Weekly notes 28/2025
Table of Contents
Thumbnail image: Berry Island was one of Sydney’s Harbour Islands and is now connected to the mainland.
What’s been happening #
It’s been another windy week here. A lot of my colleagues were happy though - the heavy wind in Sydney is said to be a sign of heavy snow down in Australia’s snow corridor—the areas of Thredbo, Snowy Mountains and Jindabyne. And quite a few of my colleagues will be on leave the upcoming week as they head to the ski resorts to get some skiing done before the end of the snow season.
Speaking of colleagues, it’s performance review season at work. Apart from submitting my personal review, I have to provide upward feedback for my manager as well as for a few colleagues who had requested feedback. For my personal review, I made the best use of Cursor - I exported all my stand-up updates, my Jira tickets that I worked on for the past 6 months, and the expectations that were set in my previous review, and asked it to come up with a review document. I tried it with various models (o3, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro) and among all of these, Gemini was the best of the lot, coming up with a document that referenced my Jira ticket IDs against my work highlights, making for a compelling document with solid evidence.
The rest of the week went by pretty fast. I took the day off on Friday as I had a dentist appointment to get my top right tooth filling redone - the dentist had mentioned that they had noticed some decay on the existing filling (it was done something like two decades ago) and wanted to get it redone to avoid complications. The procedure itself went pretty smoothly—I didn’t feel anything thanks to the numbing gel, but my jaw was in a world of pain having to keep it open for about an hour. I wasn’t sure how I would be doing after the appointment, so I had decided to take the day off—but of course, I wasn’t truly off, as I took advantage of the peace from having marked myself as away and used the time to get the above-mentioned performance reviews done.
On Saturday, we had our last guitar class for the term, with us playing (or rather, me desperately trying to recognize) the sheet music notation of the song “Do Re Mi” from “The Sound of Music”. I need to prepare a cheat sheet mapping the symbol to the note to the guitar fret position, or else I will struggle in the next term. The next term starts next week - I’m yet to sign up for it.
After the class was over, Jo asked if I wanted to go to Chatswood for an early lunch and watch the F1 movie. I really wanted to watch it in IMAX, but I couldn’t get any tickets for it and the new Superman movie had already replaced it, so I decided I might as well watch it. After the movie, we went over to Uniqlo to pick up some sweatpants that I can wear so that I don’t freeze during our morning walks. I also picked up some gym training shoes—my current shoes are specifically meant for walking and have a nice cushioning layer. As I’m now doing heavier weights in the gym and some more advanced exercises, these walking shoes are causing me to go a bit off balance, so my trainer asked me to get some gym training shoes so I can remain stable, especially when doing squats.
Speaking of squats, I had a good training week. On Tuesday, Jo & I went for our last combined PT session (Jo will be training with her usual instructor next week). Our combined session focused on us doing squats (back squats for me, front squats for Jo). I told our trainer that I would be coming back to class the next morning, so he went a bit easy on me after our squats and had us do some light barbell bent-over rows and barbell overhead presses.
On Sunday morning, Jo picked another place to go for a morning walk - Berry Island Reserve. Berry Island Reserve is a nice harbourside bushland with some amazing views of the city and Sydney Harbour. We went walking here and it was a pretty easy walk - apart from the Stairway to Heaven that is the stairs that we had to climb down to reach the peninsula. The reserve had a large open park with a couple of dogs frolicking around and lots of birds. It was really nice there in the morning. The Sunday morning walk has sort of become a ritual now—go for a nice short walk followed by a coffee, and I truly enjoy it.
What I’ve been playing #
The new season of Diablo IV launched this week and I’d been playing it for a bit. The new season mechanics are nothing novel (recycled borrowed power), but they buffed the Hydra skill quite a bit and added supporting uniques for the Hydra, and since I absolutely love the Sorcerer class, I decided to try the Hydra build. It’s been pretty fun and I’m still trying to get the required gear to get my Hydra skill to do the damage that is required. Still at Torment 3, the build is doing pretty decently and I’m having fun.
What we watched #
F1 The Movie - I admit, I hadn’t seen any promotion of the movie (trailer or otherwise) and went in blind—and I must admit, I am conflicted. I think the movie was too long - it could have been 20 to 30 minutes shorter. From an entertainment point of view it was decent. I loved the camera work, the soundtrack. I like how they had digitally inserted the actors in many of the races. I remember seeing some footage of the shooting during some of the races.
From a Formula 1 fan (and as someone who has been watching F1 since ~ 1997), I am so disappointed. There were so many scenes where I went “WTF!?”. Some scenes were absolutely ludicrous and hilarious (no, you don’t put a tarpaulin on a car and call it parc ferme, neither can you keep crashing into people and call it strategy). Don’t even get me started on the whole pitlane standoff. From a character-building perspective, both the Technical Director and Team Principal are wasted on their tropes. The production team had great access to the entire F1 paddock, and yet every single access was wasted, and most of the actual people from F1 are mere backdrop—so much wasted potential. Still, I think they did a decent job. When I read other views of the movie (Divya’s point of view made me realize how much of the sport I know and take for granted), I can see who their target audience was and how well they have succeeded. I just wish they could have taken that little bit of extra effort and made it better.
What we ate #
Myeong Dong, Chatswood - A favourite of ours—we always end up coming back to this place when Jo craves Kimchi pancake, and it was the same this time. We weren’t in the mood for BBQ, so we ordered some spicy pork and glass noodles. The pork was really good as always, and we finished it all off. The glass noodles were a bit too much, so we packed them as takeaway.
La Latina, Chatswood - We were looking to have some lunch before watching the F1 movie and found this small Colombian restaurant.
We had the share plate of Venezuelan Picada consisting of cheese fingers, fried arepitas, cassava chips, sweet and savoury plantains and empanadas. The food was pretty good—the share plate came with a side of guacamole and nata—both of which worked very well with all of the above food. The share plate had a little salt sprinkled on it, which added a bit of extra flavour. Worth revisiting!
Bay Brew, Waverton - A busy coffee shop a few hundred meters past Waverton Train Station, we stopped by here while returning from our walk to Berry Island Reserve. Jo ordered the fried chicken pancake while I ordered the sausage and egg roll. The food was pretty good—the pancakes were not fluffy but weren’t dense either. My sausage egg roll was pretty good—and the brioche bun was very soft (yes, the rolls here usually come as buns). I can see why the place was so busy—the coffee was decent and they have a rather large outdoor seating area, making it popular with people who have pets as they stop by here.
Music of the Week #
Much before we decided to go watch the F1 movie, I was reminded of Robbie Williams’ song “Supreme” - this was one of my favourite songs growing up, and if you watch the video, you’ll see why. The music video is a tribute to British Formula One driver Jackie Stewart, with Robbie Williams portraying the fictitious character Bob Williams, a rival driver competing for the 1970s F1 World Championship. What I love about the video is how they did something similar to what is shown in the F1 movie—digitally inserted characters and newspaper headlines advancing and telling the story.
Link of the week #
I came across a video about Why WWE doesn’t feel special anymore. It’s a bit of a long watch and often repeats the same point, but a TL;DR version is that wrestling is now a “safe” content farming strategy driven by metrics rather than emotions. I largely agree with that statement, and I think we can see parallels to this across many entertainment streams (movies, music, games). FWIW, I think WWE lost its plot way back—maybe even as early as two decades ago. It could also be just me growing out of it. IDK. I still watch some of the Attitude/Ruthless Era promos—and some of them are still so good.
Thanks for reading. #
Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.
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