🗓️ Weeknote 2025-W09

2025-03-02 21:00

Some random front-of-mind pieces from my week.

🏃 Ran 53.3km / 2,440m profile - Continued some specific training sessions - one tempo (2x 20min) and a hill session (5x 5min efforts on steep gradient), then a day off before a hard push up and over Ben Lomond with 6 others, part of a small low-key trail running series. The series is clearly targetted at me: "Paying homage to cumbrian fell running, each trail will aim to take the fastest and steepest route to the summit before turning around for a furious decent back to the start." It was a fantastically tight race over a big hill (1,442m of climbing over 15.6km). I came in the middle at 4th in 2 hours 7 minutes. I almost lost a couple places on the climb with a couple of pole bearers closing towards the top, but I put the foot down for a pretty reckless, fun, quad-burning descent to widen the gap again, and close in on those ahead. It was very fun to "race" again. Yarns after around the lake, and everyone had similar stories to tell.

🩸 Health - Got my ear unblocked at the audiology place. I get this probably twice a year these days. After two days of complete blockage I had enough. Usually I just go to the medical centre and a nurse flushes it out, but I went to the doctor this time who referred me to the audiologist. Both doc and audiologist say I've got narrow ear canals which is likely why I get wax build up. This mob sucked it out rather than flushed it. It was a lot more effecient. Done really quick. Will use them again next time if I need to. So good to hear in that ear again... it was starting to make me feel a bit bleh.

They also did a basic hearing test. Turns out my hearing isn't great at high frequencies, moreso on the left side. They've recommended me get the "full diagnostic" with the audiologist, which I'll get, for $30. Because I was spying on their software while they were doing this and I love a graph, they kindly printed the results for me on request:

Scan of basic hearing test results showing hearing quality reducing as frequencies get higher. Left and right shown with left a little worse.

🌱 In the garden - Picking a good handful of tomatoes every few days. All 3 plants are producing now. First was the beefsteak, then the cherries, now the mid-sized one (can't remember the name). That's worked well. I will save seed for all three for next year. The pumpkin hanging high in the greenhouse might fall off soon. It is getting big. Probably should put some netting around it so it doesn't crash land on something below.

🏢 Work - Got some good feedback from other tradies, and a colleague, on quality of work. However, having some frustrations over lack of communication or direction on some allocated work - working through how I can make the situations better, not worse. Getting frustrated doesn't help. Funnily enough, lack of task direction and communication came up as a trigger for workplace stress in one of the modules I did earlier in the week. I'll read back through that course. Can't remember if there were any helpful ways of dealing with it from the receiver end.

💻 Tools

• bagels - Groovy little terminal budget tracking tool. I'm still not all over my change of pay 4 months ago and the exact adjustments I need to do, so thought I'd start tracking some expenses. It's a neat little tool that does everything I need.

• strava-rs - The bagels tool made me think how it'd be great to have a similar style for my Strava running data, and I should try and make one as a cool wee project. Thought I'd search around if it had already been done - and it has. strava-rs looks exactly how I was envisioning it, however I can't install the damn thing. There's no instructions on how to, it seems to be a rust and cargo thing with a Makefile which I don't totally understand and can't get going on my Debian machine. I'll keep trying.

📺 Watched

• Black Mirror - Season 1 (2011) - I can't believe it's taken me this long to watch this. I loooove it. Very dark humour / serious sci-fi that is scarily relatable to our current world in terms of politics, social media, advertisements, destructive scrolling. Each episode is it's own story, with no relation to the previous ones. Looking forward to the rest of the 6 series.

• Finished Ghost in the Shell (1995) - Thoroughly enjoyed it, but found it ended quite abruptly. I was kind of left scratching my head if I missed something. Turns out there's a real-life Ghost in the Shell (2017) with Scarlett Johansson ♥️ and freakin Takeshi Kitano ♥️♥️ which I now have on hand and will watch promptly.

🕸️ What grabbed me across the web?

• Hyperlink Travel
• Linux Terminal Emulators
• Explaining it helps you learn it
• Write the Book You Want to Read
• the journey to the tail end
• The only way to know for sure... is to build a prototype
• Getting started with RSS - I really wanted to link to Chris' RSS-only post on converting others to RSS. You'll just have to add uncountable to your feed reader to read it. I try and spread the RSS message to all my friends and family. Some of it's sticking :)