2021-09-05 from the editor of ~insom
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/now: I'm looking at Amtrak and Via maps trying to figure
out if I want to spend a good chunk of my time off next year
travelling North America by train.
Actual numbers are hard to come by, but the train could be
up to 90% less carbon intensive than flying -- not to
mention I really hate flying, and as I have four weeks off
next year (in one go!) it's feasible for me to burn days of
travel time going by rail and seeing some new-to-me scenery.
I am getting an Amtrak map printed at Staples in large
format, for my wall, as I write.
Also now that we're really into September I'm going to start
a new project at work which is mostly separate from my
current team. I really like my current team, but it's also
exciting to learn something new.
One other thing that I'm excited about is unlearning some
things, or I suppose more accurately: not having to try and
master then them anymore. I think this is under-rated, when
changing jobs or teams.
When I left iWeb I think I even posted on tilde.town about
how happy I was to just ... not have to know anything about
PHP anymore. After years of running it and supporting it and
debugging it, just freeing up that space from my mind was
really pleasant.
Now I can probably stop following the latest news on the JVM
and Java ecosystem and indeed much of what's going on in
Kafka. I still want to keep tabs on this stuff, it's
relevant to my job, but I think that the period of time when
I was trying to be an expert on Kafka is coming to a close.
I can unfollow a bunch of people on Twitter if I was only
following them for this content, mark whole unread sections
of my Pinboard account as "read", etc.
Now to replace that with (re-)learning about asynchronous
database replication and HTTP proxies.
