• Putting out the app I’ve been working on for the last year.
• More hugging the family (and general appreciation).
• Catching up with friends more often.
• Ignoring the news.
• Not having my back go out and ending up in ER, like last year.

Ran a hairdryer all night, propped against my Mac laptop keyboard after a friend knocked over a full pint of beer onto it.

The next morning the whole bathroom reeked of stale beer, the power bill was astronomical, and the left quarter of the keyboard never worked again.

Took it in for repairs and was grateful AppleCare swapped it out without a peep. This was a while back, before the embedded moisture strips that void the warranty.

Minesweeper.

Richard Scarry/Busytown fans. Wife got a cat during COVID and named her Sally Cat.

I saw the security article, but that sounds like it needs to be tackled by MSFT, the way Google has to handle Chrome extensions.

Have been a paid Jetbrains user for years, especially PyCharm. But recently, I had to do some front-end web development with ionic/Capacitor and Vue, and ionic only had a VsCode plugin. A few weeks later, came across Cursor which is a fork of VsCode with LLM support, and all the same plugins worked.

Still keeping my PyCharm subscription, but am wobbly on whether I’ll re-up next year.

The cat suddenly parked itself on the stairs. Some day, she’ll cause serious harm. Until then, pet, pet you cute assassin.

Working on a new online gaming platform. There’s internal debate as to whether to allow players to message each other and post in public spaces. It would make it a lot more fun for playere, but the risk of losing Section 230 ‘safe harbor’ protections is a big concern. Also, the cost of moderation.

A works/construction department in a medium-sized town. They had an Excel spreadsheet that had a HUGE number of screens. Anyone wanting to do commercial real-estate construction had to not only fill out these forms, but keep them uptodate and submit the updates at end of each work day.

The thing was HUGE and had lots of interdependent screens, where if you picked an item from a dropdown menu, it unlocked a bunch of other complicated screens or panels, and so forth. Each screen had 30-40 items and fields on it, and there were multiple dozens of screens you had to tab through.

To run it on the jobsite, construction contractors HAD to buy a pen and touchscreen Windows ‘tablet’ ($$$). The whole thing had been written and maintained by one guy over the course of a few years.

EVERYONE hated it. The guy who had written it wanted to get promoted to management, but nobody else wanted to maintain it so he was stuck.

Sorry, but this country fully deserves where it ends up.

I shut off all news and social media, stopped checking newspapers, TV, and podcasts, and unsubbed from all politics and news mailing lists and communities. Told family and friends and they’re being cool about it.

Dove into 60’s detective novels. Anything by Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block. Have stocked up on at least a year’s worth of out-of-print epubs. Will reevaluate once they run out. Mixed with a lot of outdoor walks.

It’s been glorious.