deep dive into a dozen or so job applications to find the ones worth a phone interview. This is the first time I’ve been on the resume receiving side, rather than the resume sending side, so it’s been interesting to look through them.

Also, a couple unsolicited PSAs I’ve learned from these resumes: 1. Acronyms are not always your friend, claiming that you wrote a POS application leads to ambiguity that might not benefit you. 2. For the love of all that’s holy, have someone else proofread your resume. 33% (out of a sample size of 12, admittedly, but still) of the resumes I received have a typo or grammatical error (not including the one that put their phone number as 555-555-5555!).

Redoing my homelab in Ansible.

It’s currently a bunch of hand managed VMs on ProxMox running docker containers managed by docker-compose.

I’d like to have Ansible create privileged LXC containers instead since I don’t need the memory isolation or hardware emulation a VM provides and I’m working with a small footprint single board Intel server so overhead matters.

Trying to decide whether to use the Ansible docker-compose module to do an initial deployment or whether Ansible should just drop the files in place and let me manage them myself.

I don’t love YAML for writing complex configurations, but Ansible really does seem well suited for this kind of small scale work.

I’m dividing my time between working on my eBook generation tool and writing a novella for NaNoWriMo. They kinda feed on each other. I’m quite happy because a sample book assembled by the tool I’m building — Little Webby Press — just passed epubcheck validation for the first time. This means I’m on the right path. As for the NaNoWriMo project, sleeping is overrated!

People interested in eBook generation might enjoy a little teaser video I’ve made about an early version of Little Webby Press.

finishing reading urth of the new sun. maybe work on plan9 stuff some more

I am going to kickstart a side project that I had in mind for years. I settled for Golang, Svelte and CouchDB. I have little to no experience with either of these technologies, so there will be a lot of reading, experimenting back and forth but there are no expectations or rush.

I’ve taken on a (paying) side project with a tight deadline and moving-target requirements that I said I’d deliver for a fixed fee. What was I thinking?!?!!

I could use a good front end to assist me but to save some of that money for myself I’m probably going to be bodging it in JQuery and sticking to what I know (Scala) in the back.

Merged two apartments recently. Now I’m putting stuff on eBay etc since we got a surplus of furniture and kitchen stuff.

Enjoying my new WASD V3 88-Key keyboard.

I’m moving from TN to Cupertino by car with my family, and laughing at memes on Twitter.

And keeping everyone from driving each other crazy. In the stoic of the household.

EDIT: …and ideation. I have an idea for a search engine.

Spending some more time learning modern PHP and Laravel.

I fell down a PHP hole the other day and was pleasantly surprised how much has changed since I last used it 15 years ago.

Not sure it’s my favorite, but I’m always up for learning something new so I can form an opinion.

Finally managed to publish my website with Zola here. Would love your suggestions regarding the theme/content anything :)

• ✔️ Upgrade http and h11 to compile with Zig 0.7.0 which should be released tomorrow. By the way, there is a live stream to talk about the release with Loris and Andrew tomorrow (cf: zig.show).
• FINALLY toying with zig-network, http and h11 to build an HTTP/1.1 client. As I am very noob, I move slowly but I learn many things :)
• Thinking about moving to the countryside. The shock doctrine hits hard and unveils day after days that we are living in an open-air prison.

• Continue reading Relevant Searches
• Visit apartments for my move in December
• Play with MVCC data structures

I’m going to be familiarizing myself with the Swift Network framework so I can hook up the gemtext parser and rendering views I wrote last weekend to an actual gemini client.

On Saturday, I need to clock in some hours at ${DAYJOB} to make up for hours missed due to feeling like crap throughout the week. I’ve started doing Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to try to help with my treatment-resistant depression, and it’s really difficult to go through. The procedure itself (around 30 minutes every business day, at 8am sharp) is simple, but slightly painful. However, the pain worsens through the day, usually going from dull headache to migraine. As the day wears on, I feel more and more tired and fatigued and it’s tough to concentrate and work. I’m really hoping this pays off, because it’s not a fun experience. I’m having a hard time understanding how/why taking care of my health should/can be so painful, and if it’s worth it.

On Sunday, I hope to take my dog to Patapsco State Park for a nice five to ten mile hike, followed by diving myself into a book or two.

Yeeting out part of the exhaust in my car to make it a tad louder (the resonator, more specifically). Not enough to be obnoxious, but enough to sound like the performance car it is. I’ll probably also be winterizing my bike, as this is probably the last nice weekend until spring here. I’m not looking forward to winter.

