6 October, 2023

I have a lot of things on my mind, and sometimes I post them publicly. Here I go!

It's 7pm on a Friday and I'm thinking about what my family is going to do tomorrow. I could take my kids on a bus, or maybe a train. We could go on a hike. We could lay around the house. We could go to a park. I'm feeling compelled to plan something, because as a family we tend more towards laying around until noon and then wondering where the day went.

I have a series of digital hygiene tasks to address in my life. They're not necessarily interesting for anyone else to follow along with, but I need to write them all out so I can make progress on them.

First, my firehouse isn't automatically publishing very well. I'd like to fix this once and for all, because it's never quite worked right. And I've discovered that there's something motivating about a publish script that works: first you publish to make sure it's working. Then you publish again because something's on your mind. Before you know it, you can be in a publishing groove, and that's a good place to be.

Second, I have been writing a lot of tests for my personal projects, and I'd like to write more. There's something enjoyable about writing up some simple checks against my code, knowing that when things break the robots will rush to tell me. And it helps that the work applies directly into the stuff I'm doing at work right now.

Third, I have a bunch of blogs that I write but I've been ignoring for a while. I have one about cooking, another about my academic career, and others I can't even remember right now. It might be nice to race through them and give status updates.

I played Starfield for a while, but my playthrough was cut short by a broken save file. I was fighting a boss, then I hit save. But then I died, and came back to life right before he blew me up. I did this loop a few times, and did a dumb thing, and now all my quicksaves are right before death. Meaning the entire game is broken for me now, other than a three week old save, for a game I've had for four weeks. Bye bye, Starfield. Maybe I'll start something else, like, for example, writing more. It could happen!

New Zealand politics is in a pretty interesting place right now. I've been thinking about writing an explainer for people who don't live in the country. There are some really interesting tidbits to share and analyse. We'll see.

I've been working on my Master's thesis quite a bit. My favourite part is a gallery of ten software interactions that I'm using to underscore the points in my essay. I've done basic versions of 2 out of 10 of the pieces, and it'd be nice to get to 10/10 as soon as possible. I'm doing a novel thing with this work, and I can tell it will be well-received by the few people who see it. I'm looking forward to doing something great.