The Advent of Code is upon us once again. Every year Eric Wastl weaves together a daily series of clever challenges into a delightful story. They can be solved in any language and method you want, including brute force, and I look forward to it every December.

Which is an odd thing to say maybe considering I’ve never made it further than a dozen days in. It just seems like every year the work project I’m on catches fire and needs my full attention and my drive to work on coding challenges for fun just fizzles out.

I’m fully expecting it to be true this year, too. I just started a new project this week, and the whole reason I’m here is they are short-staffed and under the gun to deliver a fully functional robot in three months, if not sooner. I’ve already accepted the fact that it’s going to ratchet up the pressure over the next few weeks and not loosen up for the holidays. I’m ok with that.

Still, I’m ready. I’ve been wanting to loosen my reliance on GitHub (same as I’m loosening my reliance on Twitter, Instagram, etc.) so this was the perfect time to try out Gitea. Programming is surprisingly social (especially coding challenges like AoC) so I spun up git.kestrelsnest.social and created a placeholder repo for my 2022 solutions. When the first puzzle lands at midnight, I’ll be ready to go.

And if I only make it three days, that’s ok.

It was a day full of good things. Here they are, in chronological order:

• read two chapters of Dan Moren’s book “The Bayern Agenda” while drinking coffee in the hot tub before work
• the things that didn’t work in my new project yesterday started working
• attended my first standup with my new teammates
• ate a delicious chicken pot pie for lunch
• returned a library book that was six years overdue and wasn’t charged a fine
• voted in the senate runoff election
• got a delicious dirty spiced chai
• installed gitea at git.kestrelsnest.social and initialized a repo for Advent of Code
• made buffalo chicken legs for dinner
• took my youngest to their first rehearsal of a neighborhood brass band based on a poster I saw stapled to a telephone pole
• ate leftover pecan pumpkin pie
• watched several episodes of Taskmaster and had quite a few good laughs

A good day indeed.

Postscript: It occurred to me right after posting that this could have been titled “Is the ketamine working? Signs point to yes.” More on that later, no doubt.

As a software developer that gets loaned out to other companies, I tend to have quite a few “first day on the job” days. Today was one of them, joining a team working hard to get a new bio-lab robot on the market.

As is typical with joining a new project, I spent the entire first day trying to figure out why nearly nothing in the README actually worked.

Computers are the worst.

I used to be a prolific blogger, back in the very early days of the form. Had a few things “go viral” before that was a thing, meaning they were seen and talked about by dozens of people, but I was comfortably C-list in that small world.

As my online time got eaten up by other things, like farming and starting a family, my posts became shorter and less frequent and eventually just … stopped. Instead of using my own space to keep my words, I unconsciously switched over almost exclusively to a hot new microblogging platform started by some podcasting tooling developers called Twttr.

Twitter’s very short character limit made it ideal for the short bits I was writing anyway, and it was easy to write them more often. This only increased the ephemeral quality of them and I didn’t even notice really that I was just creating a gap in my once exhaustively documented life. I’ve got all my tweets downloaded and stored away, but they’re not something I can really go back and read. Those years are essentially lost to me.

But now an egomaniacal billionaire troll has taken over and is systematically destroying Twitter and that has shocked me awake. It’s well past time to start owning my words again and, more importantly, treating them like they matter and kept and displayed and shared.

So, here’s Kestrel’s Nest back from the dead.

I’m using Hugo to power it, displayed using the m10c theme. I might charge all that, and this is certainly a rough draft, but it’s a good place to start.

For a laugh, I used a page from February 2001 from my old blog here as a placeholder. I thought about making this style match that exactly, but if I go that route I’ll do it another day. It’s here if you want to have a laugh too.

Just stopping by to note that it’s been over a year since I wrote anything here. Huh. All my action these days is on Twitter (and echoed on my right sidebar under the old musty photos).

Just popping in to say that the Food Network deadline was extended again, to November 15. I think the reason is the unexpected departure of Mario Batalli from the network. As one of the Iron Chefs, they needed to replace him. Which they’re doing with a show very similar to “The Next Food Network Star” – “The Next Iron Chef”. Which makes me wonder… do I want to win, now that I won’t be a colleague of Mario’s? Yeah. Yeah I do.

When I made the video, the deadline was July 31, and I pretty much had to throw the video together over a weekend. Then, the deadline was extended to September 1st. Just now, I see it has been extended again to mid October. So, more waiting.

I got some great feedback on my video, and I’ve made another cut to reflect them. I inserted 11 seconds at the beginning to set up the local food idea (something I’d cut out earlier in the editing), and to make up for that time I trimmed 11 seconds in several bits throughout the rest of the video. The result is a better story, but with maybe slightly less production quality. It’s supposed to be amateur, and the story is paramount, so I’m OK with that. What’s this for again? Think “American Idol”, only with cooking instead of singing. Hopefully “instead”, anyway. I’m not exactly known for my singing.

So, I’ve been watching “The Next Food Network Star” on (of all places) the Food Network, and I get to thinking, “Hey – I can do that better than they are!” And a little ad comes up saying that the network is now looking for contestants for the next season, and all it takes is a three minute video showing what I’ve got. And here it is. I’ve got a few more days to re-edit it if I want before submitting, but I’m rather happy with it just as it is. How about you? Would you watch my show? If you’re feeling adventurous, here’s anine and a half minute lightly edited first cut of the video.

Turns put to be very easy to write on the weblog from the iPhone. Does this mean I’ll write more? Don’t know, but it can’t hurt.