Daniel Santos

✱ Only days away from the end of the year it's time for me to acknowledge that it will be very unlikely to fulfill this year's reading goal. I'm aiming to read 20 titles but so far I completed only 16 books. I'm currently reading another two at the same time but at the pace I'm in I guess I'll reach a maximum of 18, that is, two shy from my goal. Still, had I not made peace with my reading, it could be much worse — thus making 18, or even the current 16 I've really finished a very good result anyway. After all, there's always 2024 and the years to come, and plenty to read later.

✱ We've watched Squid Game: The Challenge, the reality show Netflix aired after the 2021 hit show with the same name. The program's first season had 10 episodes with 456 participants competing for a 4.56 million dollars money prize, for that having to participate in games and tests similar to those in the original show. Failing to pass each game meant death elimination. Overall I found it an interesting adaptation and, as I liked what I saw, I would very likely watch a season 2 of the reality. Squid Game season 2, in fact, will happen, although new episodes won't be seen until late 2024. I hope the story and plot, so nice in season 1, keeps up with the sequel.

✱ The two or three people who often read these weeknotes of mine will probably say (with reason) that I'm a little undecided on tools and websites I use when it comes to this blog. Well, I'm now right in the middle of some experiments with Nearly Free Speech and WriteFreely, a free self-hosted blog engine meant to focus on writing, from the creator of the Write.as service, where more than 150,000 blogs have already been hosted. I love Write.as services, am subscribed to them right now and all I ever wished for was to somehow host my own version of it — something I apparently got to set up with the help from a nice admin at NFSN. So expect this site to change somewhat in the near, upcoming future, to run with that tool instead of bloated Wordpress.

✱Talking about alternative ways to blog without using bloated solutions, I've rapidly seen a couple of people mentioning Pika as a new kid on the block. I have bookmarked that site as I'm always willing to try something new, and I've already felt, even without having actually created an account, that this looks a lot like similar sites like Bear.blog and Mataroa.blog, in their try (and success) to making minimal and good-looking blogs. It's nice to see this kind of service grow. So nice that if I wasn't set out to try my own instance of WriteFreely, I'd go with any of them, anytime.

✱ Friday was the last work day for us at the company in 2023. Meaning now we're all off to season's holidays, with the company only returning to work on January the 3rd, except for me, as that's the day I'm starting my vacations. I have some plans of what to do during this free time — including the above mentioned site changes and everything, but above all I expect to be able to recharge my batteries and get ready to another year.

🎄It's Christmas time. I hope you and all your loved ones can spend some quality time together, create nice memories and share happiness, peace and joy. May your Christmas be memorable.

✱ 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.

✱ We did it! During this whole week me and my family successfully completed watching the John Wick saga again. We did so by starting last week with the first movies, and this week by watching John Wick: Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum again, so we could finally watch John Wick: Chapter 4, released earlier this year. That movie was… superb. I read a lot of bad reviews about it, but whomever wrote them probably didn't understand the end (which I won't spoil here in case you haven't watched it yet). The thing is,
now that four chapters have finished, there's a lot of controversy online about a fifth movie: with some sources saying Lionsgate confirmed it is in the works, whereas others not so sure about it. Personally, given what's happened so far, I'd really enjoy seeing more movies, but realistically speaking, I guess that'll take at least a couple of years until Keanu Reeves hits the big screen again, as the general consensus is that the (many) ideas the writers and directors have for continuations still don't quite close around a proper story. So let's just wait.

✱ I've come to think of my work colleagues as a real family as, in these 20 months since I've come back to the company I've always worked for, we've developed a strong friendship — something that had never happened to me on such level before. So this week it made me very sad to learn that one of my best friends at work, one that is a real mentor and teacher in so many ways to me, decided to leave the company, effective on the second week of January. He has his personal reasons and career decisions and path, of course, and I'm sure we'll keep on talking with each other and he'll be able to yet teach me much. Still, I'd be lying if I said I'm not feeling blue. It's been hard to process all of this, yet I know my thoughts and feelings will eventually settle down.

