Weeknote 41/2022

Oh I don’t know, I’ve just been doing the usual stuff, you know? So this weeknote is going to be weeknote-by-exception.

Other than the usual work and stuff, this week I’ve been:

• Celebrating my wife’s birthday — Hannah doesn’t work Fridays any more, and I took most of the day off to celebrate her turning… a larger number than previously. We went out for brunch in Whitley Bay and for a walk along the beach in Tynemouth.
• Baking a cake — there’s a Netflix series called ‘Nailed It’ which showcases the worst cake fails. The red velvet cake my kids and I made for Hannah’s birthday wouldn’t quite feature, but my icing style isn’t threatening my day job, let’s put it that way…
• Buying a car — we happened to do this on Hannah’s birthday, but it wasn’t for her birthday. It just happened to be the only time we could really go and test drive cars. We went out thinking we’d buy a Mini, and ended up going for a VW Up! with a reasonably-high spec. This is because we need to park it around the back of our house, and we’ve got an eye on it eventually being the car in which our son will learn to drive.
• Getting back to running — after a couple of hospital visits last month, and then a flu jab and a Covid jab, I managed to run on the treadmill at the gym four times this week. Which is progress!
• Hearing back about funding — NLnet didn’t want to fund development of Badge Brainz (a prototype of which is at badge.supply). I may be biased, but this is a great idea and if you’ve got a few tens of thousands of pounds/Euros to throw at something that will have an impact around recognition and credentialing worldwide, then point it at this. Email me!
• Moving exercise.cafe — I’ll write more about this once the transfer is completely complete, but I’ve moved exercise.cafe to a new managed service. There are currently a few teething problems, but I’ve already got access to many more admin and customisation options than I did before.
• Working on slides — I’m collaborating on a session about Open Recognition next week at ePIC 2022. I spent 30 mins in the car while my daughter was at one of her many football training sessions adding to the slide deck. Ironically, the session itself is only 20 mins long!

Next week I’ll be spending mostly in Lille, France at ePIC. I’m very much looking forward to it and will be getting the Eurostar for the first time! The week after that is half-term for the kids and we’re heading to Scotland on holiday for a few days.

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Photo of gate taken in Benton after going for a walk once I’d dropped my daughter at Jump360! It’s part of the Waggonways routes.