Tony Wolski

Weeknote 2022-03

2022-01-23

I'm using my bullet journal less and less. Maintaining journals in two separate locations was never going to work, but I'm willing to sacrifice the bullet journal for a short period while I experiment with Org Mode, capture templates and Agenda. I hate to give up on the simplicity and accessibility of pen and paper, but I am seeing some benefits of plain text .org files, e.g. searching.

I updated my now page for the first time since October. With so long between updates it probably should be called a then page.

On the business front I continued with accounting and co-operative admin, and our ad-hoc 'marketing' campaign. We probably need a better strategy to bring in new (first) clients. All we're really doing is cold emails and the odd announcement. I announced Yvant on the ClimateAction.tech Slack channel and had a few curious people email [email protected] to learn more about what we're doing. I also used a 60 second intro at Green Tech South West's most recent MeetUp talk to introduce us.

We migrated Yvant's website to Cloudflare Pages. The site was originally hosted on GitHub Pages which is run on dirty energy; not acceptable for a climate-focused tech company. According to The Green Web Foundation we're now hosted green. We may end up moving again because each Cloudflare Pages 'build' takes 2 minutes to create, odd because it's a single index.html page that doesn't need any building.

I missed my second day of exercise for the year on Saturday. I hate breaking the chain. On a positive note I broke my record for a freestanding handstand, falling shy of my 2021 goal (60 seconds) by two seconds. I ran my fastest 10km in a long time, 44:03; running with a friend makes it so much easier. I needed this on Sunday because it hasn't been a great weekend food-wise.

Earlier in the week I nearly booked a flight home to Australia. It's been 2.5 years since I last saw my family in the flesh, and with my sister about to give birth to identical twins I thought it would be nice to get home in April to meet the new additions, catch some warmth after another UK winter, and spend some time with my lot. On the same day I listened to a BBC Radio 4 show called The Black and the Green which delved into how Jamaica (and other Global South nations) are affected by climate change. I'm now questioning my trip altogether. Unless we change our behaviours we'll never make the progress on climate we need to.

My Emacs progress is still coming along. This week I created some new capture templates in Org Mode to speed up capturing tasks and journal entries. I also built a Hugo archetype to automate creating these weeknotes; now I simply run:

hugo new weeknotes/2022-03.org

And I have a new weeknote to edit.

I started reading Early Retirement Extreme again. I'm not sure why I picked this up, but it's a cracker and nice to revisit some ideas and life strategy that inevitably get forgotten over time.

It's been a fairly normal week really. Lots of reading Harry Potter with the kids, taxiing them to extra-curricular activities, and building new Lego sets.