Archives: Uncategorized

• Slept: 23.30
• Woke: 09.30
• Screenplay pages: 0
• Coding practice: 1.5 hours
• Piano practice: 1 hour
• Movie: Now You See Me

Writing

Nothing writing today. I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t ‘inspired’ enough, was too lazy, or got too swept up in a deep dive on equivoque in magic/mentalism. You should Google it, it’s fantascinating.

The deep-dive was inspired by Tim Ferriss’ interview with Apollo Robbins, who is fascinating in his own right and has some wild stories (including the time he pickpocketed the Secret Service, and didn’t get arrested).

Regardless, I didn’t get any writing done, which feels like I’ve cheated myself a little there because I was on a role with 15 pages over the last two days. Broke my streak.

Coding

On the flip side, I got through 1.5 hours of coding (which kinda made up for not managing to fit any in yesterday because I caught up a little). I’m getting a little deeper into Python, little by little. It’s tough, though, because I have to keep going back over things a lot, which means I’m constantly pausing and rewinding video. When it’s a six-hour course, that means it’s probably going to take me at least 12 hours to complete.

Music

I’ve managed to get through Angels enough that it’s all down to practice now – I know all the notes, I just have to get them flowing, which I don’t need music for, just practice.

That means I’m ready to find the next thing to learn. So far I have two classical pieces, Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi, and Angels.

I just need easy things, that’s the trick of it. Easy things that sound amazing – the Capaldi song is literally four chords except for eight bars in the middle which change everso slightly.

Other stuff

On top of all that today, I managed about 90 minutes of house work: cleaning, tidying, vacuuming etc. That probably isn’t noteworthy to many people, but it’s a lot of work for me and it left me quite shattered by the end of it.

Ended up on the sofa watching a movie for the first time in a little while (maybe a week or so), which I really enjoyed. The Apollo and equivoque chat led me back around to Now You See Me, which I haven’t seen for ages and even though this must be my third time watching it I still love it.

• Sleep: 23.00
• Wake: 09.30
• Screenplay pages: 8
• Piano practice: 45mins
• Coding practice: 0

On the face of it I slept really well (11-9), but that doesn’t (ever) tell the full story. My sleep is always interrupted, rarely high-quality and never restorative. I literally can’t remember the last time I woke up in the morning and thought, “That’s better, I feel really well rested.” But that’s just life, so there doesn’t seem to be any use complaining about it anymore.

Writing

I’m really impressed that I managed another big day. Eight pages is a lot more than I thought I’d get through when I sat down because there were several scenes that I had no idea how to execute. To get through all of them and a couple more and – always important – to know what’s next next feels like a big win.

Music

My back hurts. When I’m trying to get to grips with a new piece, I have a tendency to hunch over the keyboard looking at the music and my fingering. Trying to get that little bit of Angels right has had me hunched for nearly an hour.

On the plus side, I’m making progress.

Other stuff

Last week I was contacted about a trustee position in a sport’s governing body, which was exciting. Having only spoken to a recruiter about it yesterday with a deadline tonight, that means writing an application has been the priority this afternoon. Coupled with needing to go and run some errands like pick up drugs from the chemist (always good not to run out), that means I’ve not had time for coding.

That’s a handy excuse and all, but I’m so tired and my brain feels so fried from the application (I hate them) that I probably wouldn’t have been able to actually learn anything if I’d tried a coding session anyway. That’s the biggest life obstacle right now: tiredness (at best) or exhaustion (at worst) get in the way of so many things.

The first few days of this daily log feel slightly fraudulent, tbh. Getting this much stuff done in a day is more of an exception than a rule. Not that I’m not enjoying it, but I’m not sure it’s representative.

I suppose I hope that by capturing everything like this, it’s a useful way of showing myself how much I am (or am not) capable of and how much progress (or otherwise) I’m making day-to-day.

• Slept: 03.00
• Woke: 10.00
• Screenplay pages: 7
• Coding practice: 1 hour
• Piano practice: 1 hour(ish)

Sleeping

Exceptionally and annoyingly poor. Couldn’t get to sleep because brain. Couldn’t stay asleep because noise. However, I’m surprised by the amount of energy I’ve had to do things today. Albeit the things that I’m doing are incredibly sedentary.

Writing

Seven pages of screenplay is impressive for me, more than I usually manage to write. It was perhaps a little bit misleading because I was writing a sequence that jumps around a lot – writing lots of sluglines takes up more space on the page – but I’m still happy with the day’s work on it and particularly how I managed to solve the problem that the sequence was trying to solve (namely, how do you make a long science lecture interesting).

Coding

I went back to the beginning of the Python tutorial by Programming with Mosh (it’s brilliant and wonderfully easy to follow) because when I last opened it – yesterday? day before? – I was about halfway through and realised that I hadn’t absorbed enough of anything to successfully completed the exercises he was setting. Which was demoralising.

This time I’ve started a text file¹ to take notes on the key terms and copy and paste the code blocks into as I go along so I have a quick reference guide to things that have already come up. The paper notes I tried jotting down in the first part were suboptimal to say the least.

