Me and Emma celebrated our first wedding anniversary at Ten Minutes by Tractor on Saturday night. It was a wonderful evening and the food and wine were world class. Would recommend it to anyone wanting to celebrate a special occasion.

Side note: the Main Ridge area has some beautiful driving roads. The trees and farms are stunning. It would be an absolute dream to have a house there but I think it's very expensive.

I also added starship to my zsh shell over the weekend which many other dev's use at my work.

It's nice; not life-changing but it provides good context at a glance whenever you're working in a repo.

Over the weekend I did something long overdue; cleaning up of my dotfiles. I've done things a stupid way in the past where I'd store my dotfiles in iCloud Drive as a duplicate of what was in my home directory.

Using git is a much better solution to this problem.

In interacting with ChatGPT it came up with a scripting strategy whereby you have this alias in your .zshrc

alias dot='/opt/homebrew/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

which creates an empty git directory named .dotfiles in your home and you interact with your dotfiles using dot instead of git.

So whenever I update my .zshrc now the flow is

dot status
dot add -u
dot commit -m "Commit message"
dot push

and everything is stored remotely in GitHub ready for a new machine whenever I switch.

I'm currently also storing my Ghostty config file as well as my .gitconfig. But the main thing I need to store somewhere safe is the .zshrc as I have a number of aliases and functions now that should be tracked.

I played Minish Cap ages ago but I didn't play through the whole thing. Will do so this time.

The pixel art is beautiful and it again shows how strong the Game Boy Advance library was. I wish there were Zelda games still like this these days.

Wild that it took this long but sure we'll take it.

I've been using the Codex Mac app for around a month or so now fully for work and its been game changing.

For brainstorming and actually writing the code; it's been a brilliant tool to improve my productivity. It has also meant learning to work in a very different way. I no longer actually handwrite that much code. The agent has become so good at taking my instructions and running with it that it's no longer faster for me to type.

After the sour taste that Metroid Prime 4 left in my mouth I decided to play a classic Metroid that I knew I'd enjoy. Metroid Fusion has delivered on that promise.

It's just a cracking game. Beautiful pixel art, great bosses, cool music. I can see why some prefer Super Metroid due to the more non linear structure of the game but honestly I enjoyed being told where to go in Metroid Fusion. There were some points where you were still left with the mystery of where to go next but often it was just breaking a wall or going into a crawl space.

The whole Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS library is something I haven't explored much yet but there's a whole treasure trove of good games. I'll be playing them over the next few months I dare say.

I had another random but interesting experience over the weekend playing Pickleball for the first time.

We played at PicklePlay which was a converted office space. It was almost weird seeing the courts it what clearly used to be a space with cubicles and people doing 9-5 type work.

I can see why the sport has becomes so popular though. It's very social and doesn't require heaps of movement which is great for older people. You can have some very intense rallies.

On Sunday I surfed at YCW Beach whilst Emma had a surf lesson there. It was a really nice beach for learning how to surf. The conditions were really good (7/10 on Swellnet) and the waves came in clean sets. It's one of the first Australian beaches where I've surfed that I felt comfortable and confident in the water and I could actually get some decent waves.

Spud's first official family day.

Alby's Deli had fantastic coffee and bagels. Green Olive was lovely in the sun with some sparkling wine and cheese. Spud got lots of pats from everyone. He was very gentle with young kids.

When John Rahm is on it's one of the most electric things in golf.

Exhibit A: why Australia needs a golf major.

Look at the atmosphere. It a city that isn't even the biggest for golf. In a league that a lot of people dislike. Imagine what a major would look like with big investment.

This is some exciting gaming news. Will be an instant buy when it releases. I should play Aria of Sorrow at some point to delve deeper into the series.

For some reason this song popped into my head today. A real throwback from choir days.

This was super impressive by Elvis but wish he was on the PGA tour.

His favourite spot is that hole outside next to the air conditioning unit.

Man The Masters is so cool. Looking forward to it like every year.

I've had a play with this in the last few days and it's excellent. I've been working on a database issue where AI has been really helpful both for brainstorming and getting the correct database index.

He lives a good life.

When I played Metroid Prime Remastered I loved it.

The exploration and puzzle solving was exquisite. The story and feeling of isolation was really unique. There were lots of wow moments like in Phendrana Drifts when you have to fight your way out using the thermal visor. The world feels interconnected and cohesive.

Long story short: it's a banger game.

I ended the review by saying:

Based on playing through the entire game I'm so hyped for Prime 4. Hoping it's in the style of the original 3D Prime game.

I was hyped for ~3ish long years.

Then the game came out last December.

Me being me I watched a fair few YouTube reviews of the game before buying it and the news wasn't good. Sure there are some parts of the game that feel like a true Metroid Prime follow up but overall the game was a bit of a dud.

Silly Marvel like characters that say dumb things and get in your way. A huge barren desert that has a boring fetch quest. Areas that aren't interconnected. Puzzles that are way too easy.

There's no wow moments. There's some okay ideas and things that are cool but the game just doesn't hit the highest of highs. And unfortunately for Nintendo, this is what the Metroid fandom expects after so many great games in the series.

It's interesting in this Arlo discussion video to see that Kensuke Tanabe (the producer of Metroid Prime 4 and many other Nintendo games) is retiring. It's probably a good thing he's heading off into the sunset. The company needs fresh blood at the top and new ideas for games.

We're so close yet potentially so far away. The art for the game still looks so beautiful.