Weeknotes Week 14 2024: March 31-April 6

• Easter Sunday on the 31st, one of the earliest Easter's in my memory.
  • We spent the time at my brother-in-law's house hosting a big family party where my wife wasn't even in attendance due to being sick with a bad cough/cold. So I got a chance to bring all the food we prepared.
  • My black-eye peas were a hit.
  • I ate more than my usual amount of carbs because I wanted to taste a teeny tiny bit of the potato salad, and also a very small tasting of the banana creme and pineapple trifle.
  • For whatever reason from doing this, my next-day ketones reading was higher than it's ever naturally been, 0.6mmol. Maybe there's something to that. Don't starve myself of carbs?
• Busy meetings week at work.
• Good training this week with a 1:1 session with a guest blackbelt where I got some things to train specifically on. Repetition of moves and combos is what makes sparring improve because it becomes second-nature.
• Mid-week I received 2 new (actually used) Maestro Evolve III laptops, which I got for cheap on eBay.
  • Friday I started on an effort to use Linux Mint as the primary OS for my digital ham radio activities. This world is permeated with sh*tty Windows apps, and I want to switch to Linux.
  • These cheapo laptops are 4GB RAM and 64GB HDD, and Windows struggles on them. But Linux is fine with them and barely uses any memory, maybe a third of it at any given time, especially with the lightweight nature of ham apps.
  • Some help is needed as I am stuck at some points. There is definitely a lot to figure out to get this working as my years-old Windows Winlink gateway is currently working.
  • I successfully tested one of them using the digirig sound device and my (tr)uSDX mini HF radio. I was able to hit different parts of the country with JS8Call.
• Saturday my sister-in-law, her husband, and my wife and me went to Christopher Cellars for a "Cigars Under the Stars" event.
  • The tickets were $30 for a cigar and a glass, but we brought our own cigars and ordered some bottles of good wines there.
  • I met the owner, and he's really young and very cool.
  • He launched the winery a week before covid lockdown, so had to come up with creative ways to make everything happen.
  • Almost the entire property was DIY built by his own hands, or his dad's.
  • Talk about perseverance and resilience in making your business ambition come to pass!
  • The "Vegas" cigars that I bought from Total Wine & More a month ago were good cigars. My sis-in-law's husband remarked at how good they were.