✱ This week I had a very interesting experience traveling to one of our company's customer's base, located inside an airport two and a half hours far from my home — and the company I work for's — city. I went to their site by car, along with a group of work colleagues, so we could understand their most recent needs and try to attend to them. I cannot enter into the details about what was discussed but what I can say is that this was the third time this year I've met real company customers, and I've enjoyed that pretty much. We are now only one week away from the season's break, so that has been the last meeting with customers this year. But this makes me feel pretty excited about 2024 and additional customer meeting opportunities, along with all the personal learning this brings me with them.

✱ While I'm talking about work, I have mentioned last week that one of my best friends — and mentor — will leave the company by the first week of January, next year. This Friday our department promoted an end-of-year achievements recap meeting with the whole team coming to work in person and it occurred to me that, given the fact my friend will leave on vacations next week on not returning until the first week of January, and that by January's first week that'll be time for myself to be off on vacations, this was the last time we've met in a professional environment. The only reason this is not making me even sadder is because I know that there'll be plenty of opportunities for us to meet in person out of work environments in the future. What makes me sad, though, is the inability to work along with him everyday. In that sense, I'll do miss him.

✱ I haven't watched much TV shows this week, except for 8 episodes of Family Guy — so, technically, this cannot be considered binge watching. Honestly this was much due to the fact that I needed to go to work in person three times this week, and that doing so kind of drained my energy completely. Between the episodes, though, I could watch some NBA matches, including Miami's victory against the Hornets 115 to 104 on Wednesday, followed by their loss against the Bulls on Thursday, 124 to 116. This made me very sad, as seeing Heat lose usually causes to happen to me. Fortunately it seems that Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro will (finally) return early next week.

✱ Brazil is back to hell on Earth this week, it seems. Temperatures started rising again with the arrival of (yet) another heat wave. According to the news (in Portuguese), temperatures will peak up to 45°C (113°F) in some capitals — thankfully not in São Paulo state, where I live, though. But as I'm writing these notes, it's 31°C (approximately 88°F) with temperatures having come to 35°C (95°F). I completely hate this, as sometimes even with fans and air conditioning it's hard to put up with the bad thermal sensation… 🥵😡

✱ I had to go to the dentist twice this week due to a piece of one tooth that “detached” from the whole while I was chewing. It's always a pain in the neck when such things happen, but fortunately I've gotten to find a free spot on my dentist's schedule, preventing me from having to turn to emergency dental services from my dental insurance plan, which usually isn't as nice. The problem is that I'll probably need a crown, and exams and preparations for that will probably only be possible next year, as dentists here in my city — and likely everywhere are also preparing for the season's break. Fortunately my dentist has been able to provide what I believe (and she said) is a good tooth dressing, able to resist until January at least.

✱ Using Pikapods is still proving to be something nice — except for some continued messages regarding my pod's running out of memory, which, without having deeply investigated yet, I attribute to some custom plugins I'm using to render incoming and outgoing links to the notes I'm writing. Thinking about a solution, I envision to stop using this site to collect my notes, likely transferring them to a wiki, and/ or using another host, such as Nearly Free Speech, with whom I've also got an account, and that also lets you pay as resources are consumed. I've installed Wordpress there already and will probably make some tests during the coming days. If you have any experience with NFSN, please let me know your thinking.

✱ Nostalgia filled me up this week as I've played some Worms videogames with the kids. All games in this series are amazingly crazy, making them actually one of the best options available when speaking about party games. Among all of the released titles, though, my favorite one has got to be Worms World Party, the first one I played when it was released in Brazil back in 2001, and I bought it on CD-ROM (dude, am I old or what?!) with money I got from my first job, as an English teacher.