Rui CarmoI’ve reached peak Summer break. Or close enough.
After a week mostly zoning out with a cold and another by the seaside, I have finally tuned out from news, technology and sundry and am churning through Sci-Fi books at a fair clip, which I estimate at roughly 1.6 books every 2 days (I have been mostly catching up on Ben Bova, but Alastair Reynold’s Eversion was a quite remarkable read that I thoroughly recommend).
As anticipated, the Mi Stick made a good account of itself and provided a few nice family evenings watching our favorite shows, although I should point out that it doesn’t have the best Wi-Fi reception1. But it speaks volumes that it was the piece of technology I interacted with the most outside of my Kindle–and I think that’s the gist of things.
In between the war, the (apparently final) government policies on COVID (masks are out in September 5th, something I will eventually write about) and the sheer need to just unwind and have a better break than last year, I ended up doing very little at all until now.
And all the personal projects I hoped to have time for have actually been put on indefinite hold.
In essence, I just tried to forget about everything that has been going on for the past few years and focused on having a decent holiday. And so far, 70% of it has been pretty fine.
Someplace at the back of my mind the realization I will have to go back to work is encroaching, but at this point I honestly can’t remember what I was doing before I left–as is becoming usual, I removed both Outlook and Teams from my home screen2 and put my work machines in a closet, so after the first couple of days I had nothing to remind me of work, and no reason to consider it.
As far as technology at large is concerned I expect I’ll be spending a few hours futzing about with Stable Diffusion and re-arranging my RSS feeds to keep track of similar topics, but right now I’m perfectly happy with my books and the weather, which is actually slightly cooler than usual.
I find all this quiet somewhat odd, actually. It might grow on me.
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I have unusually good Wi-Fi coverage at home, but less so on the AirBnB we stayed at, and even though I usually carry a tiny OpenWRT router when traveling, it’s not that good a repeater. ↩︎
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I actually off-loaded Teams at one point, since I was getting fed up with random notifications and it felt so much more satisfactory to squish it out of my phone than merely logging off. ↩︎