Happy Boxing Day
Today is Boxing Day! The day after Christmas. Usually a lazy day so why not write a blog post about what I have been doing this year.
I am writing this from Tenerife during a particularly strange day. There are clouds! In the sky! The locals have never seen such a thing and fear they have angered the sky gods with their excessive partying the night before. It is ever so slightly windy and there is a moisture dripping freely from the sky. This is, in fact, exactly what we need. The night before we were treated to a wonderful Christmas day in the sun entertained by the incredible hotel team at H10 Gran Tinerfe. We sat in the sun for about six hours and sipped Cava and read books. Every now and then the hotel put on some music by the pools and they even brought out a foam machine for one of them. I did not get into the pool with the foam but I did enjoy a nice swim earlier in the day. It was a lovely way to relax and even though the weather today is not as good as yesterday I think we all need a little quiet time.
Last month in the UK has been wild. Bitterly cold, or fiercely wet, or both at the same time. Some frost but not a lot of snow where we are in Bristol. But pretty much all round miserable. I was going slowly mad sitting at my work from home desk in the kitchen and watching the energy and gas usage chug away non-stop as we attempted to heat the house. Properly depressing but I also can’t help but imagine what it is like for families that cannot afford to do that. We have been thinking of ways to better insulate our house but there seems to be only a limited amount we can do without sinking thousands - and I mean tens of thousands - into measures. I can understand why home owners hae neglected this for so long: decades. However I also lament at the short sightedness of it. For example our back wall is made from concrete (don’t ask me why) and this seems to bleed heat out of the back of the house. The back room was a constant heat sink in the month of December where temperatures would reach 6°C in the morning. Doing some quick research online a suggestion seems to be to install external cavity wall insulation but at a cost of £11k! That’s quite a lot of Pounds but perhaps this would be worth it in the long run. I am currently contemplating internal wall insulation in that room. This would decrease the usable size of the room - which is already tiny to begin with. I don’t know where to start is the problem. A solution will reveal itself I am sure.
Earlier on in the year I have finally joined a gym and have been training three times a week in Olympic Weightlifting. I am certainly not going to be competing in any events but it is really fun to do once you have learned the basics. The hardest thing is getting your head around the fact that you have a very heavily weighted bar over your head. The best I have managed is 50kg in what they call a split jerk. This wasn’t from a floor start but a rack but still it was impressive for me. My goal for next year will be to do a 60kg Clean and Jerk and a 50kg Snatch. These are the two techniques that you see athletes do in the Olympics however they do them with much heavier weights.
A bit further back and most of my year has been focussed on work. We are rolling out a new internal platform to conduct Experiments within the company. I would like to blog more about that in the future as the technology is taking me in interesting places. I maintain an Android (and Java) SDK for other teams in the company to consume. This will possibly morph into a Kotlin Multiplatform project so that the code can be shared to Javascript and IOS teams as well. That would be a really big achievement for next year so (hopefully) there will be more blogs about this.
I am also using social media less and less this year. In some senses this is quite freeing. In others it is quite isolating. I just have zero interest in it. I did join a new network, Mastodon, however. You can find me here @mez but I am also seriously considering junking my Twitter account. Last year I was actually getting back into it until the Musk takeover. Now it is just hideous and a cesspit. It is sad since there are some really interesting Twitter accounts that I started to follow - a lot of them related to Spanish language learning or Formula 1 - that I have not (yet) been able to find on Mastodon. However this is something that I will be on the look out for in the future as I am sure some of them will move over to a federated network in time.
It has been a tough but interesting year. I did not think that world events would weigh so heavily on my mind as they did, but they do. Maybe I should stop watching the news? Maybe that should be my resolution for next year. Lift heavy weights and stop watching the news? Sounds good.