#105

Sep 20, 2020

Work

After what felt like an endless number of planning meetings and other discussions, we finally got back into programming things this week! There’s been a few interesting little problems to solve, as the desired designs didn’t really match what we’d been building so far, so some rethinking had to be done; but figuring out how things should work is the fun part of this job.

Books

This week I read:

I’ve decided to drop my goal of getting to 104 books (2 books a week) this year, as I’ve noticed myself feeling pressured to read shorter books so I can reach that two-books-a-week average. I’m only one book behind now, so I may well reach 104 books, but I don’t want to feel bad about taking a week to read a single long book.

Games

This week my Pulp Cthulhu campaign got into Masks of Nyarlathotep proper, with a dramatic opening in Room 410 that lead to the death of one of the cultists. This is a very nonlinear campaign compared to what we’ve done before, and the opening in particular is a bit of an info-dump, but the players are liking it so far.

For a bit of variety I’m thinking of running one-shots in other systems between each chapter of the campaign, as it is a very long one.

Miscellaneous

I decided to give my home network a bit of an upgrade, so I’ve ordered a bunch of new toys. For nyarlathotep (my home server): a larger case (with hot-swap HDD bays!); a new SSD to use as the OS drive; a PCI-E SATA card; and some more RAM. For my network in general: a 6U cabinet, 24-port patch panel, switch, and power distribution unit.

I feel like building a network rack must be some sort of nerd rite of passage.

I also redid my DNS, switching to OctoDNS, because Terraform is kind of rubbish for DNS: it always wants to recreate every record, even if nothing has changed. OctoDNS is much better behaved.