This page answers the question "What are you up to?". Pages like this, commonly called Now Pages, have become popular among bloggers. I just named my version ".plan" because I'm old enough to have used the finger protocol.

Latest update: 2024-10-07

Making

For years, our team at freistilbox has been fighting a tangled mess of technical debt, and it’s finally looking like we’ll have caught up Real Soon Now™. We’re going through all our Chef cookbooks adding support for current versions of operating systems and external dependencies. The fact that we’re running into very few issues in the process is a cause for optimism.

Over at Monospace Mentor, I finally managed to resolve a mental block related to how I will make course materials available to students. I decided to go the simple route of publishing them as raw Markdown files in a private Github repository, granting access to people who sign up. With the analysis paralysis gone, I’ve started writing lesson content. I’m hopping between different courses, depending on what catches my attention that day. But my main focus is on a Linux course for software engineers.

Doing

I’m glad that I finally found a Karate club nearby. The days when I’m doing karate again are the highlights of my weeks.

Thinking

Being “productive” is a constant struggle for me. For many months now, I’ve found it very difficult to muster the energy to get on with my work. And I can’t think of a reason for it, since an amazingly large part of my work is made up of things I like and enjoy. I’ll keep digging deeper on this problem hoping I’ll eventually find its root.

Playing

I let my World of Warcraft subscription lapse a few months ago. Everything except playing with my guild mates just felt like a chore. On Saturday, I resubscribed solely for the reason that the guilds I had been participating in over the years held a memorial for a fellow player who died of cancer far too young. Sad occasion to come back. But now that I have a month of play time, I’ll see if Blizzard made enough improvements to the new expansion to entice me back into the game. I’m not going to lie, I’d love to raid with my guild again.