This week felt weird. It kind of went by quickly for me, but it doesn't feel like anything important really happened. Its kind of like those moments in-between other events, where you're just coasting along and waiting for the more significant things to happen. My country is still recovering from the storms of the past few weeks, Trump is still flailing around trying to overturn democracy, and our own president is still insecure when someone gets more attention than him. These moments feel fleeting, but they're a pretty good time for some self-reflection. I probably need a bit more of
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2020 November
- Weather this past week was very bad for those of us in Metro Manila (and many other places in Luzon). Howling winds and strong rains dominated for 2-3 days of the week due to typhoon Ulysses. This typhoon wasn't as strong as Rolly a couple of weeks ago, but it seems that it brought a lot more rains, causing flooding and loss of power in a whole lot of places. Metro Manila was hit quite badly, even drawing comparisons to Ondoy back in 2009. Even up to today I'm still reading about a ton of people who need assistance, relief
- The World: Somehow the week seemed to go by both quickly and agonizingly slowly, mostly because of the US presidential elections held this week. Slowly because after the initial burst of results on Tuesday night (US time), the remaining states' results trickled in very slowly. Quickly because much time was spent doomscrolling and refreshing election-related updates. I think the world collectively breathed a sigh of relief this weekend as the US networks finally called the race for former VP and now president-elect Joe Biden. Celebrations on the streets in many cities in the US, notably New York and Philadelphia. Trump
- I recently did a server migration since I moved to new hosting, The move was from managed/shared hosting to a VPS, these are some notes I took during the process, which I figure might be helpful if I ever tried to do this again. (And maybe someone else finds it helpful too). Links and references to helpeful resources are included. Setting up a webserver and WSGI container I already knew I wanted to use Nginx (managed hosting on the old server always used Apache), that meant needing to choose a WSGI container for the Django apps. The choices were either
- Now: Stormy weekend here in Manila. Supposedly the "strongest storm of 2020" so far, typhoon Rolly made landfall earlier today and is currently battering many of the provinces south of Metro Manila. Storm signals are as high as number 5. As of this writing, weather is currently cold and nippy but not particularly rainy where I am. We expect stronger winds and rain to hit us as evening approaches as well. On top of everything, a second typhoon has entered the PH area of responsibility and is expected to affect us over the next couple of days as well. If
2020 October
- Leaving Hugo It's been a bit under two years since I migrated the site from Wordpress to Hugo. As discussed in this post one year ago, I was very happy with the general workflow of managing posts through markdown files in git, but had big problems with the Hugo build time, largely a consequence of my social media archiving. At that time, I didn't want to invest effort into migrating to a different backend, but the problem has only gotten incrementally worse since then, so I decided to take the jump and started working on it last month. Migration goals
- Server migration update: I had encountered some trouble with the Travis-CI -based Hugo build generating this here website last week. Luckily, most of the migration work to the new backend was already done, so I went ahead and switched over the servers. So this site is no longer plain-old deployed HTML, but rather powered by a Django backend. The site should be mostly the same, though I did take the opportunity to move some stuff around. There's probably some bugs floating around, and maybe some secrets even. Probably need a longer blog post writing about the migration itself, though it
- So I got a Nintendo Switch last month. One of the first games I had gotten for the system was the recently released Super Mario 3d All-Stars. I had really been wanting to play Super Mario Odyssey instead, but my brother had a copy of that game that I could borrow later, so I decided to get 3dAS first, as I had never really played the 3 games on the collection. I've mostly played the 2d Mario games prior to this, with the exception of 3d Land (3DS) and 3d World (WiiU), although both of those games were closer in
- So my current webhost finally decided to give me a deadline, the long and short of it is that my new server needs to be ready by December the 9th, giving me a bit under a month to get things in order. I'm already in the middle of setting up the new server, so I think I'll be ready by early November anyway. Most of the code to run the new blog is also mostly ready (who knows how many bugs there are though!) I am (re-)learning a lot about server setups though, so hopefully I'll have quite a few
- The world continues to be terrible. The PH government wants people to get back to work and everything to spur the economy (with health precautions and everything). A lot of people have no choice, but I'm fortunate enough to not have to go out there yet, and I'm sure people like me will still hold back. This all would have been a lot easier if the government had gotten control of this pandemic early on but it is what it is. Still not writing blog posts apparently. I have a lot of thoughts swirling in my head, I'm sure they'll
- In the news this week: Donald Trump, who for some reason is still the US president, has tested positive for Covid19, adding even more chaos and uncertainty to the US election season. The rest of the world has no choice but to pay attention, given how much US politics affects the rest of us The Philippines is now #20 worldwide in total Covid cases, yay! Yay? Some drama about the PH congress leadership? IDK, whatever man. Annoyingly, I've not been doing any blog posts other than these weeknotes during the past few weeks. It is what it is though. I
2020 September
- October is imminent! There are two distractions I'm looking forward to in the coming month. The first one is Inktober, which I've been doing since 2016. Basically it's just to do 30 ink drawings in October, one per day. There are some official prompts, which I'll probably follow. I haven't really done any serious sketching in a while, maybe this will help me get back into the groove. The second one is Hacktoberfest! Basically it's an event where you have to submitted some number of GitHub PRs in October, and there's some swag for people who finished. I last participated
- It's hard to imagine this is already the 3rd week of September, it feels like the month is passing by quickly, although I haven't been particularly busy recently. I did do some paid work this past week; not a lot, just filling in to provide some emergency support/consultation. I guess the reason it feels like the week passed by quickly is that I started a new side project (like many programmers, I am afflicted by the curse of wanting to start too many side projects). This one will probably get finished: I'm writing a Django based server for this website.
