Jacob Mulquin

October, 2022

2022-10-01

Didn't start the month off that well, decided to sleep through my alarm and not go for a walk.

Did some cleaning up to make up for it. Took the boys over to my parent's house for lunch, which is the first time I've had bub out of the house without wife. I think she was a bit anxious.

Had a nap in the afternoon and spent the evening working on my Parliament Streams project. I've got the Tasmanian parliament broadcasts scraped now.

2022-10-02

Daylight savings time has started today. It's 10:30 already, shiiiiit. I didn't go for a walk this morning for unknown reasons, so I'm going for a walk when I get home from shopping.

I'm feeling like a fat peice of shit so today I'm starting my good eating again; I can do low carb if I do it completely. Moderation is not something in my vocabulary.

I've written up some recipes and will be adding a recipe section on this website.

Went for a walk after toddler went down for his nap. Whipped together this bash function for getting mp3s frmo Youtube of music I've already purchased:

yt-mp3() {
    yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 $1
}

My iPod shuffle is still going strong, fucking love this thing. It helped me through a tough slog of a walk in the early afternoon.

I refactored the Parliament Streams project to look very similar to the Companion Card Directory project as both involve scraping multiple sites and putting the data together. Since all the parliaments are currently not sitting I can't make that much progress.

Made a delicious fritatta tonight.

2022-10-03

I slept through my alarm this morning so no walk. Toddler came in and we had a nice sleep in together.

Went to my grandparents with toddler this morning and had a really enjoyable lunch.

We went to the park this afternoon, I got some steps in.

I made tuscan chicken for dinner, yum yum.

Worked on TAFE assessment tonight, it is due at midnight but there's no chance I'm getting it completed before then.

Played around with Stable Diffusion a bit today.

txt2img

SHIPOMY'I GARE ALRON NOTEN

Prompt: somebody doing their schoolwork but knowing they won't have it done in time

Stable Diffusion test 1

Mayenegmemert

Prompt: it manager confused about business requirements

Stable Diffusion test 2

Looking at your own code is like looking in the void and growing a second tongue

Prompt: programmer raging at code they wrote previously

Stable Diffusion test 3

img2img

Using a picture from This Person Does Not Exist

A picture of a man that does not exist

Prompt: a devilishly handsome linux user

img2img of a devilishly handsome linux user

Prompt: a devilishly handsome windows user

img2img of a devilishly handsome windows user

Prompt: a devilishly handsome mac os user

img2img of a devilishly handsome mac os user

2022-10-04

Smashed out a 4000 step walk this morning, feels good bro.

Did some provisioning at work and worked on a new staff handbook. Our new "server" has arrived, woohoo!

Went down to Shellharbour for a walk along the beachside, toddler played in the park.

We took toddler to the library and got 16 new books. There can never be enough books.

Make some steak and veggies for dinner.

2022-10-05

It was raining pretty hard this morning so I didn't go for a walk.

Work was hectic, a whooole lot of things going on.

Made some delicious meatballs in tomato sauce for dinner tonight.

2022-10-06

Still coming down hard. I didn't go for a walk and had another productive day at work. I'm definitely back in the groove after going on holiday.

Made mushroom soup for dinner but ironically felt not hungry after it was finished. I think my body is getting back into enjoying the lack of sugar.

2022-10-07

Toddler slept in bed with us from about 1am this morning, a bit unusual but it was nice to get cuddles. It helped my semi-concious mind from getting up because "surely he'd follow me out of bed" so I didn't go for a walk again. I'm a bit bummed out about that.

Finished setting up the server today, yahoo!

We went out shopping in the afternoon. Not that hungry for dinner so just some frozen sweet potato chips in the air fryer.

I played a bit of Stack Overflow tonight and even made a bit improvement to my script to help make answering easier.

2022-10-08

Not walking for a few days has me becoming lazy. No walk in the early morning so we decided to go for a walk with the boys later in the morning. We went down near the lake and toddler was peddling on his tricycle, he's getting really good at it! Poor guy had a meltdown because he got some sunscreen in his eyes. We got him home, showered him and he settled thankfully. Lesson learned: Don't get toddler put sunscreen on his hands.

My parents and aunty and my friend came over for lunch, it was really nice to have them eat at our table once again as it's been quite a while.

While they were there I had a call from a friend who I had not talked with in quite a long time. It was a surprising and really enjoyable conversation. Damn keeping up friendships is hard as you get older.

Played some more Stack Overflow too.

2022-10-09

I spent most of this Sunday completing a TAFE assignment. We were tasked with creating a Project Change Management Plan. I chose to do mine using RLA instead of the test company so that the work felt more useful. It's funny because I've worked on numerous projects previously, but this is the first time I actually wrote up a list of issues identified, objectives, timelines, communication plan, etc. It proved useful!

Went to the in-laws for dinner.

2022-10-10

Back into another Monday. Oh boy we have so many laptops at work now. We even have some stock that needs to be offloaded elsewhere. If you told me a few years ago that I'd have laptops coming out of my ears I wouldn't belive you!

Made some curried sausages for dinner, a delightful batch this time. It's such an easy thing to make in the slow-cooker!

