A blog is a website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, typically displayed in reverse chronlogical order. A single entry is called a blog post.
2023 March
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March is ending, and the cool amihan winds have left us to our scorching hot days. Summer is truly here. My Week I spent Friday through Monday in Singapore visiting friends. Just arrived early this morning and basically slept all day. These are my excuses for why the weeknotes are coming in very late. The trip itself deserves it's own post, which I'll try to get around to soon. The rest of my week was prepping and packing and being anxious for the trip, and trying to fit in some errands before being away for a few days. Nothing much
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My Week I visited a friend in the hospital last Thursday, and it wasn't anything life threatening but I noted the visitor rules are still super strict despite the currently low occurrence of COVID in the country. The time frame when visits are allowed is limited to one hour per day, and only one visitor gets to visit each patient (supposedly for a maximum of 15 minutes, but there's no way that's enforceable). While it's inconvenient for the visitors, some of the hospital staff mention it has the added benefit that the hospitals aren't so crowded. Filipinos are super family-oriented
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My Week It's the second week of March, yet for some strange and nice reason the past few days have not yet been that hot, with the mornings and evenings a bit nippy even. The last gasps of the hanging amihan holding on before eventually giving way to the brutal summer heat. I suspect I won't have a lot to write about today. My week wasn't particularly busy, but was littered with reminders of how the universe has no particular obligation to respect one's plans. Globe gave us our first internet outage of the year this week. This time it
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I think I found this book via a recommendation somewhere and just dug into it assuming it would be one of those productivity / self-help books about making the most of our scarce time on this world. It turns out it's actually more of a philosophy book about accepting our all-too human limitations, emphasizing that we can't do everything we want and we can't control the future. I enjoyed the book a lot, so many parts of it just spoke to me and I found myself nodding vigorously and highlighting quotes liberally. It addresses one of my great weaknesses: my
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A Quote On March 4, 2023, 2:14 p.m. I wrote: "Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile." -- Bertrand Russell (via the Marginalian) My Week The first week of March was a bit boring for me. Some additional medical errands, mostly just to accompany other people for routine procedures. Lots of walking; kind of exhausting actually. For some reason, I've been getting random sporadic HTTP access errors the past few months. For a long time I suspected it
2023 February
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A Quote "Everything happens so much" Horse_ebooks My Week February is ending, time marches on relentlessly. This past week was mostly about family for me. An aunt came in from the province to stay with us for a bit. My dad and pamangkin #3 celebrated their birthdays. We all met up at an upscale mall yesterday to celebrate, and it's always fun when all the cousins get to hang out and play together. Our President, in his wisdom (?), decided to declare the 24th a holiday on the night before, upsetting a lot of people. My niece told me she
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While digging through some old work chat logs (from 2011, more than 10 years ago!), I found some interesting advice I was giving to some junior developers in our company about how to handle and prioritize the increasing workload (number of tasks) they were being given. I thought it might be worth sharing. The below are all messages from me, extracted from the chat logs, with a light touch of translation for those parts in italics, since like most informal discussions at offices here, a lot of it was in Taglish. 03:12:17 I was discussing with someone the other day
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Some random thoughts: Texting before calling A while back a shop took down my phone number so they can text me (their words) when it comes in so I can pick it up. A few days later, they notify me via a phone call instead of a text, the nerve! (At the the time I was outside pleasantly enjoying a hotdog sandwich.) Society can't seem to get the hang of the fact that many people don't want the inconvenience of being interrupted by a phone call, I'd like an update / upgrade to whatever protocols mobile phone calls and SMS
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This past week was exhausting. Lots of going out for me: some bank errands I've long been putting off, the return of quiz nights, movie watchings, meeting up with old friends. Lots of walking too. I've started taking the shorter walks without my phone, which is helpful for thinking while walking (less distractions), but also gives me a bit of anxiety because most of the time that means I'm walking around without any ID or means of contact in case of emergency. Which is kind of a very modern-day problem to have, isn't it? I did start picking up an -
Quick review: This was a great Metroidvania, I think practically all aspects have been improved over the original, the exploration is fun, the boss fights are pretty good, and the visuals are very pretty. I always tell people that while Hollow Knight has better combat, Ori has better platforming, and this game has excellent platforming. Ori controls really well, especially in midair and all the new moves mean you can do a lot of cool sequences without ever touching the ground. Also, for some reason I got waaaay less deaths in this game compared to the original (111 vs 900+ -
