To get it out of the way… May the Fourth Be With You! (Happy Star Wars Day!) And now, on to the rest of my week!
Monday I started out the week in the office, mostly with some standard meetings. In the evening I started digging into a software-related issue for work, which I knew would consume most of my time Tuesday as well.
And I was right! Tuesday I ended up working remote, as that is one of the best ways to focus on a problem for me. I actually woke up early and spend a lot of the day focusing on the issue, since it was top of mind, and fairly urgent.
Wednesday I was back in the office, though still spending some time in software development, attempting to wrap up my work from Monday/Tuesday. I ran into an interesting issue where two peripherals are sharing a FIFO, and though I’ve read the datasheet and understand what’s occurring, I’ve yet to figure out how to remedy the situation. However, I finished the rest of the work, shelved everything on a branch, and moved on.
Thursday morning I had a planned meeting with a colleague from Germany that was onsite, which ended up blowing past the original time and extended nearly to two hours. All in all it was good to meet someone from a different part of the org though, and I think it was time well spent.
Friday I debated whether to work in-office or remote, and ultimately decided to go in. Most of the day ended up spent on small tasks, and I headed home slightly early (well, early for me, not by normal standards), as my brain was running out of steam it seemed.
However, Friday was also yard work day, and so after I got home I promptly mowed my yard before I was able to actually relax! 😂
Since my mowing was done, Saturday I spent the day working almost exclusively on side projects. I did quite a bit of work throughout the day scanning and editing old photos, and in between added in a little gaming (once again trying RuneScape: Dragonwilds, though it hasn’t really stuck yet), as well as began the effort of porting my Mastodon and Instagram posts to my website.
Speaking of data migration to my website: on Saturday, my obsession with consolidating old posts from social media to my website hit a critical point, and so I started out the day by migrating a majority of my old Mastodon posts as status updates. I then followed suit in the afternoon/evening by beginning to migrate my old Instagram posts as well (in the same fashion), and by the end of the day I had most of them ported over.
Sunday, after Divine Service and grocery shopping, I continued the work of migrating my Instagram posts, and by lunch the work was done. But of course, I couldn’t stop there…
Sunday afternoon I realized that I could also post the show notes, along with links to the Archive.org archived audio, of my now-defunct podcast that I did with my sister to my website. After about 30 minutes, I had that done, and now almost everything that I posted online since 2014 is hosted here. The only things missing are my videos (maybe I’ll post them, we’ll see), Facebook posts (I no longer have my archive), and Twitter posts (same - I didn’t keep the archive, unfortunately).
On Sunday I also started listening to a new (to me) audiobook: We are Legion (We are Bob), Book 1 of the Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor. It’s proving to be interesting so far, and I kind of wish I would have started it sooner!
This week was my first week back in the office after spending the last week and a half visiting family.
Monday was mostly spent either in airports, in the air, or preparing to fly… for the first time ever, I flew home from visiting family in Ohio instead of driving, which meant I had to go through ORD on my way back to central Illinois. Overall the flights went well, but I definitely don’t enjoy sitting in airports. I was ready to be home.
Wednesday morning I had the pleasure of giving a tour of our ops center to our AWS reps while they were onsite for a visit. I’ve given tours off and on to various vendors over the past year, and was requested to step in once again. I find it fun and engaging to explain what our products do, and how they are manufactured.
Thursday and Friday I primarily spent helping a team at work track down a customer issue. I think by Friday evening/Saturday morning we came up with a good solution, and I spent part of the day Saturday doing testing from my work-from-home setup (I never fully tore down my test equipment from during 2020-2022).
Saturday morning, after coffee, it was time to start catching up on yard work, followed by work around the house. A downside of travel is definitely the number of things that pile up!
Over the weekend I also decided that I need to watch my diet more closely again. I noticed myself gaining a few extra pounds over the past two months, and I want to get back to what I consider a healthy, comfortable weight.
Sunday, after church and shopping, I decided to try out RuneScape: Dragonwilds. I’ve been an on-again/off-again player of RuneScape (now RS3) for years, and whenever Jagex offers a new game I normally at least try it out. I can see how Dragonwilds could be fun, but I’m not sure if it’s a game I’ll keep playing longterm. It seems to me to take longer to progress than I really have time for with my current workload.
Inadvertently, Sunday afternoon I also found a useful new piece of software. I was planning to use my trusty ScanSnap to scan and file mail from while I was gone, but the scanner refused to work right on my Mac. I could have attempted to use my Windows machine, but let’s face it, I try to use that as little as possible, and primarily for gaming if anything. So I did some research, and after a little experimentation, landed on using NAPS2 on Arch LInux, which worked like a charm. I may actually move to using my Linux laptop for this work going forward, as I’ve been unhappy with my macOS-based workflow for a while (ScanSnap -> File System -> DEVONThink).
… And, it looks like we might be getting some bad weather this week (hello Spring storms)… 😞
Monday morning was spent hiking with my sister and second cousin, followed by some meetings, and then some afternoon canoeing! I definitely did not pack appropriately for warm weather and canoeing, which means I was definitely wearing a polo and jeans. I’m sure I was a sight to behold!
Tuesday morning, my brother, sister, and I flew out of Charlotte to Fort Wayne, so that I could spend the rest of Holy Week with my family. Tuesday afternoon involved a little work, but mostly shopping for groceries for the remainder of my stay, and unloading my suitcase. My sister is (thankfully) kind enough to let me stay at her house when in the area, which is much nicer than a hotel (and more cost effective!).
Wednesday was pretty standard; remote work, combined with laundry. I normally prefer to not do laundry while traveling, but since I only used a carry-on for the trip, I had to make an exception.