- It has certainly been a week, yes it has. The world continues to turn (and burn even). I've been busy. Not so much with work, though there was a bit of that due to a required emergency software change (aren't they always emergencies?). I wasn't doing the emergency work myself, more like consulting and advising how to approach it, so not much to tell there. I did quite a bit of work on my personal data processes/backups/workflows. It involved streamlining my backups, dedepulication, going through old records and cleaning them up, and so on. Some combination of Python scripts and
I finished Uncharted 4: A Thief's End yesterday, and I felt like making a post about it, since I had a bunch of screenshots. Late game review because the game came out in 2016. I think I got it from PS+? Certainly didn't pay for it. I first played the original Uncharted trilogy back in 2010-2011, but I found out just now while writing this post that I never finished Uncharted 3 (started yes, apparently), so that explains why some story elements seemed unfamiliar in the 4th game. (I think I may have also gotten the trilogy remaster via PS+,- It's September! The last six months were a blur. It's considered "Christmas season" over here already I guess. The local memes are that once the clock hits midnight between Aug 31 and Sep 1, your neighbor's Christmas lights are magically up. Also of course the famous Jose Mari Chan gets famous starting September, since malls and stores love to play his Christmas songs during this time. IDK what to expect for Christmas season this year though, since we are still in a pandemic. I keep telling my mom not to get her hopes up that we (i.e. my brothers and
- This post is just quite a few thoughts on mobile apps and mobile app development, all mishmashed together. I don't claim to be a mobile app specialist, at best I've dabbled in them, but enough to form some opinions I guess? A Bit of History My first exposure to mobile app development when I got pulled to help my then-company's then-fledgling mobile team with cleaning up the codebase for their iOS app. This was back in maybe 2011? It was one of those projects where some devs built a quick proof-of-concept demo using new technology, then management liked it and
2020 August
- This last week was weird. I feel like I didn't really get much done in terms of productivity, yet I don't feel I was unproductive. A very relaxed and chill week. Once again a tiny bit of work done this past week, some fixes, including to side projects. I also spent some time preparing for some events next weekend. Although I wasn't productive this week, I did outline a bit of a roadmap of new features for one of my side projects, hopefully I can get into that in the coming weeks! We are still in a pandemic! But I
- The week after I posted about phoning in the weeknotes, here I am with one where there's nothing much to report. Not that surprising, given how busy I was over the previous few weeks, I took the opportunity to take a more relaxing week. There was a bit of work to be done, but very miniscule by comparison. Minor fixes here and there, including to some side projects. I did get to write on the blog more, as expected. Let's hope I can keep it up. These week's quiz nights were terrible for our team, but on the bright side,
- Filed under "Things I Don't Really Grok" Podcasts and audiobooks These 2 are kind of in the same boat. Their main sin is that they are audio-only. When consuming content, my order of preference for formats is roughly: text (+images I guess) (most preferred) video (with audio) audio only (least preferred) I think these preferences have to do with information density: I'm pretty sure I prefer text because text can convey the most amount of information in the least amount of bits. I'll also watch informative videos, to a point. If it's movie-length, it better be damn entertaining. That leaves
