/now: I'm looking at Amtrak and Via maps trying to figure out if I want to spend a good chunk of my time off next year travelling North America by train.
Actual numbers are hard to come by, but the train could be up to 90% less carbon intensive than flying -- not to mention I really hate flying, and as I have four weeks off next year (in one go!) it's feasible for me to burn days of travel time going by rail and seeing some new-to-me scenery.
I am getting an Amtrak map printed at Staples in large format, for my wall, as I write.
Also now that we're really into September I'm going to start a new project at work which is mostly separate from my current team. I really like my current team, but it's also exciting to learn something new.
One other thing that I'm excited about is unlearning some things, or I suppose more accurately: not having to try and master then them anymore. I think this is under-rated, when changing jobs or teams.
When I left iWeb I think I even posted on tilde.town about how happy I was to just ... not have to know anything about PHP anymore. After years of running it and supporting it and debugging it, just freeing up that space from my mind was really pleasant.
Now I can probably stop following the latest news on the JVM and Java ecosystem and indeed much of what's going on in Kafka. I still want to keep tabs on this stuff, it's relevant to my job, but I think that the period of time when I was trying to be an expert on Kafka is coming to a close.
I can unfollow a bunch of people on Twitter if I was only following them for this content, mark whole unread sections of my Pinboard account as "read", etc.
Now to replace that with (re-)learning about asynchronous database replication and HTTP proxies.