✱ Although my Japanese learning is currently down to a halt, my boss surprised me this week with what I can only call a special gift. He knows about my son's efforts to conquer his scholarship to go studying in Japan and how I'm trying to study and learn the language as much as possible so I can try to communicate successfully once I go visit him in Japan in the future. So he called me this week, saying we'd be holding a meeting with one of our Japanese customers, and invited me to participate, what I readily accepted. The meeting took place last Friday and I must say that I really, really, really enjoyed it so much. It's true that I didn't speak Japanese beyond はじめまして (hajimemashite, or "nice to meet you"), おはようございます(ohayou gozaimasu, or "good morning") and ありがとうございます (arigatou gozaimasu, or "thank you"). Still, being able to be around native Japanese and to immerse a little bit into their culture and customs was not only priceless, but also served as both a reminder and an incentive for me to keep learning and studying 日本語 (Japanese).

✱ Speaking about Japanese, Kanshudo is currently promoting their Holiday Sale. I know this site — which I found by happenstance sometime ago and that intends to teach Japanese to anyone with an approach revolving around how to read kana and kanji, but in parallel grammar and vocabulary — isn't the top one in the minds of many who've been trying to learn Japanese on their own, as it is considered to be not very easy and intuitive. But from what I could see, it's just a matter of getting used to it. So, I'm really interested in taking advantage of this promotion… yet I haven't completely made up my mind. Let's see if I think it over during the upcoming week. If you know Kanshudo or any other resources for self learners of Japanese like myself, I'm so very much inclined to hear tips from you.

✱ This wick we watched John Week. Wait (lousy pun intended— 🤡). This week we watched John Wick, as my wife and kids wanted to remember the storyline of the three first movies before watching the more recent fourth installment of the franchise. There's nothing I need to say about John Wick, except maybe that I love the series and never get tired of watching it. The only mistake I've made right after watching it was to carry on and watch Knock Knock — hopefully by myself, thus not exposing my kin to all the embarrassment — motivated by Keanu being on it and me liking suspense movies. But that movie is not only horrible, it's unbearable. Completely unbearable, from minute one to the end — so much so that it really surprised me that Keanu Reeves even accepted taking part in the movie. Don't waste your time with it. Keep following, instead, the John Wick path.

✱ This week I was able to take a short, self-training in business case creation. I'll be needing some particular skills soon enough and being able to create good business cases — and business plans — is included in the pack. Now, I have some (limited) experience with the matter but it's just wonderful that our mind can open so well to new takes on subjects that you're already acquainted with. This (online) short course had an instructor who put the ideas and concepts so simply that, despite most of the things weren't exactly new to me, I had two or three insights because of that single approach adopted. I was really satisfied.

✱ Upgrading to iOS 17 this week brought me unexpected – and so very unwelcome — news. The video scrubbing feature, that is, being able to hold and slide anywhere on the screen to move a few seconds to minutes forward and backward, was removed with the update. Now it is only possible to achieve the same result by tapping on the screen, and dragging a finger through the playback bar. I consider that's a counterintuitive downgrade. And judging by this Apple forum thread, lots of unhappy iOS users agree with me. On Reddit, the comment is that this feature seems to have been abolished from the newest iOS version “so it doesn't clash with the other actions that can now be performed on videos, like lifting subjects and visual look up”. I honestly hope Apple rolls back this change — or that it at least turns it into a switchable option, so that whomever didn't like the news can go back to the previous state without having to fall back on downgrading software.

✱ Definitely I've had better weeks. Some months ago I created an account with Bunny CDN. When I did that my idea was to host my omg.lol blog images with them, as Adam had not yet created a means to do it in the service itself. Now that's taken care of, but since then I stopped blogging there and got back to Wordpress. Months passed, until on Friday I received an email from the service telling me I had a negative balance. I. Completely. Forgot. About. That. I have now closed my account because at least for the time being using it doesn't make sense to me. But I had to spend $10 to make things right — and, unfortunately, to my own disgrace, they're not refundable… 🤦‍♂️ 😩

✱ On the bright side, December started last Friday. This means I'm officially 3 weeks from the company's end-of-year break, which is straightly connected to my vacations in January. Time to put an extra effort into things so everything that needs to be delivered this year is, and to make arrangements for the things that need to continue in 2024.

