zkbro

🗓️ Weeknote 2024-W46

2024-11-17 18:11

Some random front-of-mind pieces from my week.

🏢 Work - Pretty big one here. Wrapped up my final week at Council. I've been there 6 years in two different roles, so had built a lot of relations around the organisation. I was completely humbled by the turnout for drinks and all the genuine well-wishes, thank-yous and "don't leaves!". I will bank this time in my memory as it put to rest all that negative self talk about how I was useless and shit. Clearly it was all in my head and was right in the end that it was just a dis-alignment of interests, values, environment and sensitivities.

Worst possible time for this, but I got really sick the week prior which flowed into Monday and Tuesday as well. This caused some last minute shuffles of expected outputs for wrapping up my projects, but in the end got to a good middle-ground. I don't know what's going on with me being sick all the time recently, but I sure hope it fucks off soon.

I'm straight into my new job tomorrow and I'm pumped. I'll be offsiding with a couple of the team while I upskill and finish some online study. It's been 20 years since my last trade job. The biggest challenge on my mind at the moment is what to pack for lunch and snacks! My last one as landscaper I ate pretty bad buying burgers, hot chips and cokes a lot of the time. It was before my running days. Now I'm fitter and broker so need to eat well on the cheap and keep my energy levels up, compared to sitting at a desk. I'll figure it out.

🏃 Ran zilch again. Still sick. Queenstown marathon was on yesterday. Was lots of fit bods around all week. Lots of excitement.

🚴 Rode 29km - Managed a commute to work.

💇‍♂️ I paid for a haircut and feel a million bucks. First in a few years (I usually shave my head a number 2 all over).

🌱 I was gifted a couple of tomato plants so put them in the greenhouse. Planted another crop of spring onions, rocket and mesclun. Harvesting a bunch of silverbeet and carrots to make room for other things. Allotment is going nuts. Need to put in some potatoes!

🖌️ Feeling artsy so I've bought some water colour pencils and been drawing on scraps of paper at the breakfast table. My drawings are horrible, but it's a good way to spend 15 minutes each morning. I just draw things that come to mind, usually copying something off my phone. I want to make a zine of these so I can contribute to the new zine library at the library. Hopefully by setting the bar low others will get inspired to contribute to the library.

💻 I've deleted Windows! Now running Alpine Linux with the Xfce DE. I probably chose one of the harder distros, especially for my skill level, however I'm finding it a shotgun approach to upskilling on Linux and command line utilities, so after initially having my doubts and thinking about going back to Ubuntu, I pushed through and am gaining confidence.

I chose Alpine because:

the name is cool
it's lightweight

That's it.

The laptop does not make a sound now, so I think it appreciates the lack of bloatware that comes with Microsoft. It was not an easy setup, failing with KDE Plasma before moving to Xfce (I think I forgot to install xorg or one of the other prerequisites). But now I'm getting comfortable. I've had to make some sacrifices (adjustments) though, and been taking some notes on the experience.

I'll admit I tried to give up and create a bootable USB with another distro, but couldn't figure out how to do it from Alpine (using my older laptop which is also Alpine). I usually use rufus from Windows which is super easy, though on Alpine I'm pretty limited. I tried dd, Ventoy and Unetbootin with the likes of parted but failed on all of them! I think at Christmas I'll setup a couple of USBs with rufus on my family's computers as a just-in-case.

💻 Website

Utilised line-spacing and borders on my inline code highlights to avoid overlapping colours and stuff. Thanks to Chris for the guidance.
Had to fix my configs for RSS to work from Alpine given I'm running an earlier version of Zola now.
Not much else as I've just been trying to set up Alpine again, also I can't use VS Code so doing all this in the terminal with helix has been a little slower.

💻 Tools