Thursday and Friday included additional remote work during the day, combined with services in the evening.
Saturday was overall fairly chill for me. I went with my sister to color eggs with some family friends in the morning, and in the afternoon my dad and I worked to troubleshoot a computer at my sister’s business. It took us a while to find the issue, though eventually we realized that somehow a RAM stick had come unseated. Problem solved!
Saturday evening I also started showing my brother how to use Hugo to create a basic website. So far it’s mostly just a landing page, but I’m hopeful that he’ll eventually come to enjoy working on his site as much as I do mine!
Sunday was Easter, which meant being up very early for sunrise service! My sister (and mother) convinced me to sing in the choir, which my sister is the director of, which meant I had to be to the church even earlier than normal… but, it was fun! And afterwards, we got to enjoy an Easter breakfast!
Sunday for lunch we had smoked chicken, which was delicious (thanks mom & dad!), and then followed up with a fairly relaxed afternoon. I spent some time assisting with IT-related efforts at my parents’ and sister’s house, as I normally volunteer to do when visiting.
And that brings me to Sunday evening (now) as I’m writing this! I think we’re going to play a few games this evening, but otherwise we don’t have much planned.
Sunday and Monday I had a chance to once again delve back into embedded software development. Nothing overly complicated, mostly data piping, but it was nice to have an opportunity to code again.
Wednesday morning was spent with two coworkers preparing for our summer offsite. I haven’t been heavily involved before, but it’s the same team that I’ve worked on Christmas events with in the past, so we are used to working together.
Wednesday evening and early Thursday were spent finalizing preparations for some upcoming travel. Thursday afternoon I hopped on a plane and headed south for a few days to visit family!
The final few days this week were spent visiting my extended family in the Carolinas. Some of my extended family lives in the Charlotte area, and so my entire immediate family headed down to visit over the weekend.
Friday was mostly spent working remotely, and in the evening I went with my uncle to pick up my sister at the airport.
Saturday, we spent the morning helping to prepare for one of my second cousin’s graduation party, and then went to her senior violin & viola recital in the afternoon, followed by the party at their house in the evening.
This morning (Palm Sunday), most of my immediate family visited a Lutheran Church in the Charlotte area that is much more high church/traditional than what I’ve been to before. It was definitely a very interesting experience!
And finally, this afternoon my immediate and extended families visited the Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, only some portions were blooming since it’s still early in the year, but the parts that were blooming were beautiful, and it was a great excuse to walk around and enjoy the outdoors!
Saturday night/Sunday morning I didn’t sleep well, and had a few odd health symptoms. I ended up going to prompt care on Sunday, and was put on antibiotics.
Monday, though I was feeling overall fine, I worked from home. It happened to be a day where I had a substantial number of meetings, and I can take them just as easily from my home video conferencing setup as I can in the office.
The rest of the work week was mostly uneventful, thankfully. The weather dipped again this week, and by mid- to late- week it was again on the cooler side for Spring.
Saturday I finished and submitted my taxes, to ensure that I had everything completed before the deadline. This was one of the easier years in recent memory, thankfully!
On Saturday afternoon I also played RuneScape for the first time in a while, including a little skilling, and playing through the Contact! quest line. I eventually want to finish all of the in-game quests so that I can follow new storylines when they are released, but I don’t spend much time playing, so it’s going to take me a while…
Saturday afternoon/evening I decided to watch The Imitation Game (movie) about Turing and the Enigma machine. I’ve seen clips online for years, and finally dedicated time to watch the entire movie. Overall, I enjoyed it, and would recommend it to others!
While watching the movie, I also spent a little time fixing links on my sister’s website. I converted it to a static site for her a few months ago, but had not done an exhaustive review of internal links, and earlier this week I realized that some pages didn’t navigate correctly (thanks to a 404 seen on GoatCounter!).
I spent a little time looking for my old Facebook and Instagram posts today, with the hopes of adding them to my website. Alas… I no longer have the exports that I downloaded when I shuttered my accounts.
This afternoon I will probably mow my lawn, for the first time this season. The grass is getting just tall enough that it’s time to even everything out, and even though it’s still on the cool side, I’m ready for the lawn to look nicer.
This week is even lighter (on content) than last week!
Early in the week, I finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Overall, very interesting read, and I’d definitely suggest it to others!
At work, we released a new product documentation website that I’ve been lightly involved in, based on Docusaurus, a FOSS project from Meta that I’ve been pretty impressed with.
We built this in a very similar way to how I deploy my own website: markdown files in a git repo, with a build & deploy pipeline on push to AWS (S3 + CloudFront). I’ve been pretty happy with the overall design!
Personally, I’ve spent some more time playing piano again this week, and even started working on learning some new songs!
I don’t have much to report on from work this week. I was in-office every day, and ended up doing some remote work on Saturday/Sunday too to catch up on an issue.
Part of my work for the week included getting back involved in a software project that I’ve worked on historically, but have not had as much time for in the past few months.
Over the weekend, when not working, I listened to this month’s ATP Member’s Special, which was all about both why the three hosts have websites, and how they create their respective sites.
I won’t spoil it, as this podcast is intended to be a perk for members who support the show, but I did have two takeaways: I have a website for similar reasons to the hosts, and my posting setup is simplistic by comparison!
On Sunday, I became curious to see if I could get screenshots of not only what this website looked like over the years, but also what other websites I worked on looked like. This involved using the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, and I was surprised to find just how far back their database ran!
I added some of the screenshots for this website to my About page, for those interested.
At some point, I’ll post images of how I got started in web development, but I haven’t decided the place or the format yet.
