Wow, a long time has passed since I last wrote a blog post, huh? I’m pretty bad at doing this blogging thing. Also I guess maybe a few things happened this past year. Just a few.

My new year update is so late this time around that it’s well into the Lunar new year, but this is auspicious in its own way: as it happens, this year is the year of the Dragon, and that means it’s my year. And I intend to make that count for something!

Ain’t there?

Just a quick life update, shouted into the void as ever.

After three and a half years of running Debian Unstable as the primary OS on my personal laptop, shit finally hit the fan, as what should have been a routine apt upgrade command managed to break things so badly that systemd itself was segfaulting on startup and the system would no longer boot. I have since reinstalled Debian, and I figured I’d share my thoughts on the experience of intentionally running an unstable OS.

Well, looks like I’m way overdue for some kind of update. As you can probably guess, this one has been a bit harder to write than the others, and the simple reason for that is that this past year has been, quite literally, the worst year of my life.

I can still remember the excitement I felt when the babysitter got off the phone to tell me I had a baby brother. I can still remember the kid in the crib who would wake me up by throwing his stuffed animals across our room at my bed. I can still remember my dad and me building the bunk beds that we’d sleep in for so many years after, and how we covered the underside of the top bunk with those glow-in-the-dark stars and silly stickers, and how he’d kick me through my mattress because I’m pretty sure that’s just what every bottom-bunk sibling on the planet does. I can still remember…

Last night, my wife and I found ourselves in the middle of every pet lover’s nightmare: a lost cat, a busy road, a careless driver. A moment’s hesitation that may have cost a life.

As I mentioned at in a previous post, I’m embarking on a musical project this year. The parameters have a changed slightly since that post, but the idea is essentially the same: I’ll be writing a musical diary for solo piano, with one entry for each month of 2022. I think it’s going to be kind of neat.

Well, it certainly seems like companies, CEOs, and celebrities everywhere are all trying to cash in on NFTs’ popularity, shoving them into the forefront of public consciousness over and over again, and further enhancing the penetration of cryptocurrency into the general awareness. As a programmer by trade and a technology enthusiast, I feel like I should come out and make my opinions about these things known. You know, for posterity.

So let’s start: crypto fucking sucks.

Januaries tend to bring a time of both retrospective and prospective thinking. This new year has brought both in heaps. The past couple of years have been a living fever dream, but I started off with a more literal fever. That’s right — I’ve now officially joined a very exclusive club: despite being fully vaccinated and boosted, I caught COVID-19 and lived to tell the tale.

In 1978, the US toy company Mattel released a handheld electronic LED baseball game. In 2021, I had a 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi, and a hackathon to enter. And so, Mlattel Electronic Blaseball was born.

Wow, time flies when you’re a software developer trying to get hired in 2021 and you have to take dozens of virtual interviews before you get completely ghosted by behemoth companies and startups alike! Sadly, between actually doing the interviews and grinding Leetcode problems in preparation for the same, all the madcap mayhem has left me with only a little bit of time to make progress on the project. But progress I have made!

After reflecting on the entirety of the year I’ve spent in quarantine, it’s also (almost) time to commemorate the anniversary of the event that made me leave one of my previous jobs, something which was an absolute nightmare at the time but is actually amusing to read in retrospect. Luckily, one of my colleagues from back then is already doing the work of writing the whole thing up. You can check out Part One which describes some context and the initial disaster; future installments will cover what actually went wrong, which should make it clear why I had to leave. Names have been changed to protect folks, and I will not be giving away who I am in this sordid tale, so for now just read and enjoy. It’s the sort of harrowing story that begins with the alert nobody wants to get: not one, but all of our production systems were down.

Just a little over a year ago, several counties in the San Francisco Bay Area announced the country’s first lockdown measures in response to the spreading of COVID-19. The measures were supposed to last for a few weeks; one year later, we’re still locked down, along with much of the rest of the United States.

Let’s get this party started!

…A miserable little pile of secrets?