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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!
YA GIRL GOT A JOB FINALLY.
Well, I already had one offer, but while the tech and people were cool, the compensation was below my expectations. I kept on interviewing at a second company for a more competitive and challenging position. Today they said they LOVED me (caps theirs) and that they are prepping an offer!!
I'm a bit sad about turning down the first offer, but, like... but not $45k/yr difference sad.
The company does solar power estimation and modelling using Lidar and satellite imagery. I am EXTREMELY excited to get to use my whole-ass math degree for what might be the first time in a decade, this is exactly the kind of challenge my little monkey brain craves - I'm ordering some text books right after this to brush up on linear algebra. I am also stoked I get to work with a ton of electrical engineers in addition to software engineers. Finally, the pay is an improvement over the place that laid me off by a solid 20%.
I never imagined I'd come back from it at all, let alone with something so good. I'm so happy I could cry.
Congrats! And yeah, $45k/yr difference is nothing to scoff at, and even if it wasn't your first pick, that does sound like a pretty interesting (and challenging) job. There is also lots of room for career growth in the solar and solar adjacent industries these days too, so it's a good one to get your foot in. My father ran an engineering company that made power conduits, mounts, fittings, and plug & play electrical connectors used in large scale solar installations. It was a booming business, and so I worked in IT there for a time too (hooray for nepotism!) ;)
I am on vacation in Scotland! Edinburgh for today and tomorrow, welcome to suggestions if anyone has any!! Will be in Scotland till next Saturday the 3rd :)
@AugustusFerdinand has had some luck in getting similar suggestions by making a self post about it in ~hobbies (e.g. NYC, Denver). So if you don't get any responses here, you could try doing that yourself.
As for my own suggestion, I've never actually been to Scotland as a tourist, despite living in London for several years. I had to drive up there for work once, to a small village outside Glasgow, but that was only a very quick trip there and back again to pick up a computer that the company was contracted to do some forensics work on for the local constabulary. But were I to ever go back for a proper vacation, I would definitely make sure to stop by some of the famous Scotch whiskey distilleries there. So if you're also a whiskey drinker, and that seems like something you might also enjoy doing, VisitScotland.com has a section of the site dedicated to that:
https://www.visitscotland.com/things-to-do/food-drink/whisky/distilleries/
The one I would personally most like to visit is Ardbeg in Port Ellen, on the isle of Islay, since I've heard so much hype about them on Whiskey Tribe over the years. It's a bit out of the way, so might not be something worth doing spur of the moment, but there are others in the Edinburgh area that would probably be more convenient for you to visit.
Ahhh thanks for the recs!! Will definitely try, I am personally not a huge whiskey guy (though I really actually like the process of making it and seeing it all so hey maybe it'll be fun anyways), but my friend who I am traveling with is so I will absolutely recommend we check it out!
I finally bought myself a keyboard and set up the ao486 core in my MiSTer console for some retro PC gaming.
It’s kind of amazing that it took me this long to get this done since this is part of the reason why I designed my setup to be in the form it is. And I have to say that the ao486 core is a lot better than I thought it was. Unlike the cores made for the major consoles, the computer cores aren’t terribly complete or accurate. I remember reading about this core in particular how they didn’t recommend installing windows because of some parts that weren’t implemented which might cause problems. But I have actually found the experience less buggy than other more popular options like dosbox or qemu. It’s refreshing to open up more complicated games like Albion and seeing the 3D parts rendering at the correct speed and not super fast or choppy slow.
I also transferred over some software for the X68000 core and it is beyond buggy. Things technically work but they don’t always work well. Die Bahnwelt is technically playable but anything outside of the playfield, including character portraits in dialog, has some messed up color. Some operations appear to be painfully slow as well, as some of the fancy animated opening sequences I found had the animations last far longer than the music it was designed to synchronize with. I was excited to see the fancy pseudo scaling effect in the Phalanx intro; it worked, but getting to it was a real slog.
To be fair, every X68000 emulator out there seems to have simelar problems with timing (usually being too fast), so perhaps this is a matter of the system not being particularly well understood. Maybe it’s just too obscure of a platform and there’s just not enough interest.
One day I will get the minimum core running, but it’s weirdly complicated. Especially because I will have to deal with multiple configs for the different generations because of minor compatibility issues. Technically I have to do the same for the PC because there is an entirely different core for PCXT and Tandy 1000, but that’s a task for another day.