Happy New Year! Something I’ve gotten used to as the New Year rolls in: make a checklist of things to do for the new year. I generally copy stuff over, but the list changes a bit every year.
In no particular order:
Ponder why people give so much significance to the transition between an arbitrarily-chosen pair of 24 hour periods Take stock and reflect on the past year Count your blessings for the past year and be grateful Greet your loved ones and friends and anyone else you hold dear.
Blog: A blog is a website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, typically displayed in reverse chronlogical order. A single entry is called a blog post. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this list.
Jan 2021
Dec 2020
-
I started doing these weeknotes at the top of 2020, so this one signals one complete year of doing my weekly reviews/notes in public. I thought it appropriate for a review! Did it turn out to be a good practice? I think for me yes! Not necessarily for anyone following the blog (all 3 of you), since a lot of the weeknotes stuff might seem boring or irrelevant to you. But for me, forcing me to publicly write some thoughts about the past week has been good for my own self-awareness and keeping me writing regularly.
-
This was the year when a lot of Christmas traditions were broken, due to the pandemic. There are cultural/country-specific Christmas traditions of course, but usually each person or family also has their own personal traditions that they do every Christmas. Here are some of mine: Christmas Eve dinner, or as it’s popularly known here in the Philippines, noche buena. Growing up, our immediate family/household unit usually celebrates Christmas Eve with a late noche buena, an extra meal that happened after dinner and starting at around midnight.
-
It’s the penultimate week of the year, and I’m sure I’m not the only who’s had enough of this accursed year and looking forward to moving on to the next one. I know that’s silly since the world won’t magically become better when the calendar flips over to January the first, but I think it helps our mental health to have this sort of “fresh start” mentality, even if it’s on an arbitrarily chosen date.
-
I’ve talked a bit about mentoring in software development before, and how early on I used to get feedback about me being “intimidating”. I never got any concrete feedback regarding that, so I don’t know what problems I had specifically. Though I was recently reminded of one particular incident that was a bit cringey for me personally. This was a bit more than 10 years ago I think. I was usually assigned to mentor new hires, which means fresh graduates who usually needed guidance with a Java (which was our primary programming language at that time) and with our in-house web framework, which could be a bit challenging to work with.
-
Time passes yet again. I think I have to get used to not having much personal stuff to report in the weeknotes on certain weeks (aside from the watching/gaming parts), especially given the pandemic where I’m at home 90% of the time. Speaking of the pandemic, the UK started vaccinations last week, and the US FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine as well, so hopefully this is where things start to turn around.
-
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.
-
While digging through some old stuff recently I found a copy of the late 80s/early 90s US sitcom Perfect Strangers and decided to binge through all 8 seasons of it (really more like 6 and a half, since seasons 1 and 8 were an abridged 6 episodes each). I grew up watching this series, on live tv even, before we had cable or Netflix or anything like that. During the binge-watch I remember a good number of the episodes from the first season all the way up to the end of season 7, which implies almost all of it was broadcast on local TV, kind of a rarity I think?
-
A while back someone I know went from working as a developer to working at a senior/management type position at a bank, and that new job came with the corresponding dress code, which meant he was now going to work in long sleeves or barongs. That kind of thing is not for me - back when I still considered a regular office job, one of the fastest ways to get me to run away from an “opportunity” would be an overly stringent and/or formal dress code.
-
Last week, Twitter added Fleets, their own version of stories (short-lived posts). As could be expected, it’s not something I can relate to. I did post one (saying “This is dumb.") just to see what the interface was like, but that’s it. I thought about writing a blog post about how I dislike this sort of ephemeral social media, but it turns out that something I’d already written about before. Things don’t change I guess, and they just come around.
-
After playing through Super Mario 3D All Stars in October, I borrowed a copy of Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch from my brother and played through it for most of November. Odyssey was the main reason I actually got a Switch; I played through a few worlds at a friends house during a single session and loved it, so I had been meaning to get the console just for Odyssey alone.
-
Rhythm of War is book four in Sanderson’s epic fantasy Stormlight Archive series. Goodreads tells me I read the prior book Oathbringer back in Nov 2017, but didn’t bother writing a review, so I had to make sure I’d write one now. The book’s launch day kind of caught me a bit unexpectedly so I didn’t bother doing a re-read of the previous three books. Which given an epic fantasy series of this scope might have been a mistake, but watch me do it again for book five.
