105 - What's going on in Vince's world? 🙆🏻♂️
Hey there, !
I’m all about that low effort easy posting for a bit - so let’s go through some easier stuff - what’s happening in my world? What’s been goin’ onnn?
Cut fruit = love
I’m healthy (ish), happy (ish) and have very little to complain about. I still live at home, surrounded by numerous toys and gadgets keeping me sane during these uncertain times, living in a safe (ish) bubble for myself. I’ve had my two vaxx so I’m ready to get out on the town when this is all over :D
I’ve been reading lots (still slogging through the Autobiography of Maya Angelou), writing a ton (my backlog’s never been healthier!) and dabbling in hobbies here and there. I picked up Python once again, to continue pushing the coding boulder uphill over and over again, and have also been trying to learn how to design things in 3D (I printed something for the first time that I designed - a stamp! Hopefully leading to more customised things in the future…). Everything else is subsumed into movies and YouTube, so it’s a relatively comfortable life for now!
Hell, I still get cut fruit every night. Trying to hold on to this moment for as long as possible - I’ll have to cut it for myself one day :(
Health and…endorphins?
I’m trying my best to maintain my health - the fruit helps ;) - but also making sure I get the requisite exercise in. WFH has really helped, as well as the (pre-lockdown) constancy of futsal that gave me the motivation to keep it up. It’s a classic long term benefit that needs a short term carrot/stick - it’s always good to exercise but I don’t see the need to on a short time scale; instead, nearly dying at each game is all the motivation I need to keep this going.
I’ve started running every day when I can - usually only for 30m at a time when I can find time during the day, but on rainier days I’ll just do bodyweight stuff at home. Unfortunately, I don’t really experience the endorphin rush that’s supposed to come from running (which would be that short-term gain) - but maybe it’s because I don’t run long enough?
I’ll let you know if it does happen though :)
I think, therefore I adult
Happiness and fulfilment are present, but elusive. I thoroughly enjoy the people that I work with, and the stuff I do outside work, but I’m still trying to find the thing in my life that just…fits. I spent a lot of my life preparing for something, and now I’m trying to work out what that thing was. Or maybe I’ll have to create it myself?
On that note, I’m on the path to renovating a house I’ve just bought, which is both exciting and terrifying as it’s a completely unknown thing. I’m notoriously not a hands-on type of guy, but I really want to be, and that’s scary. Pushing the boundaries is better than not doing anything at all - like the saying goes, ‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now’.
This tree’s going to have a bunch of space for boardgames because for some reason hobbies don’t just wither away during lockdown; I’m still addicted to the thought and feelings of playing games - not only from the brain-tickling aspects, but also the social enjoyment of spending time with people you love. I do wonder what will happen after lockdown; will anyone stay in one place long enough to play games?
Next steps
I have so many things I want to do after this pandemic. Lockdown. COVID. Whatever we’re calling it. Play more games. Eat more. Cook more. Learn a martial art, write a book, find new friends and build a comfortable life. Travel overseas, visit family, eat more, see more, experience more.
Everything that’s been on hold while we’ve been in lockdown; that’s the stuff to restart.
How are you going? :)
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Drawdown - The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming - by Paul Hawken. I was looking for a book on climate change for a while as it’s one of the most important problems of our time, and I wanted to get a better handle on conversations about it. This one spoke to the engineer in me that wanted to know the actual plan that people had, rather than the wishy-washy ‘it’s all bad’ comms we hear every day. This was…good. It had actual costs and benefits for 100 different solutions (with a swathe of assumptions based on existing data - some of which is highly optimistic) and made sure they took into account double-counting and other scenario planning. However, it was repetitive in parts, with a number of the solutions being the same thing (E.g. solar farms / solar energy / solar grids, or agroforestry / tropical forests / swamps / temperate forests). Overall, a strong book that could have probably been 1/3 shorter if they combined solutions together.
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Coherence - available on SBS On Demand. It’s a mind-bending sci-fi psychological thriller that is essentially a bottle episode (which I love) - mostly occurring in a person’s living room - but the concept spirals further and further out of control (which I ALSO love). I don’t want to spoil too much, but essentially it’s the night of a comet and the power goes out at a dinner party. Weird things start happening. Highly recommended - it’s weird and wonderful stuff!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Does Oil come from Dinosaurs? - no, but it’s interesting to find out where it does come from!
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A Taxonomy of Moats - business moats, that is. A really interesting piece (a little long) on what businesses do to build a competitive advantage in the market. It’s not exhaustive, but it gives a good explanation into different ways to build that moat in the market.
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10 Secret Trig Functions Your Teacher Never Taught You - …and for good reason. Names like versine, haversine, covercosine - random values that were essentially combinations of 1-sin or cos/2 etc. that were used to look up tables (like log tables) back when they didn’t have computers to compute the values for you. Interesting math history to read about (only applicable if you need to care about teaching kids trigonometry in any part of your job right now LOL)