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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!
Worked. Far too much as far as I'm concerned.
This weekend is all about the haircut, friends and my motorbike though. Nothing super busy, but just enough to enjoy myself.
I've got a bit interview on Tuesday that may change the direction of my life... I'm really excited.
Good luck on that interview, and I hope you enjoy the time off this weekend! Enjoy yourself!
Best of luck on the interview, I'm sure you'll nail it!
Moving across town to a new apartment! It's going to be hot and generally unpleasant, but I'm so excited to be moving into a nicer place downtown. There are sidewalks, and bike paths! There's a park, we can walk to restaurants!
It sounds silly, but I keep thinking that I'm finally getting my own little Hey Arnold neighborhood. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so I'd always yearned for a more connected lifestyle.
Edit: can confirm, it was hot and unpleasant, but we are moved in! Wife and I are now sandwiched between a park, some restaurants, and a lovely fantasy/game-themed bar. It sucks that we have to work tomorrow after an entire weekend of moving in the southeastern summer heat, but we're both in good spirits, and the vibe is incredibly positive.
Also, Im so proud of our cats, they've mostly handled the move well, much better than I had expected. They're little champs.
I also just moved. It was exhausting, but worth it. I'm also in a spot that's a bit more walkable now. I'm still in a suburb (I lived in the more dense neighborhoods closer to downtown for too long already), but I'm actually within a half mile of a grocery store and a few food options, at least, even if I will still be using my car for certain errands.
Enjoy living in downtown wherever you are! It's less quiet and definitely busier, but having easy access to pretty much everything is very, very nice.
My fiance and I closed on our first house on Tuesday! I'm so excited. I can't stop thinking about colors to paint, and other landscaping ideas.
Unfortunately my fiance is having trouble envisioning any ideas she has of the house, I'm sure it's overwhelming for her. The summer is the busy season at her work and I'm sure it's hard for her to think straight with everything going on. As a result, at the moment everything is my idea, and I feel bad. I keep telling her once we move in and our stuff is here her vision will take shape.
Problem is, I would like to at least paint before we move in but even getting her to pick colors is a challenge. Trying to come to an agreement and be gentle with my ideas as to not steamroll and make everything mine, but she's upset about not having ideas like I do. Does anyone have any ideas on how to manage a situation like this?
Would giving her a selection of colors and having her pick from there work? The amount of choices can be overwhelming sometimes. Otherwise I find looking at pictures of other apartments/houses for inspiration to help a lot myself.
Thank you! We ended up doing something like that. Still fine tuning where we want them to go but it's turned more fun rather than stressful now which is a relief. Excited to move in this weekend!
The most memorable part of the weekend was a trip to an antique market the next town over with a couple of friends. It's more of a garage sale from the 80's than an antique market, but I found a few treasures to bring home.
The rest of the week was fairly typical.
I started going to the gym more regularly. I hope I can keep it up. I started some online Python courses. I talked to someone I've worked pretty closely with for years about a job opportunity coming up that I may be able to work indirectly with some NASA projects that I'm really excited about.
I decided to get stung by wasps a couple dozen times. This was not a good idea, F- do not recommend ever doing this.
I was going to power wash the patio under our deck, and I was unwittingly standing right under this evil incarnate. When I started up the pressure washer a large amount of very angry paper wasps came out and explained to me that they would prefer if I left the area, so I complied with their request.
I was chatting with a friend later and he's going to come by and take the whole nest this evening to study in his lab.
When I was younger I played a Tolkein based video game, I think it was called Shadow of Mordor. In it you have to eliminate a wide variety of orks. It was not the greatest game ever but one of the things you could do was sneak into an ork fortress, climb toward the top and shoot bee colonies or possibly wasp nests, causing them to drop into the midst of the orks below causing a little chaos.
I feel for you. Stings hurt and being surprised like that sucks. I hope you stop hurting soon.
Ah, dropping Morgai Flies on Orcs - I see you're a connoisseur of video game hilarity. There are a lot of things I enjoyed about Shadow of Mordor, but dropping nests on orcs was near the top.
The stinging hurt for a while, but the actual sting went relatively quickly (a few hours) and now I have an ache in my joints, but it's not too bad, considering how much I got stung. I was chatting with my neighbour who grabbed the nest and took it for study, and his wife told me that redheads tend to be better with pain and stings, and I think there's definitely something to it; I a (former) redhead got over 20 stings when it happened, and now the swelling and redness are almost entirely gone. My mom (not a redhead) was stung 5 times a week ago, and her stings still look way worse than mine.
Redheads also tend to react differently to anesthesia. If it's not obvious that you are/were a redhead and you are getting surgery it is a good idea to tell a doctor about it so they can choose the right dose the first time.
