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What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Moved across the country, from Atlanta to the Bay Area, after accepting a job offer out here. It was incredibly nerve wracking since I'd never even been to California before, and didn't have much of a rental history, but so far everything's gone pretty smoothly, gotten settled in at work and seem to have lucked out with housing, already moved in and I haven't found any big catches yet. Bit of sticker shock, but less than it might've been a year or two ago, Atlanta's been playing catch up hard, and I know people that are only paying about $400 less there for a comparable apartment to mine here.
So far it seems pretty nice here. The weather is excellent for mid-August and this is by far the closest I've ever lived to a job so I'm excited to try bicycle commuting (and even just walking), the bike infrastructure where I'm at is way better than I've ever seen elsewhere, and things are pretty walkable in general. It's also more relief than I was expecting to be so far from the awful things happening in red state America, which was something of a factor in my move, though I regret that I had but one election in which to vote for Stacy Abrams.
I received my passport! I don't have any international travel coming up but it's one of those things you need before you need it. I was worried because there's an inaccuracy on my birth certificate (dad's birthday), but I guess they just want a certified document and matching info.
I got some new glasses after going to the optometrist last week. They hurt a bit, but my prescription is really different, and I got a different frame shape. They've got snap-on magnetic sunglasses though, which I had a few years ago, and are super convenient.
I finally got put on a project at work, but it's a slow start because it's early days, then there's a long decision period. I'm just happy to be included. I amconstantly being told to enjoy the downtime while I have it, which is the goal, but I was getting a little fidgety waiting to be part of something. I'm sitting at home on a Friday with nothing to do, so I'm writing this comment.
I set a bunch of games up on my Deck for an upcoming trip that isn't happening now, but it'll be ready for the next one.
And my Quark^2 keyboard is finally fully up and running. I got the keycaps, slapped them on, then found a weakness playing Fallout, since I don't have arrow keys. They're bound to a layer I can expose by holding Escape down, and I mirrored it on the left and right sides of the board for different contexts. It'll even help with other games, especially since I'm really into isometric RPGs right now, and they tend to use arrow keys instead of WASD to move the camera (with the exception of Tyranny).
After what feels like an eternity, I finally got the email saying that I'm up to get my Steam Deck.
Unfortunately I only reserved it for $5 way back when, and this was a really bad time to be making a relatively big purchase like this because I just had to spend about $3000 in car repairs and maintenance, and also had to spend some extra money to get my family moved to my phone plans. I do have some comission payments that are going to be coming through that will help, but I was hoping to be able to put money back into my savings account. I'm not sure I'll be able to at this point.
For the past few weeks I have been working on a web application that allows you to write annotations associated with a piece of audio. It's just a dumb project that I'm basically writing just to add to a list of projects because I need something simple to show off that I can actually program, since all of the programming I do at work is extremely specific and proprietary and thus don't have anything to show off that demonstrates the skills I need to demonstrate.
Unfortunately this project is kind of kicking my butt right now. I know it's fairly simple, but I haven't been able to give it the concentration that it deserves. I haven't been able to concentrate on just about anything the past few days; I haven't been sleeping right because of the weather and it's even made me sick at times.
Last week I finally managed to put together the second revision of my MiSTer screen project. If I can only get the stand finished I think it's going to be ready for publishing!