You may be wondering what I’m up to these days or months or years (I’m sure you’re not, but that’s OK). Well, I’m not going to try to sum up the last decade or so, because it’s both a lot and not much. Instead I’ll just note what I’ve been doing the past few months.

Work

A few years back I transitioned from regular full time work to contracting, and that has been really good for my mental and physical health because it’s easier for me to work when I want to work and the scope of my work is a lot more focused. Both factors mean I have more time to take care of myself.

Anyway, I’ve been tinkering with LLMs to write code for work (on a contract where I’ve been explicitly asked to use AI). It’s still kind of mind-blowing how well Claude works. I’m both excited and concerned about the future – excited to see what I can learn and concerned about the upcoming junior software developers. I’m using a mix of Cline (VSCode extension) and Claude Code.

The change to my work schedule has lead to more reading and activities (watching didn’t change much.)

Reading

I don’t remember when I first learned of John Scalzi but looking at my Goodreads profile it was probably some time in March 2024. I judged a book by its cover, which is always good advice, and picked up Starter Villain, a story about a guy who wasn’t doing so well inheriting a supervillain business. The book was a lot of fun and I absolutely recommend it.

Most recently I read When the Moon Hits Your Eye, a book exploring what might happen if the moon turned in to cheese. It’s really more a set of short stories than a single novel, and I loved it.

I’ll just list a few of the other books I read this year that I would recommend:

I guess I’m on a fantasy kick.

I’m currently reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, a story about the human world being replaced by a dungeon. It’s a fun read. I had a couple of concerns early on (I have some weird issues with specific word choices) but now that I’m in to the meat of the story I dig it.

Watching

My wife and I have been watching The Great North (on Hulu in the US), an animated series about a family living in Alaska, and we just started watching The Residence on Netflix, a mystery series about the death of the Chief Usher of the White House. Both are fun and funny.

We’ve also started a weekly viewing of the first season of Stargate SG-1 with some friends. My wife and I have watched everything Stargate and are big fans and we’re introducing it to some friends who haven’t seen it before. So far it’s been a good time.

Activities

I’ve been going to a bouldering gym nearby for about a year and a half. I haven’t gotten past V3/V4 (the gym uses the same color for both), which are routes that in my experience don’t require any special techniques – you can just use strength to get through them – but it’s still a lot of fun.

I’m trying once again to learn how to play chess properly. I don’t have much to say about this right now. I’m using Lichess and Chessbook to try to improve my rating from [redacted] to something reasonable.

Apps

I’ve been spending way too much time shitpostting on Bluesky.

Cats

That’s about it. Here’s a cat picture to round out the list.

A black cat on the left and a white/grey/brown cat on the right, laying on a tan blanket on a blue couch

We are serial cat owners, so every time one passes we adopt another one shortly after. We’ve had these two boys (Frankie and Murray) for about 1 year and I think 3-4 years, respectively.