Nov 2020
-
It’s National Heroes Day over here, so I’ve been thinking about heroics. In software development, Heroic Programming can have a negative connotation: HeroicProgramming is often the only course of action left when poor planning, insufficient funds, and impractical schedules leave a project stranded and unlikely to complete successfully. I guess it’s not just in software development either. Many times heroics are an indicator of failed systems. Bonifacio and other Philippine heroes were needed because Spanish colonialism had failed the Filipino people, necessitating a revolution.
-
December is almost upon us! I had an opportunity last week to take on some additional work, but on further reflection, I thought I’d pass on it. I am in general, averse to working during the Christmas season (that is to say, more so than during the entire year in general). Even back when I was working full-time, I’d prefer taking most of my leaves during December. It’s really a result of the terrible traffic in Metro Manila, which gets significantly worse during Christmas season, a trauma that lingers even when I’m home all the time.
-
This week felt weird. It kind of went by quickly for me, but it doesn’t feel like anything important really happened. Its kind of like those moments in-between other events, where you’re just coasting along and waiting for the more significant things to happen. My country is still recovering from the storms of the past few weeks, Trump is still flailing around trying to overturn democracy, and our own president is still insecure when someone gets more attention than him.
-
Weather this past week was very bad for those of us in Metro Manila (and many other places in Luzon). Howling winds and strong rains dominated for 2-3 days of the week due to typhoon Ulysses. This typhoon wasn’t as strong as Rolly a couple of weeks ago, but it seems that it brought a lot more rains, causing flooding and loss of power in a whole lot of places. Metro Manila was hit quite badly, even drawing comparisons to Ondoy back in 2009.
-
The World: Somehow the week seemed to go by both quickly and agonizingly slowly, mostly because of the US presidential elections held this week. Slowly because after the initial burst of results on Tuesday night (US time), the remaining states’ results trickled in very slowly. Quickly because much time was spent doomscrolling and refreshing election-related updates. I think the world collectively breathed a sigh of relief this weekend as the US networks finally called the race for former VP and now president-elect Joe Biden.
-
I recently did a server migration since I moved to new hosting, The move was from managed/shared hosting to a VPS, these are some notes I took during the process, which I figure might be helpful if I ever tried to do this again. (And maybe someone else finds it helpful too). Links and references to helpeful resources are included. Setting up a webserver and WSGI container I already knew I wanted to use Nginx (managed hosting on the old server always used Apache), that meant needing to choose a WSGI container for the Django apps.
-
Now: Stormy weekend here in Manila. Supposedly the “strongest storm of 2020” so far, typhoon Rolly made landfall earlier today and is currently battering many of the provinces south of Metro Manila. Storm signals are as high as number 5. As of this writing, weather is currently cold and nippy but not particularly rainy where I am. We expect stronger winds and rain to hit us as evening approaches as well.
Oct 2020
-
Leaving Hugo It’s been a bit under two years since I migrated the site from Wordpress to Hugo. As discussed in this post one year ago, I was very happy with the general workflow of managing posts through markdown files in git, but had big problems with the Hugo build time, largely a consequence of my social media archiving. At that time, I didn’t want to invest effort into migrating to a different backend, but the problem has only gotten incrementally worse since then, so I decided to take the jump and started working on it last month.
-
Server migration update: I had encountered some trouble with the Travis-CI -based Hugo build generating this here website last week. Luckily, most of the migration work to the new backend was already done, so I went ahead and switched over the servers. So this site is no longer plain-old deployed HTML, but rather powered by a Django backend. The site should be mostly the same, though I did take the opportunity to move some stuff around.
-
So I got a Nintendo Switch last month. One of the first games I had gotten for the system was the recently released Super Mario 3d All-Stars. I had really been wanting to play Super Mario Odyssey instead, but my brother had a copy of that game that I could borrow later, so I decided to get 3dAS first, as I had never really played the 3 games on the collection.
-
So my current webhost finally decided to give me a deadline, the long and short of it is that my new server needs to be ready by December the 9th, giving me a bit under a month to get things in order. I’m already in the middle of setting up the new server, so I think I’ll be ready by early November anyway. Most of the code to run the new blog is also mostly ready (who knows how many bugs there are though!
-
The world continues to be terrible. The PH government wants people to get back to work and everything to spur the economy (with health precautions and everything). A lot of people have no choice, but I’m fortunate enough to not have to go out there yet, and I’m sure people like me will still hold back. This all would have been a lot easier if the government had gotten control of this pandemic early on but it is what it is.
-
In the news this week: Donald Trump, who for some reason is still the US president, has tested positive for Covid19, adding even more chaos and uncertainty to the US election season. The rest of the world has no choice but to pay attention, given how much US politics affects the rest of us The Philippines is now #20 worldwide in total Covid cases, yay! Yay? Some drama about the PH congress leadership?
