Week 23 of 2020 brings a hot-tub, bathroom tiles, Mike Street, Cloudflare, neglected sides, another new PB, Logging Off, commercial tech pivoting through lockdown, Rob Beckett and 90s indulgence.

Let’s go for a bullet-point braindump of things that happened this week. I’ll try to cover more entertainment which was neglected over recent weeks too.

  • This week, we had a new hot tub delivered after waiting nearly two months from ordering (high demand apparently). Following holiday cancellations to celebrate 40th birthdays, it felt like a suitable indulgence which simulates the feeling of being away. Shame the weather turned to typical British rain as it arrived though
  • Still at home, we started re-tiling the bathroom which has been put off for many years. The featured image is the decor we’ve gone for and we’ve made impressive progress, especially cutting some of the funky angles along the wonky walls. Still plenty to do (grouting will be fun) but it’s another bit of lockdown DIY that’s checked off the list.
  • Thursday, I released the finale of the Make Life Work “Home Edition” series with Mike Street. It was wonderful to chat with Mike about side projects, leadership and inspiration during fitness – three things we’ve got in common. His reasons for holding off Behind The Source content during the George Floyd racism protests inspired me too. I spent very little time on Twitter, if only to formally syndicate content for the podcast. It feels strange but I’d rather just keep quiet than try to bring attention to an important matter I’d struggle to give justice towards. #sides #makelifework
  • On side projects, I’d like to spend a bit more time on other projects that need attention over the next few months:
    • On The Side has been a great place to chat about general wellbeing over recent months but seems to have lost it’s original focus. I’ve now installed Donut to improve relationships and try to encourage peer support on individual projects.
    • House Finesse needed the SSL certificate renewing so I shifted DNS to Cloudflare rather than pay for Namecheap’s product.
    • I also need to understand how drop-shipping works on Shopify and Oberlo for my Hearables.store and my wife’s Teach Mugs idea. #sides #tech
  • On Friday, I managed to squeeze in a new personal best run of 9.2km – just short of the 10km goal. This run took me along the canal to nearby village Yelvetoft then back along the bridlepath. If I wasn’t so mindful of time on my lunch-hour, I could probably have hit the goal. At least the cooler/damper weather helped compared to recent scorchers.
  • I finished reading “trashy novel” Logging Off this week – a familiar story about a 30-something British chap avoiding tech for health reasons after becoming so dependent on it. I completely relate to this, hence the drive to read offline more (the irony wasn’t lost on me for blogging about it and recording progress on Goodreads).
  • The latest Wired magazine conveniently arrived as I finished Logging Off so I decided to focus on that during my daily 20 minutes reading time. Some interesting articles in there, specifically about Gower Street Analytics using big data to forecast ideal dates for movie launches, even pivoting with lockdown causing cinema closures, and a sponsored feature by Ericsson about how 5G could improve global traffic problems – but I do feel there are bigger challenges at foot. Lockdown has certainly been a perfect opportunity to realise how dependent we are on transport for commuting when we clearly don’t always have to.
  • Other entertainment we’ve enjoyed this week include White Lines on Netflix (if only for indulging in 90s Ibiza times), Lockdown Parenting (thanks to Sam for recommending it – always love a bit Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe) and discovering Absolute 90’s whilst tiling the bathroom – endless tune-after-tune from our era. #radio