Summer Break Blues

With summer break being nearly over, it’s now pretty obvious that it is not nearly enough time for even half the stuff I wanted to do. As an European I do enjoy my twenty-plus days of paid vacation, but this year I sorely needed to splurge. I did manage to have some fun…

Over the past few weeks, I managed to mostly forget about work and spent most of my waking hours relaxing, fiddling with 3D printers, traipsing through not one, but two versions of Hyrule¹ (as well as other games) and musing about various topics, most of which involved updating my notes in several pages:

• Minimalist coding stacks and computing (with a by now traditional peek at the Plan9 status quo, including Acme).
• Coding (and refactoring) various flavors of LISP for fun.
• Poking at Supercollider and my norns to figure out how to do some audio processing (music, low-level coding and MCUs are still a sweet spot for me).
• And keeping tabs on the AI hype while focusing on practicality whenever possible.

Besides the updates on all of those pages, this means there are quite a few early few drafts on many of the above topics–some of which will find their way here.

I also tried to catch up on (selected) TV (Moopsie!) and spent a lot of time reading on the beach and in the evenings. Altogether I think I read a book every three days on average (plus The Economist and a couple of manuals, which I don’t count as “books”). That’s pretty good considering the lack of enthusiasm for entertainment I was feeling earlier in the year.

Right now, however, my focus is on getting through this last weekend without falling into the temptation of cracking open my work inbox (or anything that might require me to ponder future intrusions into my personal time).