Weekly notes 48/2024
Table of Contents
Thumbnail image: A foggy morning at St Leonards Park, one of North Sydney’s largest parks.
What’s been happening #
After a two week vacation, I’m back in Sydney. I took a day off on Monday since I landed by mid-day and by the time I reached home, it was around 1pm and was in no condition to work.
Speaking of work, we shifted to a new office space. The Trade Desk Sydney had two offices - one in Martin Place where I (and most engineers were working) and another office in Barangaroo (where most business folks would be working from). Now, we’ve all moved to a new location in Barangaroo, in the same building as before but on a different floor. The combined office is much bigger, quite a bit more airy and best of all, I get my fabulous Darling Harbour view back :D
This week, Jo and I also celebrated our 11th Wedding Anniversary. I’m usually away to Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent during our anniversary, but this time I decided to cancel my Las Vegas visit. We didn’t have a big celebration, but I wanted to go for a nice anniversary dinner. After a little bit of search and reading up on Good Food guide, booked a reservation to Genzo. Amazingly enough, the wedding website we had built still works, especially the timeline section which uses TimelineJS and Google Sheets. Need to move that to a JSON format and update the timeline to add more of our milestones!
Being back in Sydney means returning to our gym routines. Both Jo and I have enrolled in personal training at a nearby gym, and we have both been enjoying the training. Our trainers are really good - they pay good attention to us and always know how to push us to the edge with the right encouragement without making us self-conscious. There’s still plenty of work to do in terms of improving our fitness levels, but I’m pretty happy with my progress. I’ve been using Train Fitness to keep track of my workouts. Train Fitness automatically detects most of the workouts (especially for strength training) and has been quite accurate. Sure, you still need to enter the weights, but once entered it will remember the last ones. For now, it publishes to my Strava page; I will have to see how the app fares. We also returned to our guitar class. We missed three classes in between but were able to pick up after some practice.
What we ate #
As mentioned above, I decided to book a reservation at Genzo at Walker Street. The place is walking distance from our house and features funky lighting with some interesting food and drinks. The menu is quite limited but is good if you prefer the grilled skewers of meat. We ordered the choko karaage and candie mayonnaise. Not sure what was candied but was really good. For the mains, we didn’t order any large plates, just skewers of Chicken Thigh & Tokyo Onion, Chicken tskune, Pork belly & Apple teriyaki and Blackmore wagyu karubi, yuzu & wasabi leaf. All of the meats were cooked beautifully - really juicy and tender. For the mains we also ordered a Hiroshima style okonomiyaki. In comparison on the Osaka style okonomiyaki, the Hiroshima is more layered and has a messier look but was well done as well. The place was quite empty so you could probably get away with not getting a reservation in on a weekday. Would definitely visit again to check out the large dishes.
Our friends from the Guitar class had told us that a new Indian fusion place had opened up at Walker Street called ASAP Eats - so we went to check it out. Run by a Mumbai-based Sindhi family, they have an interesting menu of fusion food such taco paneer, vada bao(not a typo), avo corn bhel and a few others. I stuck to my pretty staple roti and paalak paneer combo. The roti was nicely done and the other food that we ordered was good as well. We spoke at length to the owners who were quite friendly. They mention they’re likely to open for breakfast dishes soon, so I am looking to try out some poha & and misal paav soon (thanks to Ninad for the frequent mentions of misal paav in discord).
Music of the Week #
Yoke Lore’s cover of Savage Garden’s Truly Madly Deeply is a nice tribute of the original.
Link of the week #
ChuggersLR builds Conway’s Game of Life using Transport Tycoon’s signals, trains, tracks and depots. This is an insane (and insanely devoted) video.
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.