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2026-03-07 - 2025 Retrospective

I actually don’t know how to describe this year, as you might be able to tell from it being February March as I am writing this.

The first half seemed okay, seemed like I was figuring things out and then the second half totally went off the rails.

Cats

Robin continues to have poop issues. We tried various doses of RestoraLax which was partially affective but I had issues getting her to eat it consistently. I first tried to put it on her food but then she just refused to eat her food. Then I started giving her extra treats of Perfect Portions and that worked for a bit but then she started refusing those as well. We ended up switching her to Lactulose, which she has been better about eating but we are still working to find the right dose.

Lupo had problems with his food again. I don’t know if there was a change in the manufacturing process or how it was stored but the Hills Digestive Care stopped solidifying properly in the fridge which causes problems for Lupo eating it. I think because it’s too soft, too much of it goes down his throat and that bugs him. I ended up switching him to Royal Canin Gastrointestinal, which he is having less problems eating but I’m not sure if it’s better or worse for his poops. I might need to ask the vet about a different kind of supplement for him.

The are about the same in terms of how well they get along. There are times when they seem perfectly content to be around each other and times when Lupo is locked in on chasing her around. I would like to give them more treats together but that requires their digestion to not be questionable

Health

I haven’t had any “flair ups” lately where I just feel terrible for a couple days so that’s something. I have had problems with just feeling tired though. It’s hard to tell what’s a problem with my body and what’s just stress.

I had some severe heart burn issues in the spring. It ended up causing me extreme back pain for a few weeks but after taking antacid tablets for a month I seem to be okay. It hasn’t happened since.

Work

Work has become very challenging. Management is scared that other companies are going to benefit from AI and they aren’t so they are trying to force AI everywhere, if it fits or not. I have issues with AI both in terms of the technology and the companies so that’s not exactly making me happy.

My bosses don’t seem interested in what I have to say about the matter which is also doesn’t make me happy.

Volunteering

I ended up on opposite weeks for volunteering this year and had less luck with the staff supervisors. With all the extra stress of work and cats I was struggling, so I ended up stopping so that I wasn’t losing half a day every other weekend

I found out that there’s a thrift store near me that I an hoping I can start volunteering at, if I can get the rest of my stress sorted out

Collecting

In the first half of the year I opened a second savings account to try and control my spending a bit more. The idea is that everything beyond what I need for a given month goes into the second account and then that gives me a better idea of how much I have to spend. That was working fairly well but then work issues lead me to limit myself even more. Now I am putting the excess into my TFSA so that I can save up in case something happens.

I still managed to get quite a few interesting things this year, moving more into territories that I’m not familiar with like manuals for processors, 8-bit computers, SCO Unix, CP/M-86 and GEM Desktop.

Computers

I bought three retro computers this year, A TI-99/4A, a Tandy Color Computer 3 and an Atari 800 XL. All of them had fun delivery stories. The TI-99/4A got delivered to the Post Office for some reason, the CoCo 3 got lost in the states for about a week and the 800 XL did the thing where they pretend you aren’t home and refuse to delivery it. I also bought a bunch of peripherals for them, both new and old, as well as various software manuals. I ended up replacing the keyboard in the TI-99/4A a few times to get one that looks original but works reliably. I need to take it apart again to see if I can get the keyboard to sit better.

I have been having a lot of fun learning the various flavours of BASIC. I have only been using emulated cartridges, tapes and floppy drives. It’s interesting to see the different ways that the community has handled emulation for the various devices.

I have also done some upgrades to my 486 machine. It now has an ATI Graphics Ultra Pro Mach 32 VLB card in it and 128 MB of RAM. I bought more cache chips for them but I haven’t installed them yet because I don’t know if they are legit. I want to by a Chip Tester Pro but that’s not in the budget at the moment. I also need to do some cable re-work and try to figure out why the floppy drives seem to have errors occasionally.

I built a new media computer this year. I bought a small case and a MicroATX motherboard. It’s very cramped but seems to be working well. I ended up needing to use a combination of several right angle brackets to get it so that the SATA cables for the Blu-ray drive could fit past the CPU cooler. It has no discrete graphics card and is running entirely off the one integrated into the CPU. It’s also an AMD CPU which is new for me. I had some problems getting the DVD software to work and had to buy a different one but it’s been solid since then.

Budgetor

I updated my Budgetor application to have separate tables for account objects. This makes it easier to add or remove an account. I have been wanting to do this for a while so that I could hide the cash account that I no longer use but needing to add the second savings account was the big push.

This required database scripts to create new tables and then pull data out of the old tables as well as changes to the UI to load the accounts from the database instead of just presenting pre-set values

PenguinCooker

I started working on adding support for writing pages to PenguinCooker. I have some models and the root display page done but haven’t implemented any of the update logic or edit pages

Floppy Image Rectifier

I haven’t done as much with this project as I’d like. I was able to document the Greaseweazle code for converting an SCP to an HFE but I think I went into too much detail and need to redo it to be a bit more focused. I was also able to make some progress on documenting how HxC tools does it but that program was written by people who hate using descriptive variable names, so it’s a bit of a challenge.

MakeBoot

This is a project I started this year to make an application to write an MBR to a CompactFlash card and verify the results. FDISK on DOS has a way of doing this but it doesn’t have a lot of protections for making sure it’s updating the correct drive and I have messed up a computer doing it before.

I started writing it on my Vista machine using Visual Studio 2010. It was a very relaxing experience, writing code without all of the distractions of a modern computer. Update this, buy that, do you want to rate this product, would you like an AI to delete all your work?

I have made good progress although I am a little hesitant to test it.

MBRDemo

The MakeBoot program inserts an MBR snippet that I coped off of one of my working CompactFlash cards and verified against a version of FDISK that I found online. While working on that project, I got curious about how the bootstrap code worked. This lead me to write up the instruction set for the Intel 286 in an excel spreadsheet, also on the Vista computer, and to hand disassemble the bootstrap code.

After disassembling the code and trying to understand what it was doing, I created a demo program to verify that the code was doing what I thought it was doing. This demo program contains most of the same bootstrap code, with some changes to handle it being a program that isn’t necessarily loaded into the first 64K of memory and so that it doesn’t actually try to boot.

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