I don’t take the Goodreads “reading challenge” too seriously, but I did hit my target last year, and it felt good. I thought I’d try again this year and I did get it done – only just, though, as I finished my last three books in the last two days of the year. I think I would’ve liked to read a bit more through the year, but sometimes I just wasn’t feeling it. So it goes! I think this is a “structure your time” problem, but also it’s not the most pressing thing on my agenda, you know?

It’s December, and I should’ve posted this in early November, but I didn’t. I did other stuff. Now, though, I’m on a long plane flight, so I guess it’s time to write a bit of bloggery. (Did I really never write up 2024? Well, maybe later.)

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

A few months ago, I wrote about a new 1Password library for Perl, which I was using to stop putting sensitive information into my environment. I was pretty happy with this! It meant I could put a pointer to my credentials in my configuration, instead of the credentials themselves.

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.

This post will be short but baffling.