Writing this post in the early morning, because of course my sleep cycle is broken still. This past week was a bit relaxed, a bit productive. I managed to dig into some side projects. One of the programming things I did this week was in response to one of last week's stupid internet things. Since the NYT is killing their online archive of acrostics, I reverse-engineered how their acrostic page worked and wrote a Python script to export all the acrostic puzzles. Even if I had access to the NYT paper (I am not an American so I do not), -
Went in for new glasses last month and was told I needed to get progressive lenses already to correct age-related presbyopia (i.e. having trouble reading small text close up). Apparently this is common once you get past 40 years old. It wasn't too bad with the older glasses, but they said if I get the higher adjustment for the nearsightedness correction (the "S" column in the below image), then it would get worse, so I needed the adjustment already. This meant this year's glasses cost a bit more than it used to. The new eyeglasses came in last week. So -
It has been a week. A month actually! January went by so quickly. Trying to move some things around in these weeknotes, see what feels right. This past week was a bit chill for me. Some leftover errands. Lots of walking. Being annoyed at stupid internet things (more on that below). I got new glasses! Will maybe write about that later this week. I wandered through Trinoma a couple of times this week. Wandering through a mall these days (mid-pandemic) is a lot less entertaining than it used to be. Part of it is that there's a lot fewer things -
The Truth is Discworld book 25. Finished reading this last night! I bought this back in 2019, and it's the last physical Discworld book I have that I hadn't read yet. It was a fun read about the establishment of the free press in Ankh-Morpork, coinciding with a conspiracy to oust the city's leadership. Plays out as a sort of crime/mystery thriller, except told from the PoV of an accidental investigative journalist. While this isn't actually one of the City Watch books (my favorite Discworld subseries), many of the City Watch do appear as supporting cast. And it's a bit -
(Cross-posted from the TriviaStorm blog) Shutting Down The Twitter Bot Sad news today, as Twitter has announced that API access will no longer be free startong on Feb 9, 2023. Sadly this means the end of the bot's run on Twitter which started in Feb 2017. Almost 5 years! It was fun while it lasted. The Twitter bot will run until it can't. Migrating to Mastodon That was the bad news. The good news is that a version of the trivia bot is already up and running on the fediverse/Mastodon networks. You can follow the bot at https://botsin.space/@triviastorm. It follows
2023 January
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Four weeks in! January is nearing it's end. Time still flies faster than I expect. Middays are starting to get hotter, but the nights are still pretty brisk, making nighttime walks very comfortable. My walking discipline has been very good the past week as well. Finished the last of this batch of start-of-year medical errands this week. A lighter load, mostly teleconsults and routine check-ups. After this, the medical errands should be sporadic until they all come together again in April. On Jan. 30, 2023, 1:47 p.m. I wrote: After we finished the first jigsaw puzzle a while back, Ma
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Previously This is part 3 in my continuing insane effort to try to read EVERY MARVEL COMIC EVER PUBLISHED. You can see previous posts using the tag "complete-marvel-run". We are tackling the older/longer series first, and going in "MCU Order". The previous entries covered early Iron Man and Hulk series. This one will be focused on Captain America (plus some other random comics I read/finished during this period). This post will have significantly fewer screenshots than the last ones. (Note: All volume nos. are based on the Wikipedia listings) Captain America v2 (1968-1996) Volume length: 355 issues This is v2 -
This past weekend was the Lunar New Year, which is only for people who live in countries that have a moon. Someone told me recently that the term "Chinese New Year" is outdated and kind of racist, so the preferred term nowadays is "Lunar New Year". That's fine I guess? I don't think Filipinos are likely to change their wording regarding this anyway. I'm also easily confused nowadays because when I was young the greeting was always "Kung Hei Fat Choy", but these days there are a lot of variants. As shared by my mom from an unknown source: Just
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I walk a lot. A couple of days ago I was thinking about how I'd been a walking a lot even when I was young. Since I now have Google Maps, I can check the distances of the routes I used to walk! High School Google Maps tells me my high school is around 3.7km away from where we lived back then. I am sure I walked that whole distance at least once, but not often. What I did do fairly regularly was walk down Agham Road and BIR road to my favorite spot on East Avenue, which should be
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Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-focused RPG set in a distant cyberpunk future, set around the themes of poverty and evil corporations and such. Here's me playing through the first part of the game: Gameplay consists primarily of rolling dice at the start of each day, and using those dice to perform actions. It's primarily a menu-based narrative game more than anything else. It's kind of like one of those old choose-your-old-aventure-style books that also made you track stats and roll dice. Your cybernetic body is constantly decaying, and as it decays you have access to less and less dice. Obviously