My first month of unemployment was, in ways, not great! A few more hardships than I’m used to.

RIP Cecil

We made the hard decision to euthanize my poor baby buddy Cecil on June 18th. His kidneys were in such severe failure and it wasn’t looking like he was getting better. Our other two cats had what I could call a blood feud with him so they’re unaffected and unaware of his passing so no extra grief there.

Related to pet health, we took Bub all the way out to the Mizzou veterinary hospital to have an echocardiogram done in order to investigate a heart murmur that was detected back in January. The doctor came back after a few hours to tell us that they didn’t detect a murmur at all; his left ventricle and aorta (the important ones?) were fine, his heart was a normal size, he’s healthy as can be. 5 hours in the car and ~$500 down the hole. Main takeaway: perhaps get a second opinion if facing a substantial vet bill.

Also related to the also related above, the only place we could get refered to for this echocardiogram was Mizzou or Vetrinary Speciality Services (the hospital we had to take Cecil to). Both had multiple month waiting periods to get an appointment. We’ve got severe issues with healthcare in this country but at least there’s more than one place nearby to get service. VSS is also the only building in all of east central Missouri that I know of that is open for emergencies on the weekend. I’m not saying that there needs to be a 24/7 animal hospital on every corner, I’d just like more than one maybe.

Anyway, I miss him. He was a good cat.

Job hunting

As of today, I have put in 16 applications; 2 have lead to interviews, no jobs. The doomers at /r/cscareerquestions would have you belive that I’m not even trying to get a job and that 16 is what I should be doing every day, not every week. I was too accustomed to the pre-covid environment where I couldn’t go a week without recruiters contacting me with positions. It’s a new world and I’ll need to switch up my style to adapt.

Site updates

Twitter has continued it’s death rattle by introducing rate limits and that change is really accelerating the conversation on what comes next. My current belief is that the ideal internet resembles one of the 90s where people hosted their own sites and took ownership of their own content instead of relying on some other platform. With your site and content in place, you can then utilize forums/comment sections/social media to drive traffic to your writing, along with it being indexible by search engines as long as they’re still useful and not spitting out just LLM generated results. This site, alongside existing as a competency check for “hey I can ssh into a VPS and tell nginx to serve up some html”, is my attempt at keeping that dream alive. To further that ethos here I have implemented an RSS feed for all blog posts written here. The RSS spec stays true to its name; it’s really simple. The elixir code to convert the posts into XML for the feed ended up at about 15 LOC. I’m using a library to convert the elixir maps into xml of course but I’m still impressed by how much I can get done in so few lines. I’ve checked the RSS feed for my site in thunderbird and it seems to be working as intended. I’ll probably improve it in the future to make use of more of the spec.

I have also upgraded the site to Phoenix 1.7 so that I can make use of the verified routes sigil ~p. It is much more intuitive than the routes helper methods that had come before it and I plan on replacing the other links sometime later in the future.

Creation

I cannot let mental rust build up so I’m using my time to write some code that’ll do something useful for me. I also feel that I’d probably have better shots at jobs if I can change my “I have experience in something resembling react” answer to “Here’s something I made in react”. I have begun work on a replacement for a certain recipe manager/grocery list app that I use nearly daily. I believe this is a big enough project to display non-trivial skills while still being small enough in scope that I can get it out at a reasonable time. The frontend will be in react using vite to build, the backend will of course be elixir since that’s my whole thing, and I’ll also throw in some k8s (by way of k3s, don’t wanna get too crazy with it) as an additional overkill-but-doing-it-to-learn bonus step. I’m sure I’ll need that experience once I finally get started on home automation/media server stuff.

Consumption

After Cecil died I was feeling pretty crappy so I decided to play some video games (more than usual) to take my mind off of things. Here are my collected thoughts on what I played since his death:

• Fortnite

  I am too old (32 years old btw) for this game. I was never good at the shooting or building mechanics and they’ve only gotten more nuanced since the last time I played about 4 years ago. Big props to the account system there for keeping the account linked to my nintendo account active so that I didn’t have to go through the sign up process again.

• Pokemon Unite

  This is the most unserious MOBA game in existance. I played exactly 3 matches online before I deleted the game. Each match was nowhere close to a challenge and I was able to get the highest score out of either team each time. I don’t know if they were doing a Gears of War-style online handicap that allowed me to win effortlessly or if my chosen pokemon’s (Slowbro) high position on the page for the first result when you google search “pokemon unite tier list” would suggest an imbalance to the metagame. I’m not going to think about it too hard.

• Gems of War

  Another game that I have not played for years but the updates this one has received have shocked me. It seems like the number of gatcha mechanics has doubled since the last time I played. There’s even an auto-play feature now in case you didn’t actually want to think about moves anymore and just wanted a sort of slot machine experience. I remembered why I stopped playing; I had reached the point in the game where you could not progress your character’s advancement without engaging with the gatcha mechanics a LOT more. The enemies up until that point are fairly trivial and once they get to your level, you have no choice but to agree to manage like 30 different currencies and timers. No thank you.

• We Love Katamari Reroll

  Delightful as always. I am upset that while there is an option to revert to old textures, the level select people do not say their lines from the ps2 version. I specifically remember the red panda level person beckoning you to “Save the pandas”, now everyone just says something resembling a “hey” or “oy”. Keita Takahashi has a new game coming out that looks adorable.

• Hades

  Somehow the switch account system would not allow me to resume my old playthrough of Hades so I had to restart on Maddie’s account. It’s still a great game although I’m getting hand pains just thinking of how much button mashing I do. In my previous playthrough I had made it to the Hades fight but had not defeated him but I’ve beat him like 6 times now. High recommend.

I have also picked up the book The Dawn of Everything by Graber and Wengrow. It’s pretty good so far, I hope I like it better than Graber’s other famous work, Bullshit Jobs (it should have stayed an essay instead of becoming a D&D bestiary for types of guys in an office)