• 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. ↩︎