Work
Due to some scheduling confusion, I only went on support this week for one day, rather than a full week, so I had unexpectedly more time to spend on team things, which was nice.
It was another busy week, but I’m hoping things will start to slow down a bit from now. I’m wondering about running a retro just for us devs to talk about how our development processes are working out for us and what we need to change. I feel that I’m often doing a lot of the more complex bits of work, so I want to get to the bottom of that: am I breaking up work badly, is it that other people feel they can’t get things done as quickly as me (and is that a problem?), or is there some other issue?
The Plague
It seems we’re entering another month-long lockdown. Ah well, I’ve been living the same way since the first one.
Books
This week I read:
Inversions by Iain M. Banks, the sixth of the Culture series.
This was a nice twist on the usual Culture format. It read more like a low-fantasy book, as it’s told from the perspective of a native of a generic-medieval world which was visited by some Culture agents from Special Circumstances. So we get tales of the doctor’s miraculous medicines and strange practices (and also I don’t think it can be a coincidence that the benevolent interfering alien is a doctor) , and then zoom out at the end and see how things have changed, for the better, over the years thanks to this interference.
Games
This week my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign continued to diverge from my last one. The players have fixated on Australia being absolutely central to what’s going on, whereas my previous group skipped over Australia entirely! I’m looking forward to it, as I’ve only skimmed the Australia chapter; it’ll be nice to run a new (to me) part of the story.
I also agreed to run a Pulp Cthulhu one-shot for my other group, as we decided to postpone out usual game (Wolves of God) until January. So I’ll need to figure something out for that.
Miscellaneous
I wrote a memo on my home network set-up, now that it’s all working. It took more time and effort than expected, but I am very happy with the end result. The UniFi network management stuff is very easy to use, and I now get usable wifi in my bedroom, which is the furthest away point in my flat from the access point.
I’m already thinking about the next upgrades; but those can wait…
This week NixOS 20.09 was released, so I upgraded all my machines. This was pretty smooth, other than needing to rewrite my Caddy configs for Caddy 2. Weirdly, I also lost 256-colour support in PuTTY, and had to upgrade PuTTY to fix it—perhaps a change to the terminfo in NixOS 20.09?