Journal¶

Back to GMT time

Entertainment this week is has a 'scary' theme, watching the first 4 Hellraiser movies.

Listed the electronic standing desk on ebay, for collection. I will be surprised if it sells quickly but I am using the space I cleared off the desk to sort out other items I no longer need.

Trying to get an appointment for minor eyes trauma service after an issue with my vision last week. Calling the service at Boots has been an issue, as they didn't pick up all week.

Managed to get a blood test appointment on Wednesday after regularly checking 'swiftqueue' website.

Requested a new prescription for diabetes to alleviate increased numbness in my feet and legs. The could be more sensitive due to the colder weather or because I have Covid style flu symptoms.

A quick ride around the block on Wednesday to check the bicycle is working correctly after changing wheels and tyres. The rear disc brake caliper required adjusting as the rotor was rubbing against it.

Thursday was a cycle ride to the Archive Cafe. I was feeling really tired by the time I reached the cafe, but found the energy to make it home.

Saturday I went to the BigFoot CC club ride, but it was disorganised as usual so I set of for a solo ride. It was nice not to have the constraints of a group ride. I struggled on most hills and was exhausted after the ride.

Working like a boss

Practicalli Websites continue their upgrade to a full zensical setup, switching to the zensical.toml configuration and the Catppuccin community theme for zensical.

Most practicalli websites use the Catppuccin theme as a plugin. Due to limitations with the new Zensical theme (there can be only one override), a modified catppuccin theme is used with the main landing page.

This week I start applying for interesting engineering manager or leadership roles, as I seek gainful employment for the rest of the decade.

To support this effort I continue to update the people and processes sections of Practicalli Engineering Playbook

Whilst I am job hunting I am also considering my high level financial plan for my eventual 'retirement'. Where retirement means not working full time again.

Its wet and cold outside so time to switch over to winter tyres and wheels, keeping my really nice wheels and tyres for next summer (and many more summers to come 🤞).

A New Practicalli Hope

After a little more experimenting with custom overrides, I have converted Practical.li to Zensical.

My office has been moved upstairs where it will be warmer over the winter months. The large monitor has been fitted to an arm, with two laptops on arms either side.

The office already has a corner desk, although it is not a standing desk. Instead I use a collapsible table on top of the desk which elevates the keyboard to a good hight when standing.

Elementary

New tools for Clojure but I am finding it hard to think what kind of customisation I need for these tools. From one brief experiment, Clojure CLI REPL may be interesting to support Practicalli Learn Clojure book as it has a built-in but it will need to be more out of the box (or use a less confusing approach to configuration paths). For now I will stick to Rebel Readline.

I updated my mastodon social account last week, so used grug-far Neovim plugin for a project level search and replace, to update the footer of all my blog posts. I (re)discovered the -F option for ripgrep to use the search pattern as a literal string, so I could include special characters in the search without interpreting them as regex syntax.

Friday was spent making my house even bigger. After a month I managed to sell my standing Freezer and for the price I posted. I spent Friday making room to get the Freezer out of the house.

As part of the house org, I moved my office back to the smallest room. Its much warmer in that room, especially with my computers and monitors. There is a corner desk in the office already (I didnt get around to selling it). I may sell the powered standing desk instead (its okay, but its quite basic, no neat features for hiding cables, etc.).

Having a specific room for the office makes it feel more like a place to get work done.

Started watching Elementry TV Show again. I really enjoy this modern take on the Sherlock Homes and Watson characters. The Moriarty character also feels more relatable and real.

Whilst organising the house I've also been watching Star Trek: Enterprise

A new Clojure Terminal REPL under development

A complete migration of all Practicalli websites to Zensical is underway, now all the plugins are available.

I was not that familiar with the TOML syntax (although I am now), so time was spend wrangling the right syntax for zensical.toml configuration. I occasionally used DuckDuckGo Search Assistant (via web browser) to find working examples (which it did about 75% of the time, sometimes after telling the assistant it had made things up).

