Weeknote 29/2022
I’ve just come back from spending eight hours at a football tournament in the changeable weather of North East England. We had rain, and sunshine, and overcast periods, and wind. My son’s team got through to the semi-final and I spent a small fortune on drinks and ice creams.
I’m composing this post on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga which arrived just after publishing my last weeknote. I spent five days trying to figure out a very annoying problem where the trackpad stops working after suspend. I tried different Linux distributions, hints and tips in various forum threads, and even re-enabled hibernate (suspend to disk) in Pop!_OS.
Having bought it to replace my much-loved Google Pixelbook, which was getting a bit slow, I decided to see what ChromeOS Flex runs like on it. The answer is ‘like a charm’ and it’s so quick and slick, that I’m actually running almost everything via a Linux container, including the Brave browser. I’m really happy with it.
It was really hot on Monday and Tuesday, as predicted. I managed to work through it, but I can’t imagine what it must have been like further down south. Train tracks started to warp, roads were melting, and compost heaps spontaneously combusted, burning down several houses. And yet still some people deny climate change.
I had a really good response to a post I published last week outlining my frustrations and need for a simple claim code-based badge issuer. David Tomasoni-Major has almost built out an MVP and I’ve had a couple of chats with Stephen Hawkes from Dev Society. Watch this space, as they say, as I’m considering putting in a funding bid next week. The doc I’m working on to flesh out ideas can be found here.
I published a couple of posts here:
- Enjoy things while they last (or hope for the best, prepare for the worst)
- Some thoughts on programmatic Open Badge image creation using AI models
The second of these was based on some fun I’ve had with Midjourney, and in fact the image accompanying this weeknote was generated from the phrase ‘Boris Johnson wandering through a dystopian wasteland’.
I’ve also published a few posts on Thought Shrapnel:
- Slack emboldens the meek
- Discourses of Climate Delay
- On GitHub Achievements
- Teaching about dead white guys in an age of social media
- Social-first searching
- Chromebooks banned in Danish schools
- Productivity is the enemy of creativity
It was great to see Anne finally get her email course Feminism is For Everybody, Especially Educators! published this week. This was the capstone project for her internship which finished a few months ago, but as anyone who has ever created a course knows, these things can be complicated. This was her first one, and she’s done a great job. The imagery by Laura is perfect.
Most of my work and thinking time this week has been related to the Keep Badges Weird project, and by extension what we’ll be doing at The Badge Summit in Colorado at the start of August. I think we’ve got everything pretty much ready, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Yes, I feel a bit bad about flying across the world for five days, but it turns out the logistics are painful if that makes up for it.
I’ll not bore you with the details, but suffice to say that British Airways cancelled the first leg of my flight to Denver on the way out, and the last leg on the way back. Without telling me. I’ve sorted it out, but it means a loooooong layover on the way there, and especially they way back. Coupled with Covid rules, US immigration policy, and just the usual pain of travel, I’ll be glad to meet up with everyone, but I’ll also be pleased to get back home safely.
As I’m taking most of August off, I’m trying not to start anything new at the moment. We’re at a stage with the LocalGov Drupal project where we’re moving into a phase of supporting Aaron in his interim role as Community Manager. We’ve got a couple of days left when we get back with the current contract to run an Architecture of Participation session, and helping with other bits and bobs. I’ve already made a start on the AoP stuff here.
With our work for CAST and Sport England, we heard that most of the 21 organisations involved in the project are extremely busy in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games starting next week. As a result, we’ve been asked to pause work on the Open Working strand we’ve been helping with. We’ll circle back after the summer.
Other than that, we had our July WAO co-op half day, and as I outlined above, I did a lot of messing around with configuring and setting up my laptop! The kids are off school now, so I got roped into playing football, badminton, etc. I also spent some time painting the outside of my home office as well as the front door and porch area.
My running routine has been a bit weird this week, but I still managed to run about 35km:
- Monday: 11.5k
- Tuesday: 3k
- Wednesday: (off)
- Thursday: 11k
- Friday: 6.5k
- Saturday: 2.5k
I got up super-early on Monday and Tuesday to do those two runs, and needed Wednesday to recover. I had planned to do a 10k today, but family logistics with the football tournament mitigated against that.
What I was particularly pleased with was yesterday’s 2.5k run. This is something I do on a weekly basis with my son, and it’s something his new football coach (a former professional footballer) has brought in for the squad to do during the week between training sessions. I do it with him to push him a bit. Last time, my lungs were bursting after we both did 2.5K in 10:21. This time, we did the route in reverse and I managed to do it in 09:51!
Afterwards, my Garmin watch buzzed to inform me that my fitness age is now 33.5 — eight years younger than my chronological age. It’s an achievement, for sure, and one that’s taken me six months. It was my lungs being so battered by Covid that was the stimulus; I have to say that I feel fantastic at the moment, and greatly enjoy running every day. I’m also getting to the gym, but not as often as I was before. I feel that cardio is more important than muscle mass at the moment, especially in the summer.
Next week is the start of a month of travel. Team Belshaw will be in Sheffield for the Women’s Euros semi-final between England and Sweden. Thankfully, our gamble that the Lionesses would win their group and the quarter-final paid off! Hannah and I went to university in Sheffield (which is where we met) so we’ll be revisiting old haunts with the kids.
I’m then flying to Denver and travelling onto Boulder next Saturday. So next week’s missive will come from Colorado. I’m expecting it to be pretty warm, and will be packing accordingly. I don’t usually check a bag for business trips, and definitely won’t at the moment as under-staffed airports are meaning that a lot are going missing. I’m just trying to figure out whether I can get away with just a backpack…
After that, I’ll be in Devon for a family wedding, and then straight from there to France on holiday. We’re keeping our fingers cross that the current problems around massive tailbacks to get through the Channel Tunnel will have abated. I’m sure everything will be fine.
Image created by Midjourney
👍👍👍