:where(:is(#daniel.now))

Hey there. How are you doing? I hope you are well.

The COVID-19 outbreak has thrown everyone for a loop in both direct and indirect ways, and (I’m sure you and) I have been no exception. I’m happy to report that I have not caught the virus (Singapore has handled it well, for certain definitions of “well” I won’t get into), and will take utmost care to keep it that way.

My plan, as outlined in my birthday post for the year, was described thusly:

In the short term (i.e. sometime this month) I plan to update my battlestation with my biggest incremental update to Radiance yet. Beyond that I will continue to work on the updates to the LEGO Room that I mentioned last year, as well as miscellaneous housekeeping elsewhere on my site.

But in general, I will be taking things slow. I wish I didn’t have to, but right now I have to if I want to keep it together for a little longer, and to be clear it’s still a nice thing to be able to do, not something I’m reluctantly settling for. Talk to you later.

That biggest incremental update to Radiance yet actually happened. Praise God! However due to world-changing events that took place soon after, I never got to work on the LEGO Room. I’m still actively pursuing my LEGO hobby, but I just haven’t had the energy to also update the site along with it. Furthermore, in March a new version of the Brickset API was released, with the current version on which my site depends no longer functional as of this writing. This has not broken the LEGO Room in any way, but it has prevented me from updating my collection until I finish upgrading it to the new API. That is indeed in progress but, for obvious reasons, will take a while.

Having said that, I have indeed been taking things slow; in fact, slower this year than any other year. I’ve been focusing my time on recuperating mentally at home, and navigating the “perilous” new normal outside world as it slowly reopens. I’ve been playing plenty of video games (the then-newly released DOOM Eternal actually saved me from a crisis, believe it or not, and remains one of my favorite games of the year). I wrote only a single technical article (not counting Talk.CSS #46) and it was about JavaScript, and have left my site pretty much dormant and been nearly completely inactive on Stack Overflow. I even stepped down as a Microsoft MVP and am now in the MVP Reconnect program.

And I suspect I will continue to take things slow for the foreseeable future. But I’ll be at Talk.CSS #56 tomorrow after months of not attending, and it’ll be a big one for me. Maybe I’ll see you there.