✱ Trying to take max advantage of my NBA League Pass subscription, I've watched at least two very nice basketball games this week. First, the duel between Raptors and Pistons last Sunday, when visitors won the game # 142-113 in an amazing presentation. Raptors are one of my favorite NBA teams, and this specific victory was not only amazing, but also a 44 assists franchise high, besides opening a large 39 point lead in the third quarter. Second, the Heats against Knicks in Madison Square Garden on Friday. Now, this game made me angry as a Heat fan: Miami led the whole. The w-h-o-l-e game. Just to completely throw away a 21 point lead it conquered during the third quarter. I couldn't believe my eyes as that advantage shrank by the minute… it was almost as if Miami was mimicking Botafogo, the Brazilian soccer team that led the Brasileiro Championship during almost all rounds until recently losing its 13 point lead completely and mixing with other 5 teams in an open ended decision for this year's soccer title 4 rounds from the end. Impressive, except that I don't care about Botafogo, whereas Heat losses make me sad.

✱ In preparation for me soon starting to read Julia, by American writer Sandra Newman, I'm rereading 1984 by George Orwell. “Julia” is a retelling of 1984, approved by George Orwell's estate, where the title character, Julia Worthing, is a mechanic who fixes the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. A model citizen who believes in nothing and doesn't care about politics at all, her world becomes harder to live in when she becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department named Winston Smith, with whom she commits sexcrime. I didn't know Sandra Newman, but if the New York Times' and The Guardian's reviews of her book can tell me anything, the story is highly readable, innovative, powerful, effective and entertaining. If it lives to the hype, and I'm pretty excited for it to do so, I'll read other books from the author — like The Country of Ice Cream Star, a post-apocalyptic literary epic in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, or The Men, where all people with a Y chromosome mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth inexplicably —, both of which I've already added to my "Want to Read" list in Literal, just in case.

✱ Both my sons convinced me to watch How to Become a Mob Boss, a new Netflix documentary series in six chapters narrated by Peter Dinklage, in the same fashion of How to Become a Tyrant, that we've watched as well. I say that they convinced me because the tyrant's documentary, although interesting to a point, wasn't my favorite. And so far, the episodes about the mob bosses didn't convince me: I've watched the first four, from which the only I liked was the first episode, featuring Al Capone. The others were just average and the fourth episode even had me nodding off a couple of times. I know that the closing episode features Pablo Escobar, that I know to have an interesting story. Maybe it will be what saves the series for me. As I'll likely watch the remaining two parts this weekend, time will tell.

✱ This week I worked a lot with my notes. It's been sometime now that I'm experimenting with using Wordpress as my main content hub, and that includes publishing my notes — all written in Brazilian Portuguese, my mother language. As a means to keep these pieces of knowledge in progress interconnected, I've even added a custom feature to the blog posts, to display incoming and outcoming links, that is, posts that are linked from the current post and posts that link to the current post. This way I hope to promote better mobility between linked thoughts, and a better experience to whomever reads them. It's still a test, so I might change a piece here or there, but if anyone wants to give me feedback, it's always welcome 🤗

✱ I have recently signed up for Purely Mail as a paid email solution. As their name says, they only provide e-mail, IMAP and POP3, at a very affordable price: $10 a year, the same amount I pay for another excellent solution, Bitwarden, for password management — or even less, if you decide to use their advanced pricing and pay directly for resources used. And the best about it is that there are no hard limits on users, custom domains, storage, or anything else. It's been a couple of weeks I'm using Purely Mail now with accounts for two domains that I own, and I'm really satisfied. So much more that I wish I had known them before.

✱ I watched the last episode of Loki last Sunday. Season two was way better than the first one, and this last episode… was… amazing! I didn't expect the story to turn the ways it turned, but I'm glad it did! The writers seem to have thought the ending and everything else from the first episode in season one — maybe making Loki the best Marvel story ever made to date. Despite knowing that Marvel has no plans for a season 3 because the story they wanted to tell was completely told, I'm going to miss Tom Hiddleston's character very much. He's become my favorite (sorry, Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man — you're now #2) and at least I have the fact that he's certainly become the most powerful being in MCU to comfort me. Oh, and I'll miss Miss Minutes, as well… ☺️

✱ Back in September we had a very bad heat wave happening where I live. Things got really hot then, to the point of making me think that nothing could be worse than those days. Until this week started. Last Sunday temperatures hit 41°C (105°F) by noon and Monday greeted us with 38°C (almost exactly 100°F). I hate the heat, as I've said it already a couple of times… the fans and air conditioning at home have been on most of the time this week and yet it felt we were at the edge of comfort. Too bad.

