Notes for week 43 of 2022

Mid-week, I was finally able to walk beyond the garden boundary. Feels like getting some life back. I’ve met friends and played a lot of board games, which always helps. Theme of the year was The Mythos, which definitely feels appropriate.

Random

• I discovered I have no time for anything until the end of the year. Losing a month creates a huge backlog
• Pact supports Kafka
• cstore_fdw is an interesting extension if you want to do analytical queries without changing your database. Unfortunately not available on RDS
• Apache Pinot™: Realtime distributed OLAP datastore is an interesting storage option for data that should be ingested into analytics
• Convergence versus Consensus: CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency provides a very nice overview of what CRDT can do for you
• Automerge CRDT
• I relaxed in the past week. I’ve been active for 0.6 hours during 1 activities.

Recommended Readings From This Week

• Group Dynamics: Very Loud (and Very Quiet) People: Useful ideas if you have this situation

Book Reviews

Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Mr. King is correct in the introduction: short stories are very different than novels. Unfortunately for him, what makes his novels tick is just not there, or at least very unevenly.

I am not sure what it is. If I have to guess, it is the build-up of immersion. What makes your skin crawl in the Carrie or It is how well you can immerse yourself into the mind of the protagonists. Unfortunately, the short stories do not provide the space for such development and without it, they fall kind of flat. Some of the stories can deliver a punch, but some are kind of hallow, and I often ended with „this was it?“.

If you are King’s Constant Reader, you don’t need a recommendation. If you are not, start elsewhere.

King, S. (2015). /The Bazaar of Bad Dreams/. Hodder & Stoughton. Rating: 2/5. Goodread’s page