2022 has been routinely weird… Which is worrisome that the weird is becoming routine.
Once again I didn’t really go anywhere; thanks to the one-two punch of covid and crap economy it’s been several years now since I really left the house for more than dozen hours. The sad thing is I’m getting used to it.
I did pick up a bleeding edge MacBook Pro early in the year, and that has proven to be money well spent. As I mentioned in a previous post, I pretty much live out of this laptop eighteen hours a day. It also has all of the hardware-level encryption and biometric security I need to allow me to leave work with it… With the laptop I also relented and moved back to an iPhone mostly for the GPS enabled camera and iCloud photo support, but also to work on some SwiftUI / Xcode stuff that went pretty well.
In August I traded in the overly sensible Nissan Kicks I acquired last year as a hold-me-over until the new “Z” came out in 2022 – it still hasn’t – on the hemi-powered Chrysler 300-S I’d been eyeballing for over a decade. This has also been money well spent so far; the car is really entertaining and just caveman-technology enough to be fun to work on. I’ve hacked it quite a bit electronically and mechanically, and probably totally voided the warranty, but such is life in the modern world.
Work-wise it’s just another year filled with hijinks I can’t talk about for projects I can’t talk about related to clients I can’t talk about. I’ve done hardware design work for some mechanical test harness stuff, lots of coding for everything from script-based user-modeling to routine application development for in-house stuff, and a metric ton of wild and wooly network engineering to support isolated offline testing of cloud-based stuff.
I love my job, I just wish I could talk about it more.
Other than that, the latest expansion for World of Warcraft came out a couple of weeks back and I’ve been having an absolute blast with it in my scant free time. It’s really the only “game” I’ve had much truck with this year – other than Second Life of course. Second Life isn’t so much a game for me though as much as it’s a weird hybrid of a script engine, Blender, and Photoshop that I use to kill time creatively.
Anyway, I hope your 2022 was at least passable, and here’s to hoping both of our 2023s are truly excellent!
Listening to "Nightland" by Droid Bishop