✱ On the bright side, my father celebrated his 73rd birthday last Tuesday. Me, my wife and my sons joined him and my mother, along with my sister and brother-in-law for a small, cozy and simple night reunion, at it was nice to be around him on such a special date. I love my father and I'm so thankful for his health and happiness. Godspeed him, always.

✱ On Thursday I did something I had not been able to do in sometime now. Me and a couple of good friends from work went out for some afternoon coffee and good conversation. It made me really happy to be able to do it, because it so much helps with making work and its challenges more smooth. It's really good to have nice friends to be around.

✱ I'm sure I have already mentioned it here that I'm not exactly the kind of person who talks a lot about soccer. But this last Thursday our National Team, Brazil, played against Colombia in a match valid for the FIFA Men Soccer World Cup qualifiers. And their performance was so… lousy. Yes, Gabriel Martinelli opened the score right at 4', but then, it was just that. We attacked little and defended yet less… so much so that Luis Diaz scored both the tier and the score turner goals, at 75' and 79', defining the result as 2–1 for the Colombians. Brazil's campaign so far is one of the worst I can remember and I'm seriously questioning myself if this will be the unprecedented time we'll be off the World Cup. That would be a bummer.

✱ I'm pretty excited about this site as of lately. I decided to move my hosting to Pikapods. The performance is so nice so far that I believe this is a decision I should have made much earlier — but better later than never. I have also been able to migrate a considerable lot of my notes to the site from Blot.im, where I still have an account but will close it later this year. More migration and some adjustments before I can do it.

✱ Having recently made peace with my reading was one of the best things I've done recently. That made me finish my fifteenth book this year, Elven Star, the second part in The Death Gate Cycle series. With only five books to go, even amid November right now, I'm confident about beating my 20 books read goal for 2023.

✱ At work my week was interesting. I finished organizing a benchmarking material soon to be presented to our team. From such material I expect to show some valuable insights and lessons learned. Another thing I did was to work closer with the Value Proposition Canvas methodology, something I had not worked with in years — it proved to be very interesting and potentially useful to a case we are currently working with. But the most interesting thing I experimented with this week was mixing that canvas with an obscure lean methodology tool, called Makigami, that a friend taught me about around 2010, and that seemed like a perfect fit for what we're trying to achieve. Next week or so I will call some people and show them a mix of these methods to gather feedback. If everything goes well, I'll implement the idea.

✱ As it happened last September, when even Lucifer was using a fan here in Brazil, an orange alert has been issued this week because of another heat wave strike, that will apparently have its worst temperatures recorded in the Brazilian South region states and the interior of the São Paulo state — where I live —, with temperatures likely passing the 40ºC (104°F) and beating 45°C (113°F). Man, I hate the heat (except for this one), so I'll try to prepare for this damned thing as best as I can… Heaven help us.

✱ Having decided to catch up with some Family Guy episodes this week, I binge watched the show, which I'm doing according to the season and episode order. This led me to watch S08E17, “Brian & Stewie”, which was different, to say the least. That episode was a special, a 30-minute long episode marking the 150th episode aired of the show. In it, Brian and Stewie (both voiced by Seth MacFarlane, creator and producer of the show) get locked in a bank vault overnight and are forced to deal with each other on a whole new level. There is no opening. There are no cut-away gags nor parallel stories. No music and no other characters show up. Just a deep dialogue about values, life and even a couple of sensitive themes. Given that this show is generally trying to take laughs out of you, this episode is unique and has so many positive user reviews that it's safe for me to say that a comedic show is perfectly able to be dramatic and impose a more serious tone if the crew wants. Give it a try.

✱ I feel that with the new organization I'm trying to give my site, I have been able to write more often, and this is making me very happy. It's not so often yet, but more than I usually do. Weeknotes like this, journal entries and notes, these written in Portuguese, and more subject to change over time, all have their own reserved spaces. Ah, there's also some essays. What worries me most is the way RSS feeds will look like. If you read me via RSS, I could use your feedback. Are notes cluttering your experience?