It’s hard to imagine this is already the 3rd week of September, it feels like the month is passing by quickly, although I haven’t been particularly busy recently.
I did do some paid work this past week; not a lot, just filling in to provide some emergency support/consultation.
I guess the reason it feels like the week passed by quickly is that I started a new side project (like many programmers, I am afflicted by the curse of wanting to start too many side projects). This one will probably get finished: I’m writing a Django based server for this website. I am generally happy with the current Hugo workflow I use for publishing things here, but the build times have struggled with the sheer number of posts I have. This started back when I decided to start importing my social media activity to this site, which increased the post count from a couple of thousand to more than twenty thousand now. Even the automated builds take forever, and I can’t even run the local Hugo build on my laptop due to too many open files error on Mac. And Hugo is already one of the faster static site generators, so I have doubt that other SSGs would be able to solve this problem.
I briefly considered moving back to Wordpress, but that seems like a step back. I also briefly considered writing a new backend using a new programming language like Rust, giving me an opportunity to learn something new as well. But I kind of needed to get this done quickly, given that I have a pending server migration within the next couple of months; it’s not necessary, but it would be nice to have the new system up in place by the time I do that, so that all the migration happens in one go.
I am still generally happy with the workflow of writing using my local editor and pushing markdown files to git, so I plan to retain that. The Django webapp will have a database, but that will be a secondary data structure used mainly for indexing and searches. It’s going to be some kind of weird file system/database storage, we’ll see how that goes. Anyway, probably more details on all that when I am ready to deploy.
Stuff I’ve been watching this past week: I finished both seasons of Cobra Kai. The series is decent. I’m here mostly for the Karate Kid nostalgia and the Lawrence/LaRusso rivalry. Season two had a lot of high school drama, which I wasn’t too interested in, so I liked the first season a lot more. Will still probably watch S3 when it comes out on Netflix. Now to figure out what to watch next.
Gaming this past week:
- Zendikar Rising is out on Magic Arena! I’ve already played a couple of drafts, but things didn’t go as well as I hoped, so now I am poor, will probably be able to draft again in a couple of days. Hopefully I get better at this format, as I’ve been planning to draft this set a lot; posts on these should be under the mtgznr tag.
- didn’t play much else this week other than the regular multiplayer games with the gaming groups SC2, Blood Rage, etc. I have yet to find a new game to knock off the backlog. I have also been considering trying out some of the smaller indie games in my collection, and maybe streaming some let’s play/reviews for them, as a bit of support for indie game devs.
- this week was the much awaited PS5 announcement, with pricing and release dates and everything! The $499 price tag is reasonable, but I probably won’t be getting one on launch, since there’s not a lot of games I want immediately. I will admit to getting a bit excited at the FF16 reveal, but that’s probably a ways off. I’m probably more likely to get a Switch first.
Trivia team put up a new chaotic video of us playing some trivia. Check it out, like, subscribe, etc.
Big news from the other side of the pacific is that US SC Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. “No no no” was trending on Twitter for a little bit, and a lot of people on my timeline were swearing. I had a short discussion with some friends living on the west coast about it. Many of my US friends also have some level of anxiety/worry about what’s going to happen during/after their elections. It’s actually annoying how informed I am about US politics, although it doesn’t affect me directly. Like it or not though, the US further sliding into single-party autocracy will likely be bad for the rest of the world, so let’s all hope they get their shit together.
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