Weekly Notes 17/2026

What's been happening

It's been another cold week, but we're slowly beginning to get used to the cold. My swimming classes are going pretty well. I'm now 100% focused on building my muscle memory so that I can use my arms when swimming. At the moment, I can either glide forward, glide forward a bit and then start kicking, or glide and use my arms, but not all three. I need more practice and I'm confident I'll get there in due time. My gym sessions went pretty well. With the intensity toned down a bit especially after the heavy squats, we've been working on our shoulders and aerobic capacity and it's pretty cool to see the heart rate go up steadily as we get closer to the end of the metcon.

I'm not the one to order merch t-shirts from YouTubers/streamers but I made an exception when I saw Path of Exile streamer Zizaran's Gauntlet collection and bought a Rapture Gauntlet T-shirt. Pretty happy with the quality and was delivered in a few days!

On Friday, I had my penultimate driving class - the driving test is scheduled for next week and I'm hoping I can pass. My instructor's pretty happy with my progress, but she did ask me to work on doing the blinker-mirror-blindspot check and then the turn a bit more smoothly - right now, I'm yanking the steering wheel a little too early before completing the blindspot check as well as with a bit more force, requiring me to do an exaggerated correction. Need to make it smoother. She got me to do some of these before ending the session. So I'll have one last session just before the test - hopefully, that will go oj.

On Saturday morning, we did a small morning walk over to Little Corner Cafe in Quakers Hill. Generally when we walk, both Jo & I would have our airpods on and listening to our own music, this time for reasons... we didn't and were talking to each other - admiring the different houses in the neighbourhood, the plants that they have and chatting about walking down that lane when we did a house inspection, talking about what we'd like to do on the yards next.

After we came back, because it wasn't quite as hot and our front yard had overgrown a little bit, so we decided to clean up the yard. Jo did the edge cuts which made it easier for me to do a deeper line trim and then the overall mowing. The cold certainly has slowed down the growth of the lawn, there was barely any clippings in the bag when I was done and usually the bag's quite full.

With the Monday being a holiday for Anzac day, we did a day trip to Leura, Blue Mountains. Leura's a lovely place to visit especially mid to late-Autumn to see the autumn colours. We took a train to Leura, had some breakfast once there, and did a nice hike to part of the Leura Cascades Circuit, and then returned back to home.

What we ate

Milana Pizzeria, Stanhope Gardens - Jo was in the mood for a pizza and since this was nearby, we went here. This place actually blew our mind - fabulous place with really good pizza. Unlike many places which have flimsy cardboard like bases Milana’s had amazing super soft dough and healthy chunks of veggies and meat. Good friendly service as well. Many repeat visits are planned!

Naughty Krishna, Blacktown - A small little North Indian restaurant by the Westfield Shopping center. Jo had visited their Seven Hills branch and suggested trying this place out after we returned from Leura. I ordered a Gobi Paratha for myself, Jo got the roti-curry set plate and we also ordered a Bombay Bhel to share. The food was pretty good. My gobi paratha was a bit bland by itself but changed tuned when I paired it with the pickle/raita. Jo mentioned her roti was quite fluffy, and the curries were good too. Would definitely return again.

Music of the Week

Trivium's "Until The World Goes Cold" is a surprisingly catchy metal song with the usual metal riffs, and some amazing drums & bassline.

Links of the week

The new expansion of Diablo IV launches next week and the reviews as well as changes look promising. I look forward to playing it.

I didn't know Eurotrip didn't do quite well during its initial run. I enjoyed the movie - was quite fun.

I don't agree to a lot of the (AI) influencer crap but Karpthy's "A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs" has been doing pretty well since I started using it since the past couple of weeks.

I've started adding all the things I've working on, my meetings and to see the AI do a great job of transcribing, linking, updating my repo has been quite interesting. I can finally say at the end of a Claude code session - "summarize all that we did, the problems we ran into" into my Wiki and it gets added there. So if someone asks what was the pain with that project I don't have scratch my head on the problems I ran into and have a ready reference. Teacher's Tech has a nice quite 15-minute non-fluff guide on how to use this, good reference if you prefer a video guide.

Saikiran takes us through our childhood really well.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.