January 3, 2020

Work

Back in work after a long and confusing Christmas. Trying to carry across as many holidays into 2020 as I could meant that I was working a day here and a day there. Which is the worst kind of working. Can’t get into the flow of anything. Good excuse for catching up on training though.

Personal

Just before the new year, I came up with an idea for a personal project – a web application – that wouldn’t take too long. So first I tried flexing my rusty Flask muscles and omfg that thing has gotten so baffling and not pleasant to use. It used to be the simplest framework for banging together an application that would have three or four views. But now you’re funnelled down this road of Blueprints and it’s all gotten a bit notions-y because honestly, if I’m writing something that requires me to run multiple “blueprints” at once, I’m just going to rewrite it in Django. Which is exactly what I did. Scrapped the 8 hours of work I did in Flask and got more written in one hour with Django.

Oh and my daughter managed to catch Chickenpox on December 26th, which meant our house was pretty much in lockdown for the next week or so. She’s better now, but the winter sickness train continues full steam ahead. Choo choo!

Reading

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian gave me a goo for some Star Wars EU, so I’m re-reading Heir to the Empire and it’s still really, really great.

Playing

• Finished What the Golf? which sort of lost the run of itself a little at the end, but still found ways to be interesting and inventive. Glad it’s over though.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the new one, is really polished but the politics is pretty uh… interesting, (especially in the first few days of 2020). It’s got you fighting alongside a militia from a made-up *stan (which has a “Highway of Death”, so I guess it’s a stand-in for Iraq?) against the Russians. So it has this awful queasy Rambo III vibe.