↓Skip to main content

Weekly notes 03/2023

··588 words·3 mins
Life Sydney Weekly notes weekly-notes on-call
Table of Contents

I’ve been reading Thej’s weekly notes for a while now and have enjoyed reading it. Given my desire to get back to my blogging roots more, I figured I’ll compile my weekly notes.

What’s been happening #

  • It’s been a week of weird weather. The first half of the week was quite nice, then it got hotter (up to 32 degrees) and the past few days, it’s been raining again. I’m not complaining about the rain, it’s dropped the temperatures by quite a bit.

  • With summer picking up, we bought a tower fan. Most homes in Australia don’t have fans, and while my house has air conditioning, it’s not really effective in terms of ventilation and airflow. Just the tower fan has been really helpful.

  • Just as I bought the fan, I found out about whole-room air circulators and bought a Vornado 660. Most retailers offer a 30-day no-questions-asked return/refund policy, so I don’t mind ordering things to try out how they are and return them if they’re not good. We’ve only used it for a couple of hours, but both Jo and I believe that the Vornado makes a significant difference to the room. We’ll know for sure soon once the temperatures rise up.

Front view of the Vornado 660
Front view of the Vornado 660
  • I’ve started heading back to the office. TTD has a hybrid-work policy where people are required to be in the office for 3 days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) (it was changed from once a week this year), I figured I’ll get some exercise when I head to the office (the office is a 30-min walk from home). Plus, we have nice food, a great espresso machine, and my seat has a fantastic view 😆 Enjoy some pics from my walk to office.

  • Jo went over to the Darling Square Library and got her library card done. This means she can now borrow books (including eBooks, magazines, newspapers) online too. So cool. The library has computers, retro consoles that you can borrow, makerspace kits, and more.

  • I spent the week on my on-call rotation. TTD does on-call differently - it’s better but worse. Better, because it’s only work hours (including weekends though). Worse, because we get paged as an escalation for everything, even for things we don’t know about. And we have to triage and get the right person in - in my opinion, this is a huge waste of time and sets the wrong expectations for everyone. Talks to change have been in progress, hopefully, it improves for the better.

  • When I wasn’t interrupted by on-call, I spent a lot of time working with Alibaba Cloud’s Custom Resource and Function Compute, which are very similar to AWS CloudFormation’s Custom Resource and Lambda, except with much worse-off documentation

  • Hopefully by the time I publish this, I’d have written about my NAS device. Go check it out!

  • Had to visit the VFS office in Sydney for my Singapore visa - will be in Singapore for an office visit in third week of Feb.

  • We’ve started planning for Barcamp again! Go check it out.

Signing off notes #

Before I got COVID, I always used to wonder what people meant by ‘brain fog’ - I think I get it now. Ever since I’ve ‘recovered’ from COVID, my writing has gotten so much worse - frequently do typos, write words that are absolutely gibberish, but I seem to remember writing it ‘right’. I hope I can get over this soon.

↑