I have been coding T-SQL all day. Now I have enough DuckDB experience that I miss its friendly SQL syntax. Prefixing column names alone would be nice.

I am up working late. Tomorrow I expect to start using (and, sadly, debugging) a data ingestion and validation pipeline for potentially thousands of data files.

Amazon’s Send to Kindle page is, by far, the easiest and most reliable way to add your own ebooks to your Kindle library. You can manage your uploaded docs onlne, too.

One thing I like about Fedora Linux is that I don’t need separate programs to connect to my NAS via SFTP, NFS, WebDAV, or Samba. The file manager handles it all.

I played about an hour of Silksong today. It was worth the wait.

I have been using and liking Kagi search more and more. I just increased my subscription level from starter to professional so I can get unlimited searches and more usage of Kagi Assistant. It integrates very well with Firefox.

I have embarked on a project to read all of the Agatha Christie Poirot novels in order. So far I am two in and am enjoying them quite a bit.

It’s the last day of summer vacation. The wife and kids are going swimming in the neighborhood pool, and I’m staying home to bake bread and make ice cream.

SMART revealed that my replacement drive is actually a failed drive that I failed to throw away a few years ago. It is severely degraded. Now I have to figure out what to do. I don’t know if it is worth running a complex NAS with only 8 TB of storage if it means buying at least one new drive.

I’m working on my NAS drive replacement. It took almost two days to back up all the data onto my backup server and to scrub the zpool on my NAS. I definitely have a faulted disk. I am finally at the part where I will replace the bad drive.

I am messing around with NFSv4 tonight because I want to change how my NAS and app server interact. I currently use Samba but I don’t care for its weird quirks. For example, my Samba config file is full of weird settings turned on for better macOS support; I don’t trust that it is correct and don’t like dealing with it when things don’t work.

I need a new hard drive for my NAS and I think I just found one I had lying around for just this purpose. Or it’s already dead. We’ll see after my backup finishes.

One of my NAS drives is dying again so I am backing up about 5 TB to another drive. I will probably be hearing hard drive clicking noises for the next day.

I finally got to spend some more time on my command-line micropub publisher app. I am making improvements to prepare for publishing to crates.io. I structured my crate into a library plus a binary. GitHub Copilot helped a lot with that, but I am still trying to unwind some weird things it did.

Hello, world!

Hello, world!

Hello, world!

One thing that I have decided I like about my job recently is that it gives me an excuse to use computers. It sounds pretty basic, but I find enjoyment just doing stuff on computers sometimes. I think the reason is that I have huge screens, a weird keyboard that I love, and a brand new trackball.

I signed up for paid search service Kagi while I was on vacation earlier this month. I am very happy so far with the $5/mo plan. It’s now the default search on my Linux laptop (via Firefox) and on my macOS desktop (via a Safari plugin).

Does everyone start a bunch of different projects and never finish them, or is it just me?

Today, my son and I started to learn how to code GUI apps in Rust. We followed a GTK tutorial and used Copilot (with limited success) to help us add buttons and a textview to our app. It was fun.

I stayed up too late coding a data validator using DuckDB. It is stupidly fast!

I started playing The Plucky Squire recently. This week, it has been my late-night escape after my nighttime session at work. The game is absolutely adorable. I wanted to play it on the original Switch, but the game has framerate issues on that platform. It plays perfectly on the Nintendo Switch 2, however, which is what I am playing it on.

Today I went back to work after a two-week vacation and an all-day drive home yesterday. My family returned home at midnight, I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 2:30, I set up my home office for almost an hour this morning, and I didn’t start work until noon. My work tasks for today were all data validation-related. It’s nearly 23:30 and I have just finished configuring and kicking off 15 data validation jobs on my PC. Some of these jobs may run 24 hours or more, though I hope not, because that is terrible. I hope to have time to rewrite my data validators to use DuckDB—for speed—before the next data call cycle begins.

Yesterday my family made its annual visit to Santa’s Village, a theme park in Jefferson, New Hampshire. I was worried that my kids were getting too old for it, but I was wrong; they had a great time. My daughter even asked to go for two days next year instead of one.