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Monthly Review: February 2022

So that’s February done. I said in my last review that my focuses or themes for the month would be writing, diet, and injury recovery. I didn’t do great, but given the circumstances, it wasn’t too bad.
The big headline for the month in our household has been that Covid has finally visited us. So far, four out of five of us have tested positive, with myself completing of a week of snotty coughing. Needless to say, it’s affected pretty much all our plans. Running has been reduced to 1 milers for the majority of February. Although the running streak continues. I tested positive as the government removed legal restrictions on leaving the house. But I’ve been managing risks – only going out at around 9 pm, and swapping sides of the road whenever I see a pedestrian ahead.

Last month’s goals

Because of the enforced rest, my piriformis injury has improved a lot. This was helped along by stretches and bridging. I’m hoping over the next couple of weeks to start testing it a little, just as soon as my LFTs turn negative.

I arrived at some changes to my diet. The primary changes were to consume more carbs, while restricting processed sugars. The improvements started well. My weight was stabilising, and I intended to incorporate some principles from Racing Weight into my training. The main principles were to focus on running performance and body fat percentage. But, the Covid issue has led the past couple of weeks to a LOT of compromising. Myself and various meal delivery services have become very well acquainted. I hope to fix that as we all start to heal up.

The goal around writing more went ok-ish this month. Each week, I’ve been completing different prompts from Tracy Winchell’s Tame Your Monkey Mind. I’ve found it to be valuable. The most recent exercise I tried was writing a letter to your tomorrow’s self. This exercise externalises the events and feelings of today and sets out expectations for tomorrow. Serendipitously, RJ Nestor writes about this metaphor in his most recent newsletter. I recommend it if you’re at all interested in the “tools for thought” space. He describes it as “meta-work”, drawing a line between this exercise and the way modern teams communicate using tools like Trello. I’m going to endeavour to continue doing this, with more of a work-hat on over the next month.

Playground

When I considered what I did in the playground this month, I didn’t feel like I’d achieved all that much. In my head, I’d iterated what was already there and made the weight graph useful. But when I look at my commit log for it, I achieved a fair bit:

  • I introduced some rudimentary navigation. This involved getting all my check-ins and “windowing” them a week at a time.
  • I ripped out all the previous individual weight log pages (which was only ever going to be a temporary hack).
  • And I implemented a trend line, based on the ancient, but still useful Hacker’s Diet. That was more fun than I expected.

You can see my weight graph in action over here. It won’t show much activity over the past couple of weeks, due to a combination of illness and avoiding the truth.

Up next in playground land, I’ll attempt to integrate a calendar view. It may resemble the Contributions feature present on GitHub profiles. Originally, I wanted to wait until I had more data to display. But instead, I’d like to understand whether my data types are right before having to rework them later.

Podcast

I had the pleasure of chatting to Si Jobling on his always-fascinating podcast Make Life Work. We talked about my day job before diving into some of the history and learnings from my playground. It’s weird listening to yourself talk about this stuff. But it has given me some insight into what skills I can work on. For example, communicating complex subject matter. It’s a key part of my job, so to get some real-life introspection like this is borderline priceless.

March

Thinking about what I want to do in March has been straight forwards, there’s a lot of carry-over from last month:
  • More writing. This month though, I’d like to focus on my Zettelkasten. We’re starting a book club at work on the DevOps Handbook. It has made me realise that I’ve amassed unprocessed fleeting notes for my Zettelkasten. I’ve fallen out of the habit of focused writing/thinking. So with that, I wish to make an effort to process and develop my backlog. Also, to get in the habit of processing them as I create them.
  • My fitness plan is going to resemble to plan for February. I’d like to rebuild my running, eat well, and do more support exercises to help protect against injury.
  • And a little stretch goal – I want to start moving my musical muscles again. I don’t yet know what that will look like – Guitar, Ableton, Jazz, Chiptune? All three? Regardless of which, I’d like to shift my default fallback leisure activity from playing copious amounts of Slay The Spire.

