Weeknotes 2022 W28: Mayfield

This is the last week I’m spending as usual in Berlin.

Next week Thursday, I’m traveling to Belgium for a short trip to celebrate my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I’ll be seeing my extended family as well, which has been overdue and I am looking forward to that.

Earlier this week, I took another COVID-19 test which clearly turned out negative. The faint positive line on the test I mentioned in Week­notes 2022 W27: Air was most likely a false positive, as I read it quite a bit after the 20-minute mark.

On Tuesday, I have an appointment to get a booster shot. I’m guessing that the ritual of getting a booster is something we’ll have to repeat for the next few years.

One evening, while cycling back home, I passed a peloton, cycling next to people drinking wine, someone on the street playing accordion and a Citroën old-timer a bit further. It was a very French moment.

I wrote Mayfield, a short story. It will take you about 5 minutes. Go read it.

I haven’t mentioned any gremlins lately, because my (personal) MacBook Pro has been behaving just fine — with one exception: as I was rewatching Stranger Things, some of the episodes were showing the video rotated by 90°. As I tried to fix it, I accidentally rotated it by 180° instead. Welcome to the upside down, I guess.

Something I miss is that I could not get my personal data off my Shopify work laptop before I got put on gardening leave which immediately locked me out of my laptop. That includes feedback I have received from coworkers, which I really wanted to retain. I really enjoy having old feedback around, especially positive feedback.

There are probably other (personal) things that were on that laptop that I will regret not being able to move off.

As for entertainment, I rewatched Stranger Things season 1 and 2, and have mostly rewatched season 3 as well. It’s a little unusual to watch season 4 and then re-watch the previous seasons, but that is what I did.

Season 1 of Stranger Things might be my favorite, because it has this deep sense of mystery, which I love. The later seasons have more action and less mystery. I suppose that for all TV shows, the mystery element, as strong as it may be initially, eventually fades away.

I’m trying to get into For All Mankind, but my mind keeps wandering, and now that I am in episode 3 of the first season, my mind has wandered off so far that I don’t even know what is going on and I might have to start over with the series.

Links:

• The Absinthe Murder (Tasting History with Max Miller): The myth that Absinthe is a dangerous drink is still around, but in this episode, Max does a great job at clearing things up.

• Six Programming Languages I’d Like to See (Hillel Wayne): I always get excited when people post off-the-wall ideas for programming language.

• Lessons from Writing a Compiler (Fernando Borretti): This article is quite niche, but it is relevant to my compiler-building interests. I also found that prototypical compilers textbooks are strangely quite lacking.

• What’s The Oldest Surviving Building On Earth? (The Tim Traveller): Featuring the best accordion cover of the Indiana Jones theme —  arguably.

• DNS Esoterica – Why you can’t dig Switzerland (Terence Eden)

• Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators? (Paul Krugman for The New York Times): Cryptocurrencies desperately need to be regulated, but I believe that after that happens, there’s going to be very little that makes cryptocurrencies attractive anymore (and by “attractive” I mean attractive for fraud, money laundering, hacks, theft, scams, etc).

• Celsius Network: A Pyramid of Ponzis (Crypto Critics’ Corner)