In the spirit of trying to write more and be more collaborative all around here is a loosely arranged list of things that I’m working on at the moment. The intention is to publish one of these each month in order to keep myself accountable.

Index Cards

I’ve become incredibly frustrated with a lot of the modern ways of tracking things like workouts, recipes, what I did each day and the like. I’ve decided that I’m going to try and keep it old school for a bit and work on index cards. Hopefully, once I’ve had a bit of time to play around with these and determine what format works for me I’ll be able to share what these are looking like. The idea, is to become less digital and more physical. Open questions:

• What format works best for recipes and meal prep
• What format works well for workouts
• Can I use this to track what I do each day?
• What else should I be tracking?
• How should I store the cards?

Face Alignment and Cropping

Currently doing a loosely fitness inspired photo a day composition. Have been playing around with a few different methods for centering all of the photos (e.g. by identifying where in the photo my face is). Next step is to be able to crop and edit the photos such that I’m getting rid of any redundant information. Once this is done I should be able to easily create comparison shots between different stages as well as gifs etc. Necessary steps:

1. Be able to read EXIF data from a photo in order to determine when it was taken
2. More effectively use the settings on my camera
3. Figure out how to use a face/head detection algorithm to identify where in each photo it should be
4. Crop each photo to be able to remove superfluous information
5. Create side by side comparisons easily
   1. Potentially a command line application?
6. Be able to quickly and easily center each image (command line application or daemon?)
7. Create gifs of the output

Lots to do here should be fun

Arduino Starter Kit

I bought myself an Arduino Starter Kit. Goal is to go through all of the 15 projects by the end of the month as work and other challenges permit

Physical Training

Getting back into Callisthenic training. This is heavily impacted by covid but doing my best

• Working on my Pancake and Splits
• Have started training 1 arm pull ups again using a strap
• Handstand max hold is back to 45s, need to bring back up to a minute
  • Continue working towards one arm work
• Working HSPress Negatives
• Working HSPUs and Planche Leans
• Getting diet back on track using a meal prepping based approach

Spot Energy Trading

This is what I do for my day job. Current focus is on:

1. Better calculation of FCAS Positions
2. PnL for Gas Storage Assets (Arbitrage)

House Hunting Matrix

As we shift out of COVID Lockdowns I’ll need to get my house hunting search back on the radar. Likely to be an initial rush of both people looking to buy and places hitting the market. Need to re-update my requirements here.

Personal Finances

Trying to avoid paying the lazy tax for anything

• Moving savings to higher interest account
• Cheaper phone
• Insurance shopping around
• Minimise “junk” purchases

This is a work in progress.

Other Things

• Going to create my own beard oil, just waiting for the ingredients to arrive
• Trying to sleep more and be more consistent here
• Journalling each morning
• Meditation each morning
• Practising my knife sharpening skills (all in the angles…)
• Currently reading: Getting through the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Currently on book four, “The Shadow Rising”.