Music

I’m trying to learn Robbie Williams’ Angels at the moment and I’ve got most of it down, but the twiddly instrumental bit three-quarters of the way through is an absolute nightmare for my level because it involves a few different rhythms and some tricky hand movements to get between chords on the right hand and simultaneously span an octave with the left.²

Contentedness

Mid-level. I’ve so tired it’s hard to be totally happy, but I’ve achieved a lot more today that I was expecting I would when I woke up.

1. For notes around coding a plain text file works really well because unlike something like Word or Pages it doesn’t try to capitalise or autocorrect things. Given Mosh told me that Python is case-sensitive, that could make a big difference between useful and useless notes! ↩︎
2. I have annoyingly small hands when it comes to the piano, so an octave really is full stretch for me. If you don’t know anything about the piano this information will be irrelevant, but it’s OK to be impressed if you’d like to be. ↩︎

When hackers¹ are trying to break into something, they generally have a text file open to keep track of the methods and/or code they’ve tried so far.

That’s something I learned this week because I’ve been trying to teach myself to code, starting with Python. It’s hard. I feel like an old dog trying to learn a new trick: it’s hard to wrap your brain around something so completely alien when you haven’t been in a learning mindset for so long.

Given how dormant my brain has been recently, I’m hoping that the more time I spend trying to learn, the more my brain will adapt and allow me to take in information. Perseverance is key.

The point of the hacker thing, though, is to say that I thought maybe I could/should/would track what I’m doing each day to show myself the progress I’m making and illustrate that good things often take time.

It’s not going to be exclusively code-related. I’m trying to write a new screenplay, which is going very well but also very slowly. I’m trying to learn the piano, which is going very well but also very slowly. I’m trying to move house, which could be going better, is going very slowly, and is providing a quantity of stress I’d rather not have to deal with right now.²

Anyway, that’s what this is. Like a daily vlog, only in blog format. Oh, wait, that’s just a blog. I suppose you could say this is taking me back to my roots daily blogging my journey to transplant. Only it’s more for me than it is for anyone else. You can read it if you want to, though, because I’m nice like that.

---

PS: Given its purpose and format, there may be a bunch of Spag errors in these posts because I won’t be spending large amounts of time editing them. Obviously I’ll do my best to check through, but it’s not the priority nor the point of these entries.

Fifteen years ago today, at 00.15 in the morning to be precise, I received the gift of life from someone I have never met and can never thank.

To celebrate my 15th second birthday, I’ve put together this brief list of 15 things I’ve learned over the last 15 years. It is far from comprehensive, but it’s a start.

1. People are good more often than they are bad. If you spend too much time on social media, you will come to believe the opposite. Don’t.
2. My nieces and nephews have grown, or are growing, into wonderful people. In 15 years I have met three nieces and two nephews who wouldn’t know who I was other than from the stories my family told them, and I’ve seen the other five become adults.
3. If you think you’re immune to hangovers, it’s a good idea not to test the theory too strongly.
4. Long-term, loving relationships are indescribably precious. They take work, they take patience, they take kindness and they take a willingness to open your heart in a way that you know would all but kill you if it was betrayed, but they will repay your commitment more times over than you can ever imagine.
5. Kindness always wins.
6. Children have the best outlook on life. You will learn more from spending an hour in the company of a five year old than 10 years in pursuit of the meaning of life. What matters most to any five year old is what they are doing at the specific moment you encounter them; they have no concept of or care for the future. More than that, their imagination runs free and utterly wild. They can take themselves to the furthest reaches of the absurd or the most mundane of the domestic, but they will love their journeys.
7. Related: our greatest sin is to dampen a child’s imagination and teach them it’s wrong to embrace it.
8. Read more. Ideally more than Twitter and Facebook.
9. Learn to think for yourself, to be able to acknowledge the path that others have laid out, but still to explore ideas for yourself.
10. Never believe the source of a quote unless you’ve researched it yourself. There are two quotes from Abraham Lincoln that I love: “Never believe everything you read on the internet.”¹ and “That would have been very good if I had said it, but I reckon it was charged to me to give it currency.”²
11. Finding good coffee is harder than you think, but once you’ve tasted it everything else tastes like mud.
12. Clichés are only clichés because they contain truth. Don’t simply dismiss them, but examine them instead.³
13. Paris is an incomparable city, Kauai is an incomparable island and Hungary is an incomparable country.
14. Embrace your heritage, whatever it is. I’m three-quarters English and a quarter Scottish, which means I have a wild temper but I’m too polite to do anything about it. I love both of the countries that I’m from and I’m proud to be British (even if I’m not proud of some of the things that we have done in the name of empire or progress).
15. The most important thing in life is gratitude. We all have something to be grateful for, even if sometimes it can feel like we’re drowning in our troubles. Look for the one thing each day you can say you’re grateful to have in your life, whether that’s a roof over your head, a loving partner at your side, a pet, Netflix, food on your plate or even – if you’re really stretched – Twitter.