Baby checkup, a new keyboard and a pothole

We had the last official, bigger-scale baby checkup today. The estimated weight is 3000 grams, and the doc said she’ll gain around 150g each coming week, so her birth weight is supposed to be around 3400-3600g. It’s totally normal. Her head also has a normal diameter, but her thigh bone is ahead by two weeks, so she’ll be a tall girl :) For all these reasons, we expect less than 5% chance for a C-section. Cool!

While we were driving home, we hit a pothole so huge that I thought the wheel would break off. This was the second time the front-right wheel was hit which is not a good omen for a 2-month old car. It’s been taking it very well so far (knock-knock-knock on hard wood) and I also know that the suspension is actually designed to handle pretty huge forces really well, but still it’s not comforting to “do this” to your new car (yeah, I know I’m not doing it directly myself).

I bought a new keyboard, a Cooler Master MasterKeys LITE L. I went with the cheaper, “mem-chenical” version as I wasn’t really sure that I’d like the mechanical long-term. So I’m now testing it – but it seems like a gateway drug to DAS KEYBOARD. Tomorrow I’ll be WFH so I’ll be testing it for a whole day. I’ll report back of course.

Westworld and Bauhaus

I have finished watching the second season of Westworld. I’ll be honest here and I’ll admit that I liked most of the journey, but not the destination. I enjoyed even the filler episodes (Akecheta, the ShogunWorld) and even the constant roaming to places, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the end game. I’ll probably check out the first couple of episodes of season 3, but I might end up canceling the series.

I ordered 4 doors (that were in a great need of replacing) from the Bauhaus webshop and it said 2-4 days of delivery time. Yesterday I called them and asked how it looked and the guy told me that they were still checking the merchandise in their central warehouse and didn’t officially accept my order (I didn’t receive a non-automatic confirmation yet), so counting the 2-4 days hasn’t even started yet! My problem is that if you can delay the start of the delivery then your delivery times don’t mean anything. So I went into the store that’s near to us and ordered the doors there with delivery. They promised they’ll be here by Friday. It costs more and I had to walk into the store, but at least I’ll get what I want. So much about online retail.

Lunch with an old colleague

Today I had lunch with an old colleague and friend. He talked about issues at work that reassured me that I made a good choice when I changed teams about a year ago. He’s almost had enough already and is looking to move even out of the country. When I hear someone tell me about their plans of leaving, it always gets me thinking that maybe I made the wrong choice of staying. It’s not like anyone can know either way is better without living the other one, but somehow I usually end up comforting myself because I had a chance to try these other lives and they didn’t feel right. It’s of course selection bias, but it’s been working for me.

On a completely different note, I had my first real clash with someone I manage. They brought up that during our regular daily scrum, I’ve been marking my emails read and wasn’t paying full attention. This got on my nerves as I’m pretty good at dividing my attention especially if one of the things I’m doing is an automatic, low effort task. It might not be the same for everyone including him and I had to explain that we’re ought to not care how people do their thing as long as they deliver results. TBH this whole thing got me so off guard that I had trouble making a good argument for a while. I believe I managed to do it in the end, but never thought that I would ever need to explain the liberal approach we take when it comes to self management. It seemed that ultimately my point got across and we actually agree on the basics, but it was a surprising event nonetheless.

Stormy weather

We’ve been having very stormy weather for the last couple of days. Thunders, wind, rain, the whole lot. The dogs don’t particularly like it; they’re afraid of the SFX, so they’ve spent these days in the shed. Good thing is that they’re house-trained.

The weekend passed, which means the weekend support passed. There weren’t many major issues and the ones we had I could handle. It wasn’t that bad, but now I continue with the regular daily job. Except that I’ll be working from home as school starts and chaos initiates in traffic. Better stay home if you can :)

Baby stuff and weekend support

Yesterday we got a bunch of baby stuff (up to 3 years) from my wife’s aunt. It barely fit in the car but I was told that we would still need to buy some other things that we didn’t get. I was ready to get flooded to an extent, but this managed to overstep that limit :)
I was also put on weekend support as a primary, but unfortunately my secondary had some family emergency so won’t be able to log in. I really hope nothing breaks down, otherwise I’m looking at 8+ hours of week on a Saturday (yeah, for double money, but still). Let’s see how it goes.

Changing the format

Today I had a thought that maybe I should start writing a diary. Really, just a place where I write the things that happened out of myself. Then I realized it shouldn’t be an analog diary (pfff, it’s not the 1990s!), so I’d need a blog. Then I remembered that I have this place, so I decided to change the intended format of this. It won’t be all about what I think, but it’ll also include what happened to me. So you know, it’ll be a real weblog. More blatant, probably daily posts about my life.

The weakness of my commuter bike

I have had my commuter bike for close to 4 years now. I have ridden about 11.000 kms on it and I think I can safely say that I have come to know its design’s weak point. We’re talking about a 2013 Giant Rapid. It has the same alloy frame as the given year’s Giant Defys, so I think this applies to those bikes as well.
The weakness is its headset. It has Giant’s own OverDrive steerer, which means that both headset bearings are ‘oversized’. This adds better control and increased handling, but it has a drawback. The bottom bearing sits in its integrated housing in the frame itself, and the gap between the frame and the fork is about 2-3 millimeters. This doesn’t seem much or out-of-the-ordinary, but since the wheel is pretty close to this –about 2 cms–, it means all dirt from the road will fly to where this gap is. Unfortunately this means that no matter how well the bearing is greased, after about 2000 kms it gets really dirty. My bike starts to have constant clicking noises when this happens. There’s no other way around it but disassemble the headset, clean all parts with WD-40, apply a great amount of grease again and get back to riding. It can get a little bit worse if you ride the bike in rain — this itself can cause the clicking noise.
This is not actually a big deal. After doing it a couple of times, you can go over the whole thing in about half an hour. The bike’s awesome to ride, so this little price I’m OK to pay. It’s just something that needs to be shared.