Sep 2020
-
October is imminent! There are two distractions I’m looking forward to in the coming month. The first one is Inktober, which I’ve been doing since 2016. Basically it’s just to do 30 ink drawings in October, one per day. There are some official prompts, which I’ll probably follow. I haven’t really done any serious sketching in a while, maybe this will help me get back into the groove.
-
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).
-
It has certainly been a week, yes it has. The world continues to turn (and burn even). I’ve been busy. Not so much with work, though there was a bit of that due to a required emergency software change (aren’t they always emergencies?). I wasn’t doing the emergency work myself, more like consulting and advising how to approach it, so not much to tell there. I did quite a bit of work on my personal data processes/backups/workflows.
-
I finished Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End yesterday, and I felt like making a post about it, since I had a bunch of screenshots. Late game review because the game came out in 2016. I think I got it from PS+? Certainly didn’t pay for it. I first played the original Uncharted trilogy back in 2010-2011, but I found out just now while writing this post that I never finished Uncharted 3 (started yes, apparently), so that explains why some story elements seemed unfamiliar in the 4th game.
-
It’s September! The last six months were a blur. It’s considered “Christmas season” over here already I guess. The local memes are that once the clock hits midnight between Aug 31 and Sep 1, your neighbor’s Christmas lights are magically up. Also of course the famous Jose Mari Chan gets famous starting September, since malls and stores love to play his Christmas songs during this time. IDK what to expect for Christmas season this year though, since we are still in a pandemic.
-
This post is just quite a few thoughts on mobile apps and mobile app development, all mishmashed together. I don’t claim to be a mobile app specialist, at best I’ve dabbled in them, but enough to form some opinions I guess? A Bit of History My first exposure to mobile app development when I got pulled to help my then-company’s then-fledgling mobile team with cleaning up the codebase for their iOS app.
Aug 2020
-
This last week was weird. I feel like I didn’t really get much done in terms of productivity, yet I don’t feel I was unproductive. A very relaxed and chill week. Once again a tiny bit of work done this past week, some fixes, including to side projects. I also spent some time preparing for some events next weekend. Although I wasn’t productive this week, I did outline a bit of a roadmap of new features for one of my side projects, hopefully I can get into that in the coming weeks!
-
The week after I posted about phoning in the weeknotes, here I am with one where there’s nothing much to report. Not that surprising, given how busy I was over the previous few weeks, I took the opportunity to take a more relaxing week. There was a bit of work to be done, but very miniscule by comparison. Minor fixes here and there, including to some side projects. I did get to write on the blog more, as expected.
-
Filed under “Things I Don’t Really Grok” Podcasts and audiobooks These 2 are kind of in the same boat. Their main sin is that they are audio-only. When consuming content, my order of preference for formats is roughly: text (+images I guess) (most preferred) video (with audio) audio only (least preferred) I think these preferences have to do with information density: I’m pretty sure I prefer text because text can convey the most amount of information in the least amount of bits.
-
Mozilla made the tech news recently for laying off a whole lot of people. (Official statement). People were alarmed and worried about the future of what is the last major independent browser and the open web, bit it looks like it isn’t that bleak. Most of the layoffs were to teams other than those working on Firefox, things like the experimental browser engine Servo, devtools, and MDN. The core Gecko team seems to be unaffected.
-
These weeknotes are coming in late in the day because of reasons. (The reasons being laziness and procrastination.) Actually, I feel like I’ve been kind of phoning in the weeknotes over the past few weeks, they’ve mostly been “hey, I’ve been busy, so nothing of significance happened, but here are some things I watched/played.” Supposedly one of the side effects of writing regular updates is that you tend to look out for more interesting things to do so you have something to write about, even on an unconscious level.
-
Still kind of busy, although there’s a bunch of things I hope I can finally wrap up this week, so I can move on to the long list of other things I want to be doing. The world continues to be bleak, so I’m still hiding from it. My stuff: Forty-two. I thought about just merging these into a single post for the day, but nah, this seems better. Reworking the old charity side project still ongoing.
-
Forty two is of course the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” (if you haven’t yet read the 5-book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, I suggest you do so, you are in for a treat.) For some reason I imagined I would be able to take at least a couple of days off of everything else I’m doing to chill and actually craft a well-written, deep, introspective post for the occasion, but alas, various things I’m working on and all the usual distractions means I am here in the early morning hours of the day itself typing this out.
