6th May – 12th May 2019

Cold and shoulder pain delays… everything.

Client work

A shortish week due to the bank holiday and my cold getting a lot worse. On the positive side, the client we put “Apply with Indeed” in for last week found their candidates really like it. So, Laura rolled it out for their sister company.

Client-wise my week was lots of small jobs – bits of copy, interface changes, explorations of problems, sorting out picture changes. Lots of small, bread and butter changes, which was about all my brain could handle as I got worse over the week.

My Projects

No real progress. I tried to get some work done with Amazon’s Product API for a bit of a break, and after trying a couple of libraries which didn’t get me anywhere, I rediscovered Amazon’s test area, which kept giving me errors too. Researching the error I found Amazon have changed the access to the API so you can only get results from it if your Amazon Affiliate ID has made money for Amazon over the last month. I do have some pages displaying products using Amazon’s affiliate system on my site about fixing my VW Beetle, but earnings are sporadic and obviously not enough to keep Amazon happy in my case.

It would be very helpful if they’d update their site about using the Product API to reflect this situation.

Productivity

Got worse as the week went on as I developed a full version of the cold my son had last week. Thursday and Friday were particularly bad. Then Saturday and Sunday I had a lot of neck and shoulder pain, which might have been caused by running for the train when I was running late on Friday. So sleep is doing particularly badly at the moment.

Learning

I managed to re-start 30×500 and get a lump of time in to get through most of the exercise I’d stalled out on. I should be able to finish that early next week. It feels good to be moving forwards with it again.

The Farm

Attendance was back a bit more to normal at 19, we met once again in the Caxton Arms. My notes were…

• Finding work
• Upping your rate
• Angular and React
• Migraines
• Moving/not moving
• The Skiff coworking space
• Office space
• Travelling in South America
• Old jobs we have had
• The appeal of mindless tasks
• Domain issues
• Getting in to a new project
• Juggling projects
• Tinnitus
• Restaurant service
• CBD oil
• Laravel PHP framework

Family

I helped Tom’s Cub group with their orienteering task in the South Downs on Thursday evening. As the pack leader admitted, this was really an excuse to get them all out in the fresh air as they haven’t been able to do much outside over the winter. As an adult this was mainly a shortish walk made long due to it being very stop start and having to motivate the slow movers, but Tom really enjoyed looking for the navigation stumps marked on the map, and wanted to do more so we went out again on Saturday and Sunday to try to find more.

Also during the weekend, we went to a Fair that had set up in our local park, and went to see the film Detective Pikachu at the Dome in Worthing.

Software

I discovered Macromates, who make TextMate, one of the text editors I really like on OSX, had made a new version… two years ago. I’d thought they’d given up on the editor and moved on to other things as it had received only sporadic updates over the 6-7 years I’d been using the original version. I’m glad I randomly checked for it, as the new version is good – the speed and simplicity of the original, with up-to-date features like resuming where you left off when you shut the program or have an unexpected reboot. It has some minor differences I’m still getting used to, but in general, it’s a nice, decent update.

Reading: Still reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. I’ve started enjoying it now, although things still feel very slow. I’m sure that’s partly the book, but also a reflection of my being knackered when I’m trying to read it.

Watching: Detective Pikachu which is an odd live-action version of the Pokemon world with CGI pocket monsters everywhere. I’m not sure Tom understood the finer points of the film but it was OK for one both adults and children could watch.

Writing with: Mixing around between the J Herbin rollerball, a Papermate gel pen, and a Fountain Pentel.