Weeknote #15 (20241208-20250105)

meta

Whoops, kinda fell off the bandwagon there, thanks to a week onsite in Seattle for work and then general holiday season waves hands stuff.

did

  • Picked BG3 up off the large “to play” pile and started over — I had originally started playing it around a year ago, but in retrospect I made some bad choices during initial character creation, and then I got a little gas-lit by the “hurry up and deal with the REDACTED THING” pressure from the game. I recently saw a social media post that pointed out that this intro mechanic was completely bogus, and really the best thing to do is ignore the pressure and just explore, because there are no consequences to that approach — so that’s what I’m doing! I managed to get about 25 hours in, over the break 😳 and am having a pretty good time — we’ll see if I manage to stick with in when Real Life™ resumes…
  • Tried to switch my home networking config away from “static” DHCP, where everything is locked down to particular MAC addresses, to a more dynamic DNS-based setup. My initial attempts were less than successful, and in the end I reverted all my changes and went back to the system that has been working for years
  • Got through Day 19 in Advent of Code before I ran out of steam this year, a personal record — I keep telling myself I’m going to go back and finish it off, but that keeps not happening…
  • We took a family day trip over to the coast, just make sure we saw the ocean in 2024; it was nice
  • One of my gifts was a new M3 MBA, so I spent a solid day getting that all set up and configured. With this replacing my old Intel MBP, I’m down to a single Intel Mac in my life (a Mac Mini that’s my office desktop) — but that is pretty unlikely to change anytime soon, I imagine
  • Despite the whole mess of words above, I didn’t do a whole lot during the 16 days I had off work — some “performance cooking”, a whole lot of eating and drinking, and a great big bunch of sleeping in. It was nice, and I’m almost ready for it to be over (but I could have probably done with about twice as long a period before I got seriously bored with it…)

read

  • Lisp, Jazz, Aikido – Three Expressions of a Single Essence

    Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido are governed by a limited set of rules which remain simple and unobtrusive. Conforming to them is a pleasure. Because Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido are inherently introspective disciplines, they also invite you to transgress the rules in order to find your own. Breaking the rules is fun. Finally, if Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido unify so many paradigms, styles, or techniques, it is not by mere accumulation but because they live at the meta-level and let you reinvent them. Working at the meta-level is an enlightening experience.

  • Remove the legend to become one — this one is really long, and starts with a somewhat-less-than-thrilling recounting of some early-days Amazon reporting stuff. Stick with it — even skim over that intro third if you need to — and you’ll be rewarded with some serious reflection on Tufte, good data visualization, and why Excel line charts suck rocks

    A line graph is just another ugly chart lost in the scramble for its own gratification in a slide deck no one wants to read. It can be disregarded, forgotten. But if you make your graph more than just the default Excel format, if you devote yourself to Tufte’s ideals, then your graph becomes something else entirely.

watched

  • TheWife and I finished our NCIS binge, catching up to the most recent episode (S22E9) on Thursday the 26th
  • We moved on to drumroll NCIS: Hawai’i and are currently around halfway through season two there

cooked

photo

One of my Christmas gifts

Sometimes, as a parent, you’ll get an indication that your kid really, really gets you. This was one of the gifts I got from Mx18.