Bub is really developing quickly it makes me sad and excited that he's almost 9 months old. He's up walking and I swear he said "dad" a few times. I cried a little bit today from happiness.

Tonight I spent my time attempting to get wifi working on my old HP 14-cm0009au. I have a minimal Debian 11 (bullseye) OS installed but there is a kernel bug in 5.10, so the Realtek firmware didn't play nicely. I updated to 5.18 via the backports, installed wireless-tools, iw and wpasupplicant and it appears to be working.

There's still a bug though:

rtw_8821ce 0000:03:00.0: failed to send h2c command

Googling the error yields only a single result and it doesn't seem related. It's probably a result of updating the kernel. Hey it works so that's good enough for me.

2022-10-11

Great, the bursitis is back with a vengeance. For fucks sake, it's not like I've put extra load on it or anything, what the fuck could be causing it?

Work was a flurry today, I'm so glad we got Snipe IT up and running to manage our IT assets because a couple of laptops appear to have grown legs and gone for a walk and we have no idea where they've gone.

I improved my Stack Overflow Helper today. The code has been refactored so it's easier to extend. It now extracts more information about questions and even detects if sql appears in a tag, and if it does it includes some boilerplate code for working MySQL.

2022-10-12

Foot still in a lot of pain, worse in the mornings. I had pangs of stining pain around the front of my foot today. Booking that podiatrist appointment ASAP.

Once again work was hectic. I spent a good chunk of it trying to diagnose an issue with an external drive passing through a Debian host into Windows 10 guest. In the end it just started working and I have no fucking idea how or why. Sometimes that feels worse than something not working. Nah, just kidding.

Wife bought herself a Galaxy S22 in purple today, she's so happy.

Oh, and a toy arrived for me as well.

An EdgeRouter X! My dad has one as well so I'm going to play around with getting a site to site VPN setup. If all goes well I'm going to roll them out at work as well.

2022-10-13

Foot is starting to feel a little bit better, I may even be up for a small walk tomorrow.

Toddler came to work with me today and had a great time. Getting a plan in place for all the project work to be done.

Went to the bowlo with the in-laws tonight and drank some beer for the first time in quite a while. I had too much beer.

2022-10-14

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-15

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-16

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-17

My foot feels more back to baseline now.

I got the Edgerouter X up and running and I'm reeally impressed with how it's performing so far. I'm going to try and setup Dad's at his house tomorrow and attempt a site-to-site VPN.

Work is getting more organised, feeling happy with the progress there. God damn my tab at the kiosk is really racking up! The food is just so good!

Made some Tuscan Chicken tonight, creamy and delicious.

Toddler and baby doing well, love you two!

2022-10-18

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-19

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-20

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-21

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-22

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-23

I didn't feel like writing today.

2022-10-24

Wow. Not walking really tanked my motivating to keep at this daily blog project. I'm coming up on 1 whole year doing this and I'm still undecided if I should continue.

Maybe part of the problem is I'm trying to make each entry a log of what happened each day. Maybe I should just think of 1 thing each day that was noteworthy...

I need to walk tomorrow. I need to.

2022-10-25

Well, I didn't walk. Alas, I also did not feel like walking. Argh bugger these bad habits.

2022-10-26

The heat is ramping up. And although I didn't walk this morning, I feel motivated to write about the day.

Toddler went on an excursion to the Botanic Garden today, that meant we didn't have to make this lunch this morning. It's the little wins.

This morning I whipped together a little script that allows me to build nested replace() functions in Power Automate. It's pretty bad code so I will improve it, create an article and release it on Github soon.

Got quite frustrated with one of our spare laptops at work. We've got a couple of old x360s with Windows Home. Since they are shared computers, we want to clear them out of any documents that may be saved, and to clear browser history on close. For some unknown reason, one of the computers does not want to co-operate. Powershell is throwing enigmatic return codes into Task Scheduler. It's a task for another day.

This evening I started (yet another) side-project. The problem is that I like to watch some Youtube before bed but I usually fall asleep before my wife, leaving some annoying light and sound eminating from a laptop. The solution is to learn some Ruby and create a small web-app so she can mute, turn down brightness and even turn off the computer.

2022-10-27

I forgot to write something today.

2022-10-28

It was the one year anniversary and I forgot to write something today!

2022-10-29

Since I forgot yesterday, I'll write something today about my year of blogging.

After a morning of walking, chatting throughout the day and an incredible night, it was concluded to be a good day.

I can't believe I'm been doing this daily blog thing for a year. A whole year. I stuck with this thing for a whole year. It's such a surreal feeling, simultaneously feeling like I have accomplished nothing while having material proof that contradicts the feeling. The shitty thing is the feeling is stronger than the proof. But oh well, I've been doing this for long enough for it to feel real so I shall be continuing.

2022-10-30

My legs are a bit sore this morning. Not sure why!

Cleaned out the garage for a bit this morning.

Spent most of the day playing Pokemon FireRed.

Sunday dinner with outlaws tonight.

Oh, I hit 3000 points on Stack Overflow this afternoon!

Also wrote up a small article about the "Wifey Laptop Controller" that I hacked together.