December 2022

Updates #

My wife had to go to the hospital ER for kidney stones. She ended up needing surgery, but she’s doing much better now.

Here’s a picture from when we were sitting in the hallway for seven hours during the night:

My full-time contract ended suddenly before the holiday. I’m taking a break to work on house projects before getting back into the fray. I’ll be looking for roles in web development, DevOps, and SRE.

I’m open to working with another agency again, but I have to be more strict about my “no Elementor” rule.

I’ll be ramping my own agency back up again while I search, but this time I’m looking into more passive sources of revenue: selling themes and templates, in an effort to soften the feast-or-famine dynamics of freelancing.

I contributed to Hanukkah of Data, which launched in December! It’s a data puzzle series inspired by Advent of Code. I had a lot of fun working with the group on the site design.

🐱 Cats #

📖 Reading #

I read Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, the first in a series on my list since March, when Kev Quirk recommended the trilogy. I thought it started off weak; Sanderson’s world building is vague, and his character personalities aren’t as varied as when they were first introduced. However, his strength lies in creating tense situations. I kept putting the book down because I felt my anxiety ramping up, which isn’t ideal before bed.

Midway through the book, it started getting good, and while I expected a twist at the end, I was surprised at the specifics.

I’ve started the next book in the series, The Well of Ascension.

📚 Learning #

I’ve been learning more about Docker and Kubernetes. I’m motivated by a potential career change into DevOps/SRE, and I’m looking to switch away from managed WordPress hosting to save costs.

💪 Fitness #

I returned to the gym a few weeks after last month’s injury, and I made it through 3 days before the holidays disrupted my routine and motivation. I’m not looking forward to going again in the next couple months; gyms tend to get crowded by New Year New You people.

🎮 Gaming #

I got back into Caves of Qud, a ASCII-inspired roguelike. Battlefield 2042 has become a go-to of mine, along with Warhammer 40k: Darktide. Codfish has been a staple, though not as much in the last two weeks.

I’m surprised at how much I’m playing BF2042. It launched with a ton of problems, and I’m glad I didn’t pay for the game (GamePass), but it’s gotten better.

📺 Movies and TV shows #

Shows I’ve been watching #

• Inside Job - they made an animated comedy about my mom’s Facebook feed
• JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure - after a stellar first season, it took us a couple years to get through the second season, the third season dragged, but the fourth and fifth seasons are excellent

Movies I’ve seen #

• Knives Out: Glass Onion - a middling film trying to reference too much. But who cares whodunit, I just want to listen to Daniel Craig’s exaggerated American accent
• Zoolander - this one has been on The List for a while, and it fills the blanks on a few references. It has a couple problematic scenes
• Zoolander 2 - terrible
• Ace Ventura - Although the ending was dull and problematic, I liked Jim Carrey in this one
• Cool World - I went into it knowing nothing about the film and came away with a new perspective on how bad a film can be. It’s not even enjoyable to make fun of