I bought some new keyboards

July 5, 2025  ⚙️

I go to Melbourne a couple times a year, for work. It’s where our HQ is, and it’s good to have time in person with my colleagues. It used to be that most of this time was spent at big tables or in front of whiteboards. There’s still quite a lot of that, but the past two or three times I was in Australia, I spent a much larger chunk of time at a desk, programming. Surely not the majority of my time, but enough time that I cared about the ergonomics. So, last time I was there, I dug through the spare hardware cupboard and put together the best workstation I could. It was… not great. Fortunately for me (in one sense, anyway), one of my colleagues was on leave. I boldly appropriated his desk, which was much better hardware than my scavenging had gotten me. The thing that I ended up grumbling about, though, was the mouse and keyboard.

rjbs in Rio, part ⅲ

July 2, 2025  ✈️

I’d had four days in Rio so far (and one in Miami, better left unmentioned). I had covered lots of ground for things I wanted to see, and also lots of things I didn’t know I should see. I had eaten so, so much cassava. I had lots of things left unseen, lots of food left uneaten, and just about two days left to fill. I think I made good use of my time, but I definitely left things to do… next time?

rjbs in Rio, part ⅱ

July 1, 2025  ✈️

After a rocky start, I had two great days in Rio, leaving me about four days of vacation. This meant lots more walking around, a little more beach, a bunch more food (70% cassava, 20% pork, 10% other), more forró music, and not enough caipirinhas. If you didn’t read “rjbs in Rio, part ⅰ”, you should start there.

rjbs in Rio, part ⅰ

June 30, 2025  ✈️

So, I went to Rio de Janeiro! It was great, and it’ll probably take me several entries to sufficiently cover the trip. Here we go!

my problems with CP2077 (and lots of RPGs)

September 28, 2024  🎲 ⚔️

When Cyberpunk 2077 was announced, I was really excited. The teaser for it looked exactly like the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG that I’d like so much when I was a kid. When it came out, I tried it and it was a mess. Later, I heard they worked out lots of the problems, and I went back and I’ve been playing it. It still looks just about perfect, and gets lots of things right. It feels like a really good adaptation of Cyberpunk 2020. There are a lot of bugs and interface issues, still, but I don’t want to write about those, because it’s boring.

I still like printing code listings

July 12, 2024  🧑🏽‍💻

I used to program on paper, then type it in later. Not all the time, but sometimes. Sometimes I’d write pseudocode. Sometimes I wrote just the code I would type in later. Sometimes just flow charts and subroutine signatures. These days, I only really do the last version, because I always have a computer nearby now. I’m not stuck in a boring lecture, for example, with only a legal pad.

trying to cope with Slack's BlockKit

June 30, 2024  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

The other day, a concatenation of circumstances led me to thinking about the lousy state of sending formatted text to Slack. We have a bot called Synergy at work, and the bot posts lots of content. Mostly it’s plain text, but sometimes we have it send text with bold or links. This is for a couple reasons. Our bot supports channels other than Slack (like SMS and Discord and the console), so we can’t express everything in Slack-oriented terms. But even doing so would be hard, because of the APIs involved.