Belfast!

Headed across the short stretch of sea with an ex-colleague to see Stiff Little Fingers gig tomorrow night, which means a weekend in Belfast around said gig.

First full week for $work, including nearly all of the company coming together for two whole days at the end of the week which is going to be exciting. (There’s a couple of folk I’ve not met in real life yet, and it’s always nice to see the ones I have met before.) Quite liking Sensu as a monitoring solution, having managed to push it all out to the start of our server farm without needing to lean on puppet’s exported resources as I have in the past with Nagios.

Outside of $work, I’ve finally plucked the road bike out the shed and serviced it, and made it out a couple of times for a ride. Getting back into that being a habit most days is going to be the trickier bit I fear, especially as the weather in the UK will deteriorate quickly into winter now. Also need to migrate some servers around as I’m paying far too much for a physical host when all I need is a simple little VM somewhere for some static sites.

Hopefully getting my home network up and running so I can put the wifi access point back on the hall ceiling. It’s almost there, but pin 4 isn’t showing up as connected according to my cable tester, so there’s a few punchdowns to check along the route. Of course one of them is underneath the bedroom floor, which won’t be fun to get to.

Also spending yet more time in the car going to visit my friend for the weekend. (I usually drive about 30 miles in a week, this week I’ve done about 800 so far.) Looking forward to a social weekend, it’s been a hell of a week.

Sidenote: it really irritates me how the culture tag’s negative hotness modifier causes this weekly thread to drop off the front page almost immediately. It’s only 12 hours old and already halfway down page 2.

• git log
• gitk (when I remember it exists)
• Github
• GitX

Last full week with my current employer, driving down to one of our datacenters to rack up some $work servers I have at my house before I leave. Last visit to a datacenter for some time probably, as new employer doesn’t have their own hardware (nor needs it in the imminent future.)

Waiting on some patch panels arriving for home, then I can finish wiring up my home network (it’s expanding to two switches in two separate racks!) Although like an idiot I pulled two bundles of multiple cat6 through the walls without labelling both ends of cables, so I now have to figure out which end is connected to the other a few times over. Super amounts of fun. (Yes, I’m an idiot. Ugh.)

Off to Edinburgh for my last visit in my current job. Still got a couple more weeks until I actually leave, but this was the latest I could make it up to see everyone in the office & say goodbye^W have a good night out.

Also finally got my desk in my office, so now I need to engineer a solution to mount my screen onto a monitor arm. The arm has a VESA mount, the screen does not. (I suspect I’ll just sell the screen and buy a replacement with a VESA bracket.)

Setting up a second microserver as NAS for a family member, debating whether just go with FreeNAS or put something like Ubuntu & LXD on it. (Probably just FreeNAS. ZFS & everything else installed for sharing to Mac basically equals winner here.)

Really need to migrate my physical server back onto a couple of VMs - I’ve just not ended up running the services on it that I expected, which means it’s a very expensive static web server right now. Also sorting out infrastructure for $newjob whilst still working $currentjob and seeing the family.

Casting a level base & moving a shed at a family member’s house. Planning out how to run cat6 (and probably starting to drill holes) through my house, as I need to get that all laid to/from the loft before the loft is boarded out at the end of the month.

May even get out for a bike ride at some point too, we shall have to wait and see.

Going clay pigeon shooting in the Peak District (Middle of the UK) for my mate’s stag do. Never done it before, so looking forward to it. Along with the usual shenanigans that come from drinking proper beer and sharing good company with other people.

Also get to drive the Mini One (#ProjectBMW ) through the Peak District too, which is good fun when the road opens up and there’s no-one holding you up.

Celebrating a friend of mine incrementing the significant bit of his age. Picking up some work for a friend who needs an extra pair of eyes. Continuing with trying to write a language parser in ruby for another client.

Another week of being all over the place. Working, Sailing, heading to NWRUG (Ruby user group), Gardening and no doubt working on the car.

Also need to put two cars up for sale, turns out owning four cars is hard work and I only really need two in the family. Oops.

(Ha, nice. I’ve wondered about doing these previously but wondered if it would be too granular given the weekly what-are-you-doing threads technically cover the weekend. Nice to see someone else had the thought—and tested the theory out. ✌🏻)

I picked up a secondhand gas BBQ tonight, and have cleaned it so we will have to fire that up Saturday evening to give it a test run. Also got a friend (& future colleague) coming to stay for the weekend, his one request is I take him sailing so that’s pretty much our plan once he arrives tomorrow.

I might see if I can flush and refill my car’s manual transmission fluid at some point too. Had a lovely big syringe and hideously expensive oil turn up in the post today.

Another slightly odd week, after last week’s unexpected shenanigans travelling to Edinburgh to celebrate my employer being acquired successfully.

This week I’m off to meet my new team/employer in person for the first time (job change in August. Unrelated to buyout.) Which means more travelling, albeit to Sheffield this time. (Sheffield is lovely to boot, any excuse to visit.)

Working on a parser for a client in-between everything else, which is the first language parsing I’ve seriously undertaken. Interesting stuff, currently writing a library for Ruby so looking at parslet to do the heavy lifting for me.

Also the good weather in the UK amazingly continues, which means my garden continues growing. Bought a chainsaw last week and chopped a load of stuff down to start tidying it up, but there’s (as ever) always more to do.

I spent some time a few years ago speeding up my own shell (I think I was up to around 5 seconds startup time), and replacing Oh-My-Zsh with hand-built files was one of the biggest wins.

Out of interest I just timed it, and it’s still under half a second so I’m happy. (Although Zim looks interesting, thanks for pointing that out @aminb!)

$ echo -n "$SHELL "; for i in {1..10}; do /usr/bin/time $SHELL -ic exit; done |& awk '{ i += $1 } END { print i/NR }'
/usr/local/opt/zsh/bin/zsh 0.34

How fast does your shell start?

We need some form of “strict” mode which turns these all onto sane settings by default.

This week I am mostly working on my suntan in the outside office. (5Ghz wifi, power, a gazebo for the screen, decent table & chairs on the patio…) It seems the UK is in a minor heatwave at the minute so time to take full advantage of it.

Also need to work on the garden, ignoring it for a few weeks has lead to rampant growth of everything and it all needs trimming back. Time to break out the power tools for some fun playtime.

Off to Frankfurt, Germany for a couple of nights to start the week. Last minute short break, mostly to experience another place in Germany and partly because my mate needs to get abroad occasionally. Looking forward to it, especially not having to touch a laptop for a few days.

Main project when I get home is sorting my wifi network out. Up until now it’s been a Ubiquiti AP-AC-LR doing the heavy lifting, I’ve just picked up an AP-AC-MESH to go alongside that but placement of them isn’t ideal currently. Need to pull some cat6 from the loft down through a bedroom closet to the hall to move one of them to the ground floor to see if that makes a big enough difference. (The goal is decent 5Ghz coverage in the main house & on the patio.)

We also use the same services to monitor non-production environments, nagios in this case. We only use Pingdom to monitor the production services from external sources however. (Mostly so it doesn’t alert us to things going down out of hours we don’t care about until the next day.)

Love the project… although a chainsaw is a more suitable tool for slicing up logs. Angle Grinders are more for stone or metal 😍😋