Week Notes 23#01

A pretty intense start to the year with a four day week filled with Cookie being a bit poorly, the weight of the performance review cycle and addressing issues out of the CircleCI breach.

• Woke up on Monday to find that my analytics had stopped working ~2300 the night before. Very weird, and couldn't find the root cause in any logs, but a restart of php-fpm seemed to solve it
• Had a big walk at Blidworth which was nice
  • She was a bit puzzled when she found that at one point in the walk I was hiding from her as joke
• Cookie's been a bit poorly this week, our first sign of which should've been her not barking at the milk delivery. We took her to the vets and they weren't sure what it could've been, but she had quite a few voms - including on the living room rug and under the bed, or in the side of the garden, which she then dug up and proceeded to try and eat a couple of days later - but seems to be mostly back to normal, although today she's been rather annoying which may be down to her having a bad reaction to her worming tablet, as she'd been a little bit off last time she had it. We've not been on as many walks because she's not been well, but has mostly been chill. One day I walked into Anna's office and she had a bit of a subdued bark at me before going back into her bed in Anna's office 🥺
• Morph managed to bite my nose for the first time in a while. As much as I'd like to say it was him scenting me, it's much more likely to be a warning. Hurt a bit but seems to be OK now
• After the binging of Jack Ryan, I had a dream about trying to covertly move a nuclear warhead 😅
• Got my Spotify data through so did my own analysis of my music in 2022, and was very interesting to see that a song I only discovered in December took the top spot as most listened to song all year 😱 Always interesting to see that the data from Wrapped doesn't match the raw numbers, which could be partly due to another month of data not included, but I think it's more likely that I'll hit "rewind" before a song goes to the next song, whereas Spotify only count full plays
• Cookie's been super cute and sleepy, maybe because she's been poorly, but 🤞 also because that's who she is now because it'd be very nice if she was cuddly cute and fairly quiet
• End of year performance reviews need to be in by tomorrow, so this week has been difficult with 10(!) reviews for others, and starting on my self-reflection
  • I've got through it with a good amount of sugar - demolishing probably a half kilo of M&Ms that were left in my room, and some Jaffa Cakes
  • Decided that standing was better - for some weird reason - but it kinda worked, although my feet ache this weekend after pretty much 4 days of solid standing, and some walks
  • Shelter - Flowidus was on repeat for a bit as it energised me
  • Had headphones on with my high-energy playlist to try and get me going and nudge me into the headspace to write feedback
• Had some remediation work for the CircleCI breach
  • it'll partly be my ADHD but also my familiarity with dealing with security incidents from a previous role, but I was all over the incident and loving it
  • it was a nice distraction from doing performance review things
  • got a blog post out about it, later than I'd hoped, but I was in two minds about posting it as I wasn't sure it'd be worthwhile to others, and was as ever surprised by how long it took to write
• Cookie's been so tired this week we even got a lie in on Saturday morning to ~0900 which was very good, especially as we were up late the night before
• Got our new rainbow rug and put it in the bedroom, which was surprisingly less awkward to install than we expected at first
• Finally got around to having our Aperol Spritz kits from Gousto
• Cookie curled up on my lap earlier 😻🥰 and then when she moved she spent the whole time I was eating breakfast with her head on my knee, looking up at me 🥰
• Had an unsuccessful Asda trip for pizza, so got a takeaway one instead. Disappointing in comparison, but still good, and got to try the "sweet Whiskey" BBQ I had in the cupboard which works nicely
• My Pixel Watch froze on Saturday which was pretty concerning - considering it's so new - but found a post on reddit that solved it for me
• Got some mineral oil and re-oiled the chopping boards with it, which seems to have done the job a bit nicer than plain cooking oil
• With a lot of Goustos carried over from last week, there were even a couple of days we cooked for both meals
• A single day of on-call on Wednesday at least broke it up so we could get a takeaway
• Feeling under the weather after a busy week and then two late nights 🥱
• Cookie had a right bark earlier because Morph was standing by the water and she was thirsty and he wouldn't move 💀
• With the footstool not being quite flat against the sofa, Cookie's accidentally had one/both of her paws fall through and it's been cute but she's definitely been taken aback 😅
• Finally got to dig into why my AWS bills have been higher than usual - rudely assuming that it may be due to the Fediverse now being more popular - and it actually being because I was testing something with Lambda and Go a couple of months ago, and I accidentally left a load balancer running 😬
• Started doing a "my site's stats in review" blog post for the last few years, with the data being pulled out of the Matomo API, and it's pretty interesting seeing the shift in traffic over the last few years. Definitely going to be interesting to look at, when I get round to posting it.
• Was lovely to have Carol over on Friday for wine, a catchup, a fire and Athenian 😋
• Managed to get Cookie and Morph on the footstool next to each other for a bit - with no scuffles - but only while we were feeding both of them
• Spent a while looking for a kettle/toaster combination, but unfortunately couldn't find the right ones
• Have done some good editing of my Chef post while gaming this week and almost got the post fully written. Was pretty close to getting it shipped tonight, but think it needs a bit more time than I've got. Hopefully in the morning, or on Tuesday on my way to London I'll sort it
• Morph and Cookie have been at each others' throats quite a bit, and quite literally 😅 Morph's been eating some of her wet food, which is normal, but she doesn't seem to be happy with it recently, and has chased him off a bit, and they've had some scuffles.
• Bought a new set of nail trimmers for Cookie - with the hope that she just wouldn't be as scared of them as we thought - and turns out the different design they've got is better and much more effective at trimming them, too 👏
• Binged Kaleidoscope in this order, after seeing from a TikTok that the order we had was very similar to theirs and it was apparently one of the good ones
• Got asked to be a backup speaker at FOSDEM but decided I'm probably a bit too burned out to prepare a talk - on top of everything else going on right now - as well as then spending a weekend conferencing and taking in interesting discussions. Seriously considered it, but prioritising mental health over excitement to do a thing
• Cookie's been a bit of a nightmare today, not napping, and wanting to go out for the loo but then not going 🤷 Very annoying, and the day's involved a lot of barking

Watched:

• Jack Ryan
• About Fate
• The People We Hate at the Wedding
• The Recruit
• Blockbuster
• Kaleidoscope
• Community