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.
On Monday, I was scheduled to help some friends at a local church with some minor electronic repair after work. It took a little longer than I initially expected, but it was good to catch up, and it’s a skill I enjoy using.
The middle of the week was pretty normal, and there’s not really much to report. I was in-office every day for a combination of meetings and catching up on some projects.
Friday I worked remotely. I wanted to enjoy the last very nice day (for at least a little while), and so used my breaks to take walks around my subdivision.
Friday evening saw some pretty strong storms come through the Midwest; thankfully, nothing more than rain and wind near me!
Saturday was a pretty relaxing day at home, where I didn’t do much outside of reading and going for a few walks. The weather started cooling off, though it was still nice enough to be outside in a short-sleeve shirt.
My book of choice on Saturday was Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I heard about it earlier in the week, specifically because of Meta’s attempt to limit its promotion, which of course had the effect of making me curious about the book. I’m about half-way through, and so far it’s a captivating read.
On Sunday, by the time I left for church, there was snow on the ground! It’s amazing how fast weather can change in the Midwest this time of year.
For the first time in a long time, I decided to make stir fry on Sunday. I think it was a success… I enjoyed the taste, though I definitely wasn’t as fast at preparing the food as I thought I would be.
Over the weekend I also played piano for a little while at home. It’s been quite a while since I really did that either, outside of a few times when visiting family.
