Work
I'm coming up for the end of my current Leuchturm journal and it's unikely to see me to the end of the year. This is partly because it's been increasingly used for work stuff. This week I got a new hardback book for work notes and I've also started adding my work weeknotes to an internal work blog.
This division is an experiment, so we'll see how it pans out. My current thinking is that I'll not want to duplicate a lot of notes in two places so hopefully I can keep some very high-level notes on my work week here and give more space to reflecting on personal stuff.
To that end, here are my week 41 worknotes:
- attended design system day 2023 in Edinburgh, took a lot of notes, wrote it up as an internal blog post
- co-ordinated the resolution of a problem for QA: branches deployed to test were not reflecting changes. turned out there's a hard limit on the number of artefacts we can host. I didn't solve this problem, but I took ownership and pulled the right people into a phone call and we got it sorted quickly - teamwork!
- loads of PR reviews for B2C and B2B projects
- the frontend work for the removal of financial info in the CTF form.
Leisure
I've been out for drinks with friends twice this week which is socially if not physically healthy. A bit of time playing TOTK on switch and retrogames on the RG35XX.
Handheld gaming
We "couldn't find" the tablet when my daughter wanted to play games, so I've got her playing some GBA Barbie game from 1997. She's enjoying it but it's the logic of retro platformers is also presenting some challenges. Unlike my boy, she's perfectly happy to take advice from me or let me get her over a specific hurdle, so it's turned into quite a cosy, quality-time activity.
One weird thing is: we don't know what to call the device. Anbernic is what we call the RG351M and doesn't exactly roll off the tongue for a 6 year old - still less so RG35XX. We've landed on "Gamegirl", which I'm fairly happy with, but it has made me think about how these machines could do with having proper model names, or nicknames at least. It's a symptom of the oversaturated market that none of these things gets a name, but it also represents the shift away from the console as a more broadly cultural artefact towards being niche pieces of industrial hardware of interest mainly to adult men with too much disposable income.
Bute
I took the kids to Bute to see my parents on Saturday. It was good to go for just one night, I think - it meant I could easily carry everthing we needed in my backpack (we could even have traveled lighter) - and that meant we could easily come and go.
END