Life

Thanks to the break (see below) I’ve had the time and freedom to be an always-available uncle to a couple of absolutely incredible twin girls. I can think of no greater privilege.

I also just recently completed the 2024 Enbridge Tour Alberta for Cancer and now have to enter full blown knitting mode as I make socks for all of my raffle winners!

Work

The big story is that at the end of June, 2023, after over 20 years at INVIDI Technologies, I decided to leave and start a career break/sabbatical/whatever-you-wanna call it. As of this writing I’m just a bit over a year into that break and am starting to think about what I want to do next, though I don’t yet have a clear answer.

As an aside, these last 12 months were an incredibly weird time to take a seat on the sidelines.

Projects

  • Maintaining and garden and the yard certainly keeps me busy. While early in the season I was a bit worried that my garden wasn’t doing well, its since more than met my expectations…
  • I recently made some updates to my Nintendo DS port of NetHack. I won’t claim I’m “maintaining” it again, but I do tinker with it from time to time.
  • Relatedly, I managed to replace the top screen of my Nintendo DS Lite.
  • I continue to act as maintainer for the jekyll-webmention.io gem, though I haven’t cut a release in a while…

Learning

  • I learned how to replace a bathroom sink because life loves curveballs.
  • I’ve so far achieved level 12 on the Smash the Stack Blowfish wargame1. Though I have to admit I’m now stymied and haven’t gone back to it in a while.
  • I’m now four hours into my in-car driving lessons! In a manual no lesson. So far, minimal stalling and no crashes. Winning!

  1. I still can’t believe I didn’t start attempting these sooner given how well this kind of work aligns with my past low-level programming experience. ↩