Introduction
It has been two weeks of break and I am about ready to start writing!
The two weeks have been simultaneously relaxing and eventful. After 8 years of full-time working I haven’t been in a hurry to be extremely productive too fast, but have focused mostly on a couple of hobbies and a bit of online learning.
In this first post I wanted to give an introduction to these activities as some of you may not be familiar with all of them. I am aware that just talking about each of them may not be very engaging, so I will try and generate some nice content that hopefully makes you want to come back for the next post!
Before I get started on the activities I want to say thank you for at least taking the time to read this. In an effort to keep it engaging I would love to hear your feedback, even the most critical feedback I will take positively. Feel free to get in touch through any of the links on the left.
Cooking
For around 7 years now I have had an interest in cooking, and for this I need to assign a little credit to James Conolly. We shared a house together for a little over a year whilst we were working at BAE Systems and he was always cooking something fancy. After a while I decided I wanted to try and keep up, and once I got started it was hard to go back to bad food.
I love making pizza
In the past couple of years I found myself being a little lazy when it came to food. I would order takeaway more often than I was used to, and my home-cooked dishes weren’t as inspiring as they used to be. Hopefully you can appreciate that after a long working day, a couple of hours shopping and cooking aren’t always so appealing.
Now I am reverting back to an old method that served me well around 5 years ago. I plan 7 days of meals every Sunday with specific recipies. This means I can go shopping on the Monday with a precise set of ingredients to buy, and know that I can make really nice meals every day, usually with enough left over for lunch the next day!
So from now on I will document these meal plans and take some nice pictures, and if all goes well hopefully I can inspire you to try some yourself!
Statistics
When I said engaging content my prior belief tells me that statistics didn’t come to your mind. Given that I am writing this blog in R Blogdown, it should be possible for me to convince you otherwise in the long run.
At the time of writing I am part of the way through an online course called Improving your statistical inferences. From my time working at trivago as a Data Scientist I knew deep down that my lack of statistics knowledge was driving me to bad conclusions more often than I would like to believe. By the end of the course I hope to be much better in experiment design, and more importantly drawing statistical inferences!
I promised content and content I shall eventually deliver. As well as doing the course I am also building a number of small applications to help visualise the concepts in the course in R shiny. For now it is a work-in-progress, but you can follow it right here!
Fitness
I have a rather mixed history with fitness. On the one hand I have enjoyed a number of fitness activities over my life, I always enjoyed playing football and I have been a keen cyclist since a teenager. On the other hand I have suffered a number of injuries over the years: ankle sprains, knee pain, and most severely a disc herniation in my lower back. On top of this I am not an ideal weight, I am not hugely overweight but I definitely could do with losing some.
A cycling adventure with Rich
Much like cooking hopefully you appreciate that after a full working day it is tough to think about exercise, whether that is going to the gym or even just walking or cycling home. I decided I am out of excuses to focus on my health, so now exercise is at the forefront of my activities.
I am attempting to cycle at least twice a week and I record my activities on my strava account. I would love for you to follow me and tell me when I am not training hard enough!
The ultimate tracker for this is my weight, it isn’t a comprehensive measure of health but it is certainly an important one. I have some digital scales in the bathroom and weigh myself most mornings. I am going to upload the data to this blog, and you can follow my progress on the weight page.
Drone Flying
At the start of 2020 I bought myself a fixed-wing drone called a parrot disco. It’s a bit different to the usual quadcopter in that it runs more like a plane, it uses a propeller and wings to fly but can’t land vertically. I have been a flying enthusiast for a long time and it is probably as close as I’ll get to actual flying.
It has a first-person camera which can record some very nice aerial footage. There is a page dedicated to the footage and I will keep adding videos as I get the chance to fly.