It snowed quite a lot in the night, so that means another day of working from home!

I made full use of my office today, and simply by being in the room for a long period of time, I have some ideas of what I want to add:

• Introduce another colour other than white to the walls.
• I want places to hang my many backpacks on the wall.
• I have a lot of little ornaments and gadgets, so a mini bookcase/shelving unit would be helpful.
• Either curtains or blinds, because right now there’s nothing in front of the window.

For dinner I made another traditional Italian carbonara, which I think I’m getting the hang of!

So last night was the great night in our new house, and today was my first full day living in it.

That’s mainly because I was working from home today, while a few deliveries arrived.

After work finished, I went to Vegan Nights with a friend, in Shoreditch. I’m by no means a vegan, but I go to a lot more vegan restaurants than most vegans!

I can’t really remember where this was from, or what was inside it, but this Tempeh sandwich was very nice!

Tonight I’ve managed to get the tv set up, so Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube are all enabled. And with our remote, each of those is only one button press away.

Very big day, very short journal entry.

So today, me and my girlfriend moved into our new house!

We got the keys just before 2 pm, and we spent the rest of the day moving things between houses, picking up appliances, and then trying to at least get things in the correct room.

Of course one of my main concerns was my office because I now have a whole separate room for that! All I’ve done so far is move my desk, chair, and wired up a few things. But I want to get a lot more storage in here. I’ll probably paint it another colour as well.

After a long day, we finally got around to eating dinner just after midnight! I cooked the first meal in the new house, and it was a chicken stir fry!

Another good day for podcast listening! I managed another three episodes:

• A Slab of Glass 25: Why are you Microwaving a Notebook?! (With Alex Cox)
• The BirchTree Podcast 157: Pixel…Um…Perfect
• StarTalk Radio: Inside The Big Bang Theory, with Simon Helberg and Bill Prady

I also got a bit more packing done, which involved dismantling my desk and poking away most of my electronics. It’s all roughly ready, so hopefully, it won’t take long to actually to move.

Between the various bits of preparation for the move, I also managed to fit in watching Arsenal! We played Cardiff City and beat them 2-1. Not a totally convincing result, but other top teams lost points, so it edges Arsenal just slightly back into the top four.

Tomorrow is going to be a big day.

A pretty average day at work, I did some code, wrote out some ideas for future customer journeys in the app, and other stuff.

But outside of work, I managed to do a bit more.

I wrote/linked to a blog post from New Scientist, where they were claiming that the ECG feature is actually a bad thing.

And I also managed to listen to three podcast episodes:

• The Tim Ferris Show 355: Greg McKeown – How to Master Essentialism
• Core Intuition 358: Accidental Dark Mode
• Under the Radar 157: Editorial Content

That was helped by the fact that I spent a bit off time tonight packing up some of my things in my bedroom. Getting ready for the impending move in a few days!

A few things I did notice from my packing exercise:

• I really underestimate how many books I own. I filled up two big boxes with them, and I have a couple left over. For someone that didn’t think they owned that many, I easily have over 50. It also varies a lot, from Harry Potter to Swift development books, to even books on theoretical physics.
• Maybe I own too many keyboards. I currently own a Cherry Windows keyboard, a Unicomp Spacesaver M, Apple Extended II, a Magic Keyboard for my iPad, and of course the Smart Keyboard that’s now attached to my iPad Pro.
• I have a lot of items that have just been stored in a cupboard for quite a long time. Some of it is stuff for the new house, so mugs, glasses, board games, etc. But a big chunk of it just hasn’t been used. Maybe it’s time to get rid of a few things.

I must admit, I already see a theme emerging from that small list. So I think I’ll end it prematurely. My bad memory is quite visible to me when I come across all of my belongings that I have completely forgotten about.

I regularly read articles about Apple products that seem to try and be negative just for clickbait reasons, or because it’s a trendy thing to do. But not many of them are as confusing as this article in New Scientist.

