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Hard decisions

There are many things at work I would like to push forward. There are many things people ask from me or suggest that we could do to improve things. If only there was enough time to so all that... and still have time to do the customer work.

The resources are finite, but there is always things to improve. It's just not possible to do everything. Some things improve productivity, or quality which both make us more profitable and appealing to the customers. Other things make the employees happy. That's also important as the competition for good workers is fierce in this industry.

To Europa!

NASA's Europa Clipper was launched today. It's destination is Jupiter where it will focus studying it's moon Europa to get a better idea of it's conditions and possibility of extraterrestrial life.

The project was first proposed back in 1997 while the Galileo probe confirmed there is vast oceans of liquid water under the moons icy surface. This fact sparked the interest of further studies to explore the possibility of there being suitable conditions for microbial life. But it wasn't until 2013 when the mission was finally approved.

It's almost Christmas

Every year the Christmas feels to be starting earlier and earlier. It's not even past mid October and the Christmas products have been in stores already for weeks.

It's not like there wouldn't be any other celebrations for stores ro sell seasonal stuff around this rime od the year. Even Halloween, which is much closer hasn't gotten much shelf space at the stores yet. And it never will because the prime aisles are filled with Christmas chocolates, Christmas, drinks, Christmas decorations and other Christmas products.

First impressions

My album has been put now since yesterday. Youtube was the first service to publish it and there are already some listens on it. The top track has already been listened over 500 times! That's was more than I expected, especially in the first 24 hours. It might be just the algorithm helping me force feeding it to some unfortunate listeners.

It's also now on Spotify. Noticed it there sometime in the afternoon. So now I can finally listen it myself without resorting to any workarounds to get it playing in my systems beyond my phone/laptop and headphones.

Out now

Yesterday I was finally able to do the last edits to my creation, to my new album. It was a long road getting there. I worked on this project for over three months, but in the end I'm quite satisfied with the results. This is something a year ago I wouldn't have even dared to dream of - me, a completely non-musical person releasing an album!

No joy in writing anymore

I have started to feel I've lost the spark of writing these daily posts. There doesn't seem to be any purpose beyond just keeping the streak alive with them. It's not that I couldn't still write daily. I've done it without a miss for a long while already even though I haven't cared about the streak that much. It just happens, the power of habits.

Ready but not done

Last week I finished my album. All songs done and ready for release. But not quite yet. I was hoping to do the final editing, mastering and clearing lyrics over the weekend to be ready for the release. Unfortunately I didn't manage to finish all that until today. Now all that is left is the publication.

Making days feel longer

After spending what felt like a whole day at the office I wasn't really looking forward to today as yet another such day at the office. But then I realized I don't have to spend "the whole day" at the office.

First of all, as a morning owl I could start my work day early at home. Get some things done before heading to the office. Depending on my calendar if there are no morning meetings I could then head to the office and have a few hours of work there before lunch and another few afterwards. Same thing in the afternoon. Leave early and complete the day at home.

Shorter days

It's the time of the year when days are getting shorter. While there is still light it becomes apparent when having a full day at the office. It wasn't still exactly dark when I left and there was still light left when I got back home, but not much. Soon it will be dark all the time outside of work.

A. I. doesn't create everything

If you would have asked me which one is harder for A.I. to solve in creative space between images and music I would have been wrong. While the image generators have been out for longer already they don't really meet the quality that the music generators can output.

Might be just me, but for the music I can get satisfactory results from the A.I. but for images there is always something wrong and they don't really meer my expectations.

Morning sauna

It's Saturday, the traditional sauna day even for those who don't go to sauna that often. I had a long day, got home late and still hd a long call with my son back to the States. So I'm a bit too tired to go to sauna today.

In addition, when I checked the current electricity prices seems it would be relatively expensive experience at this time as well.

So rather than staying up another hour or so, and ro save some money, I decided to postpone it until tomorrow morning. It also seems that the electricity price will be much lower tomorrow so there is also that.

We have all the time

With 8,2 billion people alive today on Earth we collectively experience the equal amount of time since the birth of the universe in just a bit over thee years. That's a lot of time over our lifetimes.

Part of that rime is spent sleeping, but the rest is ours to do something meaningful. Even of we just would spend one twentieth of it that's still the age of the universe in total.

But how much we actually do that? We spend time in meaningless things. The time stolen from us. We have all the time in the universe to do great things.

The full story

My "musician" hobby has taken another step forward as I finished my latest project today. For a while I have been working on a full album which has required a lot more work than just doing singles. It also led me to yet another rabbit hole doing investigation for the background of the songs. And if that wouldn't have been enough I have also been wiring a backstory to give even more depth to the whole story of the album.

Thinking work

In software development most of the work is thinking. I'm used to the concept that I don't need to seemingly be always doing something actively to it being counted at work. You just can't do that kind of work efficiently.

Single household

One downside of living alone is that I'm now responsible for all the household expenses. They were already the biggest expense when we were living together, but now they are in total over half of my monthly income.

Artificial knowledge

Artificial intelligence can be classified in three levels: artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI). While the models of the current A I. graze can be debated to be real artificial intelligences the GPT style language models can be classified in similar manner. They might not be real intelligences, but they can mimic the human knowledge in convincing extend.

Oneshot

Usually in tabletop role-playing games the game continues between sessions as a campaign and players assume the role of their character over and over again. This allows epic story arcs and deep character development. Usually the players get quite involved and attached to their characters.

Reading the rules

I play a lot of boardgames, and there is a lot of rules involved. Usually when getting a new game I like to read the rules first thing after unboxing the game itself regardless whether I'm getting a chance to play it anytime soon. Even when playing somebody elses games I like to read the rules.

Alone

My son left to his work assignment today. He has been living with me for the past few months, right after the youngest one moved away while they were living with me temporary as well. Now I'm expected to be alone for at least the next three months.

It's weird to think about it. I've really never lived alone for more than a short periods of time occasionally. I don't really know how's it going to be. On the other hand it's nice finally having all the me-time I could need. But at the same time I don't know how I will manage it.

Productive day

After spending two days away from regular work planning our next years strategy there was a lot of tasks waiting for me when returning back to ordinary daily work. A lot of questions from people, actions to be taken and things I already had to postpone before our retreat.

These things tend to pile up and can easily overwhelm you. So as I luckily had some "free" time between all the meetings I tried to get as many as possible of those small tasks off my table.

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