#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:
Volumes 14 and 15 of Nana, by Ai Yazawa.
I’ve also got volumes 18, 19, 20, and 21 sitting on the shelf… but volumes 16 and 17 haven’t arrived yet. That’s kind of a pain.
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.