Wrote a bit more about my adventures in getting off Spotify. Spoiler: I got sick of not having a streaming service, so I created my own out of my venerable old Mozilla-issued Thinkpad w520. Jellyfin is pretty great!

https://wrla.ch/log/2026/03/music-updates/

Went to see Nine Inch Nails in Hamilton yesterday, which I listened to a lot in a previous life era (somewhat less now). They were a 15 minute walk from my place, it would be almost silly not to.

Coming out of this with the same realization I have whenever I go see live music (whatever the genre): I really should do this more often.

apache bench (ab) is such a great little utility. Installed everywhere, great way to do some simple load testing of anything that speaks HTTP. e.g. to test 40 requests, 20 concurrently do:

ab -n 40 -c 20 'http://localhost:8000/my_expensive_endpoint'

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html

Learned about this interesting consensus-oriented decision-making framework yesterday at work.

In a meeting discussing a proposal and not sure how to proceed? Try the fist to five:

https://www.lucidmeetings.com/glossary/fist-five

tl;dr: Instead of a "vote", everyone gives a score of 1-5:

0: No way
1: I see major issues we need to resolve
2: I see minor issues we need to resolve now
3: I see minor issues we can resolve later
4: I support this proposal as-is
5: I will champion this proposal