Travelling light, doing stuff
2026-08-19 07:09
I'm travelling light at the moment. Have a laptop, phone, couple of books, running and swimming gear and a few days of clothes. I'm staying at family and friends homes. Very generous of them. Comfortable living too. Not just a couch. Spare rooms, whole floors with kitchenettes, house sitting even while the owners travel. I'm very grateful.
Sometimes their kids come and wake me up, wanting to play blocks or sing me Johnny works with one hammer or my favourite Wash your face with orange juice. Turns out I'm pretty good with kids. Funcle they say. Typically shy kids aren't shy with me. A couple times little ~3 year olds have run up and grabbed my hand to cross a road or walk a trail, after only spending time with their clan for a day. There's been a few shoulder rides too. Mindful of sleep times so not to rile them up at the wrong times. Managed to avoid nappy changes so far. Funcle can come and go at the right times.
I haven't got a sim for my phone. Rolling with WiFi only, which is managing fine, and somewhat freeing. I have CoMaps for offline navigation, but I'm generally pretty good with following my nose.
I've found a nice running loop here in the city that skirts the Sydney harbour. I'm feeling new muscles getting a workout because of how flat and concreted the routes are. Haven't had a blowout yet.
Reading a lot more. Between William Gibson's sci-fi Idoru and Mark Douglas' non-fiction trading psychology classic Trading in the Zone. Have a couple of others in the pipeline I've found in street libraries and off fam's shelves.
Off to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas You Must Take Part in Revolution on Saturday. Intertwining runs with the sis, a bushcare volunteer session and hanging with the niece.
My TrueNAS and Raspi servers back in Queenstown went down on Sunday. No idea what happened. Didn't end up planning for this. I could get a friend to go reboot, but I'm not too phased. It means my Radicale calendar is offline, as is my FreshRSS feed and reader, my Gemini capsule and fit.zkbro.com.
More of an opportunity for me to test my tech flexibility really. I'll run a local Radicale calendar on my laptop. Been using my own blogroll on this site which is hosted on Neocities, instead of my RSS reader, as well as Blogosphere, Kagi Small Web, and the numerous aggregators in Gemini. The fit website is no big deal, but I haven't been happy with my setup there anyway (both how I rsync from the laptop to Raspi, and the style of it), so it may force me to give it some love and attention. In the meantime I'm using Runalyze to track my activities. There's some old laptops and phones floating around these parts which I may be able to utilise for something fun.
I'm being the family IT help desk while I'm about. Glad to help. Turns out I learnt some things at my last job that are very transferrable.
I'm taking my trading a bit more seriously, diving back into the documentation for AmiBroker while I continue placing my nightly systematic trades. My focus is to learn my software better so I can analyse my trades through the statistics reporting, tax, which I've largely ignored til now, and risk management concepts.
I watched my old NRL team Manly get flogged at Brooky oval last week. Despite the result it was still a fun evening and good to be back at the battleground. It was me, 2 mates and 6 kids, which was a different experience to 20 years ago.
I just felt like getting some things down with no real objective. And that is that.