Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Weeknotes 2020-12-06

This week felt like another set of those moments-in-between, where not much seemed to happen, but it somehow still went by quickly anyway.

I think the household and the family has slowly gotten used to the idea that any big Christmas celebration isn’t happening. My niece’s birthday was last weekend, so we sent her gifts via Grab delivery instead of being able to get together. Most likely something similar’s going to happen for gift exchanges on Christmas. We’re still trying to figure out what we can do in the meantime. The extended family has proposed a zoom call on the day of, instead of our traditional annual get-together, I’ll let them manage the logistics of that, they have a lot of digital natives to figure it out I think.

The past couple of weeks I’ve made improvements to one of my side projects which is an app I use for personal data tracking. Improvements to that app’s feature set meant I could also take the time to do some digital housekeeping. That mostly means digging into a whole bunch old files to process their contents and possibly extract them the tracking app. Also regular maintenance things like backing up what needs backing up, deleting what can be deleted. It feels appropriate as a near-year-end activity to be going through junk from the past. (Although I should get started on going through actual physical junk as well.)

Gaming: In the never-ending quest to defeat the gaming backlog, I started working on Arkham Origins. I believe I’ve had my Steam copy for years now, well before I finished Arkham Knight, and never got around to it. It’s not a particularly new game, so I figured my five-year old PC could handle it fine. However I’m experiencing graphical slowdowns, especially when dealing with bug groups of enemies. I’ve already tried turning the graphics down to minimum settings, but still experiencing some issues. My suspicion is that it may have something to do with me currently using an AMD graphics card (the game does say it’s optimized for NVidia when starting up). So maybe I should have gotten around to it before my old GeForce card started having trouble. It’s still mostly tolerable, and I did manage to get through some of the quick-time event sections despite framerate drops. I’ll stick with it a bit to see if I can crawl my way to the end.

Watching Lately: Finished the binge watch of Perfect Strangers, and have caught up with Mandalorian and Discovery. I also blazed through S4 of My Hero Academia. I’d read the manga already, so just skipped ahead through the boring parts. I kind of want them to catch up with the current manga arc, as I want to see some of the more recent fights animated, but I guess that’s going to take a while. I also started rewatching The Big Bang Theory as my background show of choice, it’s aged reasonably well.

I mentioned recently that I’ve been meaning to write more, and I did manage to churn out one blog post per day last week! Maybe I went overboard? And that says nothing about their quality of course. Still, writing more + going through the past should help me focus my thoughts to help me figure out what I want for the upcoming year (aside from the to-be-expected wish for the end of the pandemic of course.) I’m not committed to daily posting, but let’s see if I can keep up the writing pace.

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