Weeknotes #119

in weeknotes

  • The kids all came down with colds. Emma’s school has strict rules about attending school with cold-like symptoms so she stayed at home for most of the week. By the end of the weekend, her symptoms hadn’t entirely disappeared but we’ll send her to school on Monday and see how it goes.

  • The weather was so good on Friday that it felt criminal to be inside.

  • I’ve hurt my neck and the worst part is that I don’t actually know how. I suspect it’s something to do with my sleeping arrangements since we moved into the new apartment. The boxes are gradually decreasing in number but it remains a slow process and our bedroom continues to be the storage area so I’ve been sleeping in Emma and John’s room. The thing is I’m sleeping on the same futon with the same pillow as what I was using in the old place so what would be the cause? Perhaps it’s just age?

  • I started watching basketball again. Mostly it’s just been the extended highlights that are available on NBA League Pass but I’ve also watched entire games in the Golden State/Denver series and the Boston/Brooklyn series. The Warriors look very fun and I’m greatly enjoying my spot on the bandwagon.

  • The biggest surprise has been in discovering that the Celtics came good over the course of the season. I was paying more attention in October and November and they seemed gone for all money. Yet here we are in April and they’re legitimate title contenders. This video on YouTube was the best explanation I’ve found for the semi-casual fan who wants to know what happened.

  • I think I’m going back to Clojure? After a year or so exploring other options, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that I’m going to a lot of effort to avoid the startup time of the JVM. That is annoying but if none of the alternatives are particularly compelling at what point do you admit 30 seconds or so isn’t that bad? I still have a soft spot for Janet but there are syntactical choices in it that bother me and the experience of using third-party C libraries is about as miserable as anything I’ve encountered programming. To be clear, none of that is Janet’s fault—it’s all on C and its lack of a package ecosystem—but regardless of who’s to blame, it makes it very difficult to extend the functionality beyond what Janet provides you with. All that said, I’m not actually trying to build anything in Clojure yet: at the moment the focus is on finally reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, completing the exercises in Clojure rather than Scheme.

  • I gave up trying to set aside time to watch movies in one sitting and finished The Batman in three sittings. I didn’t expect to like Robert Pattinson’s Batman as much as I did but he was one of the highlights of the film for me. That said, I didn’t enjoy the movie and I can’t imagine wanting to watch it again.

  • Clearly audiobooks are the way to go because after completing Liar’s Poker, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this week I finished Robert Iger’s Ride of a Lifetime. I would have preferred a memoir rather than a how-to-be-a-leader business book, but if that is what you’re after, I think it does a good job. I’ve now moved onto Midnight Library and so far, so good. I do worry that I’m not absorbing as much from these books as I would if I were reading them but given how little reading I was doing before I started listening, I figure something has to be better than nothing.

  • I was happily listening to Double J (the station for middle-aged people who don’t want to admit that they should be listening to ABC Radio Sydney) when I was verbally attacked by a DJ introducing the xx’s ‘Islands’ (Apple Music) as a ‘classic’. Sure, the song is from 2009 and is more than a decade old but it’s… it’s more than a decade old? No, no, that can’t be.

Michael Camilleri inqk.net