A quick spike test with the Clojure CLI REPL was carried out using a simple Practicalli project, comparing the experience with my current preference of Rebel Readine. Potential is there, but a few more things to be added before I could use it regularly. A great start though and it is a new project.

Trying out the whalebird Mastodon desktop clients for Debian Linux, which was installed from a Debian package in the GitHub release (via DRA).

I needed to create a new Mastodon account for Practicalli: mastodon.social/@practicalli_johnny. Functional.cafe is closed to new accounts and clj.social was down (need to check if this domain is still active).

Added a comment on my concerns about 'AI' driven contributions to projects to the poll posed by Bruce Durling.

This week I am listening to an audio book version of "The Truth" by "Terry Pratchett". It is a satire on the evolution of the first printing press with many familiar Discworld characters and a few new ones too.

Ungovernd Produce channel has a few Terry Pratchett books that they read as their own Audiobook version. Curiously, I was thinking of creating my own audio books on my walk in the park yesterday.

Optomising Savings

This week I continue to optimise my saving as interest rates have been creeping up a little.

I contacted Spatzwear again about their Shiftr3 Jersey and they finally confirmed there was a manufacturing issue with the rear pockets. Spatzwear have said they would send replacement jerseys, so I sent a picture of all 4 jerseys that have the issue along with the order numbers.

The Sound of Silence

Quite surroundings at the start of the week as children start to go back to school 🥳

Optomised the Zensical docs publishing GitHub workflow by using the UV package manager.

Captured some thoughts related to Engineering Manager approach.

My health seems to be improving, in part thanks to the "30 plants" supplement from Zoe.com. It seems relatively expensive but if it keeps making a significant improvement then it will be worth it.

Found more documents from merged pensions that are now shredded, continuing to free up more space in my house and making it simpler to move if I find a new place I like.

After switching to the default Firefox rather than Firefox ESR on Debian Linux, I am able to take the UserCrowd desktop based studies. I've also applied for some interview studies, which can earn between 35-45 USD.

Reorganising Configs and Binging TV shows

A bank holiday ride turned out to be a bit of a mystery tour. We had a route although the garden centre cafe we were heading to was not actually on the route 🤷‍♀️ Not everyone seems to be as fussy as I am about creating accurate routes.

I continue to have a few issues with my breathing, but specific exercises for my breathing during the day are starting to help.

Cat sitting this week, looking after a long haired fluffy cat whist my neighbour is away on holiday. I am trying to make my neighbours cat as fat as my neighbour makes mine when I am away 😺.

Converting all the Practicalli books

Another heatwave is over so I was able to focus on getting more work done on migrating the Practicalli books to Zensical.

The main Practicalli books are now using Zensical to build the site (locally and via CI workflow). However, due to challenges with the Zensical theme the books sill use the original mkdocs.yml configuration.

The root Practical.li website is still built with MkDocs and will remain so until Zensical supports blog sites. I could separate the blog site out of the practicalli.github.io repository, but as this site is so small it is not worth the effort.

Entertainment this week includes:

• Silo: season 3 of the excellent post-apocalypse Sci-Fi show with Rebecca Ferguson as a person desperately trying to save the people who live in their silo.
• Lucky: a new crime thriller mini-series in 7 parts, with Anya Taylor-Joy trying to survive the wrath of a crime syndicate whist not getting caught by the FBI. A smart and fun joyride.

A Focus On Focus

Its another week of uncomfortable temperatures, so I am putting even more effort into focusing on specific tasks. When the temperature gets closer to 30 Celsius I'll spend more time thinging about specific issues (or sleeping if it gets too hot).

Saturday was cooler and I stayed up late to start migrating Practicalli books to the Practicalli Megalinter Custom Flavor for Zensical projects.

The first run of the Megalinter workflow with the Zenical flavour took 54 seconds, significantly faster than the 6 minutes 14 seconds of the previous workflow that was using the Megalinter documentation flavor.

An AliExpress sale on Sunday gave me an opportunity to pick up some new disc brake pistons at a reasonable price .