20 july 2024
Sports / weights / strength
Went to the gym this morning for a session of deadlifts / overhead press / lat
pulls. Went mostly well, except the crowd at the gym felt more annoying than
usual. Folks, how hard is it to not leave 60kg of plates on a bar when you're
done with it, and how hard is it to understand that if you don't put your weight
back reasonably cleanly then MAYBE you're lifting more than you should?
(Accidents happen. When it happens 5 times in a row, it's not accidents
anymore.) Yes, I'm judgemental. And I did not appreciate the impression that I
was in the way/not in my place because folks were just taking ALL THE SPACE
around me and moving close to me during my lifts in a way that felt unsafe. And
I'm pretty sure the fault was not mine on that one.
Grmbl, people.
Went to Baden for late lunch - Pierre went there by bike and I joined him by
train. We walked a bit around the city, enjoyed the Limmat and the bridges above
it, and went home (by train). It was very nice (also the tapas lunch was nice!)
but it was also quite hot, and I felt more tired/grumpy than usual when coming
home. Water helped, though (:surprised_pikachu:)
Finished my "Hangeul refresher" class on Coursera (namely "The Korean Alphabet:
An Introduction to
Hangeul"
and it was overall a very enjoyable experience. I liked the format with both the
videos and the small texts; the quizzes were maybe too much on the "easy" side
to be really useful, but oh well. It was maybe also a bit fast on combination
vowels. But overall, this is what I needed as a refresher before restarting my
learning proper.
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19 july 2024
Sports / running
Went for my (planned) 28-minute run today, and it was... actually pleasant. I
started listening to the Slow AF Run Club by Martinus Evans, and it's super good
so far (well, for the first half hour-ish anyway). My run got interrupted
towards the end because I saw a stroller with a baby in it and no responsible
adult seemingly around, so I panicked a bit - but said responsible adult
reappeared quickly enough, and the only victim were the last 2 minutes of my
run. I was still happy - and I think I may well have hit my personal fastest
kilometer (at 9:30 for the second km today). And I would probably have hit the
3-km mark today if not for said stroller incident. So all in all, a good day.
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18 july 2024
Pretty anxious day today, BECAUSE I was meeting with colleagues of
$previouscompany this evening - people I hadn't seen, for most, for 3-4 years,
in a place I didn't know... there was potential for things to go wrong. And I
had a lovely evening. It's strange how this group still kind of gels, even
though we've gone to various other paths in the meantime, and we didn't have
much more in common than to have worked for the same company for some years. It
was quite emotional, in a good way.
I ate too much, but that's a me-issue, not a other-people-issue ^^;
Continued the "meta-learning" course on Coursera, and really enjoying it. It
basically dumbs down (... in a good way) the neuroscience of learning, and I
find this very valuable (and high-school me is a bit annoyed to not have heard
these things at that time, it would have been helpful.)
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17 july 2024
Sports / weights / strength
Grmpf, my trainer is sick, so my session for today is cancelled, and the next
one is moved from Wednesday to Tuesday, which means my schedule is all out of
whack, and I'm having analysis paralysis, which really doesn't play well with
the anxiety that was already there. Grmpf grmpf grmpf.
Okay, let's do the following:
- today gym
- friday run
- saturday gym
- monday run
- tuesday training
As for programme, I'll go for squats/bench/row today, deadlifts/overhead
press/lat pulls on saturday. Okay, let's program weights and let's goooo.
Update: I did indeed go to the gym, and did all my programme. I found a
16kg-kettlebell, which was good to improve the weights on my squats less
brutally than going from 15kg to 17.5kg in one go. I did manage benching my
12.5-kg dumbbells, so I'm officially back on the barbell next time, I decided :)
And I rowed with a 12.5-kg dumbbell too, which was an increase over the last
time I did these sets.
All in all, pretty satisfying.
I have THOUGHTS on what I'm doing better, brain-wise, than I was a year ago, but
that's probably content for a larger post. But essentially: turns out Phil was
right all along (SHOCKED PIKACHU) and accepting what my brain does when it's
frazzled works better than trying to tell it that it's NOT ACCEPTABLE while
kicking and screaming. Weird.
Continuing on my Coursera bingeing - I may or may not have started three courses
in as many days. It's not my fault - the second one was a recommended
prerequisite for the first one (although it wasn't written explicitly and I had
to look for it a bit more), AND I heard a lot of good things about the Learning
How To Learn class there, so this morning I went "well, what the hell, let's try
that too". It is indeed interesting, and somewhat more "pop-sciency" than
"self-helpey", which I appreciate.
I also did another day on the Hangeul writing class. It's interesting because it
also gives some historical context, which I actually enjoy - although it's also
very very clearly with the goal of "promoting Korean culture and language" and
it can fele a bit preachy. Which is also interesting in itself, mind you. The
class is taught by a person who speaks Korean, which feels like a weird choice
for an intro course - one that I wasn't too sure about - but I find myself
enjoying it immensely! There's quite a lot of repetition in what she says, and
it feels like my ear is getting used to the word and sentence cadence. And I'm
starting to catch a few words here and there, with the corresponding grammatical
suffix, which is fun.
I did some AlphabeticalZürich work today! For one thing, I posted the last 'A'
street, AND I
went out with the camera for the first 'B' street. I had been procrastinating on
that one because it's far away (Witikon may be the furthest place to go from
here), and I had been WRONG to procrastinate, because it was super enjoyable:
the two streets I shot today were forest paths, and I like wandering in forest
paths! Today was particularly enjoyable: great weather (but not too hot), summer
time after rain, great smells, lovely noises (I heard some... crickets?),
vibrant greens. And I saw a doe! Didn't manage to get a picture of it, she flew
as we made eye contact. But it was a nice surprise!
Writever
The word for today's Writever is "Care".
"Why do you care?
− I have hypermerimnasia.
− What now?
− From hyper, excessive, merimna, care, suffix -ia, denoting the disease.
− You suffer from giving too many fucks?
− From giving ALL the fucks.
− Sounds exhausting.
− You have no idea."
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16 july 2024
Lalalalalala anxiety for no identifiable reason is THE BEST /s
Anxiety mostly receded during the day and/or got a couple of more identifiable
reasons (when I think a tiny bit about it, there's actually quite a lot of stuff
going on). Day was mostly quiet, did some code reviews, answered some people's
questions, had a primer on Polish food on Slack... Reasonable day.
Also this morning I continued refreshing my Hangul; I'm missing a bit of
"translation" between the fonts used on computers and how characters seem to be
written by hand (in particular on ㅅ(siot) / ㅈ(jieut) / ㅊ(chieut) ) (I
apparently don't have the characters in the font I'm using when typing this,
unclear if they'll appear on the web version! We'll see - and correct if
necessary.)
UPDATE it works!
Well, drat, I just noticed that LimeCocktail was working significantly less well
on Firefox than it did on Chrome. I guess I'll have to fix and update it...
Writever
The word for today's Writever was "flamboyance".
"The kingdoms are competing for the most exuberant gifts for the royal
wedding.
− As expected.
− We have received a lot of the usual: gold, jewels, art, spices, fabric...
and a group of flamingoes.
− Of... flamingoes?
− That's the best flamboyance the Queen of Isla could come up with,
considering the circumstances of her territory."
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