This week has been fairly uneventful for us in the Ravenscroft household. It’s largely been business as usual. We did our usual pattern of 2 days in the office and 3 days at home.

I’ve been continuing my somewhat meta “thinking about thinking” stream of thought from last week with a thorough refactor of my personal knowledge management practices. I started writing an update about it here which turned into a full fledged blog post so I’ve published that as a separate piece here

I’ve not done much gaming recently but yesterday I read an interesting article about Elden Ring’s novel open world design and I decided to take the plunge and buy it. This was my first experience of a From Software game. I know that, by reputation, these games are typically very challenging and often frustrating (your character will die many many times) and I went in with my eyes wide open. I got my butt kicked by the boss in the tutorial area of the game about 5 times before progressing into the game world proper but I really enjoyed myself. A+ would get completely annihilated again.

With our local eco shop sadly shutting down, I’ve been scoping out where else I can get hold of zero packaging products and refills. On saturday we drove to the nearby Westlands Farm Shop where they have a decent selection of refillable toiletries and detergents as well as veggies, dairy and meat produced on the farm itself. I think I’ve found a new favourite local business.

It’s been a bit chilly for gardening this week with temperatures plummeting below zero several days in a row. We’re pretty glad we didn’t plant the veggies in the new raised beds yet as they might not have fared well in the frost! Hopefully things will warm up again soon. They don’t have as big a selection as All Good Things used to have but its reasonable. We also discovered that there’s a zero waste refill shop a few minutes down the road from my office which I might try to scope out during the week at some point.

For anyone who’s familiar with AWS and their somewhat confusing portal, it’s always interesting to see new users of the platform come onboard and try to make sense of it. A friend of mine from university recently had a first time experience trying to set up a simple web app to run in AWS and I thoroughly enjoyed reading their twitter thread on the matter:

Next Week

I’m working for Filament 2 days this week so that I can spend 3 days on my PhD since I’m trying to get my last experiment/paper over the line so that I can really knuckle down and focus on finishing my thesis (which will be my existing papers + a new intro chapter + some editing) by the end of the academic year. One of our remote staff is coming down to visit the offices on Wednesday so we’re planning on having a work pub lunch and we’re planning on having another go at meeting up with Mum now that she’s gotten over covid.