Anesthesia and also other pain medicine, at least in my experience. Two short stories:
A fairly long time ago I had some persistent pain about something and I went to the doctor and said "these ibuprofen don't really seem to do anything" and she said "how many are you taking?" I told her I was doing exactly what was on the box - 2 tablets every 6 hours. She said, "Oh honey. You're a redhead and you're built like a brick shithouse. Take 4 and if that doesn't work take 6."
I had a minor elective surgery, and told the doctor - my urologist - that I would likely require more anaesthetic due to previous experience. He kind of hand waved that, and gave me a dose. The next four times he asked "can you feel this?" and he did the poke test, I visibly moved and said emphatically "yes". I wouldn't mind so much, except see above re: urologist, and one can imagine where he was doing the test pokes.
Dropped 3k on car repairs which is pretty unfortunate because that's about the cost of the car and it'll still have an AC issue. I just find cars to be extremely frustrating. Doing repairs yourself requires a lot of knowledge, tools, and time. But even with those things you might mess it up, be missing a part, or have it take longer than you have. But autoshops are equally expensive in terms of money and time. It's a real pain in the ass.
Otherwise my week was uneventful. I got a horrendous Java application running so I can start development on it. But I was unsure it was going to work at all so that's nice.
In my view, the cost of getting a car repair is actually kind of a steal compared with the amount of time I would spend researching the problem, finding and obtaining the repair part, pulling the car apart, doing the actual repair, putting it all back together, and dealing with any problems caused by any potential mistake I would make. Cars are becoming increasingly proprietary, too, so there are many parts that you might basically not be able to fix yourself because there's a specialized tool or software that you don't have access to. Weirdly the same thing is happening to bikes, too!
Research! I'm a systems/computational neuroscience PhD candidate finishing up my thesis. I've spent the past two weeks brainstorming further analyses to do with some preliminary data, and I finally started implementing them this week. I've also been looking into various statistical analyses (if anyone has strong opinions about hierarchical bootstrapping, let me know!) and playing Returnal in my spare time. In other news, still procrastinating on learning Data Structure & Algorithms along with more common industry data science approaches to make myself appealing on the job market.
Quiet week at work, the last for a while - from now on to late September at least one of us will be on vacation, so extra work for the ones remaining. My direct coworker I have to step in for has a month vacation. She deserves it, doing a long vacation across the globe being still young enough, but I hate trying to keep up with her workplace for such a long time. I'm not supposed to get everything done, but ... geez, even after 20+ years I still know I'll try anyway for the first three weeks.
On the other hand another coworker almost had a heart attack when she realized I still have 41 days off at hand. So my vacation in August und September will still be 2022 days off carried over (we can take them until October the following year). I always carried over ~ 10 days, but given some big drama summer last year I didn't take any vacation after June 2022 for the rest of 2022, so I carried over much more than I expected to. (Yeah I know, most US tilderidoos will hate me now, sorry...)
I was sidelined from sports having a cough past two weeks, this week I did sports three times again. Not full level of course, but a step in the right direction.
Monitored a few ongoing jobs at work. None of them need me involved, but will at some point - and when that happens I want to be locked and loaded.
Started another LARP project, this time for infrastructure. Went to the hardware store and got four cheap canvas drop cloths, got some outdoor-rated thread, and cut a half dozen small trees to make tent poles.
Saturday I'm already busy, but Sunday I plan to spend the day sewing canvas together and making a whopping 18'x24' sun shade!
This week was just working and starting a new diet (CICO). I went a bit crazy with food the past six months and now it is time to pay the price.
I also ordered two new boomerangs. One for me and one for my wife. I have been throwing boomerang on and off since college, and sadly I lost my newest boomerang to the weeds at my park. My wife has been trying to throw the boomerangs I use but hasn't had too much success. I'm hoping with a more beginner-friendly boomerang, she will have a good time and be able to get it to return.
Started splitting firewood for the winter. Will be having friends up for the weekend to just hang and also discuss plans to go to a small local music festival!
I went to my second-ever professional athletic event - a work gathering at the local baseball stadium. I'm not really interested in sports, but it was kind of nifty to see a community-centered game with a bunch of just-out-of-college kids in a farm league knocking baseballs around.
The announcers didn't take anything very seriously, their in-game music included clips of all kinds of things (they managed to sneak in a few bars of Green Day's American Idiot). There were a couple of foul balls into the stands, there were pauses for on-field contests to let children and families take part in the event, and the concessions included local craft beer and wine. I enjoyed myself a lot more than expected, but I couldn't tell you whether the home team or visitors won.
