Weeknotes: week 25, 2023
✱ Our fridge, with the family for almost 15 years now, started this week decided not to work. On Monday morning we all woke up to noticing it had completely de-iced everything. And worse, as we were about to schedule the visit of a technician to look into what was happening, it suddenly came alive again — and is now on life-support. We’d been already planning to change it for a newer model and everything, but it seems we’ll need to speed things up a little bit.
✱ On the PKM side of my life, this week I came across two very interesting YouTube playlists: Mastering Obsidian and Daily Notes First. The first gave me many insights on YAML — which I currently underuse with my Obsidian setup —, the Dataview plug-in usage and inline fields, which I completely ignored existed for Obsidian, thinking it was a Logseq only thing; the second playlist gave me ideas on the Daily Note: I’ve never doubted it was an important thing, and I use it a lot, but this playlist gave me some really nice ideas on how to better structure what I have, and making it even more useful by combining what I register daily with the data view powers.
✱ I attended an in-company training about decision making on project management issues, that is, those mostly common and unexpected deviations everyone has already experienced at least once during the course of a project’s endeavor. The instructor, a workmate with whom I’ve already had the chance to learn a lot in the past, gave us many insights on decision making, but what really caught my attention was the great deal cognitive biases play on us as project managers and the way we respond to what is right in front of us. On the biases and decision making fields, I even discovered two additional reading references besides Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — the reference literature in the area — that I didn’t know about: the first is The Art of Thinking Clearly, by Rolf Dobelli, whereas the second is You Are Not So Smart, by David McRaney, this one with the interesting subtitle of “Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself”. Both now already added to my anti-library.
It’s Elephant Mario in Super Mario Wonder!
✱ Nintendo Direct 2023 happened last Wednesday, airing live from YouTube. Now, while I couldn’t exactly watch it because I was working at the time, my son did, and from what he told me, this years reserves some nice things for Mario fans like we all are here, including a new Luigi’s Mansion and a game starring Princess Peach. But particularly, my interests lay on a remake of Super Mario RPG, originally released in 1996 for the SNES, scheduled for November, and on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the much expected new 2D platform game of the franchise, where Mario even turns into an elephant, scheduled for a release in October — just in perfect timing to become my birthday gift!
✱ This week I needed to step into a bank agency for the first time again, after I don’t even know how many years. The reason is that I needed to close an account I had opened more than 25 years ago, and that I had not been using. And not satisfied with a single visit, to finish the account cancellation process, I needed to go there again — so after years, two times in a row in the same week! Fortunately, the account is now officially closed, and I hope not to need to go to a bank again in many years to come… 😊