This week I started the Terra.do Climate Change: Learning for Action course. In this first week we had a welcome session, spending time in breakout rooms getting to know fellow Fellows, and a logistics session that introduced us to the online tools we'll be using (e.g. Zoom, Slack), the schedule, assignments etc. There are 150 of us in this cohort, Terra.do's largest yet.

Note: If anyone who reads this is interested a Terra.do course contact me for a 25% discount.

Part of the on-boarding was to introduce ourselves on Slack, on the Terra.do platform, by writing a short bio. This is something I really struggle with (note the lack of About page on this site). For some reason I find it hard to answer the question "Who am I?", particularly in a public forum. To attempt to get over my mental block I'm posting the bio I wrote here:

Dad to two great kids. Husband. Sports fan. Very competitive. Runner, surfer, yogi, bodyweight trainer, volleyballer, ex- Australian footballer. Minimalist. Reader. Lazy blogger.

I'm a software and DevOps engineer by trade. I've worked in Australia, US, Spain and UK, in small and large organisations, startups and established, health, insurance, aviation, finance. In 2012 I built an conveyancing system for a law firm in Cardiff which is still in use today.

Together with a couple of friends I started Yvant, a co-operative building tech for climate. We have only just launched in 2022, so we're looking for our first project. Doing this Climate Change: Learning for Action course to learn more about where we can best direct our efforts.

I'm an Australian native but live in Cardiff, UK.

Co-operative related, we've begun an new push to try and bring in our first project. We're using a ClimateAction 101 AirTable and various other resources to identify and reach out to organisations whom we really identify with and feel we can add value. It's a frustrating period we're in, starting from scratch and learning how to develop new business. This is not necessarily the forte of techies/developers. I guess with each new contact we get closer to that first gig.

On Tuesday I had my mentoring session. I'm doing this as part of the One Million Mentors program, although to be honest there's not a lot of mentoring going on. My mentee doesn't need any guidance or advice, or at least he doesn't ask for it. Our conversations have turned into a good old fashioned chin wag, delving into interests like Marvel movies, MMA, Islam, food science, basically anything that crops up. I have enjoyed getting to know my mentee over the last 4-5 months and hope we can remain in contact after the 12 months comes to an end.

On the tech front I tried to set up org-caldav to have calendar events show up in Org Agenda. I thought I had this nailed in record time, but I hit numerous glitches which make it unusable. For example, changes to events on a remote calendar weren't reflected in the Org file after a sync. I also replaced my custom built TOTP script with pass-otp, which works really nicely, and started using Fastmail's Masked Email with new accounts I'm forced to sign up to.

I updated my Ledger files for the first time in a month. This is still more manual than I would like, particularly when you've got 4 weeks of transactions to explain. I just can't seem to find the time to automate the imports using my bank's API, even though it's a programming task I'm looking forward to getting stuck into.

I continued reading Early Retirement Extreme. Re-learning lots of great lessons. Hopefully the second pass will embed them more firmly.

I journaled quite a lot this week, but not in a bullet journal, in Org Mode. Last week I set up a capture template and a recurring task to make it easier and more visible (Atomic Habits) to jot down a few notes about my day. Ten minutes is all I need. An added benefit of having the content in org files makes it easier to copy and past content when drafting my weeknote.

My son won player of the week (football) this week. I've never seen him play with such intensity, composure and skill. Considering he was extremely reluctant to go because of the miserable weather outside, I couldn't have been a more proud dad on Saturday morning.

I played a competitive volleyball game on Saturday. A group of the guys from Cardiff Volleyball Club played Cardiff MET and more than held our own. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love this game. I think our group will form a team and enter the regional competition.

Other than that it was a relatively normal week. I made time to play games with the kids at the breakfast table each morning. They're much better at getting out of bed in the morning when there's a game of Exploding Kittens, Pirate George or Uno to play. Otherwise I still find them under their duvets with 15 minutes remaining before we have to leave for school, not good for our stress levels!