Roy Tang

The big news this week was the passing of basketball legend Kobe Bryant. Not personally big on basketball myself, but I can get why a lot of people sympathized. It was sad, but at least it wasn’t on the scale of another natural disaster or global pandemic. Although the global pandemic did also spread to the Philippines this week…

I know it’s only been a month, but I’m digging this weeknotes practice. It establishes a regular cadence for the blog and at the same time provides a general bucket where I can place any spare thoughts that don’t make it into a shorter note but don’t merit a whole blog post. And somehow I always find a few more bits to say! At the same time, I can still be writing additional blog posts other than the weeknote, so that’s fine.

Anyway, this week wasn’t very productive. I did have a few meetings/events I was supposed to do during the week that for one reason or another didn’t push through as scheduled, so I had a lot of free time for the week. Most of that free time actually went to Tales of Berseria though. Game is good, I have to start regulating myself to make sure I’m not just playing it all the time. I also got a bit of writing done.

One event I did manage to go to was a Lord of the Rings themed quiz night last Friday. We had decided to try out this new quiz venue/organizer (new to us at least). And it turned out to be quite a different! There were a few written rounds, as in we write all our answers on a sheet of paper then exchange papers after the round. And after that, a couple of rounds with a physical component: teams had to race to raise their hands after the question was shown! And this was a right-minus-wrong section, with heavy penalties for wrong answers. So maybe our strategy of “just always raise our hands as fast as possible assuming we can get the answer” wasn’t quite the best strategy we had hoped it would be. We didn’t do too well (I think we finished at most 5th among 8 teams), but it was still pretty interesting.

On a personal note: pamangkin#5 was born last Friday, the 31st.

Site changes this week:

• search no longer uses JS, HTML now rendered directly by the Django backend. Output might be a bit buggy though.
• for some reason I decided I needed less content types, so I folded “Replies” and “Reposts” into “Notes”, so that “Notes” now feels like a more comprehensive microblog/tumblr-like thing. May have been a mistake, we’ll see.
• added a build log file generated at (/build/log.txt)
• added some placeholders for things I want to add later
• added a note about what RSS feeds are available
• usual random cleanup of minor things and older posts that didn’t import well

Other random site-related things:

• I got featured on Kicks Conder’s href hunt! This is fun for me because I sometimes use this as a reference for finding new/interesting blogs to follow
• may or may not be related, but I was looking at the AWStats for the site, and for some reason, January was a record in terms of number of unique hits, more than 3x the monthly peak for 2019. Not sure what happened there
• I’ve been thinking for a while about revamping the front page. I’m not super happy with the top menu (I kind of want more items on there), and the main feed on the front page that mixes all the different content types kind of de-emphasizes the blog posts. I like having the notes/photos/links archives on the site, but I kind of want the main focus to still be on the longer blog posts? I’ll have to think about this a while.

This week I’m looking forward to:

• a couple of quizzes in Makati
• hopefully closing out a deal that I’ve been trying to get done for a while
• working on some more changes/fixes/improvements to my recent personal project and the backend for this blog

Take it sleazy!