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This was a busy week! I helped out at a blood drive (and gave blood), had a Toastmasters celebration meeting, spent time with a good friend on Wednesday evening, a Knights meeting, Dungeons & Dragons (online) and today a board game night.
That's in addition to a full-time job, workouts, and spending time with Wifey and the kids.
I hope to have more time this coming week to work on my personal projects, programming, reading, etc.
I have a week's vacation coming up early next month. I can get more creative activities done then.
This is a short week, since I have the 4th off. Still it seems like a really long one. Today I am looking at a possible new app we will be building, a mobile version of a desktop app. I've had a brief look at the desktop app, which has a ton of capabilities built into it. If we take this on, it will be a major project for my small team.
Work is good. Being busy is good. But we are finishing up a major effort, and already have another one on the horizon that will be kicking off in the next 4-6 weeks.
The next year+ should be interesting.
I found solderpunk's 5-year anniverary report of Gemini interesting.
A couple of notes from the post.
Gemini isn't huge, and that's part of the charm. I have a few friends/family on here now, and I enjoy browsing their capsules. I'm very excited that my brother has joined Gemini.
Here's to another 5 years of Gemini, and hoping for over 5,000 capsules!
The US political system - two corporations, the Republicans and the Democrats, put forward their choice of candidates we get to choose from. And for the 2nd time in a row, they are giving us Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The parties can just "choose" their candidates, and don't need to hold primaries.
Court Concedes DNC Had the Right to Rig Primaries Against Sanders
In many states, it is made intentionally hard for candidates to get on the ballot. After Ross Perot's strong performance as an independent candidate in 1992 (he got 18% of the vote), the Democrats and Republicans made sure he was off the debate stage in 1996, and no independent candidate has had the opportunity to debate the 2 main party's candidates since.
I guess the point is this - the Republicans choose their candidate. So do the Democrats. And then those are the choices we get... a Biden vs Trump choice. They hold primaries, but the parties will heavily push the candidates they like, and handicap the others (ex. Howard Dean in 2004, Pat Buchanan in 1996).
We can still vote for 3rd party candidates, thankfully, when and if they make the ballot in your state.
Julian Assange is finally a free man, after being harrassed for a decade by the British and Americans, and spending the past 5 years in Britain's Belmarsh prison.
I've launched my own aggregator today. I'm introducing a few files of capsules, including two of my own, the short-form log, and the gemlog. I'll probably add the TLM log in there too, if I can find the time to keep it updated in a timely fashion.
This post right now is just a test, to make sure the short-form log updates Leetaur's receiver. I find short logs a bit easier to update, so I hope to update this more often than the gemlog.
Back to work after vacation. WFH makes a lot of things easier, though I miss seeing people in the office. I have a good home-office setup - monitors, everything wired by ethernet, etc.
The beginning of Lent. I'm basically giving up sweets for Lent - any candy, cookies, etc.
We have child being Confirmed at the Cathedral in a couple of weeks. My vacation starts at the same time. I'm taking 2 weeks off in a row, something I haven't done in almost a decade. I'm planning on getting some projects around the house done.
On Wednesday, January 3, I watched the first "Untitled Nerdy Chat Show" from Bryan Lunduke. His guests were Rob Braxman, Chris Fisher (Jupiter Broadcastign), and Wendell Wilson (Level 1 Techs). This isn't a review of the whole show, but just me jotting down a couple of thoughts. If I choose to do a longer view of it, I will create a full gemlog post.
There were two topics in the show - 1) What type of phone should Bryan get now that his iPhone broke, and 2) What are the guests thoughts on the leaks coming out from IBM and Redhat about their D&I program.
The phones being recommended by the guests were basically Pixels loaded with AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) code.
My thoughts on this. If you like Android, and want to run a Google OS on a Google device, that's fine. Do it. But it feels weird that people promote AOSP-based systems as an *alternative* to Google. It's not. Using AOSP you can strip out Google services, but you are still using a Google-developed operating system and, with Pixel, on a Google device.
A couple more thoughts - The guests took swipes at Purism, and the Librem 5. If they don't like Purism, well, that's fine. But the Librem 5 is much more repairable than a Pixel. There are videos on installing a breakout board, completely taking the device apart, etc. A friend of mine swapped out the bluetooth wifi card for a new one, no problem. (try doing that on a mainstream device)
And true Gnu/Linux based OS's, like Mobian and PureOS and UBPorts, etc is truly going independent from Google. Using AOSP is not.
Again, if you *like* Android (or iOS for that matter), that's great. But it is not getting away from Big Tech. Using Android (or AOSP) and iOS is embracing big tech.
I might write a separate post on these, to express my own opinions, later on.
For now, I just want to say I was disappointed that, instead of tackling the topic head on, saying either "I support Redhat/IBM" or "These leaks show that the program Redhat/IBM is using is horrible", the guests pretty much completely dodged the subject.
I mean, if the subject is brought up, debate it. Rather, what was discussed is that "Well, these programs are diminishing in importance going forward anyways" or "what affects tech more, these leaks or *this other thing over here*" ... again dodging the question.
I like a lot of Lunduke's articles. I'm a big fan of Rob Braxman. I'm not familiar with Chris Fisher or Wendell Wilson.
It has been an interesting week at work. We are pretty short-staffed right now, so for a developer that means I am getting a lot of extra work done. The work keeps coming though. New requirements, new bugs found, etc. I'm making progress getting through the list of stories for this sprint, but the stories are changing mid-flow.
That's fine. I'm used to it. We just rank the stories, re-prioritize for the sprint, and keep on going.
I'm starting a short-form log in Gemini. I will jot down thoughts of mine in here, as a single file. Longer, more thought-out posts will go onto my gemlog. A link to my full Gemlog is below.
The short-form log may be updated several times throught the day.
I'm looking forward to the new year. One of my main goals is to finish my book Quest for the Artifact. I'm at 63,000 words now, with probably another 15,000 - 20,000 words to write.
I am also using World Anvil to help flesh out my world.