Weeknotes 2021 W51
The Notes section on denisdefreyne.com finally fits in the design of the rest of the site — whew. Also, now that I’m writing my weeknotes publicly, I’m pondering having a separate section for that on my site.
I hung out with Justine on Christmas afternoon, for good food and good conversation. Year over year, Christmas has felt less of a special event. I like being able to be able to spent it with friends.
COVID-19 booster shot (Moderna) obtained. I felt a bit hungover the first day, and second day I was mostly tired, but on that day, I went grocery shopping twice, got my vaccine certificate, took out all the trash, made a giant batch of vegan bolognese sauce, made bread, had a breakthrough in my budgeting app prototype, and updated the design of the Notes section of my site. Maybe the reason why I’m tired is not because of the vaccine but because I got a lot of stuff done.
Not much is happening on the closecontact front. I deprioritized the work on open-sourcing it for now.
There’s some progress on my budgeting app prototype. It’s a tough nut to crack though, primarily from the business logic side of things. I’m learning more about accounting that I could ever have anticipated, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
This budgeting app has a lot of potential. For one, it is better than YNAB at dealing with split transactions — see YNAB split transactions are confusing. For this, I’m piggy-backing on the excellent beancount, which I’ve been using to store all my financial data for the past few years.
Unfortunately, I also managed to screw up my YNAB budget. I pulled in my PayPal, Steam wallet, and borrowing accounts into my budget, which shook up the historical budget so much that it’s nigh unrecoverable. YNAB does not have version control, and the undo system is unreliable. It also does not provide a way to duplicate a budget to play around with. All the more reason for me to create that text-based budgeting app.
I’m glad that I have re-found some of my energy — I’ll cautiously pose that My 2021 open source burnout is not having as much of an effect on me anymore. However, it’s looking more and more likely that I will not release much software as open source going forward.
Nearly all the plans in my apartment are dying. I’m at a loss to why, as it started happening all at the same time. Initially I thought I was overwatering them, but I’m confident that is not the cause. Still, most plants now have brown leaves, dying off leaf by leaf.
No plants makes for a much sadder apartment.
In TV news: The Witcher season 2 was enjoyable, visually stunning, but somehow I thought it was lacking, especially in character development.
Emily in Paris is back for season 2, and it’s decent. It’s Paris Syndrome wrapped in a TV show. It’s a tacky, cliché-ridden show, not based in any form of reality — but that is what makes it enjoyable. It’s shallow, escapist entertainment for sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Still early on in the show though, so we’ll see how it evolves.
I also started watching Inside Job at the recommendation of a coworker. It’s a weird and wonderful ride, fast-paced, hilarious yet honest and down-to-earth at the same time.
I watched Don’t look up. It’s decent. It has its moments, but otherwise probably forgettable. It’s definitely a product of its time, and I wonder what people 5 or 10 years down the line will think about it.
As for gaming, I’ve been very slow to play Skyrim. It’s a large game and it doesn’t hold your hand, which makes it not always obvious what to do next — and some locations in the game are really not meant for low-level characters, which you find out because you die very quickly.