As predicted, it’s been a busy week. Eddie is doing much better and so I’m hopeful that this week will run a little smoother, because juggling everything we needed to do with no childcare was super tiring.

I’m also not sick anymore, which is fabulous. Still feeling a little chesty, but it’s definitly just residual now rather than actually part of the illness.

Phoebe and Elliots joint part went really well. 42 kids in total, plus parents, and I think, everyone had a good time. We hired a science themed kids party entertainerr, and watching all their reactions as this guy set his hand on fire with a mixture of washing up liquid, water and butane was hilarious.

We were up until the small-hours for both of the previous two nights making a giant overflowing conical flask of a cake based on a picture that Phoebe drew.

Sadly I didn’t weight the finished cake, but it was heavy. Turns out we gauged about right on the size too - We had neithr too much, nor too little left over. Enough for us to have a sneaky bit of cake with lunch for a few days, but not enough that I’m going to resent eating it, or worry about it affecting my weight!

I took Friday as holiday from work. Mostly for a bit of pressure relief from the relentlessness of the week. I’ve been meaning to explore NixOS for a while and having the day off meant that I didn’t feel guilty for sneaking a couple of hours to myself while Eddie was napping. So, I switched my Thinkpad to NixOS.

I spent about 30 minutes installing NixOS from the minimal iso, and prompting Claude Code to convert my existing Mitamae based configuration management and dotfile setup to a nixOS repo, with most of my setup in a flake, and using home-manager for my dotfiles.

And then I spent the rest of my two hour window actually getting the code to work on my hardware, reading a lot of manuals and fixing all of the clown-shoes code that Claude had generated.

So now I have a nixOS powered laptop that I can modify and update, that mostly looks and feels like the Arch system it replaced.

Unfortunately, then the boy woke up, so I haven’t had chance to actually formulate any coherant thoughts about what I think of it yet.

Maybe when I buy a phone I can fill the weeknote void with NixOS crap.

I’ve been broadly obsessed with two new-to-me bands this week. 國 (Kuni), who just released their first album, Kids Return, last month and it’s an absolutely brilliant alt-rock banger. It gives me hard mid-90’s throwback vibes and I love it.

The other is another Japanese band Crazy Blues, who I think only have a couple of short e.p’s out right now, but make super chilled out, dreamy, shoegaze adjacent pop-rock and I am really enjoying it. If these folks could sort out an album release by next years RubyKaigi that would be great.

I’m in this kind of mood a lot lately so if you have any recs, feel free to hit me up on Mastodon or Last.fm.