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Notes

short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title
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Chris M.
| April 8th, 2020

Right now it feels like every day is Monday.

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Chris M.
| April 8th, 2020

I really like the design of the new Playstation 5 controller. It looks very futuristic, like it’s straight out of a sci-fi movie – or even a game – itself.

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Chris M.
| April 7th, 2020

Finally got around to watching some of The Mandalorian. Definitely enjoying it so far! I'm a few episodes behind the release schedule, so I could binge most of it, but I think I'm going to space it out, take time to enjoy the series as a whole.

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Chris M.
| April 3rd, 2020

Me: "Hi, Bank! I’d like to lower the credit limit on my credit card, please."

Bank: "What’s that? You’d like to close your account? OK, done. Please pay the balance."

Me: "What?! No! WTAF?!?"

Bank: "…you clearly asked me to close the account."

My Morning: A Story, by Me.

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 30th, 2020

I’m finding my sleep routine has been completely upended by the "new normal." Going to bed late, mostly by accident, and waking up even earlier than I was when I had to commute. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but right now I am so. darn. tired.

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 27th, 2020

The last couple of times we've gone out for our state-sanctioned household exercise, my partner and I have both noted we've seen far more police patrols than we normally would.

4 Comments
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Chris M.
| March 26th, 2020

Instead of the usual "wear whatever" while WFH I’m going to try wearing normal work clothes (smart/business casual) instead, to see if it helps with the mental context switch of "work time" vs "home time".

2 Comments
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Chris M.
| March 24th, 2020

There's so much stuff in Disney+ that it's a bit overwhelming. But also a bit scary in an “oh, I didn't realise they owned that too” sense — even as someone who had a sense of just how much of the entertainment world they own!

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Chris M.
| March 21st, 2020

It’s taken me over 2 hours of fiddling around, but I finally have a working CI/CD pipeline working on Azure.

Dotnet 3.1 is the version the docs direct you to install and use locally, but by default Azure App Service uses 3.0. You can override it to 3.1 in settings, but Azure Pipelines doesn’t seem to know about 3.1 yet (even as "LTS"), so will change your override back to 3.0 when deploying, unless you change an option buried away in the Release settings. But you can’t change it to a value in the dropdown – you have to type in your own value.

And if you don’t do this, your 3.1-base app won’t run at all, with no helpful error messages (that I’ve found) to indicate why…

But it’s working now. Hopefully it stays that way and I can get on with developing something!

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 21st, 2020

We watched Knives Out this evening, and it was fantastic. One of the best films I've seen in ages. I definitely recommend it. Such a great take on the Murder-Mystery genre.

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 21st, 2020

My grocery home delivery is arriving later. The list of substituted items is longer than the list of items not substituted. Managed to get some loo roll though! 😅

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Chris M.
| March 19th, 2020

That’s us officially had the general order to work from home where we can, for the foreseeable future.

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Chris M.
| March 18th, 2020

I'm really surprised Disney haven't launched Disney+ early in the U.K. to entice subscriptions from all the people finding themselves stuck at home. I guess it's not that much longer to wait anyway, but they could've got some extra free publicity and possibly good will.

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 18th, 2020

One side-effect of all this anxiety about isolation is that I have this overwhelming urge to create something, although I’m no sure what. I even dug out the microphone I bought years ago with the intention of starting a podcast, just in case…

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 18th, 2020

I took a walk to the supermarket first-thing this morning, hoping the early hour would mean it would be quiet. We needed a few essentials, and I needed fresh air. It wasn’t quiet. I was glad I’d worn a mask and gloves, and I did my best to stay as far away from other people as possible. I’m pretty sure I got a few people looking at me as if I was mad.

Several shelves had signs with "this item is restricted to X number per customer" on them. Thankfully it seemed like most people were honouring that request. It meant I managed to get an extra hand soap to tide us over.

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Chris M.
| March 17th, 2020

I’m going to have to come up with a good, sustainable, _safe_ way of maintaining my activity levels while we’re all in lockdown. Today’s my first official day working from home (as a result of the pandemic) and it’s the first day I won’t reach the goals I set on my Apple Watch since January 5th.

Walking on average 16KM a day has been my go-to, both for the physical maintenance of my weight (which can shoot up scarily fast), and the calming effect on my mental health. I really struggle to engage with other forms of exercise. While we’re not at the "absolutely cannot leave the house at all" stage, it does feel a little wrong to go outside for something that comes across as so non-essential…

1 Comment
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Chris M.
| March 17th, 2020

Oh joy. The remote access gateway seems to have fallen over 😑

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Chris M.
| March 16th, 2020
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Chris M.
| March 15th, 2020

Yesterday I tried to follow some dotnet1 tutorials that also show some Azure concepts. These were all tutorials and documentation on the Microsoft website itself. For context, I was using my desktop PC, which runs Linux2

The initial setup worked great. I installed Core, the Azure CLI, and various useful extensions for VS Code. Then I created a new Web API project from a template, which ran on my PC without issue. Finally, I used the Azure CLI to setup an App Service I could deploy to from Git. So far, so good.

Things went downhill when it came to putting everything together and tried to deploy to Azure. My code would be committed, I could see the deployment churning away for a couple of seconds, and then it would crash out with a build error; my project was targeting dotnet Core 3+, but Azure apparently only supported targeting up to Core 2.2.

I tried a couple of things to try fix it, but I haven't been successful yet. I'll start over from scratch again when I get back to it. But it does make me wonder how well someone with even less experience in this stuff than me would get on.

  1. I'm going to keep using this instead of the “.NET” branding I never really liked ↩︎
  2. Can I just remark on how cool this is. The last time I was using dotnet it was still Windows only. ↩︎
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Chris M.
| March 15th, 2020

Because neither my partner or I drive, I usually get the supermarket to deliver, when I know I need to buy big, bulky, items it would be hard to carry home. Normally arranging a delivery for the next day – or day after at the latest – is no issue, but right now the earliest I can get is Thursday. Or April, if I look at one of the other stores. Needless to say, a lot of stuff I'd be looking to be delivered is sold out, so I guess it's all academic anyway.

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Chris M.
| March 15th, 2020

These videos brightened up my morning, so now I'm sharing with you: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDz9or_Tob72vId-zZF67gYbACcqBVLGL #emosnotdead

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Chris M.
| March 13th, 2020

As a way of getting my head back into C# ways of doing things, I'm taking the time to also learn Selenium, by writing an automated testing suite using WebDriver and NUnit.

It's all really very cool and fun to watch the tests flashing across my screen, but I am slightly cursing the added complexity of testing a legacy application which still uses frames!

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Chris M.
| March 11th, 2020

‪After dwelling on today, it seems like now might be a good time to refresh my dotnet skills‬. I haven't had to use them in >5 years, and a lot has changed. I'm excited by the idea of Core, and maybe I can use it as a springboard to better understanding Azure.

2 Comments
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Chris M.
| March 11th, 2020

Technically nothing has changed, but thanks to the machinations of project bureaucracy and client sign-offs means things are feeling a little less secure in my current position. Not great for avoiding feeling overly anxious, to be honest.

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Chris M.
| March 5th, 2020

Last night a release went live that I'm about 90% responsible for, and touches deep into the internals. I'm currently glued to my inbox waiting for anything to come in… Today is either going to be a non-event, or it's going to be absolute hell.

1 Comment

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