Every work week I have to manage four different Outlooks to do my job. For this long weekend I got to enjoy four new and relaxing outlooks instead.

The long weekend concluded with whatever work-related application is synonymous with driving for kilometers down a blacked out hill dodging fallen branches and trees.

In the distant past I used to perform several minutes of dynamic stretching before using my body for basketball games or long runs. Today I found myself going through wrist warm ups to prepare myself for a business meeting where I'd need to shake hands.

While this is sad, I was happy with my wrist's performance today. I forgot my ergonomic mouse AND my rolled up beanie that I use for ligament padding, but I got through a day in the office using the default mouse setup that all the normal people were using without any pain! Maybe this was because my lower back and hamstring tendon origin were on fire! You can only suffer so much.

My lunch plans got cancelled and despite forgetting my ergonomic equipment I had remembered to bring my backup lunch - 2 Minute Noodles. But given the conditions I left those in my locker and treated myself to what is apparently an Adelaide institution and its best panini.

Well, it was no All’Antico Vinaio, but it's a lot closer to my house.

No matter where I turn in my house I see something half-arsed that I did or built or bought. Examples include: the shower grouting, the hair straightener hook, the cupboard door under the kitchen sink, the cardboard curtain on the window above the stairs, the rug, the rangehood lighting, the front door shelving.

I spend a lot of time at work getting the colours correct and the alignments perfectly straight in my architecture diagrams. I proofread all my Teams messages. I update design documents after go live to include any changes during development. Is this why I don't have the energy to full-arse home improvements? Or is physical work just a lot harder?

Last weekend I tried to get through a few things on the to-do list. I half-arsed a mount for the fan in the gym, and I half-arsed relocating the tomato from a pot to the corner of the garden. Now the tomato is dead. It's tied up like a crucifixion to a trellis, but I know it's dead because I didn't dig a deep enough hole or erect a sturdy enough trellis or keep enough roots attached when I lifted it from its pot. I loved that tomato. It provided nearly three years of amazing service and killing it was no way to thank it. Will this be enough to motivate me to stop half-arsing things around the house? I don't know, but my passionfruit vine can only hope.

Last year I listened to Power and Thrones as an audiobook. As it regaled from start to finish of the Middle Ages in a thoroughly entertaining way I couldn't help wishing that Mark Corrigan (aka David Mitchell) were narrating it. Mitchell is the perfect comedian for me, wordy, not smug, but not too much self-deprecation. The perfect combination lampooning the past while still possessing a historian's authority.

Well, when I saw he'd written Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens and that he'd also personally narrated the audiobook I felt like the simulation had come up aces. This is the exact kind of content I'd wished for during Power and Thrones, albeit for a much narrower slice. Mitchell is in top form for this book. I'm not the type of person who'll ever piss themselves laughing. The equivalent for me would be a short, audible chuckle. And by those standards I was doing the equivalent of pissing everywhere. It's the first audiobook I've needed to slow to normal speed I think ever so that I could catch everything in its rich comical, historical detail.

The only reason I considered not rating this book 5 Stars is because it coasts along through the centuries with delightful cadence, then stops abruptly after Elizabeth the First. I understand why it stops there, but I still felt disappointed. But if wanting more is what you feel after a read like this I think you can say it was a good book.

After listening to David Mitchell's voice for so much of the past couple of days he is now appearing in my dreams.

How much do I like APIs? A decent amount, it seems. They keep me employed, to an extent, and they make it pretty seamless for me to check the weather, my email, the stock market, along with a thousand other daily use cases. They justified my work paying for me to fly to Melbourne for two days to attend a conference about them.

I don't just like APIs because of the free food and chance to spend time in airports and around lakes. I like APIs because, I think, they're just my kind of software.
Two aspects of my personality are solved by good APIs.

One, prescribed, effective communication. APIs have standard protocols and mediums. Connecting to one can be done at any time. Responses contain the data you asked for in the format you expect. There's no standing around with a half eaten pastry wondering if you should speak now. No waving back at someone who was actually waving at the person behind you. No lingering once the message has been delivered. Good APIs are elegant and clear.

Two, APIs enable maximum efficiency for tiny increases in value. You can asynchronously plug in to an operation while the main program carries on. I prep my milk and take my fish oil while I'm cleaning the blender each morning. If the interfaces of the froth button and my mouth weren't always available I'd spend more time each morning achieving the same result. APIs let me upload images while I'm creating the entry, and spam new iServer objects via a script instead of using the UI.

So yeah, I do like APIs. And free food. And even kinda airports.

Social activities planned for the weekend all vaporized for a variety of reasons. Instead, how I spent much of my time was building an API into Bing Chat so that I could use it from my PHP application. I couldn't do this directly as I needed to host a NodeJS library to act as a proxy. So I elected to deploy a serverless function app in Azure to fill the gap.

As an IT Professional I've advocated for serverless solutions plenty of times as Cloud becomes a more routine part of organisation's infrastructure landscape. There is much to like about the concept of code that's only running when you need it, that will spin up in milliseconds any time you want it. But despite having a reasonable understanding of how that works under the hood, I've never actually deployed serverless code myself. So there was an element of magic that lingered behind the curtain.

Building and deploying a serverless API only took a few hours, and that included setting up an Azure account and installing Visual Studio Code plugins. The only real problem I had was with a version of Node that was too high. I called my API a few times from my PHP application and it worked. Such a mundane experience, but it felt like I was finally over the threshold and ready to call myself a Cloud expert.

Away from my computer, no one seemed to care that there was a piece of code in a database somewhere, but not hosted until it was called into action whenever it was needed. I went for a walk around the neighbourhood, enjoying the golden, sunny light knowing nearly everyone I was passing had never deployed serverless to the cloud.

Some days it seems bizarre that my job is to sit, which is not very comfortable, and not to walk up steep hills, which feels so natural.

I experience a moment of self awareness at lunchtime. I was walking back to the office from the city library. A borrowed book and a kilogram of low fat strawberry yogurt balanced in one hand while I tried to slide my sunglasses on between the headband of my noise cancelling headphones with the other. I realised that I was probably peaking.