The Olympics are now underway in Paris, just on the off chance you didn’t notice. I’m only really interested in table tennis, gymnastics, and badminton—you can take the boy out of Singapore, but you can’t take Singapore out of the boy—but it’s impossible to walk around in Australia without coverage of aquatics plastered everywhere. I think it’s traditionally the country’s strongest set of events.

This poster by Speedo at our local shopping centre made Clara and I do a double-take:

The design of these outfits are so cool! They have the national green/gold colours with Australian Aboriginal motifs. I want a print of this I can hang up:

Designed with former Olympic Boxer Paul Flemming’s ‘Walking Together’ first nation art, this piece represents the journey for the athletes along the way to the Olympics.

We checked out the Speedo website though, and of course, the female version is amazing, and the male version… isn’t. Is there some unwritten rule somewhere that men, even mildly dysphoric ones such as myself (cough) are allergic to colour!?

Actually now that I screenshot that, they’re available for women, girls, and boys… but there isn’t even one for men? Phooey.

As an aside, I can’t wait to get a new gym membership sorted out when we move. Although where we’re going, it’ll need to be heated (cough). I’ve coughed a lot on this post, maybe I should get that (cough) checked out.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-07-26.

I spent some time fixing the performance issues some of you reported earlier this week; hopefully things look better now. It’s all actually configured and running correctly now! My plan is to eventually replace a bunch of stuff with the imitible Poul-Henning Kamp’s Varnish, but one step at a time.

Funny story, I realised that I stood up my latest cloud VM using a very old copy of my personal Ansible roles library which, lets just say, did some horrible things. The mark that you’ve improved as an engineer (or an artist!) is whether you’re embarrased by your past work. The way I did networking back then was… well, let’s just leave it at that.

In the process, I noticed posts from Thursday only just posted. Whoops! It’s not like I’ve literally been blogging for two decades or anything.

Special thanks to Rebecca H., kivikakk, and E.D. who helped me with some of the troubleshooting from their homes in Europe. My only regret now is that I badly want to visit Wales and Estonia, on top of Latvia, Poland, Armenia, and Ukraine. Clara and I are specifically budgeting for a house price range so we can travel more again. I hope you’re all happy with yourselves.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-07-26.

American psychologist Lee Roy Beach, as quoted in WikiQuote:

Decision making is essentially social behaviour, even when there is nobody else present, because one anticipates how others will react and factors this into the decision. […] Organizations per se do not make decisions, but individuals in organizations do. And when they do, they must take others into account.

By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2024-07-25.