After all the effort and cost another christmas is now all but done and before you know it we will all be back at our desks into another year of work. Feeling over indulged I am starting to think about new years resolutions and in particular how to get back to regular exercise. The last few months of this year have been challenging and it has been hard to find time between the endless Teams calls to get out of the office. Intentions of 30 mins on Zwift at lunch time have very often fallen by the wayside.

The answer will be to learn to set standards and to say no. No when someone puts a meeting in my diary that I didn’t previously agree to. No to dealing with urgent emails that can be dealt with after a break from the desk. No to taking on others issues to try to do the best for the service. Having said all that I do accept that this is difficult to do, I should know I have been trying for years.

This is my first post for nearly two months and another potential target for a resolution. Finding time to learn new stuff and to document that new knowledge needs to be higher on my agenda. Over the last couple of days I have started on this. I am trying to learn to touch type, which is REALLY hard after a near life time of typing very badly. Unlearning a life time of bad habits doesn’t come easily and will take some practice.

I am typing this post on an old laptop that I have installed Linux Mint 21.2 onto. Previously this laptop was running Pop OS! and for a short time Vanilla OS. As usual I am using VS Code as my editor and Microsoft Edge as my main browser. With this setup Linux is really not substantially different to Windows or macOS for my main uses. Most of my day is spent in Office web apps (Outlook, Teams) and I can function pretty normally on any modern OS as long as I can install Edge and a few extensions (Bitwarden, Raindrop.io etc).