-
Kind of a busy week for me again, so the week kind of passed me by quickly. It’s August! In one month it will be (PH) Christmas season! It feels like July went by more quickly than other quarantine months. My stuff: A bit of consulting work. Reworking the old charity side project still ongoing. I was hoping to finish all the changes last week and next week would be testing and deployment, but stuff got in the way (and estimates may have been a bit off), but the spillover is small and we should still be fine for finishing everything next week.
Jul 2020
-
The world: hm. I was a bit busy this week, so I wasn’t paying too much attention, so I don’t have too much to rail against today. Well of course, things are still ongoing. There’s still the pandemic, fascist police state philosophy continues to rear it’s ugly head in the US, PH gov’t continues to be dumb, etc., but this week seemed a bit tame comparably. On 26 Jul 2020 12:00am I wrote: Pandemic thoughts and updates, July 26 edition:
-
Just in time for #JRPGJuly, I finally managed to complete my platinum run for Final Fantasy VII Remake! Spoiler-free review first, then the rest of the sections are no-holds barred. (Click to view full-size) 22 Jul 2020 12:00amView postClose Spoiler-free review The game is a fantastic retelling of the original FF7’s Midgar section. The plot largely tracks the original, except greatly expounded. More plot details are added to expound on character details and backstories, especially for supporting characters like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, and even for Shinra corporation itself.
-
My country: There are days when I have to consciously temper my rage at the shenanigans of this government. I can’t write about them today. My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes. Had a busy work week again; at the same time I also picked up an older charity project where the client asked for UI updates. Had issues with running the old code, and it was small enough, so I decided to rewrite it in a new tech stack.
-
I was going through some old emails and found some receipts for things I had purchased from the iTunes App Store for my iPad, and I wondered how much have I actually spent on apps/games on the App Store? I went through all the receipts and decided to write mini-reviews for each item as well: Purchase Date Name Price (USD) Still Available on App Store? Notes 2010/10/30 Alien Blue HD - Reddit Client (Unofficial), v1.
-
My country: Friday afternoon the House of Representatives voted to deny the franchise application of the nation’s biggest broadcaster ABS-CBN. This despite all agencies of the executive testifying that the company had no violations. Justifications cited were mostly personal reasons. The Palace claims they remained neutral on this issue, but no one really believes that. Probably not even then. What now, Philippines? My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes.
-
So recently Github secretly rolled out a new feature where you can create a file named README.md in a repo named github.com/<your github username>/<your github username>, and that markdown file would be rendered on your Github profile page. It means, you can now put basically anything you want on your Github profile! I just read this post from Simon Willson about using this new feature + Github actions and a Python script to automatically generate and update his Github profile.
-
My country: Friday afternoon the president sighed the controversial “Anti-terror law” that vastly expands police powers, allows people to be arrested without warrants on mere suspicion of terrorism etc. Interesting timing, right after China applies a new anti-terror low to Hong Kong (and rightly gets castigated for it by countries all over the world) and also right after the PNP (who promise not to abuse their newfound powers) are under criticism for killing some soldiers in a misencounter and tampering with the crime scene to cover it up.
-
In several places on this site (like if you click Photos in the menu up top), I have a grid-like view of a list of photos/images: (Click to view full-size) 1 Jul 2020 12:00amClose I used to just have each thumbnail open the post permalink on click, with the anchor set to the image itself. The image would be shown in full size inline of the post.
Jun 2020
-
My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes. Easily the most annoying thing this week: our broadband modem conked out Wednesday night. Customer support isn’t super responsive for local telcos: I called their support line the next day (support line is not even available 24/7!), got put on hold for 45 minutes TWICE before they agreed to send a repair crew over the next day (Friday). Friday morning I got a text that the technician visit was actually scheduled for SATURDAY morning.
-
I had been meaning to quit Facebook for more than a year maybe, but I kept putting it off. The main reason being that I like having backups of my own digital data (still very much a pack rat), and Facebook’s social media export is less than ideal, for me at least. Less than ideal why? It doesn’t include a lot of content I would like backed up, including: comments on my posts (there have been some good conversations with friends over the years I would prefer to preserve) things I’ve reposted from other people content of certain groups I’m members of (again, mostly for some interesting discussions over the years) pictures posted by other people that I’ve been tagged in For a while I looked around for scraper programs/scripts to this for me, but none really did what I wanted.
-
My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes. Some days still hot, but weather beginning to turn for the better. Sleep kind of better and a bit more regular too. Did my quarterly medical checkup this past week (slightly delayed). No issues, but I need to do an FBS test for next time. Sleep schedule kind of settling back into my usual biphasic sleep. Although the second phase seems to move around a lot… Not much work-wise the past week, and a bit more family-related expenses.