Weeknote 2025-42

I updated this side to use latest Bridgetown release. It was surprisingly uneventful given how long it’s been since I touched this codebase. I still need to transfer most of my settings from the old Yaml based config to the new Ruby initializer API however. I’ll do that next week (maybe).

I’m still rough on how long I’ll keep up the weeknotes for this time. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to record and write these things, and even though I enjoy it, I am incredibly busy, as well as incredibly lazy.

Still, first one in over a year so I guess there’s a lot to catch up on.

I won a guitar in an online raffle a couple of weeks ago. It was very exciting and I am now the proud owner of a Gibson Les Paul Studio in Cherry Burst! It’s very nice, and I am enjoying it.

Unfortunately I now have enough guitars that need set-ups and fret work done (3) that paying a tech to do it would be very expensive. Instead, I bought some tools and watched a lot of YouTube videos.

This kind of hubris hasn’t ended well for me in the past.

Anyway, this week I levelled, dressed and polished the frets on my Telecaster and set it up with a fresh set of 11-52’s in D standard and I’m blown away by the difference it’s made. I’m very proud of myself.

I’m going to hold off on doing the Gibson until the current set of strings on it need changing, even though it’s strung with 9’s, which I don’t like very much, because I am still a little scared of going near an expensive guitar with a file and sandpaper.

Some of the parents of kids in P’s class at school started a run club, which I’m now a part of. We meet every Sunday morning at 6.30am and normally do between 5 and 10km.

I started running during the pandemic, but over the last year or so, with a new baby in the house I just haven’t had the time, and it’s fallen by the wayside. I’m trying to get back into it and lose some of the weight I’ve put on now that I’m a tired, sedentry, old man.

Enjoying the run club so far, or I would be if I hadn’t got ill right after the first run, and had to skip the following two.

I won’t lie, I’m finding it rough. But at least my ridiculous people-pleasing, self-shaming millenial brain is forcing me to actually push through. 80s/90s upbringing got to be good for something right?

Speaking of Sundays: I had an excellent day in London this Sunday. Arrived in the early afternoon and spent some time catching up with Tom. Then met up with Chris, drank beer, yelled at clouds and then generall put the world to rights for the rest of the afternoon/early evening, and finally went to see YOB at a venue in Dalston.

The weather was shit, but other than that it was a great day. Wonderful company, decent food, great beer and some strangely uplifting doom metal as a coda.

I’ve had a really annoying issue with my Emacs being slow. Opening files, using Magit, basically anything that seems to interact with the Filesystem has been lagging, and it’s driving me to distraction.

I think I finally tracked it down to the treesit-auto package. Which is kind of handy because I’ve been fighting some of Treesitter’s indentation rules for Ruby and wanted to go back to enh-ruby-mode anyway.

I stripped out treesit-auto, reverted to enh-ruby-mode and configured Treesitter manually for C, Rust and Python, which should cover about 95% of the programming I do anyway.

And the difference has been very pleasantly noticeable.

I’ll not be writing about any of the latest Ruby dramas. Just imagine me heaving the world’s largest fucking sigh and leave it at that.