Weeknote 17/2020
After a crappy week last week, I’ve actually really enjoyed this one. Sunshine, family, meaningful work, and tangible progress have all combined to vastly improve my mood and outlook on life.
Another thing which has been a huge boon was the delivery of the exercise bike we ordered over a month ago. It’s installed in my home office, and I’ve been over there pedalling away while playing GRID via Google Stadia. Incredible.
On the advice of friends and family, I brought forward my follow-up therapy session to Friday. It proved to be a great idea as it showed how much progress I’d made. The evidence? I managed to dig myself out of a hole I’d created for myself within the space of a few days, instead of weeks.
We went through some other things, including avoidance, balance, and the ‘masks’ we all wear. I’m going be checking in again next month, having found that the value I got from a remote session was the same as in-person.
It hasn’t rained here for ages. Since the pandemic started, in fact, unless I’m remembering things incorrectly. As a result, when we did some family gardening on Saturday morning, it felt like we spent half our time watering the existing and new plants in our garden!
I never thought I’d say this, but there’s nothing like gardening in the sunshine with other people. Light physical activity coupled with instant results makes me happy.
After that, we toasted some marshmallows in the fire pit and sandwiched them between two chocolate digestive biscuits to create a British version of smores.
On the work front, I’ve been busy with the co-op helping a London-based charity with their pivot to fully-online provision. We’ve also been creating an email-based course for ‘the new normal’, with the first output (available soon!) being The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Virtual Meetings.
With MoodleNet, I want to explore framing what we’re offering as a ‘distributed digital commons’ as I think a ‘federated resource-centric social network for educators’ is not only wordy but difficult to grok.
Ivan asked me to help him add more educator-focused examples to the styleguide-as-code he’s been working on. This can be accessed via design.moodle.net, which is currently a redirect and work in progress, but had me using git for the first time in a couple of years!
We’re in the midst of reconfiguring the team as MoodleNet is moving beyond the ‘innovation’ phase into production. That means that a couple of existing members of the team are taking the opportunity to focus on other projects. The aim is to start federation testing in a couple of weeks’ time, if all goes to plan.
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter recently. Not only is the platform doing an increasingly good job around verified news accounts, but there’s just so much interesting and fun stuff that people are sharing on there at the moment. You still won’t get me using Facebook’s products, but it’s hard to argue with network effects.
Writing-wise, I quoted Seneca extensively in an article for Thought Shrapnel entitled Thus each man ever flees himself. I also posted my usual link roundup, and tweaked the theme for the weekly newsletter.
The biggest things I miss most from pre-pandemic life are, I would say: travelling; watching my kids do their various sporting activities; and seeing my parents in person. Apart from that, life is very much the same as it was.
Next week, therefore, I’ll be working from home my usual mixture of working for Moodle, We Are Open co-op, and trying not to put on too much weight…
Otherworldly header image created by using detergent to clean a roasting pan earlier this week.
