Monday and Tuesday were pretty normal, with meetings scattered throughout the day. As I did last week, I worked remote Monday morning, then drove to the office for some in-person work in the afternoon.
Tuesday evening was our R&D Christmas party at a local establishment. For the… fourth year in a row, I was on the planning committee, so I arrived slightly early to set up, and stayed afterwards to assist with some minor cleaning. The food and festivities were fantastic, and I think everyone had a good time! 🎄
Wednesday was mostly my standard schedule, with the exception of a meeting with a vendor over lunch. A month or so ago I got a chicken/bacon croissant, and really enjoyed it, so I decided to try it again (and it didn’t disappoint!).
After work I drove to church for our Advent services. I (unfortunately) missed last week due to a work commitment, but was glad to be able to attend this time around!
For the second week in a row, Thursday ended up being quite busy, with only a brief break for lunch. I felt like I got a decent amount accomplished though, which is always good!
Friday was a pretty standard day in-office, though it actually started with a quick trip to our ops center to assist a colleague with a product-related question. After work I did some quick shopping, as I saw that Saturday/Sunday could be interesting weather-wise.
Saturday the temperatures began dropping, and it also snowed for about 9 hours. I think all-told we got nearly 7 inches of powdery snow, which I spent the late-afternoon hours shoveling. 🌨
I pulled out my camera to take some photos of the snow… which didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. But I did take a photo inside of my snowman that’s not… terrible.
During the day while inside, I (once again) migrated my task lists from OmniFocus back to Todoist. I’ve mentioned such a transition in the past, and as before, the allure of some of OmniFocus’s design drew me in, somewhere around a month ago. However, the interface was actually feeling slightly clunky to use, and after some consideration (and bouncing my thoughts off an LLM, which was semi-useful), I decided to go back to the trusty tool I knew.
Saturday also saw me continuing to finalize my gift planning for family for Christmas. I split my shopping between online and in-person this year, which was a little abnormal for me (I mostly shop online historically). I also used an LLM for some idea generation for gifts… I had a few individuals that I was struggling to finish shopping for, and needed some ideas (well - specific ideas, I had a general category in mind). Using an LLM made it a little more interesting than just browsing online stores or doing standard web searches.
This morning when I woke up it was below zero (Fahrenheit)… brr! Since I wasn’t sure what the roads would be like, I got around and left for Divine Service early. The roads were snow-covered in places, but overall not bad!
After church, I came back home, finished some shoveling that I didn’t do yesterday (sidewalks), played a bit of Northgard, then began prepping for the week! In between said prep, I’ve been writing up this post. 🙂
All that’s left today is some cleaning, dinner, email, and then it’s off to another week! See you then!
Potpourri
I had a few other things that don’t fit my normal format, but that I wanted to include, and aren’t long enough for their own standalone blog post… (and yes, Matt, if you’re reading this, I totally stole the section name from you! Although I’m kind of using it differently.)
Maybe 2026 is going to be the year of the Linux (gaming) desktop? I enjoyed reading Matt Birchler’s thoughts, and realized that even though I’ve had a Linux desktop for years (that could game), I haven’t really given it a go recently. I keep a Windows desktop around for 90% gaming/10% random other uses that require Windows, and I wonder if perhaps in 2026 I should see how much of it I can run on Linux now? Most of the games I play are on Steam, which means they likely have Linux support, either natively or via Proton.
I read through (well, ok, skimmed) Joel’s post on things he learned making a game engine. Though I no longer program as much as I used to, designing a game engine (or building a game that requires only a rudimentary engine) has been something on my far-distant someday/maybe list. It was interesting to see some of what Joel learned, and perhaps one day I’l take a stab at it myself.
For those interested - when I use LLMs, it’s through Kagi Assistant. I’ve been using Claude 4.5 Haiku model, with reasoning, and with Kagi web searches enabled. I keep an eye on Kagi’s benchmarks, and switch models roughly every other month, if there is a better recommendation for my use cases.
I ran across a Chicago food recommendation blog post from Cassidy Williams this week that caught my attention. While I don’t visit Chicago often, having a list of restaurants to try in my Obsidian vault is always a good idea for if/when the topic comes up!
Edits
2025-12-14: Added comment + link from Cassidy Williams’ blog.
