Last Year’s Retrospective.

Another year; another retrospective. I suppose this is a habit, now.

Physical Health 🚲 🐕 🍻 ☕ 🤒

My health was pretty stable; I rely on daily dog walks and cycling (in-season) for most of my exercise.

Usually I cycle with my youngest (17) – which makes it a 2-for-1 of exercise and quality time ™. He was less inclined to do many rides over 15K, so this year was “little and often”. I don’t want to twist his arm so I probably need to create the habit of going off on my own for longer trips.

I basically gave up drinking beer except for social situations outside of the house. It almost always makes me feel lousy and I don’t even like it that much. I might reduce that even more next year, although I’m still drinking spirits occasionally.

I’ve also cut down to ~one coffee per day. Unlike beer, I really like coffee, but I’ve been caffinated my whole life and I’m starting to think that’s not good for me. I have no intention of quitting and do not wish to drink decaf – I’d rather have one good full-caffiene coffee per day. I rarely have problems sleeping anyway, but my energy level throughout the day was unpredictable before. I think that this has improved somewhat in the last few months since I cut down.

I finally caught COVID. Even as a basically healthy person with no extra risk factors it totally sucked. I felt terrible for weeks, and I disrupted my family’s lives too when they caught it from me and missed school and work. Keep opt-in mask-wearing normalized, IMO.

Mental Health 👩‍⚕️

I feel like there’s a trope of people my age deciding to get fit before fourty. Instead of deciding I was going to stop putting off the gym, this is the year I stopped putting off getting help for depression and anxiety.

It’s unfortunately a privilege to have access to psychotherapy, but for those who do: I’ve never met anyone who wished they waited longer to start dealing with their mental health issues.

Music 💿

I bought a lot of CDs this year, almost no vinyl.

New vinyl is only worth the expense if I’m supporting the band (generally bandcamp) or it’s an album I already know I will sit and listen to.

I decided I needed a CD player in my office, not just the parlour, and I ended up buying and fixing up three from charity shops to get something I’m happy with.

I’ve found listening from CD (not just ripping it to an MP3) is an important part of the experience of getting to know an album. The friction of having to change the disc means I listen to the same album over and over, like I did when I was younger, and forces me to give things a chance. The downside is that I am less aware of which track is which – which I would be with an MP3 or a stream 🤷‍♂️

I also bought about 80% of my music second-hand from record stores. Obviously doesn’t help artists, but I really appreciate having record stores around, and if you don’t support them, they won’t be there.

Getting a phone-call telling you that they’ve got a copy of the new Pixies album is about a million times better than a Youtube Music recommendation.

Books 📚

16+ fiction books this year. My favourites:

Ra was excellent, it kept changing premise throughout the book without resorting to big leaps forward in time (like, say, Seveneves does).

The Thursday Murder Club books make me kind of nostalgic for England and a very particular way of looking at culture. The third book even has a short section that takes place in Stafford (where I used to live).

I also bailed on quite a few books that didn’t grab me, which I think is a healthy habit.

Books that I do not enjoy and yet finished or will finish:

  • The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
  • Ulysses by James Joyce

I wanted to like Lot 49 so much because parts of the premise are right up my alley, but I hate all of the characters and most of the writing. Fuck that book.

I knew I was going to have a hard time with Ulysses because I’ve read James Joyce before, but it is widely considered one of the most important pieces of Irish literature, so I’m going to see it through.

Ulysses is also a nostalgia trip because I’ve been to places in the book, I understand a bunch of the slang, I’m from Dublin, I’ve even played rugby against Clongowes. None of this is enough to make it a pleasant read. I will perservere.

Games

Despite buying a gaming PC in March, I didn’t play many new games. I did sink some hours into Elden Ring, but after a break from it I had lost my muscle memory so I stalled and gave up.

Horizon Chase Turbo is enjoyable (in small bursts) because unlike most racing games that I play, that are trying to simulate either realistic or ridiculous physics, it’s like a 1980’s arcade racing game where your car feels like it’s glued to the track. Fun.

Also: the PS5 DualSense controller is amazing. I’ve been a fan of the Xbox 360 controller since it was released, and I use one with my PC, but this is the first PlayStation controller that I would choose to use, instead of just putting up with it.

“Social” “Media” 🐘 🐦

I quit Twitter in February which was a great idea. I finally deleted it in December over some or other red-line the new management crossed. It’s hard to keep track of the red-lines. Twitter is Going Great.

(What I have not been able to quit: following the daily news out of Twitter and it’s new main character).

Mastodon is fine. Much like how I approach cycling and photography: it’s two hobbies. Doing the thing, and maintaining the equipment for the thing.

I decided to come up with my own markup format for my Gemini/Gopher/finger on tilde.town. I started writing a parser in Rust but it was getting in the way of me actually updating my site so I just use a big pile of regexes and state in Ruby. I’ve been pretty consistent with my updates there and I enjoy it more than blogging.

I “closed” this blog, as I update it rarely and only link to the good stuff from the homepage. I link to the not-as-good stuff from social media 😀

I rely on the Today in Tabs Discord for the good stuff (and, of course, the actual newsletter – which is obviously excellent, but it’s a four-days-per-week thing and currently we’re in a seven-or-more-days-per-week media cycle).

Work 🤷

It’s been quite a year.

Since getting promoted to Staff (and then Senior Staff) I’ve written fewer and fewer lines of production code each year. That’s probably continued or at least stayed flat this year, but I’ve been able to find niches where my experience lets me find super-obscure bugs or go deep on something or other. Sometimes I write or pair on the hideous scrappy first draft of something. Showing that something is possible is valuable!

I will probably never be the best Go programmer in any room, but I have ended up with like twenty+ years of experience doing things to databases and that’s been pretty useful this year.

It was also humbling because I screwed up a bunch of things this year – not fatally, but I am not looking back at that year and thinking “absolutely nailed it”. But that’s where the growth comes from 🌻

Tools 💚 🧰

Firefox still rocks. Sidebery has taken over from Tree Style Tabs for me.

I have de-Adobe’d my life, and switched to Affinity Photo and Designer on iPad and on PC. They’re really good, and really cheap if you compare them to renting your software forever from Adobe.

This means I also moved away from Darktable for catalog management (replaced with … Windows 11 Photos App?!?). I still use GIMP and Inkscape for things and they are great, but they are simply not at the same level as afforable proprietary software is.

I rip discs with Exact Audio Copy. Honestly, it’s not great for me, but I don’t have a better option. I think I’ve finally dialled in the settings and I get the UI. I have intermittent problems and I am not sure if the external CD-ROM that I use is to blame, or Windows itself, or EAC.

This Staedler pencil holder has been a revelation. Yes: it’s a $20 writing instrument that doesn’t even technically write on its own.