I’ve been thinking about what to write on the blog. One thing I think would be nice for me is to keep a sort of journal of what I’ve been up to each month. So here is the inaugural entry.
What have I been up to this month.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been trying to be more active, so took up running and try to get out cycling more. This month I’ve not manage to run much, only managing to get out 3 times. Running a total of about 11km. Not my best month. On the cycling front I picked up some new parts for my bike but only managed to get out a couple of times. I added a dropper seat post and new handlebars. The dropper post is nice, I feel like I can get lower in the bike and it helps my confidence when descending. For the handlebars I wanted to try something with a higher rise and bigger back sweep. The new bar is 45mm rise and 12 degree backsweep, I’ve only managed one ride with them but so far they feel nice. As for the actual riding, although it was only two rides this month one of them was a big 70km, which is a new record for me. I rode from Callander to Killin and back. Stopping in Killin for some lunch. It was a nice ride and one I’d wanted to do for a bit since the route was pointed out to me. It’s all on walking/cycle paths, nice and quiet.
Books wise it’s been a slow month. I read one new book, Matter by Ian M Banks. It’s a Culture book and one of the bigger ones. I’m a sucker for eh Culture novels, just really enjoy the difference stories and worlds that they portray. To finish the month I’ve been slowly rereading the Hydrogen Sonata another Banks Culture book, only about half way through but just a much fun as I remember.
It feels like I’ve been going back to music styles I’ve not listened to in a while this month. Lots of drums and bass and IDM. So that’s things like Dilinja, Alix Perez, Boards of Canada, Autechre and Aphex Twin.
I’ve also been doing some home improvement, just a couple of small things. Switching out a free standing coat rack for some coat hooks on the wall. Freeing up a bit of space and making the area feel a bit bigger. Myself and my partner finally decided what we wanted to do with one of our rooms, after 18 months of indecision. We are going to turn it into a library. We found some wallpaper we both liked, shock. Now are looking for paint, we’ve got some samples that I’ve put up on the wall we want to paint and we just need to decide now. It’ll be nice to actually have done something with the house. One thing I’ve been contemplating doing since we moved in is running network cables through the house and I manage to start on that this month. My partner’s office was getting very poor Wifi signal. To remedy this I’ve run a cable through the walls to an ethernet wall socket, this has been made easier for me because there is already a coax cables running all over the house. We don’t need those so I can just slowly replace them with ethernet.
I’ve been slowly learning Go! I’ve spent my entire career working with Python which is nice, but I’ve been itching to learn something new. I’d previously bounced off of learning Go, I think because the developer ergonomics didn’t gel for me. Re-visiting things and I’ve found it a lot nicer to work with. I’ve been using this tutorial. I’ve found it pretty easy to dip in and out of it, doing 30 minutes to 1 hour on it every now and then. If I had one criticism it would be that it gets a bit tedious with the focus on TDD. I think at some point I’m going to try and re-implement one of my Python projects in Go.
And finally I’ve started a trial with Kagi. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a while, but I do find myself dropping back to Google a lot. Kagi has a 90 day free trial and I’ve been hearing rumblings about the search engine for a while. So I thought it would be good to see how it goes. It’s a paid service, but if the search results are good I may end up switching. So far I’ve done about 50 searches and it’s been good. I’ve not had to drop out to another search engine. Fingers crossed.