Now

Last update: Tuesday 28 May 2024

This is a now page, which I'll update to give you an overview of what I'm doing now. Inspired by Derek Sivers!

What?

It's been months since I've updated this page. Right now, it says I last wrote an update on the 29th of November 2023. A lot has happened since then!

Moving House

After 24 years living in the same house, and 27 years of living with my parents in the deepest darkest doldrums of North Dorset, I've made the leap to living in Brighton. This is a town that has an incredibly unique set of properties; not least that it's the LGBT capital of the observable universe, but also that it feels alive in a way that nowhere else really has to me before. Perhaps it's not so much the city that feels alive, but me, after living in the shadows for so long I now feel like I'm truly living and thriving.

This Website

I've been mulling over changing this site away from 11ty, mostly because I want to build a photo gallery for my film photography and I'm sort of hitting the limits of 11ty in weird ways that I'm quite tired of debugging. I'd like to use something new and fresh, so it might be Astro. As long as I can write in Markdown as I do now and it'll auto build out pages, I'm happy! I do not want to do SSR as I don't want to run a container to serve my website. Static pages dumped into an S3 bucket is perfect the way it is.

I would also like to write out some more general personal blog updates, but separate to my technical articles. Perhaps I should keep personal things under /blog, and have my other things under /writing? Or /articles? Answers on the back of a postcard. I'm not going to be as prolific as my friend Adam, who very frequently writes 'weeknotes', but I feel there's enough separation here to warrant it for my own website.

I also want to make a tagging system for posts, and pagination on the blog and article roots, so that'll come soon.

Becoming a Photographer

I've decided that I want to focus more on photography in my spare time. I really like the instagram page Mildly Interesting Cars of London, and after spotting some undeniably interesting motors where I live I've decided I'll start a project for Mildly Interesting Cars of Brighton (and Hove). I love the blend of photography, writing, and history that MICOL produces and I hope the boys don't mind me tapping into their space.

I Like Sports Now, I Think?

Recently a friend invited the Group along to watch some baseball. My entire knowledge of baseball up to this point was watching (for some reason that I can't remember) MLB on Fox - but as we sat on the grass next to the fences at Brighton v Brighton (more on that another time), the head coach approaches us. He's a fascinating man, and he instilled in me that day not only a baseball nickname (Hotsauce) but enthusiasm for sport in a way I've never had before.

I went to the British Baseball Federation website for this update to try and find some information and it turns out that they are running a photography competition this year, so I might enter!