Consumption Highlights

Films

Good movie watching month, helped on by Covid layup. Highlights were aplenty, but I’ll stick to three for now:

TV

This month we blazed through Murderville, while Pam and Tommy has proven compelling. We’ve watched lots of other stuff too, but I don’t want to use this as a place for negativity. Those two were my definite highlights.

Podcasts

Reviewing my podcast listening for the month, two things occur to me. First, I need to take some notes on these, if only so I retain more from them than mere passive listening gives. And two, a lot of my favourite/most memorable listens come from the same source podcasts. But rather than regurgitate the same three sources, I’ve picked out a few different ones this time:

Books

  • In February I finished Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. A lovely book with some great lessons contained within it in a non-preachy way. I expect to look at more of her canon in the future.
  • I completed Team Topologies, it gets referenced a lot at my workplace, and for good reason. It overlaps with concepts found in literature such as Accelerate. As well as modern architectural principles like micro-services and event-driven architectures.
  • I started Greg Egan’s Diaspora, which is so far heavy but already rewarding if only in the amount it makes you think.
  • And I started Making Work Visible, another much-cited book at work. It’s too early to have formed an opinion yet though.
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2013: So How Did Those Goals Go?

My last post was entitled ‘Goals for 2013‘. Reading back on it should be quite depressing because I’ve missed just about every objective I set myself:

I didn’t really take up BJJ again until about 3 weeks ago when I discovered a Caio Terra affiliate around the corner from where I work.

The obstacle race never happened, I flaked out due to a mixture of my stupid subconscious and other commitments.

I didn’t get started properly again on the ‘big’ fitness tool idea I had. It’s OK though, I’ve had an idea for a new tool that I can roll that into. I’m sure that I will definitely get round to making that.

MMA-Urls is still dead.

I still suck at guitar and uke. I’ve not practiced any of that. I did invest in LSDJ and a Gameboy though. I reckon spreading myself even thinner is definitely the solution.

I’ve barely progressed in German.

And I’ve not written a single blog post since that last one where I said I was going to write more blog posts.

So yeah – success all around.

Actually yeah, really – success all around. I genuinely intended to do all of that stuff. I just didn’t. I’m not going to beat myself up about it. There are a billion and one reasons why none of that happened, the main one was that it ultimately wasn’t important.

It’s not like I’ve sat on my arse all year – work has been busy (we have quite a sweet little product about to go live to the world, you might hear me blather on about it on Twitter in the new year), I’ve bought a house, and then took the massive step of moving in with my girlfriend and her kids. And that’s without all of the other tedious rubbish I got up to that would be better left undocumented. I guess ultimately, this was the stuff that was important, and so that was what got done.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in myself this year, and I thank running for this, it’s that I’ve become more reflective. In times past (like at the beginning of this year), I’ve very much got caught up in the 43 things, bucket list, if-I’ve-not-done-this-this-this-this-and-a-bungee-jump, experience-first mentality.

If I’ve seen something happening, I’ve thought, “shit, where’s my camera?” without really knowing why I’m taking photos (is it for my own recollection? to show how interesting my life is? all of the above?).

I mean, these snapshots are nice, but at the same time – what am I missing out on? And who really cares?

If I die tomorrow, will anyone (including myself) really care that I never learned to play piano?

This might go some way to explaining why I’m quite a bit more low key on social networks these days. Facebook basically gets Dailymile updates and the odd accidental Goodreads cross post. Twitter gets my witless tedium. There’s the odd photo here and there, where I remember to upload them.

To bring this terrible, terrible piece of writing back on track, those goals I set still matter to me. They’re not what people tell me are SMART objectives, and I’m not sure they should be. These are just things I enjoy doing, and that’s why I will either do them, or I won’t. They don’t make me an interesting person, they’re not going to make me millions, and no one’s going to mention any of them in my eulogy.

