A Series of Defeats

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

— George Orwell

I finished Level Four of Pimsleur's French yesterday, and celebrated by listening to four episodes of InnerFrench, buying some French DELF/TCF books, and starting Level Five today. I understood much more of the InnerFrench - not quite 100%, but enough that I could follow it quite handily. Great sign, I think.

I finished a jigsaw puzzle last night - normally not something particularly challenging, but this one was without a picture of the completed puzzle to work from. It was fun.

My R720's ZFS pool is degraded after a disk failure. I resilvered with a spare, but another drive failed in the process. I had one other spare, and it's not working at all. I can't really be arsed to buy another, so... things might get spicy. I might relocate a drive from another machine (I have two NASes as well), or I might relocate those files. I just don't really know. But it's running, at present.

I deployed a change into production this morning, a major change that I've spent many weeks working on alone. I didn't see any increased error rate or other issues - in fact, a substantial decrease in errors. But I won't declare victory until probably a week has come and gone without complaint.

I had a frustrating experience practicing math today - managed to botch a few simple operations and get wrong answers. I took a break, though, and the second stretch went far better.

My son is going off to watch a play this evening - for fun.

It's shaping up to be a lovely evening - a little thunder, some rain, and the grass is a beautiful green when it's overcast during the golden hour.