Some (most of you even) will know that I, until recently, had a blog. You may not have noticed that at the end of last year I chose not to renew the hosting. It’s expensive, and I wasn’t getting enough use out of it to cough up the subscription. I was also writing very infrequently.

Now I have this newsletter. I can write when I have something to say, on whatever irregular schedule inspiration strikes, and it gets delivered to you. It seems like a better format for what I actually want.

It might take a few tries for me to find my stride in this new format, but hopefully this’ll be a moderately amusing use of your next five minutes and you won’t instinctively roll your eyes when the next one hits your inbox, or heaven forbid send it to spam.

I’m writing this on a brand new MacBook Neo; a gift from my Husband, as I will be working away from home a little more frequently. It’s the silver 512Gb model, and small and light enough to fit in my bag with my work laptop. My work laptop is a simultaneously too big and not quite big enough¹, ugly, and barely functional, Windows laptop and strictly for work stuff; so now I will be able to take a personal computer with me in addition without literally breaking my back (the MacBook Pro is heavy).

I’m very impressed with this little machine. It’s more than powerful enough for my intended use. I don’t mean that it’s just good enough to get by doing lightweight tasks; I mean this thing can process multiple 4K video streams in real time and that’s way beyond anything that I’m going to ask it to do. People are comparing this laptop to a Chromebook because that’s all the machine you traditionally get for £/$600 or less. The Neo is not equivalent to a Chromebook.

It’s also just straight up adorable.

I’ve also replaced my work bag. I bought the one I’ve been using these last two years before I was made redundant from my old job in 2024, and since then I’ve been commuting super infrequently (a couple of times a month at the most). I did not like that bag as much as I wanted to but actually used it so infrequently that I didn't care enough to do anything about it. Now I’ll be working from an office a couple of times a week I wanted to get something I’ll actually love.

I went back to probably my favourite bag maker, Trakke. My even older bag, prior to the one I’m replacing, was excellent. Unfortunately it was made for 15” MacBooks and while the 16” does in fact fit, it pokes out above the zippered pocket where the zipper is going to scratch the holy b’jeebus out of it. What a great excuse to get a beautiful, new bag². 😏

It has a slightly smaller capacity than the bag it is replacing, which means I’ve paired down my carry a little. More focused is better (and lighter).

So this isn’t just about money that I’ve spent, and as much as I am a huge Apple nerd and a big carry nerd and want to enthuse about both this is about talking to you, my friends, about whatever the hell I’m up to without the performative demands and fleeting attention span of mainstream social media and I want to keep this first issue light and shortish.

I recently passed two years in my “new” job, which is to say it’s no longer really new at all. I am, contractually, a software tester but in the spirit of personal development (something HR departments love to tell you that you need to do more than they love just about anything else) I have become something of a project manager. I’ve had oversight of two major software development projects, both of which are currently very likely to come in ahead of their deadline. This is actually an achievement.

Lastly, around this time last year I spent a stint as Moustache Dad³. Since then I am back to full-force Viking Face Armour, and it’s almost long enough to braid again.

Part of me really liked the moustache, so it may make a reappearance at some point. I’ve also considered trying a couple of other styles but I haven’t found the conviction to try any of them just yet.

I’ll try and settle into some semblance of frequency of writing, and please let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to ramble on about. The tone will be a little different than the blog, which was much more open to the internet at large (and AI crawling/scraping). This can be a little more about life and less just about opinion.

Let me know if this looked OK and was easy to read. The platform gives me a little control over the formatting.

Take it easy.