2023

18 December, 2023. 932 words.

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Wednesday 12/13

08:10 # What is this “journaling” on phones that I’m suddenly hearing about every day in the news. Is it just “recording everything people do on a phone except in a way that makes it sound like you’re doing it voluntarily instead of us doing it secretly” like it sounds? Or less cynically, is it some kind of new- fangled, more convenient form of blogging or microblogging for the kids? Probably that second one. Probably.
17:33 # Oof back from dental work. Going to have a sore jaw tomorrow that’s for sure. Also need a root canal and some kind of gum surgery before they can fit a permanent crown on this back tooth. Yay making appointments to go see strange people in strange places. My favorite.

Friday 12/15

08:13 # Yeesh, Max web developers went nuts with the Barbie stuff over on their site.

Saturday 12/16

11:43 # Hrm. A problem I frequently have in this digital world we live in: I remember a YouTube video I saw in the last 1-2 years in which someone diagrammed out a complex computer system with some kind of whiteboard-style art drawing software, and today I want to know what that software was because I want to do something kind of like that. I have no idea how to track down that video or that software amid the general noise of information that’s out there. I probably even made a note of that software, because I definitely studied the description of that YouTube video to find out the art software they used, and probably even downloaded it or looked at it. But I open so many new pages every day on the Internet that it’s hopeless to try to find anything in my browser history that happened more than a week or two ago.
- 11:48 # This is one reason why I desperately wish someone would come up with a way to merge browser tabs and bookmarks and history into one thing. I leave things in tabs that I want to remember, but they don’t make it into bookmarks and they disappear from the history after a few weeks, so when I eventually close the tabs they’re gone from my life forever.
- 12:06 # AH HA I remembered the video was about Scrum or Agile, so after a bunch of searching for various keyword combinations and discarding thousands of similar videos, I found the video - Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE and the software is called Artrage https://www.artrage.com/
- 12:27 # Incidentally, I would describe that as a must-watch, must-bookmark video for anyone in the software development industry. It’s a concise 15 minute explanation of every detail of the modern software development lifecycle that pretty much everyone remotely connected to software development will benefit from understanding.

Sunday 12/17

10:35 # My marathon, exhausting 2 1/2 hour photo-finish Tactician fight against the Apostle of Myrkul has been uploaded, which, now that I look back, felt like what should have been the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, but for some reason, it kept going and going into a completely different game, a thousand million billion hour all-walking, all-talking Act 3 that I have yet to finish, but still think about finishing someday. Ideally before I run out of videos to upload. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8jbY4veT7k #baldursgate3
11:19 # I’m doing another A/B test of the new blog (I called it a blue/green test last time which is wrong because it’s a blue/green deploy but when it’s a test it’s an A/B test even though they are pretty much exactly the same thing). Anyway, I’ll leave it running for a while, collect some log data, switch it back, then fix any fixable errors. #blog
12:43 # Hrm I was considering setting up remark42 again on my home server but it’s kind of a pain in the butt to get two different applications running on a home server on two different ports at the same time. I need to suck it up and move this stuff to a VPS somewhere.
14:02 # I was half expecting this, but when I switch from the old site to the new site, rss readers are probably going to report a duplicate post. InoReader did, at least. Not sure how to avoid that. Turns out the trailing slash on everything from Hugo on the old site is tough to replicate in canonical links because Next.js does NOT want a trailing slash on anything. The only thing I can do is limit the damage to one duplicate post instead of a full rss feed of duplicate posts. #blog
14:06 # Incidentally I made a tremendous mistake putting an offhand paragraph about Indiana Jones into my rss feed because it’s now accounting for like 5000% of the traffic that I’m trying to analyze for problems. #blog
16:06 # Blog test has concluded and the static site is enabled again. No major explosions detected. Just a ton of traffic still trying to load non-existent WordPress admin resources. #blog
21:20 # I successfully played about an hour and a half more Baldur’s Gate 3 today. As per usual in Act 3, I did not advance the story in any way toward a conclusion. I also managed to kill two companions (resurrected) and a major NPC I was supposed to rescue (dead forever, yet another long-standing quest started in Act 1 now failed). Also a couple of incidental innocent prisoners died. And also I accidentally shut down any avenue of cooperation with one of the big bads. So a productive session I guess. #baldursgate3