I don’t always deploy code…
…But when I do, I deploy it to production
All posts by The Plaid Mentat
What are my good habits?
After my last post, I started thinking about what my good habits were. I could also write about my bad habits, but I find that bad habits are harder to think about because they can tend to be more subconscious. Also, I want to like writing, so I think I’ll write about my good habits instead.
Below, I’ve compiled some of what I think of as good habits. These are changes that I’ve made in my life that I hope have a net gain. How do I judge this? Well… …It’s completely subjective. It’s whether I think it’s a net gain, and that’s what matters to me right now. Feel free to disagree in the comments.
Habits
I’ve been thinking a lot about good habits lately. Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to cultivate more good habits. I know I’m getting older (not old yet), so I have felt the need to make myself a better person. However, it seems like the more good habits that I try to squeeze in, other things drop off, like it’s some sort of zero sum game.
For instance, I recently started taking the bus to and from work every day. This takes about twice as long as driving (-) but I save on gas (+), I get time to read while I’m on the bus (+), and get more exercise walking to/from the bus stop (+). However, it also has ripple effects – I haven’t been cooking at home as much, so we have been eating out more (-). Also the bus is on a fixed schedule, so I tend to stay late at work more often (-).
This isn’t so much an expression of frustration, so much as a recognition of where I am when I say to myself, “I want to make time to write.” This is an experiment – can I make time to write without giving up too much else? In this case, I’m giving up some of my reading time on the bus in the hope that I will be able to update my blog more often. The tradeoff, of course, is that it will take me longer to finish anything that I’m reading…
It Actually Paid Off
This past Sunday, I had one of those experiences that pretty much everyone dreads – I had a hard drive fail. However, it was also one of those days where all the prior preparations actually paid off. When I set up the archive disk on my server, I used a software RAID (level 1), so the data was duplicated across a second drive. Also, I had purchased a couple of other drives beforehand as “cold spares”. Even with all the preparations, it was still non-trivial to replace everything and get it running, so I thought I would document my experiences here.
Christmas in July
For Christmas last year, I did a lot of stuff with my 3D printer. For me, it’s a compromise between “hand made” and “doesn’t look stupid” because, well, I’m neither artistic nor very good at hand made. I never really got the chance to talk about them, as I ended up being very busy this spring, so I wanted to do a little show and tell since I had a bit of time to write. Here’s a brief selection of what I made:
…And I might as well play them
It’s been quite a while since I blogged, but I wanted to kick things off with a post about a new game that I got from a friend – StarDrive. This one has been on my steam wishlist for a while, but I’ve mostly been watching to see how it develops. However, I’m glad someone picked it up for me, because otherwise I might have missed out. Below is my impression learning the game, and my thoughts from 3 hours in.
On Rogue-likes
I picked up Torchlight II as part of the Steam summer sale (ah, yes, that was a while back), and I immediately reinstalled Titan Quest. Titan Quest is probably my favorite Rogue-like of all time, so has become a benchmark of how I think about them. Now that I’ve played Torchlight II a bit, I thought I would take a stab at some of the things that I like about various Rogue-likes, in particular: Diablo II (with Lord of Destruction), Titan Quest (with Immortal Throne), Torchlight II, and Path of Exile.
The Butcher’s Hound
Since I ended the fall with a winning record with Zerkova (5/1), I decided I would get the Conquest colossal. However, one thing that always bothered me about the Conquest was that it didn’t have any axes. I actually prepared this about a year ago when the Conquest was announced, and picked up a couple of extreme axes from the Privateer Press store. The result is the model below (not at all painted, but ready at least to show):
Math Distraction
A short distraction for my math readership:
What is the smallest integer n > 0, for which 9n and 9n+1 have the same number of digits?
This came upon me at work the other day, and while I came up with a solution, I started thinking about other ways one might tackle this problem. So I’m posing it to you, how would you attempt to solve this problem? What about a general solution to find all n that satisfy this critera? I’ll post my solution at some point, but I really want to know how other people would think about it.
Gun Carriage
A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and decided that I was going to paint my Gun Carriage – the Khador battle engine. I was fully aware of its size, but I was somewhat unprepared for all the little details that Privateer Press had managed to fit into that large size, so it took me quite a bit longer than I expected to finish.