Thanksgiving food and parade

Thanksgiving was nice, R. kindly indulges me with her cooking. For dessert, the pecan pie seemed more popular than the pumpkin. On Friday, we finished up the savoury leftovers. We'll probably do something similar but smaller around Christmas when it is just me and R., other family being away in America and Asia then.

For watching the parade from here without paying, there is typically the option of various free streams (some clearly near each other) from random parts of the parade. I like to see the performances too so this year I took the option of simply finding some free not-NYC feeds that were well-positioned for their parade, e.g., I think we settled on Philly's in the end from some local station there.

Entertainment better than expected

R. fancied seeing Wicked (2024) and we get £5-each tickets at Odeon for having sold our souls to Jeff Bezos so off we went into last night's wind and rain. I didn't know what to expect: I don't have much memory of the original story, perhaps some memory of Tin Man (2007) which hardly hewed closely, and I am not much up on modern musicals. It turned out to be better than I expected: I found myself engaged and I thought that the green lady sang very well. Given what I know or guess of what constrains the plot of the followup, I am curious to see where it goes.

Listening to Radio Scotland tonight, they did well for me in choosing songs from big albums from 1984, then followed up with a show which seemed to threaten folk songs in Gaelic. Giving it a chance, I've been surprised to find that I mostly like the music, at least as background. (Typically, British and Irish folk I'd avoid even more than I would country music.)

Designing reliable distributed systems

I appreciate that my job presents me with some interesting design challenges. ( In past jobs, I had to think about distributed systems whose state could be accessed easily. )

In my current job, I have to create webapps that are backed by a database and a blockchain. ( Blockchains turn out to be tricky to deal with. )

( My set of services has to make transactions happen exactly once. )

The system of services coordinating via the database is satisfying to figure out, the blockchain interaction is partly a matter of making a best guess given the nature of the beast. In my current project, I finally got to write some simple smart contract code and it worked as hoped. More broadly, it is nice to see things working well but it takes some thought to get there.