Weeknotes #65

in weeknotes

  • This was technically the weekend before but we celebrated Easter Sunday by giving the kids some chocolate eggs. I wasn’t on the ball and by the time I went looking on Amazon for large, hollow, chocolate eggs, the delivery dates were all after Easter but I managed to nab some smaller eggs and the kids fortunately didn’t care.

  • The surge in COVID-19 cases I mentioned last week continued to get worse (Reuters). My concern at the moment is that even once vaccinations roll out more broadly, the virus will mutate into a form that prevents herd immunity developing and we’ll be right back where we started. The numbers in the U.S., while initially declining, appear to have hit a worryingly stable plateau.

  • Despite the increase in cases, Emma started her final year of pre-school on Friday. This is about the most trite thing I could say, I realise, but boy does time fly. It does not feel like two years ago that we were taking her there for the first time.

  • My monthly visit to see the doctor was on Monday. Despite it being monthly, I actually forgot it was on and would have missed it but for the fact that I got a warning on my Mac that I needed to leave if I was going to make it on public transport. This is the first time that feature has been useful but I’m glad it was there.

  • I’m a regular viewer of the video essays on the Philosophy Tube channel. Philosophy Tube is written and performed by Abigail Thorn, an actress and university philosophy graduate. In February, Thorn announced in a video that she had transitioned (she was previously Oliver Thorn). I’ve found the transition… difficult. I think of myself as pro-trans in the abstract but admit that that I’m uncomfortable with the phenomenon in practice. I recognise it as bigotry and assume it’s similar to how some older people felt as homosexuality became normalised in the 90s. All of this is to say that I watched my first essay since the transition. It was fine.

  • I continued spending a lot of time working on the rewrite of my CommonMark parser. Still nothing to show publicly yet but I’m making steady progress through the examples in the specification.

  • Eri and I started watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine. We’ve watched some of these episodes before but stopped for reasons I don’t remember now. We’ll see how far we get this time.

  • Meanwhile, I’m now up to season four of Law & Order and am at the point where I’ve started to remember the basic details of the episodes. One thing that I didn’t remember was the ice cold way they dropped the characters of Captain Cragen and Paul Robinette from the show. No explanation, no nothing. The new season commences and they’re gone. I realise it was an important tenet of the show that episodes not focus on the lives of the characters but it’s a little odd that nobody even mentions it. That said, I really like both Lieutenant Van Buren and Claire Kincaid so I’m excited they’re now in the regular cast.

  • I don’t usually listen to songs on repeat but as I was working through some difficult parsing logic in the CommonMark parser, I found a sort of serenity in putting ‘Los Muertos Vivos Estan’ from the Spectre soundtrack on loop (Apple Music).

Michael Camilleri inqk.net