Going to be catching up on cleaning around the house, a little bit of Christmas shopping, and probably working on No Crafts Left Behind some more. I hope to finish a bare bones version of blog post editor, and then to move on to considering a product gallery.

That, and probably playing some Particle Fleet Emergence. It’s been a nice game to zone out too in the evenings.

Hoping to get a long bike ride in on Saturday before it starts snowing Sunday and Monday.

But mostly playing with this new computer, and then cleaning up and organizing my desk.

• Reaching a milestone with the next rev of my SBC image bootstraping scripts. Scripts are working and stable for Arch on an ODroid xu4, and about to compelte Raspbian on RPi4.
• Playing around with various cameras on the RPi4
• Testing a script to generate SBC mounting plates using Bash and OpenSCAD
• Plenty more CAD, plus some fabrication

Writing music for symphony orchestra and visiting my parents tomorrow. Hopefully will have time to paint a wall in our corridor aswell.

The weather here in Tronna is going to be gorgeous, so we’ll try and spend as much time outside as humanly possible. Lots of walks in parks with the kids, playing soccer, &c.

I’m doing my final reviews for my “in-person” loop with Amazon on Monday, which is exciting/terrifying. I have been extremely impressed with their interview process so far, though, and I think I’ll do well. But it can’t hurt to study.

Celebrating the obvious victory and letting myself be filled with joy and hope. Don’t care if it’s slightly false right now, I can handle that part later. Then fathers’ day’s things.

Exploit contest on Saturday. If they succeed, we’ll make a new version and release on Sunday. Oof.

It’s time for NaNoGenMo 2020, so I’m going to be working towards making a generative novel or two…

Doing a few workshops from remoticon. Going to finally learn how to do something with my SDR that has been sitting in a box for too long and learn something about rf debugging.

I think I’ve figured out a path forward for ggez, a lightweight Rust game framework I maintain. There’s two problems: First, the current graphics engine is kinda flaky and based on some deprecated libraries, but also works quite well in practice as long as you avoid a few known foibles. So I’d like to write a new one, better faster stronger etc, but that’s a reasonably large task. Second, there’s a big backlog of issues and pull requests I need to deal with one way or another, some of which deal with bugs and updates to the existing graphics engine,

So my plan is to spend the rest of the year dealing with the second issue and updating all the stuff I want to without ripping out and rewriting the graphics engine, but which does involve a lot of other stuff improving the windowing, sound API, fixing bugs, stuff like that. That leaves me then free to work on replacing the graphics engine; I know more or less what I want to do, and have a decent prototype in place, I just need to fill out all the details.

I just got a sweet new airbrush that I’m going to paint some mini’s I printed with. In particular, I’m going to attempt to participate in my first miniature painting competition

Giving the finishing touch to a campaign’s website to advocate for better working conditions for tech workers in my country.

1. I’m participating in Global Day of CodeRetreat: Virtual Edition - trying this out online with a long-time cohost running the show for Code & Supply while I sit back and participate for once.
2. I’m speaking for OLF Conference on my document workflow using Pandoc.
3. I might work on my personal website. The thread last week made me think about things and I think it would be a good geek self-care task to update my website materially for the first time in ~9 years.

Friday - daemon/sockets programming and reading TLPI.
Saturday - meeting my girlfriend for Filipino food.
Sunday - chores, daemon/sockets programming

Playing with my new Oculus Quest 2. Maybe spending some time writing a post on https://reliability.substack.com/ about some tips on running Go in production and sharing some protips.

Have our yearly get together for my old group of friends from high school, so we’ll go out for dinner and then to mine to get a few beers afterwards.

I also need to put up the blinders I bought, and tomorrow my uni friends are dropping by for ranting and boardgames.

I found a book about Neuroevolution in Python that I plan on perusing after church.

Lots of examples with NEAT and HyperNEAT that I’ve been dying to dig into.

I’m working on fixing a car audio amplifier. It’s a neat device - 6 channels, 1000 W, class AB. It’s a Soundstream D’Artagnan, built around 2000. Apparently only around 100 of them were made. But part of the circuit has been damaged and I’m having trouble selecting appropriate replacement parts because I have no idea what this part of the board is supposed to be doing.

I’ve posted a question on the Electronics Stack Exchange but don’t have any real solid leads yet. https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/530928/what-does-this-rail-splitter-like-circuit-do