5 min read

Best of 2022

A few favorite things from 2022, in no particular order šŸ™‚.

Travel

I felt some intense stir-craziness after not getting much of a change in scenery during the early pandemic years and have been grateful to have been able to travel so much this year.

Some friends and I went on a road trip to Joshua Tree and another to Bryce Canyon and Zion. In July, another group of friends and I spent 4 days camping on the playa in the Alvord Desert.

My dad and I went on several bike trips, including the Banks-Vernonia Trail and the Trail of the Couer dā€™Alenes, in Idaho.

In the fall, my girlfriend and I did a road trip to Banff, visited some good friends of hers in Denver, and spent 11 days in Costa Rica. I also went to a conference for work in Los Angeles.

In between, Iā€™ve made several trips during the week to Bend to work from there and visit family, which has been really nice.

Books

I read 47 books this year, totalling 14,368 pages. Thatā€™s an increase of 2,726 pages and 7 books over last year, with the caveat that several were audiobooks and I spent a lot of time on the road šŸ™‚.

Some favorites were:

I also read a couple technical books in my field that I enjoyed:

Audiobooks

I listened to 16,487 minutes (11.44 days) of Audible books, which is an average of 45 min per day. Thatā€™s almost exactly how much I listened to in 2021 (16,878 min), so points for consistency!

Apparently I had a ā€œmarathon sessionā€ of 455 min on August 25, which lines up to a solo drive I took to meet some friends to camp at Diamond Lake, about 5 hours away.

Podcasts

Games

Video games

I finally picked up a PS5 this year and have been immensely enjoying that. But I also played several Switch games.

PS5 favorites:

(I played a lot of Horizon when I had COVID)

Switch favorites:

iOS:

Tabletop games

My coworkers and I used to have a weekly in-person board game night before COVID and we rebooted that in the fall. Itā€™s been fun to play more of those.

Some favorites have been:

Movies

TV

Projects

I bought my mom a FastFoto bulk photo scanner, and we digitized all of our old photos. It feels really good to finally have that completed. I know itā€™s been something my mom has been wanting to do for years, and itā€™s been fun to revisit those memories.

I migrated all of my home automation stuff to Home Assistant. I was using a cobbled mix of IFTTT, Google Home, and the Hue app before. I donā€™t know why I didnā€™t try HASS sooner, itā€™s an awesome ecosystem. I built a network of Aqara Zigbee sensors around the house, added alerts for if I left the garage or front door open, added a ā€œvacationā€ mode which pauses the Roomba schedule and lowers the HVAC, etc. Iā€™ll write a whole separate post on that.

I made my way through previous yearsā€™ Advent of Code problems. Iā€™m up to 217 total stars now, meaning Iā€™ve solved almost 110 out of 200 problems. Iā€™m hoping to solve the remaining ones in the next year. One thing Iā€™ve done differently this time around is to consolidate my helper code into its own library so itā€™s really easy to reuse, and so I can share it with coworkers who are also working through the problems.

I got my new work laptop, which motivated me to do an overhaul of my dotfiles. I settled on a setup that uses stow to manage the configs and Homebrew to install the dependencies. I also added include yabai and skhd for automating window management and hotkeys. Iā€™m really happy with those.

Whatā€™s next

Iā€™m on my 6th year at Work and am eligible for a one-month sabbatical. Iā€™m planning on going to either Europe or Southeast Asia in the spring and am very excited to start planning that.

Iā€™ve been lurking in /r/homelab for a little while and would like to start building one out. Iā€™ll likely start with a NAS, a UPS, and some basic networking gear. Long-term, Iā€™ll migrate my Home Assistant to a beefier machine and may even spin up a small Kubernetes cluster.

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