January 2026
The Vibe
We saw in the New Year with friends, which was really nice. I picked up a cold on the way back from our Christmas with the in-laws and have been dealing with it throughout January. While the symptoms have certainly diminished, I still don't feel 100%, and certainly don't sound it. I'm still snotty and nasally, but feeling mostly fine.
I went straight back to work this year, experimenting with balancing leave while staying present, by taking Fridays and Mondays off, and making each weekend a long weekend. In hindsight, I wouldn't do it again. I only feel somewhat rested, and I never really got the chance to fully engage in the deeper planning I would normally do for the year ahead . I've come to rely on January to shape the direction for the year ahead. Going into 2026 I don't have that usual feeling of confidence.
It's probably also a symptom of the work environment. While we are now officially merged, very little is clear about what the future will look like. I had to onboard a new team without any real knowledge or direction of what we are doing in the short or long term. It's been odd and unsettled.
That said I threw myself into getting some old projects moving again. One of those was building an archive of the OUA project work I led with my team prior to the merger. There is now a bit of ticking clock around those courses, which won't run the same or look the same in the future, as it will all be rebranded. We started the work last year but got snowed under. So I picked up developing up an 11ty site, adding in PagesCMS, and building a site archiver. The plan here was to get screenshots of all of the pages in the course rather than taking copies of the entire course. I spent quite a bit of time in Claude working through the screenshot app. I tried last year to do it with ChatGPT, but it failed miserably. I knew about Puppeteer and so wanted to script clicking through a course and taking screenshots of the content area.
Claude was actually a joy to work with - it was iterative, and was very much like my own programming experience - building an MVP and then adding features as we went. Knowing what I wanted and having enough programming experience to ask for it helped speed up the process. One of the key aspects was getting content to load before the screenshot was taken. Canvas is an absolute beast with JavaScript, so "normal" times just don't work, and its built-in techniques require scrolling into frame to trigger loading. With a bit of tweeking I got there so it became pretty much a set and forget process. The work now is to write about each course and choose the media to archive. I also want to pull together some of the supporting elements we also created during the project. If you click on the link - you'll see it's a work in progress, but I am hoping this will be an important portfolio piece my team can use into the future.
I also took some time this month to do some digital hygiene stuff. I have an old MacMini that has been a faithful server, but I've noticed that in the last year its performance has degraded substantially, and I can't really trust its role as a central hub. I want to move to a better setup and have been exploring various NAS and DAS setups, but given some recent issues with the MacMini, I decided need to speed up the process and settled on getting a new Orico Mini Tower with two 4Tb drives setup as a Raid 1 mirror (mirrored drives in case one dies) just to consolidate all the files before disaster strikes. That in itself was a big task, but pretty seemless. I now have a backup of our media library, RAW photos, music, ebooks and audiobooks. There's still a bunch of stuff I want to sort out, but having files backed up is a nice feeling.
One of the biggest helps with this was getting a fibre connection to our home. This has been something I have wanted since the NBN was first announced in 2007. That said - it's been more than 15 years of waiting since it was taken off the table due to a "genius" decision by the Abbott and Turnbull to 'demolish' the NBN and deliver a 3rd rate solution. Thanks to a consistent 1Gb connection I was able to consolidate files from various cloud services and backups. Downloading a 28 gig library of photos just wasn't a problem and made my life infinitely easier!
Apart from all that – the other key thing for January has been the heat! It's been crazy hot – with multiple days above 40 and it getting up to 50 in the state. We've survived thanks to the AC, but also it's put a big curve on wanting to go outside and do much.
Events
Half of my family seems to have birthdays in January - so there was a flood of well-wishes criss-crossing the country. Ms A and Mrs K celebrated their birthdays. We had a bunch of girls attempt an escape room before dinner out and a sleepover. Mrs K's birthday coincided with Labyrinth's 40th Anniversary release, which we saw at the old Capri theatre in Adelaide. It's an independent, not-for-profit cinema that houses an impressive Wurlitzer organ, which was in fine form and played before the movie started. We also headed out to Hoosegow for celebratory dinner, somewhere that had been on our list for years.
Photos
Watched
I really enjoyed the weirdness of Bugonia. I got into the chaos of Rogue Heroes - there are some really powerful episodes in the series so far. John Candy: I Like Me was just a sweet film and helped unpack an actor who was in a lot of childhood movies but didn't really make sense to me at the time. Also got through two seasons of Dark Winds which I really enjoy as a blended genre.
Listened
I have been on a The Rest Is History bender, consuming a vast chunk of the back catalogue. What am I getting out of it? A more fleshed-out timeline of history - but also a deeper recognition of the ebbs and flows of human history. I've really started to appreciate more about the idea of 'civilisation'