#156
Sep 12, 2021
Number #156! The end of a third full year of weeknotes!
While some of the entries are less good than others, I think I’ve found writing a brief summary of my weeks useful. I have a pretty poor memory, but I’ve never been able to establish the habit of keeping a traditional diary. So this slightly different public diary format has been handy.
I don’t often want to look something up from a previous entry but, when I do, they’re nice to have. When I realised that a frequent use of past weeknotes was to find links I’d talked about, I set up my bookmarks database to streamline that. I also used old entries to recreate the bookdb database after it got corrupted in 2019. I’m sure some new use for these weeknotes will come up in the future too.
Work
This week was pretty slow. I finished implementing some caching changes, and a bug fix, and opened a PR to make logging out work when we switch to the new auth service; and that’s about it. There are a few things I’m waiting on the auth team for and, when they progress, I’ll be able to make some more changes on our end.
Also, we’re getting a new backend developer on the team next week, so I spent some time looking for small self-contained tasks they could pick up to get used to our code.
Books
This week I read:
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
This book starts from the premise “what if we had a way to transfer minds into new bodies, and a way to grow bodies in vats, and then gave it to a bunch of space colonists who want to play at being gods?” The result is a world where Hindu mythology is playing out, only the gods are real this time.
Zelazny said that he wanted to write a book somewhere between fantasy and sci-fi, and so the book gives the gods powers which they control with their minds; but psionics is pretty old hat at this point, so that didn’t really stand out to me as fantastical. The way in which the story is told feels very fantasy-like but, again, I’d seen that before in Ilium / Olympos by Dan Simmons.
I guess what was cutting edge in 1967 doesn’t feel that trend-setting today. It was still a very enjoyable book though.
Miscellaneous
This week was my birthday. I turned 30.
It doesn’t really feel like a big deal, I didn’t crumble to dust that morning, and I don’t really see the need to celebrate my birthday: my whole life should be good, not just the occasional day here and there!
I had some family visit, which was nice, as I’d not seen them at Christmas due to the pandemic. I received some presents, which was also nice. But the fact of it being my birthday didn’t really impact the day.