Weekly notes 44/2024
Table of Contents
Thumbnail image: Luna Park Sydney is a heritage-listed amusement park at Milsons Point. It is one of Sydney’s most famous landmarks.
What’s been happening #
-
It was my oncall week, so I couldn’t do much since my oncall shift runs for the whole week during business hours. It was fairly quiet for the most part except for one incident that happened midweek. While the actual underlying systems themselves were functioning normally, the exporters on each of these systems crashed, causing our alerting systems to raise many, many alerts. I wrote up a small brief about the problems and published it to the team that runs and maintains the alerting infra with suggestions on what can be done to make the life of an oncall person easier.
-
We’re flying back to India this weekend! We will be on a two-week vacation - Jo’s cousin brother is getting married and we’ll be heading home to attend it. I’m looking forward to disconnecting and not having to think about work for a couple of weeks. I’ll try to have the weekly notes published during this time but no promises! Unlike my previous visits, I won’t be spending any time in Bangalore as most of my time will be spent in Mangalore. Jo & I will be in Bangalore and stay at the airport hotel a day before flying back to Sydney, so I might try to sneak in a meet with someone or the other.
-
The new gym is going pretty well. I changed my membership to 2x PT a week for the first six weeks. I’ve been pretty happy with my trainer and having him give a bit of personalized advice has been pretty good. I’ve cut down on a lot of snacks and sweets, counting calories and… still haven’t dropped much weight. That’s fine, I can feel my overall health improving. With CPAP, my sleep has improved quite a lot, and with the gym I don’t feel fatigued as much. I’ll be going to the gym this week and suspending my gym membership while I’m in India.
-
Along with the gym, we’ve been doing a bit of walking especially in the evenings. I took my Insta 360 Go 3S with me and made this small walk-vlog. I might consider doing more in the future! Give it a view.
-
North Sydney Festival is a small day-long festival and party to celebrate the arrival of the new Sydney Metro Victoria Cross station that was held on Saturday. We went over to check it out after our guitar class and grocery shopping from the Produce Market. There were several stalls and entertainment stations for kids and adults. We didn’t spend a lot of time since it was raining but we did stick around for a set of live music performed by The Toothpicks who were pretty good.
What we ate #
We went to Westfield Chatswood to do some shopping for the summer season and upcoming trip to India. It was around lunchtime, so we decided to head to Lamb & Cumin. This tiny little place is the corner of the sprawling Westfield Chatswood food court and they have some amazing lamb skewers. The meat is really nice and juicy and it comes as either lean cuts (the lamb minus the fatty bits) or as the classic cut. Jo doesn’t like the fatty bits and so goes for the lean cut while I prefer the classic version. You can have it as a mean with some carrot salad and chips, or just the skewers itself. Would highly recommend giving a visit here if you’re looking for a really good fast grill place.
Music of the Week #
It’s amazing how many musicians/bands that I used to listen to long back I realize now are Australian. Today’s music of the week comes from Dustin Tebbutt, a Sydney based folk rock musician’s lovely song Give Me Tonight.
Link of the week #
Josh Kwan does videos of his bicycle rides across Sydney - and they’re good to watch. Check out his his video of a new series called drive by series.
Subscribe to my posts #
Till next week. If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider sharing it via the links below and subscribing to the blog. You can subscribe via email using Substack. If you prefer RSS/news readers, you can click here for the feed link. If you prefer to follow only my weekly notes, here’s the RSS feed for the Weekly Notes series.