Sometimes it takes a vacation where you’re largely unplugged to have a really good think about the technology choices you make. Are the things you’re using in service to you? Or does it feel the other way around?

I’ve been busy pulling apart a ROM of the old Sega Genesis NHL Hockey game, will have that article up as soon as I hit the pay-dirt I’m looking for (although I’ve already found a few odd bits along the way…)

I’m pretty sure I blew out a pound of dust from the inside of my laptop today, and now magically the overheating issues seem to have disappeared. I love it when you get a nice performance bump from such a trivial activity.

It’s time for New Year’s resolutions, so I’m going with something I’ve put off for a while, and that’s finally switching to hjkl for moving around Vim. Oh sure, I could learn another programming language or something, but hjkl just seems like a change that I’ll appreciate the rest of my life.

I’m in the throes of another “do thing X every day for the month of Y” challenge (not computer related). This one is “Sewvember,” where I’ve been doing a sewing project every day so far for the month. I’ve been finding a bunch of common threads (har har) between programming and sewing along the way.

The Lisp journey continues, although I’m starting to get the itch to build something silly with the newfound knowledge. For now I’m going to keep it to simple programs until I can at least finish one of the books I’m reading :-P

Well, I’m utterly exhausted after a week at HashiConf, but it ended up being so darn educational that I feel like I’ll regain that time pretty darn quickly.

The Year of Lisp continues, one chapter at a time. I thought I’d clarify a bit how I’m going to read these books (and how I generally go about reading so many darn textbooks in the first place).

It’s been a while since I’ve written, but now’s as good time as any to check in a bit. Chatting with one of my co-workers has got me looking once again at Lisp.

I’m being my usual procrastinating self and went through Joe Armstrong’s Twitter feed, plucking out the pearls of wisdom before they bitrot away. Given his stance on the destructive nature of the World Wide Web, it’s a little funny the number of tweets in his timeline that are now missing context because of deleted tweets.

Been a while since I’ve had a good afternoon just to hack away on a project. For Record Store Day I whipped up a little Rails app to hold information about my record collection. I don’t imagine I’ll be open-sourcing it (a bit on that down the page). It’s satisfying coming up with something that matches exactly what I want in a program - and I’m seeing that this doesn’t always align with what is available in the market nor in open source software.

Final day of Winterpalooza, and I’m now free to get back at the keys and nail down some personal projects. I’m still doing a bunch of writing (not worth going into for the sake of this diary), but I’d like to get the Go rewrite of the CoffeeOutside bot done and dusted. I’ve also picked up the coffeeoutside.bike domain, which currently redirects to the Twitter account, but in the near future should have a nice little site.

The Winter Cycling Congress is over, and Winterpalooza is wrapping up tomorrow, so I’ll have free time to start work on my projects again come Monday.

I’ll give a short plug for SoundFlower, which creates a virtual audio device for recording application audio in macOS. I was surprised macOS didn’t already have this functionality built-in, but I think that’s because Linux has had the ability for so long. Anyhow, managed to record my television interviews before they fall off the internet for good.

The more I use the Kubernetes, the more I feel like this thing is shaping up as the next OpenStack (I don’t mean that in a good way). Too many players setting direction, and tooling that leaves a lot to be desired.

Still got the flu, mixed with morning internet connectivity problems. At least everything important for me is generally decentralized, so wasn’t too much of an issue.