Weeknotes for week 14, 2023

The week of April 3rd.

It's been a lovely, long Easter weekend with beautiful weather.

We've barbecued and gardened and had breakfast outside.

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I've resumed our pond project from last summer. The first step is to build a little retaining wall, and the first step of that is to dig a trench.

I don't mind the digging, but carrying surplus soil up the sloped garden to dispose of it is hard work. I use it to flatten out the slope under our swing seat.

If it was a bigger project I'd look into some sort of conveyor belt.

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Work feels like an age ago.

I've been pairing with a similarly senior developer for a change, and collaborating more closely with a designer than usual. It's a lot of fun.

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I had a routine eye test. My glasses are falling apart and I wanted an up-to-date prescription for new ones.

The optician took eye-health photos and studied them for a few minutes. My mind (calmly) wandered into thoughts about programming via voice control and whether I could do my job if I lost my eyesight. Then he was done and said it was all fine.

As usual I had a ton of questions about how eye tests and prescriptions work, but held back because he probably didn't want to talk to me all day.

I watched some videos about it afterwards, to my partner's amusement.

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I also watched:

Liar Liar (1997). First time I've seen it. Entertaining but the inconsistent internal logic offended me. For most of the movie he can't lie by omission, until it's convenient for the plot.

Tremors (1990). Also for the first time. Enjoyed it a lot. I appreciated the non-dumb hicks and the mostly unsexualised female lead.

I finished Goodfellas (1990) which I had started the week before. Not quite my kind of movie, but I can't deny it was skillfully made. The drug-paranoia sequence was intense.

True Lies (1994) was a rewatch. Very good action sequences, though I could have done without the misogynistic sidekick.

I think I've given up on The Mandalorian. I watched one more episode and it seems to have lost its magic.

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I read "Pompeii" by Robert Harris which was really good. Good human drama. Interesting to learn more about Roman life and about the eruption. Appreciated that the main character is a water engineer.

I was sad to learn they planned on making it into a movie but never did.

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My employer hooked us up with GitHub Copilot. So far, I think it's a net productivity win, but a modest one.

It's rather convenient when it suggests the thing that's in your head, so you don't have to type it out.

It's more of a mixed bag when it outputs a bunch of code before you've thought that far ahead. Suddenly you need to review someone else's code. It's like your pair partner suddenly took the keyboard and wrote out a bunch of code without explanation.

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Some things I enjoyed: