Though I didn’t have any big plans this weekend, I kept myself busy around the house. I mailed some packages, did the grocery shopping, prepared some meals for the week, rearranged my kitchen, cleared out some expired food, and cleaned up my desk. It feels very good to be this productive.
I’ve been keeping up with X-Men 97 weekly, it’s such a good show. I love that it has a pretty serious plot but also keeps some of that Saturday morning cartoon charm. The weekly release schedule is so nice, I love spending the week leading up to the next episode hypothesizing with my partner about what will happen next. It’s also gotten me into the X-Men more in general, I’ve been watching the original 90s cartoon in between episodes, and I think I’ll pick up some comics as well!
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I’ve been looking at gigs on Upwork to try and bring in some extra cash and bolster my experience. Some of these jobs seem braindead easy but I’m still so afraid to apply for them. Logically, I know that if something goes wrong nothing bad really happens, but the fact that something could go wrong terrifies me. I guess I just don’t want to disappoint people. My browser currently has a half-filled out proposal for a job. It would take me a couple hours to complete. I just need to submit it.
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I’ve started doing intermittent fasting to help achieve my fitness goals. It’s only been a week so far but I’m liking how it’s making me be more intentional about my eating habits. My eating hours are from 11am to 7pm, so I basically get two full meals and some snacks. I thought the hard part would be waiting until 11am to eat, but it’s actually pretty easy (probably all the coffee helping there), then when I do eat breakfast I can put more thought into it than when I’m half awake. What is actually hard is not being able to eat after 7pm. I eat dinner around 6 but by 9:30 or so I’m starting to get hungry again. Maybe the solution to this is just going to bed earlier. I imagine it will get easier as my body gets used to the new schedule and I figure out exactly how much I need to eat in those 8 hours.
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As a teenager, the music I listened to was music my dad shared with me, music my friends would play when we would hang out, or music from video games and movies I liked. I remember spending time on Pandora creating stations based off my favorites in hopes I could find something similar I liked. I would discover a few songs this way but otherwise didn’t have much luck. As a result, I find I just listen to the same stuff over and over again, but there is so much music out there, I want to find more! But how?
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Last weekend I was really getting the semi-annual itch to play Minecraft. When I loaded it up, I realized it would be a good idea to do a backup of my world, because I hadn’t done it in a while. I’ve poured a lot of hours into it with my partner and we would be devastated to lose it. So I wrote up a quick rsync command to send it over to my network storage (a strong term for an Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hard disk attached). I/O error. Huh that’s weird. After some intense googling, I found out my SSD has reported 535 blocks unable to be reallocated. In other words, much of my SSD was becoming unreadable, and it was running out of good blocks to move my data to.
2023 was truly one of the years of all time. In this post, I will look back at some of the cool things I did in 2023 and set some goals to achieve in 2024.
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Specifically, I got a ThinkPad T450s from 2015 for about $40. It didn’t come with storage, a power adapter, or the external battery, which cost me about an extra $100 to order. The internal battery is there but I can’t really test it until my power adapter comes in (I forgot to order it at the same time as the laptop whoops). There are also some keycaps missing. I can’t test if the switches are good yet but hopefully it turns out to be an easy fix. When I removed the back panel, I found that the plastic towards the front that the screws go into was broken, as if someone had just ripped the thing open with the screws still in there. One screw’s plastic is completely gone, but the other two are there, loosely hanging around, which is annoying, but some super glue should fix that right up. Assuming the laptop works once all my parts come in, I can’t be too mad over a $140 laptop.
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I’ve spent the majority of my holiday break working on my PC and software instead of relaxing. Here is a quick recap of what I’ve been up to.
First is powerlinx, the static site generator that runs this site. I rewrote major parts of the program and finally gave it a cli. I’m gearing up to add some cool features, like tags and categories on posts. This website now generates Atom feeds for all directories in the site contents.
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Yesterday’s news about Yu-Gi-Oh! author Kazuki Takahashi really hit me hard. Yu-Gi-Oh! was a huge part of my childhood and introduced me both to card games and mange/anime. I would be a very different person without his influence.
Thank you for everything, Takahashi-sensei. May you rest in peace.
This week, Apple announced it was ceasing production on the iPod touch, officially making the iPod a gadget of a bygone era. My first iPod was a 3rd gen iPod touch, but I also owned a few Nanos. That iPod touch was my introduction to the mobile web and app space, while smartphones were still a novelty, before they were a necessity. Everyone I knew had novelty apps like the beer glass and the zippo lighter. It was also before mobile games were basically only freemium-only, with a lot of high quality games for only $0.99. It’s strange how different the internet and mobile tech was only 10 years ago, it certainly didn’t turn out how I expected.
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This year will mark two years since I graduated college. Despite graduation feeling like the resolution following the climax of the movie with the bad guy defeated and the cast living happily ever after, time continued to move forward.
While in college, I studied Japanese to fulfill my degree’s language requirements. In my Japanese 101 class I met a few classmates who were as weirded out as I was by the general clownery that some of the other students engaged in, and we started studying together. Over the next two semesters, we met up to study (by which I mean not doing that) almost every day and became quite close.
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My favorite thing to do is nothing. Just sitting idle, observing the environment (or more likely, my apartment wall). It’s fun. I just get to think. Like David Puddy on a 16 hour flight. The world requires constant attention these days, so don’t forget to take a break.