I started fuzzing a JSON parser that I wrote a while ago as part of a game engine, and quickly found a lot of crashes. Oops!
Also made a pizza from scratch, making the base round and flat was a lot tricker than YouTube chefs made it look...
Pizza is all the same shape in your belly :)
What kind of dough were you making? I've been doing Adam Ragusea's No-Stick Neapolitan, and it's been pretty easy to work onto my baking surface, though I'm using a much smaller and weaker oven so I can't get the good temps.
Ah, JSON; fooling people into thinking that parsing data from text is easy since 2001. I've been having some problems with it myself in a learning project that I'm working on. Sadly I've been too busy and stressed to work on it for most of the week.
This is the first week since February that I haven't had episodic intense pain, and I took advantage of it! Salsa class Wednesday, 45 minutes of exercise bike Thursday, kayaking Friday. Today we're barbecuing for company, helping a friend build a computer, and cleaning the house. Tomorrow I'm going to finally test out my new drawing tablet and attend a rec hockey game as a spectator. It's so wild that I can just suddenly do normal people stuff without fear again.
Do you know what relieved the pain? It's lovely when pain disappears (i had a severe nerve problem a couple of year ago and the shot of morphine I got at Urgent Care was wonderful! Though getting off the prescribed oxycodone a month later wasn't fun). It sounds like you've gone full on with vigor now, so I hope it lasts.
I had a hormonal implant removed several weeks ago after about 2.5 years, and I'm positing that was it but don't know for sure. Having intense abdominal/pelvic pain every two days for 4 months wasn't something I expected to be a side effect, and no doctor ever brought it up. I ended up calling my doctor's office after a surgery because the pain was much worse and got it removed then just to get rid of a variable.
Some long overdue computer maintenance activities:
I've had a server with Linode forever and been very happy. But I recently noticed it would periodically go inaccessible, perhaps after some idleness. Perhaps it had something to do with their acquisition. So I decided to switch providers.
Back in 2009 when I created my website I built it in Rails (backed by files rather than a database) Last week I replaced all that with raw html, generated with a tiny Lua script. It's nice to be able to unsubscribe from some mailing lists of vulnerability notifications.
I've been backing up my local laptop to my server, but that was causing me to overflow my disk. Cloud servers are a relatively expensive way to get storage. So I decoupled those concerns and now back up my laptop to rsync.net.
All in all, I'm much happier with my server. It's leaner, runs less stuff, and it'll be easier to move next time. With the way we've been seeing services degrade lately, I think it's useful to be thoughtful about how we cobble together our personal digital infrastructure, architect it to be nimble and easy to move around. If you keep options open you'll be less likely to need to use them.
had c*vid for the past 5 days, i feel like i've done nothing at all
Saw new Mission Impossible movie. Edge of your seat but a bit longer than it should be, like most movies these days. IMAX is always a treat.
Helped my parents move. It feels strange saying goodbye to the home I grew up in. I'm a pretty sentimental person so I expected to be a total mess during this whole process, but barring a couple stray tears here and there I've been largely fine. I imagine once the dust has settled I'm gonna have a good long cry about it, but for the time being I'm trying to keep myself busy and be as helpful as I can.
Also got a dock for my Steam Deck. I've been watching One Piece on Hulu for ~100 episodes and got fed up with all the ads. Now I can watch it on Hulu via the Steam Deck with adblock enabled so I'm averaging an extra 2-3 episodes per day (still won't be caught up for Gear 5 :( ....)
Watched part of Das Boot with my nerdy, WW2 naval obsessed 9 year old. I figured it would be good to show him one of the few war films which actually pulls off the trick of not glamorising war. We're taking it in chunks.
I am currently cowboy camping 2 miles away from a wildfire, next to our fire engine. The junebugs are relentless but the night sky twinkles with lights above, natural and artificial. The stars spread out, occasionally interrupted with satellites and planes, including one of the starry Musk chariots.
The fire itself continues to burn despite the set sun. It started patchy, but it was snaking its way through overgrown grass and dead fuel. As we work to protect the land, this lightning started fire will do good for the land as it grows.
I've worked 16 hour days for the last 10 days, and I'm looking forward to a similar next 10 days in a fire assignment close to home but far from where I work. The hotel has been nice up until now, but there's nothing that beats the fresh mountain air and a clear, starry night - not even the ten junebugs that flew into my face while typing this could ruin such a feeling.
Bashed my head against a Dockerfile until it built an image capable of training a YOLOX image inference model to detect foxes in my back yard and trigger home automation to scare away foxes. Got the training running, now gotta keep iterating on that until it detects all the things I want effectively. Then think of something to scare away foxes if the cameras see one.