Week Notes 2025-48

Week Notes for November 24-30, 2025

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Things this week

Our condo corporation wanted to update the siding on all of the units, and since our house is an end unit on the first block of houses on the street we're up first. The work is incredibly noisy and there's lots of banging with such force that they knocked picture frames off the walls. I feel bad for our dog who has to endure it - we find it difficult to work from home with all the noise. "Luckily" I have to be in the office 4 days a week so I don't need to put up with it. Hopefully they finish up quickly but it looks like they're behind and they have a lot of work to do; I'm not sure how the weather affects them.

Speaking of which, we got a healthy amount of snow yesterday and temperatures are getting colder again after we had a few days of mild weather that melted all the snow we got a few weeks ago. My wife and I both think the snow is sticking around this time. I don't mind if the snowfall amounts we get are low like this, spread out over a few weeks/months; it's when we get dumped on all at once that it's worse.

Health Notes

This week was quiet on the health front, which is always a good thing. The only thing I'd mention is that we had a great workout at the gym on Saturday, and I pulled the heaviest weight so far on the sled - I think 340 pounds if I remember right. The hardest part wasn't the strain on my legs, but my cardio levels. I need to work on that (which is something I need to do anyway, to lower my cholesterol levels).

Tech Stuff

• When I have my "No Socials Sunday" routine active on my phone, it really does show: at the end of the day my phone was still at 40% battery life. Lately my battery runs down a lot lower when I'm accessing more apps, so this just shows I'm using my phone a little less on Sundays.

• I finally got around to playing with Quick Draft. With help from the developer I was able to point one of the "routes" to my weekly review note so that from the widget I can add notes for the current day.

  • wrinkle: the current week advances on Sunday, I'm not sure how to work around this other than to just not use the widget. It's not a problem I'm dying to solve.

• I spent a couple of days trying to figure out why I have such an easier time with the iOS keyboard vs. GBoard on Android when it comes to moving the comma and period keys off the main keyboard view. I thought I'd give it a longer try to use GBoard without those keys to see if I can get used to it (for a slightly larger layout for the keys, to reduce fat finger typos)

  • So far I've gotten used to it. It took a few days to get around the muscle memory and hitting the emoji key all the time when I went to input a comma.

Media

• music: listened to the new Aerosmith EP ("One More Time"), a collaboration with Yungblud. It's alright. I liked the lead single ("My Only Angel") when I first heard it played a few months ago, but overall there's not much to write home about.
• books: I finished reading Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix (mostly in audiobook form); started up Harry Potter & The Half-blood Prince (again will be mostly audiobook)
• video games: I started the levels on new planet Kijimi in Star Wars Outlaws. The planet map is tiny compared to where I just came from, Toshara. As far as I can tell the entire planet map is the same size as Mirogana City on the latter planet (which is a small portion of that planet).
  • Also upgraded to NHL 26. It was unplanned, but the game was on sale for ~half off, and I got $7.50 (wow!) trade-in value for NHL 25. I haven't played many games yet but so far I find the gameplay a tad easier / more forgiving, and the CPU isn't impossible to play against in Pro mode. Some neat visual changes but overall it's not a re-built game from last year. I hope they add the new Vancouver & Seattle team names + jerseys for the PWHL.
• movies: No new movies this week, we continued our Harry Potter mini-marathon with Goblet of Fire. This one was on DVD, not 4K; the upscale on the PS5 looked pretty good though!

Links

Shared Links on Raindrop - here's what I added this week.

• Personal Websites Aren’t Dead
• Narrative Podcasts Are Disappearing. What Happened? - referring primarily to longform investigative journalism. Sad to see another aspect of quality journalism disappearing.
• Linkdump No 83 - 82MHz - Completely agree with the tech angle to the intro write-up

Things I Made This Week

• LEGO Yoda - not entirely by choice, it fell on the floor. Didn't need to rebuild the entire figure, just pieces.
• "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser | An Almost Anonymous Blog