Running goals went alright though – I ran further than last year (1157 -> 1657, exactly 500 miles further in fact). And the streak continues. I actually have 3 new draft blog posts in progress on that (told you I’d been reflecting), as well as a small php library (you probably shouldn’t use it yet though, the API is shit and not final). I’ll get round to publishing them soon. Probably.

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Personal

Goals for 2013

This was an addendum to the streak post last week, but it has kinda developed a mind of its own, so it is now its very own post. Yay.
So what of the next year? Are we going for 700+ day streak? Am I going to define some new goals? Well I am, yes – the streak is too useful to just let go like that. The next big milestone will be 512 days, which comes around at the end of May – so that will be nice to aim for. And I have several new goals:

Physical

I’m hoping to support my running with some level of core / muscular exercise – I need to start up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu again, it’s kinda shocking that I founded what has turned into one of the best BJJ communities on the internet (no thanks to me, mind), and I’m still not training it consistently. I can’t set a solid goal like blue belt, due to the fact that I ultimately suck at anything competitive, but something simpler like weekly attendance isn’t out of reach.

I also have my first obstacle race booked in March (another reason to train some actual core). And I have a silly pie-in-the-sky plan to run 31 miles on my 31st in June. So that should give me something to build mileage towards.

Projects

I’ve had a fitness tool in mind for a while now – I’ve told a few people the idea and it seems to get a pretty decent reception (it’s not a top-secret thing, I just don’t want to tie it down in writing, because I’ve not exactly specced it out yet – I’d be hugely grateful to discuss it or have it naysayed in real life if anyone fancies to talk over a pint or coffee or a pint of coffee). So with a simple data-collection part coded over the past month or so, I look to dogfood and continue with building a prototype over the next 3 months – it might go the way of dogfood and end up as dogshit, but I’m alright with that, having something to work on in my spare time is a great motivator to keep me skill-building, regardless of the outcome.

mma-urls is a link aggregator I built a while ago. It’s broken beyond disbelief at the moment, and traffic’s non-existant – I need to fix it pretty soon. I also have some nice features in mind for it, and some semantic-web goodness I want to inject into it (coding with RDF and the semantic-web at work has given me plenty of ideas, it’s just a matter of making time).

Skills

There are three skills I’m looking to develop over the next year, both major and minor:

  1. Music – 2012 saw me actually playing music again. It’s been a longtime coming. I joined the ukulele club at work, and I purchased Rocksmith. Both have been excellent motivators – I plan to keep up both throughout the year.
  2. Language – my German skills have remained dormant since 2004, the year after I returned from living there. I’ve been refreshing myself recently using the awesome duolingo and memrise webapps, and hope to improve that into the year – at least to the point where I can start reading German literature and hold a conversation decently.
  3. Writing – I have been completely overwhelmed by the response to my streaking post last week. Where previously I felt a need to only write geeky techy posts here, the response to the running one has made me realise that there’s nothing wrong with turning this thing into more of a hodgepodge of subjects. WordPress makes it easy for people to filter out shite that they’re not interested in using tags, categories and their associated RSS feeds. And it also results in me starting to consolidate content in one place all owned by me – I’ve previously fell afoul to publishing on various other web services to get around the single subject matter of this blog, as a result, I’m at the mercy of google and tumblr rather than just a single transferable webhost.

Tracking

To stay on top of all of this, I’m pretty much abusing Joe’s Goals to mark a tick against which ones I do daily (they should start paying me commission), and then getting a ‘score’ at the end of the day to let me know how I’m doing.

But aside from this rudimentary aggregation, I log workouts and running on dailymile, I track German progress at the aforementioned memrise and duolingo, and rocksmith does a good job of assessing progress on guitar – so I guess there’s micro-tracking elsewhere too.

I’ve actually trimmed out a few goals from here, because either they were ridiculously insignificant, completely unachievable (the 31 miles at 31 thing probably should accompany this cut, but a man can dream), or just made for too much to concentrate on. I’m probably spreading myself remarkably thinly here, but I may as well try to make hay as the sun shines and all.