It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement.

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• 🏢 I got a promotion at work to Software Engineering Lead 🎉. It wasn't a total surprise, especially as I said a week or two ago, I've gone from leading a team of 4 to 15 in the past year. When I joined the company, most developers had similar titles, like "Software Engineer" or "Senior Software Engineer". It was nice how flat it was i.e. my manager had the same title as me. On the other hand, it also meant that if you wanted to "move up" you had to lead teams and do people management. Now we have 2 tracks so people that are good individual contributors and want to remain ICs, can.
• 🏃‍♂️ Leo went running with me again. He was looking forward to it all week. This time we ran about 1km, with a few walking breaks.  Good thing too, as it was my only run this week 😬.
• 🎶 My iPod classic arrived...and the hard drive was dead. The disk still spun, but it had enough bad sectors on it that I couldn't even sync music to it. I upgraded it with an iFlash Solo, which allows me hook up a SD card to the ribbon cable and I replaced the battery. I excited synced all my music and...the headphone jack was also worn down and only a single channel worked reliably 😫. So I've ordered a new headphone jack / lock switch off Ali Express. I'm hoping that allows me to start living my offline music dreams again.
• 🎮 Having a custom / modded iPod Classic has also gotten me looking at other old tech that I liked and I discovered a huge scene of modding / upgrading Gameboy. I'm really tempted to pickup a Gameboy Advance SP so I can play the games I used to...(technically I could do this with my switch today, but that's always hooked up to the TV and requires a subscription to Nintendo Online).
• 🦁 On the way home from a friend's house, I suggested we visit Manma Pasta and Leo could get a pizza or something. He went on about how he'd rather make a pizza (fine, but not starting at 5:30pm without dough on a school night) and it turned into an argument between him and my wife. As we left the parking lot (it was on the way home) he realized we were serious about not eating out if he's gonna be so selfish and hardheaded. "Ok, ok, I got it. Let's eat here" he said, but by that point, we've already decided we're not eating out. Naturally he continued to argue most of the way home. The next day, without any prompting, he apologized for his behavior the night before! There is hope!
• Readers might be feeling a bit of whiplash – a single post with both great and horrible days. Such is life with a 5, almost 6 year old. Sometimes you miss the "good ol' days", when things were easy and you had (so much!!) free time, especially on the bad days...but the good days... the good days more than make up for it.

Online platforms allowed me to cultivate a freer version of myself. Then the digital world began to close off.

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