Now
This is a space to explain what's going on in my life right now. These are things which I don't think need their own blog post, nor are things which have the right home/dumping-ground on any of my social media accounts.
Many of the musings or ideas on this page are either only on the surface-level or half-baked.
Hump day curiosity dump
This was meant to come out on Wednesday, 12 April. But work was unexpectedly chaotic, so I wasn't able to push this out until the 13th!
I'm thinking of doing a once-a-week series of interesting things I found on the internet. Since it's a Wednesday, let's call this series the Hump Day Curiosity Dump!
Today's videos are all engineering related:
- Tom Scott takes a look at a one-man hovercraft project.
- NASA is finally going to build nuclear-powered rocket engines!
- A look to the past in early UI/UX in the Apple Lisa.
"Oh, I'm working on a side project", I exclaim for the millionth time.
For the last five-or-so years I've been telling people I've been working on some side projects. Well, it's literally been one(-ish) project this entire time. For five years.
Honestly I conceptualised a very, very vague version of what I'm working on now back during my internship at National Australia Bank in 2018. It's an idea that's evolved through the years:
- The user experience has shifted dramatically over time.
- It has been partially implemented, scrapped, and re-implemented at least 2-3 times now.
- It has grown from a one-purpose SaaS into a full-blown workspace-like experience, and back into a one-purpose thing.
As of March 2023 I honestly thing it's finally going somewhere - there's finally a cohesive vision and purpose. I was a little too picky about getting everything perfect from the beginning, but now I think it's only possible to make the right decisions by giving them a go first.
And no, I will not be broadcasting what this project is just yet!
Tags: projectswebdevproductivityEras are out, montages and vignettes are in.
Spotify has somewhat broken my ability to have a favourite artist. I used to have phases where one or two particular bands or singers I really enjoyed listening to on repeat defined my music tastes.
Prior to embracing music streaming (and curated recommendations) as my default way of listening to music, I had my Beatles, Coldplay, Radiohead, and The National eras. And by eras, I mean I only ever wanted to listen to music of the exact same style. That usually just meant sticking to listening to that same artist's entire discography front-to-back, back-to-front.
Fun fact: back in high school I was in band club - my first band hated me because they were in their Linkin Park and Green Day phase while I was still in my Beatles phase; my second band got sick of my growing fascination with Radiohead's Kid A.
These days, I may listen to a lot of a handful of artists at any given time. It's no longer the case that they would define the entirety of what I'm listening to at the time. I'm absolutely loving the transcendant stoner rock of Queens of the Stone Age; but I'm also really leaning into Do Nothing who have this unexplainable subtle unorthodoxy to their lyrics and musical arrangements.
Tags: music