Happy New Year (Weeknotes

Highlights

Here are the highlights from week 1 (January 1–7) of 2024.

🧺 Spent New Year’s Day holiday doing laundry and packing for the upcoming trip and enjoying the fact that I didn’t have to go back to work on the 2nd.

⌨️ I purchased an Apple Magic Keyboard for my iPad. It seems stupid expensive but I like the form factor and it just plain works. I don’t use my iPad as a laptop, but having a keyboard comes in handy for travel. It’s heavier than I expected, but so far that hasn’t been an issue.

⚙️ Updated my now page automation scripts (yes again) so that now all the logic is contained in a single Lambda Function. The code is at least a bit more robust now, and I got rid of some of the redundancies that were present in the multi-function design. Also made it so categories are determined on the fly rather than from a preset list.

✈️ Started our trip to Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands. I’ll post more about it soon, but for now I’ll say this. I had the privilege of spending the first full day of my first visit to South America with a very interesting man named Eduardo. He introduced me to some of the rich cultural and biological diversity of Ecuador. I am very grateful to him.

The Week in Entertainment

• Watched a few more episodes of The Bear. I’m still not sure where this show is going, but I’m beginning to really enjoy it anyway.

• Single All the Way was an enjoyable if predictable Christmas movie. Well okay I guess that’s redundant. It’s basically a Hallmark Christmas movie but with actors you’ve heard of.

• Happiest Season another decent yet predictable movie—also in the vein of Hallmark Christmas movies, but with lesbians.

• The Santa Clause 2 and The Santa Clause 3 were not as good as the first two, but now I’m ready to watch the series.

• The Holdovers - I expected to like this movie (or at least I assumed I would) and I did, but the plot and ending actually surprised me. Pretty great movie.

As always, be excellent to each other.