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Rebuilding this blog again

It's that time again when I decide to rebuild this blog with the idea of testing new technologies and hopefully start writing consistently, which has not happened really.

This time I'm excited about the way the blog is built, using MDX and React Server Components, using Decap CMS and my own git repository as the backend for the content. I love this setup.

I'll try to write more and possibly explain how I'm building this, the custom preview component that I use and how to leverage the Gitlab API to fetch content on real time.

See you soon,

JC

It broke again

Last year I went to India in the best trip I've had until now, I think I talked about it before, not sure anymore. The thing is that during that trip we went to a place called Ellora Caves, the most beatiful place I've been to. I loved it so much that I was taking pictures of everything. The people that was with me had to tell me to hurry up, because I was stalling everyone and we had a lot to walk still.

In that place, being pressured by locals to buy things from them, I went to help a friend who was being harrased by someone tryng to make her buy something. So, me, the hero, ended up buying a necklace from that man. At first I didn't want to buy anything, just help my friend get away from the salesman, clearly it didn't work.

But I was super happy buying that necklace and been wearing it since that day to today, not as a necklace, but as a bracelet. I love it and I actually feel bad when I forget to put it on. It's silly, but I'm really fond of it and I want to keep wearing it, but it broke today, again.

It's the second time that this happened, I think the first one was close to this date last year. I know because it was before I went to Europe in October, so it must have been close to September, maybe August.

I fixed it last year using a fishing thread, because I thought it wouldn't break again with that, since when I bought it it just had a cotton thread. Now I have to look for a way to fix it again, probably going to use fishing thread again, since it worked really well.

I love it, and it deserves to be fixed again, even if it takes me a long time, since I have to move those stones it has one by one to a new thread. Yep, it takes times, but it's worth it for me.

Ordering my thoughts

Lately I've been in a lot of stress, most of it because work, but also some recurrent thoughts I've been having. What I want to write today is about them, just to get them out of my head for a while.

You telling me not to go to that place in the next months has been hard, but I wanted you to tell me something related to that; at first you were completely silent about it. I know it's a bit cryptic. It's been a long time since we met now and I told you that I wanted to go where you live and you said it was ok. I didn't thought much about it at first, but you said nothing about it for a while, I started to feel like you didn't care. At last you mentioned something and told me to wait some more time to go and of course I agreed with it, there's no point in going if you wont be confortable with me there.

Another thing that's been on my head is about work and it's related to the goals we are following as a team: there's no clear one. This has to do with our project being to relevant in our client and the "neccesity" of them to sell more things. Right now it feels like our team is just a support team for our product and that other teams are the ones touching our codebase to add new things. This doesn't sound that bad, but the problem is that they're touching some legacy stuff we have, that's really unstable and, clearly, any problem with it in the future it's gonna be our problem.

This is a pretty common issue in the industry, I guess, but the thing that bothers me the most is that we are not having the space to evolve our products, since we are all day fighting with incidents related to them, because they're unstable, even the non-legacy one, or attending meetings for these other teams that are touching our products. It's frustrating, to the point that we're, sometimes, being pressured to fix the problems, but it's just not possible now, we need to replace them with the new one we're working on. Again, we have no time work on this, even though we started it a couple of months ago.

One last thing I wanted to say is related to some relationships, there's people expecting things from me, even though I've been kind of different to that all the time. It seems that I need to be more explicit in the way I live normally, so that I don't need to think about this. It's been stressing, to the point that I've been trying to avoid some persons some days, just because I don't know how to react when I'm with them.

0AD HiDPI configuration

I'm a fan of RTS games and 0AD has been one of those games that I wanted to try for a couple of years now, so I installed it on my new laptop, a Dell XPS 13 with a 4K (retina) display. The game works like a charm, of course, but the GUI is not configured by default to work on a HiDPI screen.

I was googling a bit and came to a thread in the forums, posted a few days ago, and found out that there's an option that scales the game. Add this line to your user.cfg file.

gui.scale = "2.0"

If you don't know where this file is, look at this page. There's info for Windows, Linux and OS X.

Go on a try it, the GUI looks a bit pixelated, but nothing really annoying.

I can't sleep

I've been suffering from insomnia for way too long, I can't even remember when it started, but I'm used to live with it. Sometimes I don't even know if it's ok to call it insomnia, since I don't feel tired at all. It's like I just don't need to sleep more than I do.

Just so you know, 4 hours it's usually more than enough for me. Yep, I know it sounds like I'm in a really bad case of insomnia, but the truth is that I'm fine sleeping this much. Of course I'd like to sleep more, I like to sleep, it feels good, but I just can't. At some point in the night I have to be awake, for some reason, and to go back to sleep again it's really hard. For some people 4 hours is normal, because they are used to it too and, sometimes, because they don't want to sleep more. That's not my case, I want to sleep more, I just can't.

In my job some colleagues called me a robot, because, even when I sleep just 2 hours, I can deliver without problem and I don't look tired. Of course this is not all the time, there are moments when I do look tired,

Sometimes, when I'm awake at night, I text this person that lives in the other side of the world. I do it for two reasons: I know that person must be awake, since we have 12 hours of time difference and because I want to talk with that person. The order of importance of those 2 reasons it's backwards, as you can imagine. I even come to think, at times, that the reason I wake at night is because I want to talk with this person.

It can be, now, but as I said it's been for too long since I have this sleep problem, so it would be hard to believe that it's the only reason.

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