Weeknote 42/2022

I seem to have relapsed in recent weeks to the bullet-point weeknote. This week is going to be no different, I’m afraid. Who knows, some readers might even prefer it?

Anyway, this week I’ve been:

• Travelling to Lille, France for ePIC 2022. I had a great time, presenting a couple of times on Keep Badges Weird and with Julie Keane and Don Presant on the OSN Open Recognition working group. It was my first time on the Eurostar and it definitely won’t be my last!
• Moving exercise.cafe to new managed hosting with Fedi Monster. I wrote more about this here.
• Buying a second car. We’ve gone for a high-spec 2018 VW Up! as we need to take our kids to different sporting activities at the same time in different places at the moment. We don’t live in a city, so public transport would take a ridiculously long time, sadly.
• Not leasing a main family car. We were all set to lease a Hyundai IONIQ 5 through my business, but the funder rejected my application. Given that I’ve got a perfect credit score, I’ve leased a car through the business before, and I’m earning more than I was when I last did that, I can only blame the Tories and Brexit for wrecking the economy. We’ll probably end up just replacing our (lovely) nine year-old Volvo V60 with another one at some point.
• Listening to politics podcasts, mainly The Rest is Politics, hosted by Alaistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, and Today in Focus from The Guardian. What a crazy week.
• Running, both at home and in Lille, trying to keep my heart rate at around 155. This seems to be enough to get enough of a workout, without pushing my heart too much. Not so many endorphins, but safer — I’m also taking my phone running these days, just in case.

Next week, I’m working on Monday, seeing my sister and her kids, and then heading off with Team Belshaw to Scotland for a few days as it’s half term.

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Photo of the opera house in Lille taken in the early hours of Friday morning, after a whisky with friends to celebrate the lettuce’s victory!