weekly-notes

Weekly notes 05/2025

Week 05 summary - markets weekend.

Sathyajith Bhat

01 Feb 2025 • 6 min read

Thumbnail image: Australian National Maritime Museum is a maritime museum in Darling Harbour, Sydney.

What's been happening

The week started with a holiday because of an in-lieu day for Australia Day. Jo's batch mate from college who lives in a nearby suburb asked if we'd like to meet. We were free, so we agreed to meet - we went over to Mosman - first stopping by Frenchy's Cafe for a quick coffee and brunch and then taking a small walk around George's Head Lookout. The original plan also involved a beach visit; however, with the Australia Day holiday crowd packed at Balmoral Beach combined with the heat, we decided against the beach visit - it was hard enough to drive by the beach, let alone find parking. All in all, it was a good few hours spent with some friends that made the day.

Jo told me there's a live music performance by the String Quartet from the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Whenever Jo tells me of some concert or performance, it's quite likely that I am going to like it as well, plus this was a free performance and we didn't have any plans so decided to head to the Art Gallery of NSW to attend the performance. Prior to visiting, Jo told me they'd performing some works of Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, Gabriella Smith and more - having listened to Erik Satie's Once Upon A Time In Paris, I was looking forward to it. The Art Gallery of New South Wales was quite packed with all the seats taken. Luckily, I noticed there were some foldable seats kept aside for overflow so I picked them up and got a nice place while waiting and frantically signaling Jo to come over (I was asked if the seat was occupied 4 times in a span of few minutes). Once the performance started, it was quite nice. Despite being an open floor event, the music sounded good. The musicians started with some Stravinsky and then playing some works of Satie. Most of the performances were pretty technical (read: quite complex and not something I'd appreciate) but seeing them perform you know it's not an easy piece to perform. Erik Satie's pieces are what I loved the most. I recorded them and have uploaded to my Mastodon profile. I suppose this officially starts our first concert of the year!

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View on Mastodon

The Twilight Food Fair is back at the Ted Mack Civic Park. The Twilight Food Fair features live music, variety of food stalls and a bunch of other events for everyone. Lot of families come over with their kids and picnic blankets and spend a chunk of time there. We went over to check it out and grab some food. We spent about an hour listening to the performers and grabbed some empanadas and a paella.

Our Saturday morning started with a walk over to St Leonards Park - Jo was doing her training run for her Couch to 5k program while I did a casual walk. The North Side Produce market was on as well, so we went over to the Produce market, grabbed some fruits and veggies and came home. And then on Sunday we went over to Kirribilli as Jo wanted to check out the Kirribilli Markets. Jo got a small pendant there.

I've been lurking in svs' discord for a while now, watching and learning from the conversations that pop up. This Saturday, there was a conference-talk-watch-a-long followed by discussion. I missed most of the talk and discussions but did stick around for a short while to answer couple of questions.

What we ate

Frenchy's Cafe, Mosman: A nice cute little cafe with lots of open space for pets and kids to play. This place has pretty nice view of Sydney Harbour but the food was pretty average.

Sidano Cafe, Milsons Point: Jo asked me to find a place nearby the Kirribilli Markets so that we can grab some breakfast first. I picked place without takign a deeper look and this experience is a warning sign to check the menus first before visiting. They had decent iced latte but my cappuccino was pretty bad and could barely taste the coffee. They're in the middle of food revamp so barely had any food options and ended up getting a cheese toastie for me & a ham and cheese toastie for Jo - and both weren't that good. I hope with the new menu they can turn this around.

What I've been playing

The new season of Diablo IV started this week and I've been playing quite a bit of it. I've built a new Barbarian and having quite a bit of fun with a leapquake Barbarian. The new witch powers are pretty interesting but have trivialized the game quite a bit. I've got about 25 hours in this season and already clearing Pit level 90. I'll continue playing till this Thursday after which I will switch over to Civilization VII.

Come follow me on Twitch as I will be live streaming our launch day game and see how the new Civ plays! At launch Civilization VII will lack quite a bit of things that we currently use in our Civilization VI games such as the ability to rename towns (Kush's names are always a riot), customizable victory conditions, no large maps, no teams in multiplayer and I hope Firaxis can add these features in soon.

Music of the Week

I came across Marlene Cummins when someone mentioned on Twitter she was busking in Sydney and listened to Feels Like Rain. I ended up playing her album for an hour straight. As someone who doesn't listen to a lot of jazz, I really loved her saxophone, the vocals and the occasional didgeridoo that comes every now and then. If you haven’t listened to her I think you will love her.

Link of the week

Railway has a nice blog post on how they set up their data center. At work, we run our own data centers as well and while I don't work on data centers, I talk to the data center and metal provisioning engineering team every now and then and it was a very relatable read.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.

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