Weeknotes for week 28, 2023

The week of July 10th.

My partner's parents are visiting next week, which means a lot of tidying and cleaning the house.

We should invite people over more often, as a forcing function.

I took the opportunity to fix some things in the library/guest room.

I replaced the 1-gang brass light switch with a 2-gang and put a Hue Wall Switch Module behind it – the first toggle still controls the ceiling light and the second now controls the decorative lights around the room, that were previously on an unsightly plastic Hue dimmer switch.

I also put up a wall shelf – just the one shelf, but between deciding which one, how big it should be and where it goes exactly, cutting, painting, marking the wall, measuring, calculating, drilling and adjusting when something inevitably goes a bit wrong, it was a bigger project than anticipated. Looks great, though!

After stumbling over the Ruby "Module Builder" pattern last week and trying it in our codebase, a coworker volunteered me to present it at our Friday social.

I got a bit carried away after I started preparing the presentation, so I ended up writing my first blog post in a while. And revised it a few times as my understanding got clearer. My partner got a bit annoyed with me sneaking off to write as further realisations struck.

This was my last work week before a long summer holiday.

I love the ritual of winding down work – setting an email autoresponder, setting a holiday status in Slack, writing a little handover message.

I also somehow managed to get everything to inbox zero, including my work email and the Slack "Later" list, neither of which had been empty for a long time.

Looking for a non-work coding project, I asked my partner if she missed anything.

She was unhappy with her workflow for adapting photos from our Fujifilm camera for Instagram – enlarging the canvas and then cropping.

After surveying the landscape of horrid apps, I realised Apple Shortcuts was up to the task, and had a fun time writing one. It's an interesting way of programming – piecing together predefined components, assigning a variable into some slot.

I finished the season of Interview with the Vampire (2022–). Still good, though the finale fell slightly flat – they had an amazing party scene on paper that was meh on camera. They even had Garden of Earthly Delights decorations that somehow didn't do it for me.

We rewatched Pippi on the Run (1970). Very nostalgic, and you can't beat Swedish summer.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) was really quite good! Fantastical setting, a well-calibrated lightheartedness, entertaining. Felt like a throwback fantasy movie in excellent ways.

Coincidence of the week: We saw the Mozart scene in Mad Men, then watched an old Swedish children's music act only to encounter a similar performance.

I enjoyed:

• YouTube: Niagara Daredevils. Got curious after a scene in the Pippi movie.
• YouTube: The Princess Bride: Home Movie. Stumbled over this via someone's IMDb credits. Serialised remake by celebrities during quarantine. Can't believe I hadn't heard of it.
• Podcast episode: Darknet Diaries: Deviant. Stories from a physical penetration specialist, testing building security.