March 2018 Review

God that was a long month. On the first Thursday I must have absorbed something alcoholic around lunchtime, because I went slightly wobbly for twenty-four hours. I didn’t do anything stupid and even made it to the gym, but accidental alcohol makes me feel shaken. At the end of the month I took the four days before Easter off, and naturally, the weather was cold, wet and not worth getting out of bed for. Equally naturally, I slept badly and kept waking up early. That may have had something to do with the clocks going forward and me only finding out when I looked at my watch on leaving the house Sunday morning - Wait 06:25? What? My phone said it was 06:25 an hour ago, oh, that must have happened.

I continued the Food Experiment. One week I tried salads and other potato-based lunches from Masters on Throgmorton Street: result were satiety, no sharp appetite in the evening, and an extra pound of weight that fell off by Saturday morning because I work from home then. The next week I tried bagels from Bagel Mania on London Wall: results, less dozy in the afternoon, no extra weight, but a tendency to light-headedness by the end of the afternoon. I lost three kilos but no more. This will continue for a while.

I re-gained some of my Python chops, using PyCharm, writing a file-copying utility with a simple UI. Hence the post about the rotten documentation of os.walk(). Python is a nice language to use, but I sometimes wonder if some of the people who write documentation and help posts actually follow their own advice. I may write a post on how to write instructions as well. It’s nowhere near as easy as you think.

I read Ben Yandell’s Honors Class, a series of biographies of the mathematicians who solved Hilbert’s Problems; Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the British Isles, which got me interested in Anglo-Saxon England, about which I now have a book to read; Nicolas Naseem Taleb’s Skin In The Game, which makes a lot of good points and is prime NNT; and started on Per Olov Enquist’s The Wandering Pine.

I succumbed to Calibre. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, this is to e-books what the iTunes is to music. It’s a terrific program and I had my small e-book collection consolidated, organised and with updated metadata after a couple of hours. I will probably write a post about using it in the future.

I finished S3 of House. Five more to go. I had a break and started watching S2 of Follow The Money. I saw some movies in my holiday week: You Were Never Really Here and Isle of Dogs at the Curzon Bloomsbury; Red Sparrow and Unsane at the Cineworld Leicester Square; and The Square at the Curzon Soho.

I had supper with Sis for her birthday at Picture on Great Portland St, and with my mate at the Argentine Steak House in Richmond.

I had a lot of early nights. If I’m tired, I’m in bed at 20:30 and if I’m not, at 21:15 at the latest.