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Weekly notes 31/2024

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Life Sydney Boulder Los Angeles Weekly notes weekly-notes gaming
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Thumbnail image: The Boulder Marriott is a boutique-style and pet-friendly hotel in Boulder, Colorado.

What’s been happening #

  • Ah finally to be back in my own home and on my bed. And yes, I missed last week’s weekly notes, and as much as I wanted to write, by the time I got back home, half the week had gone by.

    • I had a series of flights starting from Denver to Seattle and then from Seattle to Sydney via Los Angeles. I was supposed to reach Sydney on Monday morning. But of course, as fate would have it, the Sydney to Los Angeles flight was the worst flight ever, making last week’s Alaska Airlines flight look like a business-class trip.
    • Essentially my flight from Saturday was initially delayed by 24 hours to Sunday, and then on Sunday, it was cancelled altogether. Thankfully, I was able to rebook on Qantas and I finally managed to be back in Sydney on Wednesday morning.

  • My week in Boulder was ok. A lot of my colleagues who I wanted to meet were on PTO, so that was a bit of a bummer. To make matters worse, I fell ill on Wednesday, to the extent that I decided to skip work on Thursday because I was feeling pretty weak. I didn’t feel like eating anything and remembered that there was a Nepali restaurant near my hotel, and thus I ordered some Daal Tadka, Roti, and Daal Soup. The food was really good, and after having these I felt so much better.

    Rice and Dal was just what I wanted.

  • This week marks two years of us moving to Sydney and two years of working at The Trade Desk. Leaving Adobe was not an easy choice but things have been pretty good at The Trade Desk. My work profile is now closer to a mix of consulting and platform engineering and I program now with Typescript - didn’t think I’d be working on Javascript but here we are. Overall, it’s been a great ride and I look forward to the next few years!

  • The next term of my guitar classes has started again. It started two weeks ago but because of my travel, I missed the first two sessions. For this term, we’re learning Coldplay’s Yellow and the melody of Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender.

  • Jo had picked up some records from the nearby second-hand book/record exchange store last week. The store accepts only cash and she didn’t have enough cash that day so asked the owner to keep the records aside to come pick up the following week. We went and picked up the records, and just as we exited the store, I saw another person enter the store with a crate full of records. I mentioned this to Jo and said we should check out what they have. And what a decision that was - we picked up several more amazing records, including U2’s The Joshua Tree, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, and Led Zepplin I and II. The person said he might be having Led Zepplin IV but unfortunately, they did not. Would have been a great addition if they did. Our record collection is now grown to pretty sizable counts and need a better way to collect/catalog the ones that we have.

    Van Halen - Jump & Mr Mister - Broken Wings

    Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms and Making Moves

    U2 - Joshua Tree and David Bowie - The World of David Bowie

    Queen - Night at the Opera and The Allman Brothers Band - Brothers and Sisters

    Led Zepplin I and II

    The Essential Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson - Thriller

What have I been playing? #

Just before I left for my trip, I picked up Balatro and have been playing it quite a bit! Balatro is a card game based on poker hands where you try to score enough points to clear rounds (antes). Each ante has three rounds (blinds) and your goal is to score enough points to beat each blind. With poker hands, you get your base score and then try to scale out the score using Jokers, Tarot cards, planet cards, and other special cards.

Balatro has a hyponotising soundtrack and along with the amazing gameplay had me hooked on the Steamdeck and helped me kill time as I was waiting through the flight delays and cancellations. And yesterday after about 15+ hours of failed runs, I finally won a game (thanks to Rush for being on stream and guiding/bouncing off ideas with him). If you’re on the lookout for a new game that’s easy to pick up, hard to master and has infinite replayability, highly recommend giving Balatro a try.

Screenshots of Balatro

Screenshots of Balatro

Screenshots of Balatro

I have uploaded a video of the last game where I won - you can see the thought process that goes behind selecting a card (long video, btw).

Music of the Week #

A small interview of Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham’s playing style turns into an impromptu rendition of Big Love. Pretty amazing stuff and gotta appreciate the ooh-aahs!

Last week’s major failure of CrowdStrike brought international attention to them. While everyone was scrambling to delete the offending files and enter the recovery keys, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz found a way to use barcode scanners to do the data entry and save a ton of time. Way to go!

Those who know of Winamp will also recall the old-school mp3 player had some crazy skins that radically changed the way Winamp looks. Jordan Eldredge while exploring some of the older skins found some that looked corrupted, however, had some fascinating stories behind them. Give the post a read, and remember the good old times when “Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass."

Subscribe to my posts #

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