Right, here we go. Back in writing the writing process after a four week hiautus.

I should really have spell check turned on in my new editor, but it turns out Emacs isn't the most intuitive system to set up; I've not yet worked that one. My new Emacs init.el file, now written in Org mode, is complaining about the American dictionary not being found and I haven't had time to resolve it yet.

I have however managed to do a lot in Emacs this week. I'm still slowly transitioning from other editors - vim, vscodium - and the process is slow. At times it's downright painful. Last week I was working with Evil mode, which made some things faster but other things… confusing. This week I've reverted back to the default Emacs keybindings. Some (most?!) of them are slower, but I have the feeling I'll get more out of Emacs in the long run if I use it as it was intended.

I'm hopeful that with enough practice I'll eventually be able to do everything in Emacs: email, web browsing, videos, document viewing/editing etc. This is the long term goal anyway. No more context switching or tool envy/evaluation cycles. It's going to be a slow and painful process. This week I worked out how to open PDF files, a huge time saver. I used to open a browser and navigate to file:///home/tony/Downloads and open the file from the browser's built in file tools.

I did some work on Yvant's website this week. It's very much still a work in progress. I wanted as fast a feedback cycle possible and I wanted to do everything with Emacs. So I invested in setting up my development environment properly. I installed and configured company-mode, lsp-mode, web-mode, Flycheck and a host of other bits and pieces. I nearly gave up as I just couldn't get lsp-mode to load or work out why completion wasn't working. The whole emacs-lisp thing is just so different to what I'm used to with vim and other editors.

I started researching Sociocracy as the governance model we're likely to adopt at Yvant. Much of the system might be overkill a team of three. But there are lots from the model we're likely to adopt. It seems a good starting point.

With the help of Principle Six and Siôn Whellens we submitted our application to become a Cooperative. This is a huge step in our short history, and a long time in the making. We really needed help with our Primary Rules (Articles of Association) as we're not your typical UK based cooperative. Siôn and his team have been a huge help. They've really grasped our situation and given us direction. With a bit of luck we'll be a registred coop early in the new year.

My boy got Chickenpox this week. The first spots showed up on Tuesday and his first day off school was Wednesday. He was loving being off school, watching TV and movies and not feeling much effect at all. Things changed on Thursday night though; he was up much of the night itching, crying and generally feeling miserable. We felt helpless. We didn't have anything other than Calpol to give him, and he wouldn't let us touch him. I slept in his bedroom in an attempt to give him a little bit of comfort, but it was a long night for both of us.

I cleaned up my dotfiles, creating a separate repository for private dotfiles, like .ssh/config. I also created a monorepo for all the regular things I maintain, like my website and Ledger files.

I continue with my Overcoming Gravity workouts. This week I hit a 55 second freestanding handstand, beating my previous best by two seconds. I'm determined to hit one minute before the year is out.

I had my Moderna Covid booster jab on Thursday. I was glad to get it done now as Covid seems to be everywhere at the moment. We've had numerous notifications from the school this week about cases in pretty much every year group, and all the kids have been sent home with lateral flow tests on Friday. A storm brewing?