Weeknotes #256

It was one of those weeks where a lot that had presumably been building seemed to happen all at once.

I was extremely surprised to receive a push notification on Tuesday night that President Yoon of South Korea had declared martial law (Wikipedia). A few hours later, the declaration was over and South Korea has been living in the aftermath for the remainder of the week. At the time of writing, it’s still not clear how this all resolves or whether it will have deeper significance for the region as a whole.

Then on Sunday, the President Assad of Syria was deposed and fled to Russia (Wikipedia). To be fair, this one does seem a little less sudden than what happened in South Korea. For reasons I’ll explain below, I hadn’t been paying attention to the daily newsletters that I use to keep in touch with global events and reading them back this evening, I see that there had been gains for rebel groups in the days leading up to Sunday that made the capture of Damascus somewhat less of a shock. I’m also not sure what significance this will have either.

The first reason I was so blindsided is the amount of attention I’ve been giving to the home loan. There have been more phone calls with the bank, more forms to complete and more documents to submit. We did decide in the end to go with SBI Shinsei Bank and as with all things associated with the house, I hope this doesn’t end up being the wrong choice. I’m the type of person who hates being committed to a fixed plan for the weekend and here I am making the largest financial commitment of my life.

The second reason is the upcoming trip to Australia. This is less to do with the salient (like packing) and more the subtle (notifying people, like the kids’ respective teachers, that they’ll be absent for three weeks).

The third reason is that Eri has been sick. She’s not sure what it is; it’s presented as a particularly nasty cough. Emma was sick a couple of weeks back and we thought it might be that but the tests have come back negative. She’s finally received some antibiotics and hopefully that does the trick.

The final reason is my mREPL server, the current programming project I use to relax. I got an initial prototype working where a client I wrote for the text editor, Neovim, could send messages back and forth with the server. Of course, as soon as I had something that worked practically I quickly discovered various limitations of the server’s design. Most of those have been rectified—or so I think—and I was able to use the server to develop a solution to part 1 of Day 1 of Advent of Code. This felt like a particularly noteworthy achievement given that it was wanting to have an nREPL-like experience when writing Janet for Advent of Code a couple of years ago that precipitated this work.

I’m too lazy/busy to look this up but all my delivery times for things I order on Amazon have blown out to four days or so. I hope this is a temporary phenomenon.

Trash Theory’s video essay on Soul II Soul filled in the historical background to some of the most memorable music from my childhood. This wasn’t the focus of the episode, but the essay did mention Mark Morrison’s ‘Return of the Mack’ (Apple Music) which brought a nostalgic smile to my face as soon as I put it on.