In just under 500 words, Clare Wilson describes the new heart rate monitoring features in the Series 4 Apple Watch, the main one being the ability to run an ECG. However counter to the title, the main body of the article seems to praise the new feature. With about 20% of it actually explaining the point they’re trying to make:

But many people have an irregular heart rhythm without symptoms. They will be told by their watch to take the ECG result to a doctor. They could then get potentially risky surgery, go on unnecessary medications risking side effects such as dizziness. At the least, they will be falsely alarmed.

Several trials have investigated whether it is helpful to give ECGs to people without symptoms and the US Preventive Services Task Force has concluded that the evidence fails to show this approach does more good than harm.

The point they’re trying to make is that people will be diagnosed with irregular heart rhythms, but as they lack any negative symptoms, they may be lead to having unnecessary risky procedures.

I have two points to make regarding this. Firstly, if you have an irregular heart rhythm, and the watch detects it, then it’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do. And secondly, if you find you do have one, and even without symptoms, your doctor puts you through risky surgery, then that’s by no means the fault of the watch.

Some people will always read any slightly negative diagnosis with the worst case scenario in mind. That’s why there are such things as hypochondriacs. But then that’s also where qualified doctors come into it. By no means do I think Apple wants you to take an ECG on your watch, and based on that one result, have heart surgery. It’s an indicator that you can use to diagnose atrial fibrillation, and then you can go to a medical professional to further diagnose any issues.

It’s a super short entry today, simply because I haven’t done much at all!

I started the day playing World of Warcraft. Then I watched a few episodes of Ed Stafford: Left For Dead. And after that I played more World of Warcraft, while also listening to the very apt podcast The Instance.

A usual Saturday with my girlfriend.

We went to the cafe for breakfast, and I had the usual. Which for a while they didn’t remember, and I had to say my order. First world problems definitely.

We then spent a few hours shopping for our new house (not moved in yet, but it’s ours!). We have things like saucepans, a kettle, cleaning supplies, etc.

I then watched some more football, as there’s a bunch more FA Cup games going on this weekend. A lot of small teams beat major teams, and while that process the magic of the cup, they hardly ever win by playing good football.

Friday!

A mixed day, that started reasonably well. Work was good, I got a few things done, and the engineering department took part in a code kata session, which was pretty fun.

I then had a nightmare getting home, as the underground train I was on suddenly stopped, waited for 10 minutes, and someone then pulled the passenger alarm. Which meant that had to be investigated, and as usual it was a good false alarm. But following procedure, it had to be investigated, and then it can be reset. However, there was some kind of fault with this, and it was unable to be reset. So everyone on a busy train at peak time had to exit the train, onto a packed platform. Because the train had to be moved out of service. I decided to stop waiting and walk the rest of the journey instead. It was a 45-minute journey, instead of the 5 minutes, it would have taken on the tube. Luckily I walk fast and did it in 30 minutes, but I would rather have not walked it.

It then got worse with the football, as Arsenal lost their FA Cup match against Manchester United 1-3. Arsenal seemed to dominate the game, but two major injuries and defensive mistakes cost us again.

There was still some good points throughout the day though, as I listened to two podcasts today! The first one being episode 227 of Connected, and the other being a very old episode of Mac Power Users from 2015 with John Gruber.

It wasn’t work as usual today, I worked from home! So meant I was pretty productive and managed to focus on a few things.

It’s always weird when I work from home because I seem to forget about a lunch break. I usually go between 12:30 and 1 pm, but if I’m at home I forget about it until about 2/3pm. That’s a pretty weird metric, but it somehow proves my productivity levels. At least to myself.

I listened to the rest of the Talk Show from yesterday, with Joanna Stern. It wasn’t as long as they usually are either, with this one only amounting to 107 minutes.

Over on the blog I wrote about a Quick Look plugin for viewing JSON files, it’s going to be pretty useful for me. There’s a bunch of other plugins I’m going to look into as well.

Also, I managed to watch the remaining episodes of The Punisher. Which means I’ve finished the entire series of 13 episodes in just 5 days. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. But this series was incredible, and I hope they extend it for another!