2021-09-05                         from the editor of ~insom
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   /now: I'm looking at Amtrak and Via maps trying to figure
   out if I want to spend a good chunk of my time off next year
   travelling North America by train.

   Actual numbers are hard to come by, but the train could be
   up to 90% less carbon intensive than flying -- not to
   mention I really hate flying, and as I have four weeks off
   next year (in one go!) it's feasible for me to burn days of
   travel time going by rail and seeing some new-to-me scenery.

   I am getting an Amtrak map printed at Staples in large
   format, for my wall, as I write.

   Also now that we're really into September I'm going to start
   a new project at work which is mostly separate from my
   current team. I really like my current team, but it's also
   exciting to learn something new.

   One other thing that I'm excited about is unlearning some
   things, or I suppose more accurately: not having to try and
   master then them anymore. I think this is under-rated, when
   changing jobs or teams.

   When I left iWeb I think I even posted on tilde.town about
   how happy I was to just ... not have to know anything about
   PHP anymore. After years of running it and supporting it and
   debugging it, just freeing up that space from my mind was
   really pleasant.

   Now I can probably stop following the latest news on the JVM
   and Java ecosystem and indeed much of what's going on in
   Kafka. I still want to keep tabs on this stuff, it's
   relevant to my job, but I think that the period of time when
   I was trying to be an expert on Kafka is coming to a close.

   I can unfollow a bunch of people on Twitter if I was only
   following them for this content, mark whole unread sections
   of my Pinboard account as "read", etc.

   Now to replace that with (re-)learning about asynchronous
   database replication and HTTP proxies.