Happenings

  • I’ve had that chest infection all this week. I’m on the tail end of it now, but for Monday and Tuesday I had basically no voice, which is not ideal as a teacher, especially as I had an observation lesson from my line manager.
  • The observation went fine. I generally don’t mind lesson observations.
  • My wife got a new job. Everything seems really positive, and it gets her out of a less-than-ideal situation at her current job. The big downside is it will only be practical if we get another car, which we’ve resisted for a long time. We live in a rural area with poor transport links. My work is only 10 minutes drive away, but buses are every two hours and the journey can take up to an hour, especially at the end of the day, and I’m not cycling down winding country road while motorists do 60. There’s the expense, the ongoing maintenance, the extra space it will take up, plus all the social and environmental problems caused by cars. But in some parts of the country, it feels like the only way.
  • Had a nice weekend with the family. On Sunday we had some bananas on the turn so I baked a banana loaf with them. This is the first cake I have baked since childhood. It turned out okay, though my wife mocked me pretty hard for my first attempt at lining a baking pan.

Links

  • This guy does amazing genre-breaking covers, like this pop-punk/emo version It Wasn’t Me by Shaggy.
  • A triumph for blogging. Kind of aspirational for me, I guess. I’ve “met” a few cool people from blogging but I think it’s awesome when people are able to forge friendships as close as this without having actually met in person yet.
  • The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner. Great post from Writing Slowly. I’ve been itching to pick up my bass guitar again recently (it’s currently in the loft, and I’d need to clear some space in the house proper before I can actually justify getting it down). I’d describe myself as an “okay” bass player: an intermediate. I can play some cool songs, I have created some okay bass lines, and I know my scales and arpeggios. But I also have a strong sense that to get beyond the level of an intermediate, I’ll need to adopt the mindset of a beginner.

Playing

I got to the final Colossus in Shadow Of The Colossus and then my PlayStation crashed. Talk about an anti-climax! I’ll finish it next time, I guess. I’ve also been playing through the Sega Master System games from my childhood on my retro handheld. I set up Syncthing on the handheld so now when I take a screenshot it appears on my laptop pretty much instantly, which feels lke magic.

Reading

I aim to finish The Score (and maybe even Republic) this week. Next week I’m taking a break from the technology reading list I’m following to do a buddy read of another classic of ancient Greek philosophy. More on that to follow, no doubt.