Week Notes 25#11

A very restorative week off in Wales

• Had a very restorative week off, being a bit more chilled
• Managed to very intentionally switch off
  • Didn't read any tech posts, touch LinkedIn, listen to any podcasts, or think about work or side projects (aside from a couple of random thoughts I pushed out)
  • On our last day, I did get an issue raised for renovate-graph - aside: very cool to have more users - and I did well to mostly ignore it
  • Reading a lot of reddit (ignoring tech posts) and especially a lot of /r/ShittyDaystrom
• Our first day of holiday was my birthday which was a chill-ish, and a chilly, day
• We were very lucky with the weather and had some beautiful days in the sun - very surprising for the UK / Wales in March!
• Cookie loved stealing one of our spots' on the sofa, as each of us got up, as the sofa wasn't quite big enough for the three of us
• A fair bit of driving while we were there
  • And as Anna put it as we were coming home "you can tell we're back in England, cause the road quality isn't as nice" - it was quite amazing driving on the Welsh roads, and they were truly very great quality
  • 3rd gear did a lot of heavy lifting, especially with some 10%/15% hills 😅 was very fun racing up them at 50 in 3rd!
  • Where we were (towards Builth Wells) meant we needed to drive a fair bit to get to reasonable food options or walks, but when we went to Hay-on-Wye we felt that'd probably have been a better place to be situated for walks and food
• Driving back to the house and heard a very loud noise, which felt like a very knobby motorbike - I pulled over and it turns out it was a fighter jet that flew past 🫣
• Had a lot of lovely walks, some good food, nights in and enjoying the weather
  • One day, spent some time on the river at Hay-on-Wye and I (very badly) skimmed some stones
• Cookie was very good while we were away, and we had a couple of meals out - at Hay-on-Wye we sat at a lovely restaurant, which was amazing because of being on a busy-ish road and having lots of people and dogs walk past, all without Cookie getting bothered 👏🏼
  • Including a "pink roast beef open sandwich" 😋
• Morph did not enjoy the drive home from the cattery, and spent the whole drive home wailing, yeowling, and meowing sadly at me - we were both very glad to be home and cuddling on the sofa 🥰
• Bought some new RAM, and wasted ~2 days trying to install it
  • It didn't end up working straight away, so spent a while going through various reboots, moving around the RAM sticks (alongside my existing ones) and then my old RAM didn't work either
  • After finally getting it to a successful-ish setup (after running a MemOK boot) I then ran into fsck errors
  • Today, I managed to get it re-working with my old RAM, so decided to try and do BIOS updates given this motherboard hasn't been updated, and ended up worrying I'd bricked it as it then wouldn't boot at all
  • Aside from some laptop issues trying to reformat a USB to set up a BIOS re-flash USB, then managed to upgrade the BIOS
  • Started specing out what would be a replacement CPU + motherboard, if I did have to, and 🤑
  • And finally realised that the memory was a higher frequency than my CPU allows 😞
• Very much hating Google's rollout of Gemini instead of Google Assistant, and how much it doesn't detect the same wording that Google Assistant perfectly did
• Started playing AdVenture Capitalist again as another inane mobile game
• TIL that WASDKeyboards have shut down 😞
• Finished off a bumper release of renovate-graph
• Continuing to ramp up worrying about going to Vegas for Elastic's Engineering All Hands 😬

Reading:

• The Mars Challenge

Watched:

• Reacher
• Brooklyn 99
• Archer
  • Got to the last episode with Jessica Walters and 🥺 was a lovely send-off
• Rogue One
• Electric State
  • Not sure the flashbacks were very good - Millie Bobby Brown didn't look at all de-aged 😅
• Andor
  • I've been meaning to do a rewatch for a while, and am so glad I made the time, and dang it's excellent, and some very good and relevant quotes
• Adolescence
  • Incredible story, depth of characters and enthralling
  • And loooove the cinematography and the "one-rs"
• The Good Place Presents: The Selection
• Severance
  • Finally got round to watching season 1!