Adrian Faulkner's Blog, page 22
February 24, 2021
Streaming Valheim – The Climb #732
Today was the first day of my latest IT Course. Unlike all the others, this one didn’t seem to hold my interest and went into areas of programming I’m not interested in pursuing.
Still, it’s a free course, and if the only thing I learnt was that Microsoft Graph is NOT the function which creates pie charts inside Excel, it was still useful.
It meant that I was a little burnt out by the afternoon and whilst I had a lot of tasks to do, I pushed them to the evening and d...
February 23, 2021
Still Working On Things – The Climb #731
I thought I had the start of a 2 day course today, but it turned out that’s tomorrow. So instead I spent the morning catching up on The Climb.
For once I can attribute the 4 day backlog to something other than laziness. Thursday was the second day of my last course (the third day of training that week). The weekend was Pokemon packed with the Kanto event and our PvP tournament. That only really leaves Friday, which given the amount of learning I did last week, is u...
February 22, 2021
A Productive Week – The Climb #730
This year my focus is on productivity. This comes after a year where lockdown caused me to be sporadic. Things got done, but it seemed to alternate between super-productive weeks and weeks of no productivity. Going into 2021, I wanted to even that out a little. I had a backlog of things I wanted to accomplish; to use lockdown as a opportunity rather than something to weigh me down.
January started well, but the news cycle wore me down a couple of weeks in. It wasn’...
February 21, 2021
Collecting All 151 Kanto Pokemon In A Single Day – The Climb #729
Today was the Pokemon Go Kanto event and it was a crazy day.
I’ve been a little on the fence with Pokemon Go lately. There are things I like, such as the collections and research tasks. And then there are things that really bother me, such as when Niantic seemingly forget that we are in lockdown and shouldn’t be leaving our houses.
The Kanto event was a pay-to-play event. I’m not against throwing money at free games, so long as I am already getting value for money....
February 20, 2021
Short Story Deadline – The Climb #728
I have a short story deadline coming up and I may deliberately miss it.
In recent weeks I’ve collected details of a few open submissions, the idea being that as part of my work for 2021 I should write and submit a few short stories. I had a 2 week window where I could work on these and the submission deadlines matched up.
And to be fair, I ended up writing the first draft of one story and making editing notes on another during the fortnight. It might not be the most p...
February 19, 2021
House of Learning – The Climb #727
One of the things I wanted to do more of in 2021 was learning. I’ve picked up a bunch of courses over the year and whilst I’ve dipped in and out of them, I don’t feel I’ve sat down and really studied.
Primarily I’m interested in story theory – how stories work or don’t – and whilst I don’t see any one thing as prescriptive, I like the idea of dipping my toe in and seeing what works and doesn’t for some people. It’s also useful when, for example, I’m doing a Netflix ...
February 18, 2021
Progress By Inches Rather Than Miles – The Climb #726
Ordinarily, Wednesday is my Warcraft day but I’ve got some more Microsoft training over the next couple of days so fitting it into my day has proved difficult.
I made a point of doing the weekly World boss as they give 250 anima. There’s ordinarily another World Quest that does gives the same but maybe it was the time I eventually logged on, I couldn’t find that second quest. I figure I have an entire week and it’s pretty quiet in-game at the moment so I didn’t wor...
February 17, 2021
Boring Progress Is Progress – The Climb #725
Some days are boring. The problem with doing a daily blog is that sometimes there’s no one thing that jumps out of the day: no exciting news; no new insight; no new plans. At times that’s because nothing happened, that the day was spent procrastinating.
But this week is a little different to a lot recently. I’ve actually been really productive.
I’ve been a bit snowed under with tasks recently. There’s lots I want to do and it’s often felt that I spend my entire ad...
February 16, 2021
Tales From The Support Bubble Sofa – The Climb #724
For various reasons, myself and C formed a legitimate support bubble at the beginning of the pandemic. Every night after I finish work, I head over a few streets and we hang out on the sofa watching TV.
The problem is that I’m not into all of the programmes. You very quickly complete Netflix when you’re doing this every night. Plus, we’re both fussy when it comes to TV, and I tend to lose as it’s not my house.
I’ve long wanted to be able to do some work in the evenin...
February 15, 2021
System Changes – The Climb #723
As much as I moan about the lack of productivity here, I do have a number of background systems I use to at least try and keep me on target.
I primarily use two tools for my day-to-day admin. The first is ToDoist. It’s a task tracker, but it has some features that I’ve utilised to take it beyond a simple todo list. The second is Notion, which is a knowledge management tool where I hold my notes and record things like daily word counts and the like. Although it’s imp...
