February 2023 Update

February 11, 2023

Update

As the winter here in the Canadian prairies starts to very slowly thaw and the days grow gradually longer again, I remember that I haven’t blogged for a while. What’s the easiest way to remedy that? Another update filled with what has been keeping me busy for the last few months, including a bunch of links to content I’ve enjoyed!

TV & Movies

No Time To Die - I watched this on New Year’s Eve and I generally enjoyed it. It’ll be interesting to see where the Bond films go after this one.
ReBoot - I got the DVD set as a Christmas gift. I haven’t started watching these yet, but I have been digging out my DVD ripping software and getting these into Plex. This will definitely be a nostalgia trip for me and I’ll finally get to run through the entire series together (as I recall, the original airing felt a bit spread out once they got into the later seasons).

Podcast Episodes

Design Details 444: Writing Effective Self-Reviews - Discusses techniques to help remember the important things to mention when you are filling out a performance review for yourself.
Back to Work 600: The Trauma of My Chumby - A mention of Readwise, discussion of e-readers, notetaking, etc.
Under the Radar 260: Subscription School - Speaking of Readwise, this is sort of a podcast corollary to Daniel Doyon’s Twitter thread about startup Carrying Capacity including a neat tool for visualizing it.
Reconcilable Differences 200: The Genius Who Keeps Retiring - John Siracusa’s nightmarish toenails… again! I laughed in horror for most of this episode. Not for the squeamish.

Fitness

I finally started a proper exercise program in July by signing up for my highly-educated brother’s services (check out his online training services and numerous written articles and I might even get a discount or something if you mention me 😛).
- So far I’ve been doing things at home using bodyweight, (pricy) adjustable dumbbells, and resistance bands. This has been plenty of weight/resistance for someone like me who otherwise sits at a desk all day. At some point I might outgrow this equipment, but starting this way allowed me to “just do it” as they say and remove the friction of having to drive to a gym somewhere first.
- Having someone else figure out the details of what exercises should be done and how many sets and reps of each has been a big time saver for me and made it easier to fit exercise into my life. One of my goals when starting this process was to make exercise something that I do regularly and I’ve achieved that goal by working with my brother. On to the next one!

Reading Queue

Speaking of exercise, I’ve been trying out Readwise Reader on the treadmill and it feels like a neat way to get something educational done while I’m walking. For example, I used the Text-to-Speech feature of Reader to listen to an article with a ~40-minute listen time in one session and it was a great time.
Some articles I saved to my Readwise Reader archive since the last update: