Weeknotes #15

It’s now been more three weeks since I started working entirely from home. With the exception of a doctor’s appointment I had two weeks ago, I haven’t been in a moving vehicle for the entirety of that time. Really, I haven’t been more than about a kilometre away from our house. I’ve started to go a little stir crazy as a result. On Friday, I was imagining the places I would take the kids on the weekend before remembering that’s not something we can do at the moment.

The absence of a commute has been absolutely awful for my reading. I have been playing more Rocket League than ever before. It’s been something of a release valve for my stress, I think. Or at least that’s how I’ve been justifying it to Eri. All of which is to say that I don’t have much to recommend in the way of reading this week.

While I don’t have the commute, that doesn’t completely explain why I’ve fallen so far behind in my reading backlog. The other is that I’ve spent a good chunk of the free time I have reading about Janet. Janet is a Lisp that’s similar to Clojure but runs in a bespoke virtual machine rather than the JVM. It doesn’t have all the features of Clojure (and none of the interop with Java) but it’s very fast to start. I still haven’t got used to the startup time of the JVM and find it a constant source of frustration whenever I do anything with Clojure. I’m not sure Janet is the answer but I’m very intrigued. I still think Clojure is an incredible achievement but for the types of things I do (mostly in Ruby), I wonder if something like Janet would be a better choice.

I’ve generally resisted the use of apps in the ‘gig’ economy due to a discomfort with the goals of the giant multinationals behind these services. Namely, the aggregation of customer demand to the point where they have monopoly-like power. That said, I found myself twice this week using them to order lunch. Did I throw my principles out the window at the first sign of trouble or am I taking advantage of venture capitalist largesse to support local businesses?

This isn’t the first time I’ve used one of these services (who can forget my pad ki mao à la fettuccine from #10?). That time I used Demae-can, a Japanese service. This time around I tried Uber Eats. As you might expect, the Uber experience was more pleasant. I particularly liked that you could request that the delivery-person leave the food at your door rather than you needing to physically take it from them.

I ran a couple more times over the past week and my body mostly held up. I did have two corked thighs and an ankle sprain but I’ve refrained from going out when I felt like my body needed more recovery time. While my ankle is still a little ginger, my thighs are coping better than they were and have been OK after the last two runs.

I took Emma to a nearby park a couple of times last week. We tended to go after her lunch and only for about 15 minutes or so. There’s a park near us that is nothing special but has swings and a slide and is typically deserted. That said, one of the days, there were a pretty large group of older children there and so we went to an even smaller, somewhat crappier park instead.

Music has been another casualty of the lack of a commute. But while I haven’t been listening to the same amount of new music, Chillinit’s ‘Overdrive, Pt. 2’ caught my attention this week (Apple Music).