Made-Up Bits

a personal blog, by Sven Seebeck -

Weeknotes #8

Since the last instalment of this series again a few months have passed, but I took a bit of a distance from the blog and my computer and in hindsight this was a very beneficial thing. It was good getting a distance and re-thinking the whole thing a bit.

With the current situation being what it is (I briefly considered naming this post “Lockdown Week 2”) I am forced to sit in front of the screen, just like everyone else, much longer than I care for and I guess I need to have a distraction from time to time, which in return revived my interest in blogging.

But more on that soon.

The last two weeks, had been stressful, very busy, exciting and exhausting, a bit of a rollercoaster, but we’re trying to make the best of it.

Work

For now two weeks now I’m teaching from home (famously out of the kids room) and am running through all kinds of video-conferencing software. Zoom, a rather popular choice, has the best controls for sound, and so far had been consistently good, but not overwhelmingly so. The next, and my favourite because it works out of the box well, would be Google Duo. The latter is handy because it comes pre-installed on newer phones, hence quite a few of my students have access to it.

Of course our network here at home has to deal with about 3-4 running connections at the same time, hence things slow down on that end.

Especially interesting is the part with the “band-rehearsals” and we are at the looking at a solution to do remote-recordings. In any way, it is interesting but things still need to be ironed out a bit more.

Blog

One thing that I did to get a bit of a distraction from all of this, which happens to be also part of a much larger attempt to simplify things in general for me, is that I moved my blog back to Blot.im after a roughly 7 month run on Wordpress.

There is nothing wrong with WP and I still like it, but it feels way too heavy for what I am using it, yet still somehow limiting.
During the import of my last 7 month worth of posts, a shout out to David from Blot.im for his help converting my posts, and during some minor editing I realized yet again how much more I enjoy working with a plain text blog.

For example simply changing some links in ALL my posts is merely a matter of a mass find and replace and is done within 30 seconds or such.

I will now check during the next few days if something major is amiss and then will delete my WP-blog for good. This back and forth of mine is plain annoying.

Reading

During the last few weeks I did not manage to read a lot, if at all, but when I do, I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman - Kindly Ones”. I’m still looking forward to get the final volume of Joe Hill’s “Locke and Key”, but libraries are closed now as well. So I guess that has to wait a bit more.

Handwriting

At some point during the last months I had some sort of breakthrough and all my work getting a better handwriting finally paid off, and my cursive is now much more going into the right direction. Still, I’m working on it everyday in my journal.

Things watched and listened

During the night, while editing some arrangements, I finished the season finale of Picard and in hindsight can say, that I enjoyed the series. It was nice “meeting” those characters again. I have never been much of a Trekkie, yet still watched it quite a lot, as I realized recently during a re-watch of the old seasons of TNG, as I was rather familiar with quite a few of those episodes.

I’m also catching up with my podcast-backlog and found the latest episode of The Bugle and Stephen Fry’s Seven Deadly Sins particular entertaining and interesting.

But I think that’s about it for now and stay safe out there.

Posted in:
✴️ Also on Micro.blog or ✍️ Reply by email