Week Note Ten - Cat Snuggles
Collect-a-vaccine
Within under a year of the national lockdown in the United Kingdom, the vaccine has been rolling out solidly since the beginning of the year and suddenly everyone was thinking "is this truly the end of the pandemic?". The distribution list starts at higher levels (the elderly - let's say levels okay?) before trickling down to the lower levels.
Until it was my turn, it was a shock to see the text from the local GP surgery and got offered a slot to have the first jab of Oxford-AstraZeneca. Afterwards, apart from having the classic 'sore arm', the next 24 hours was unreal. Ranging from quick little chills, headaches, sudden fatigue, randomly nodding off, and the aches was manageable. What was amusing was that saying the words was weirdly nearly impossible to do when switching to sign language was immediately identifiable.
The following day, everything was back to normal and suddenly surrounded with positivity for the future.
It's a glimmer ray of hope for 2021.
Visual Studio Code
Drifting back to VSC again after using the bigger editor, Visual Studio, the keyboard combinations has taken over the muscle memories and eventually gave in to use at home. After the announcement of the Apple Silicon, all eyes were on Microsoft to see how quickly they will release the universal binaries. VSC was available for M1 only via nightly releases and recently went stable to my liking. Again, the M1 loads everything in a blink of an eye which seems to be so natural now and it is a breeze to use.
Configuring editors seems to be everyone's favourite hobby which amuses me because of the 80/20 rule - are we really doing work (80%) where we constantly tweaking the look (20%)? Including of extensions overload which is not ideal, workspaces can deal with that easily if done right.
Microsoft deserves praises here for what they are doing with their software and releasing it across multi-platform. That is how companies should be adapting.
Another language
Python looks like a decent language to try out after discussing and watching how a colleague from work coded up one of his project. Curiosity got the better of myself on how to code a game and was recommended to check out tile-based HTML5 games development. Before anyone recommends libraries, it is important to learn it the vanilla way to truly understand.
Yet the desire to learn Python has been getting louder in my head and it is important in order to get better at coding, learning more than one language is a better course of action.
And finally...
Cat snuggles is definitely real, the past hour of writing today's week note has been interrupted by my furry companion. The distraction is often welcoming when needed and always at the crucial parts when things are on a roll.
Mind you, it is a sneaky quick play of The Kilobyte's Gambit chess game to play. Beautifully done in CGA palettes - be sure to check out Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez's Nanochess which is an amazing feat that uses only 1k JavaScript to run.
Stay safe, stage 1 commence!