The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.
Today marks one year since I had my liver transplant. It's hard to believe a year has gone by already, but looking back, a lot has happened in the past 12 months.
I commented to Des that it feels like the transplant wasn't that long ago, but other events, like getting on the NBN, seemed … Read more →
There's one word that fills an organ transplant recipient, or potential transplant recipient, with dread: 'rejection'.
TL;DR: I've just experienced an episode of rejection of my transplanted liver, but I seem to be coming out of it ok 🙂.
Before starting on the transplant process last year, I thought that organ rejection was an all-or-nothing thing. I thought that if rejection happens, it was like: 'well, good luck, go back on the list and hopefully you'll have a better time with another organ'.
That's not actually the case. Apparently, rejection is a common thing in the first … Read more →
I should probably add a disclaimer to start this post. At the time of writing this post, I work for GitHub (and by extension, Microsoft (who own GitHub)). As a GitHub employee, I have no more insight into Atom's or VS Code's development or roadmaps than any other member of the public. Both Atom and VS Code are developed as open source communities on GitHub. All opinions in this post (and more generally on this blog) are always my own.
For the better part of the last 5+ years, I have used Atom as my editor of choice … Read more →
Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favourite games of the past five years. I've played through it multiple times, and even purchased it a second time (as the Definitive Edition) not just to get more content, but to also give an extra bit of money to the devs (I had bought the original game with a heavy Steam discount).
I have always played the game using Steam's "Remote Play" feature (previously called "Steam Home Streaming"). The game runs on my Windows gaming PC in our study, but I play the game on my living room TV … Read more →
We've been using an Intel Celeron NUC for the past four years. It has served as a Plex client, a (buggy) Steam Home Streaming (now called Steam 'Remote Play') client, and occasional console emulator machine.
It did an admirable job over that time, but it was time for an upgrade. Windows Updates became an annoying – and on the Celeron – a time-consuming distraction. Steam Remote Play was buggy on it, and Plex had announced the intention to deprecate their desktop clients (I was using OpenPHT, which has also been mostly abandoned). Plus, the hardware wasn't keeping up … Read more →
In the time since my last post on getting a keyboard, I'm now on my second one since then. 😆
The Corsair Strafe that I was using since 2015 started stuffing up at the start of last year, with flickering lighting and key double-presses. It is quite disappointing for these Cherry switches to only last ~4 years.
At the time, I still wanted mechanical switches, and nothing came close to the silence of the Cherry MX Silent Reds. So I got a ten-keyless keyboard which I liked the layout of: the Fnatic miniSTREAK.
I really loved the smaller … Read more →
I started this blog in 2004. Since that time, there have been a lot of changes in writing and publishing your own online content.
To give a bit of perspective, back in January 2004, WordPress had only (by a matter of days) hit 1.0, and still wasn't really a thing yet. Back then, it was really only Blogger (newly acquired by Google), or older services like LiveJournal that allowed you to have a blog. To give even more perspective, even MySpace wasn't really a thing yet.
So, in the 16 years that I have maintained this blog, I have … Read more →
So, nothing much happened in this past year, ey? 😂
Of course, this year can only be seen through the lens of the massive event in my life that was my liver transplant.
Now that we are also at the end of the decade, you could say that this whole decade has also been largely defined by my illness (diagnosed in 2010) and it's now hopefully-permanent solution (the transplant).
So, 2019 has been a massive rollercoaster of a year. I started a new job right at the beginning of the year, and only a few months into … Read more →
These are my tweets for 2019 (sans replies and retweets). All the URLs are still Twitter's 't.co' ones, as the Twitter API doesn't spit out the original URL text.
Here we are, at the end of the Disney 'sequel trilogy'. The whole thing has been a bit of a weird and unexpected experience. A bit of history first:
I first watched the original trilogy as a child, mainly on VHS tapes. I did not see the movies in a cinema until 1997 at the age of 14, when the Special Editions were released theatrically on the 20th anniversary of the original movie.
The prequel trilogy marked my coming of age. I was 16 when Episode I came out, and 22 when Revenge of the Sith was released.
So for … Read more →