A Retrospective for Years 2016-19

I thought I’d update my blog to reflect recent changes in my life, and review what was good and bad about them, as I was doing before.

The “Not Awesome”

1. My overall health level has got a bit worse over the years. I have had limited success in losing weight. I was going for regular walks nearly every week with a friend of mine, but that has stopped lately. I find it difficult exercising while living in a city, as my favourite activity for excercising is walking, and there are not a huge amount of pleasent walking oppertunities around my area. I have been getting Ubers to parks and walking there. A posssible solution that I am actually considering is moving outside of the city, where there are a lot more pleasent walking oppertunities on my doorstep, and which would hopefully lead to a much more active lifestyle.

The “Awesome”

1. Conny and I got married! We have also adopted two cats, so we have a little family now 🙂
2. Brexit is not going to affect Conny’s ability to live and work in the UK after all, which is a great relief.
3. I am doing well in my job, having achieved a “High Performing” overall performance rating at work for this year. This has taken a huge amount of personal effort.
4. I have cutout meat from my diet for health reasons, although I’m still eating fish. I have also started getting prepared healthy dinner meals from this site online. The meals are a lot more healthy than what I was eating before, plus it saves Conny from having to cook for me in the evening, which is good as she is currently working two jobs.
5. Conny has started work and is really enjoying it.
6. Our finances are looking much more healthy than in previous years, with Conny starting working and due to bonuses in my current job. I have increased contributions for my pension, and we are doing very well with budgeting and financial planning.
7. I’ve managed to build up my music studio and gaming PC setup quite a bit, which was always something I wanted to do after taking on a more stressful (and rewarding) job.
8. Our house price has gone up a lot.
9. I’ve developed a much healthier attitude to my professional skills and development, after reading the ‘Passionate Programmer’ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6399113-the-passionate-programmer. I have been putting in extra time after work to read a number of books and developing my technical skills.
10. I have started learning maths in my spare time through enlisting one of Conny’s friends who is also math tutor. Building up my math skills will unlock a lot of interesting paths for my software development skills, such as audio DSP, graphics programming, and data science.
11. I have taken up record and CD collecting, and have quite a large collection of electronic music on vinyl and CD now. I bought a Rega Planar 1 turntable and two CDJ1000s with a pioneer mixer for DJing. I can connect the setup to Serato on my laptop for digital DJing too.