2022 Year in Review

It’s cold, I’m cold, I’ve got a cold and I’ve run out of beans. Just a week to Christmas and I should be out somewhere having festive fun, but I just feel run down and have no energy and little motivation. I’m even purposely planning on trying to find a disappointing roast dinner tomorrow. I’ve had fun this month – too much fun as fun comes with consequences in your 40’s. Alcohol-fuelled fun does, anyway, and I like a drink or 8. A World Cup, 4 Christmas parties, the usual roast dinners including a ridiculously expensive one, a trip to …

From Bracknell to Harrow and then Croydon? Why the hell am I even considering Croydon? Let’s back up a bit. I want my own place. Preferably I want to live in Marylebone. If not, then Hampstead. If not, then Hackney Wick. If not then Walthamstow. There’s a problem here. The average price for a flat in Marylebone is £1,551,010.The average price for a flat in Hampstead is £946,658.The average price for a flat in Hackney Wick is £489,164 (getting closer!).The average price for a flat in Walthamstow is £393,681. Oh yeah, and my budget is £250,000. This is worked out …

I was at Luton Airport wondering why on earth I was catching the 9:40pm flight to Skopje. I needed a break from work, but why was I going to Skopje? Why didn’t I just stay in London and chill? Well, I wanted some warm sunshine, and Skopje I knew would be cheap – despite the collapsing pound. Plus I wanted to go to a new country – and I’d never been to North Macedonia (or maybe call it Macedonia…depending on who you want to upset). One of my goals for 2022 was to visit three new countries – and this …

I’m looking for a new job. Firstly, isn’t the image cool? I’ve got access to Dall-E’s AI image generator, and this is what I received from “unhappy software engineers, pained by Gustav Klint, in a Marks And Spencer’s shop”. Yes, M&S has finally pissed me off sufficiently to hit the feared button on LinkedIn – the “open to new positions button”. Yes, an influx of recruiters has begun. What happened? Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I was merrily coding away on my Outfit Generator project – using the new tech stack, a project that was promised to me in …

Well if it was a few degrees less hot right now, then I’d be going outside and enjoying the sunshine rather than writing a blog which about 3 people will read, but hey, I like writing and Lola is keeping me chilled right now. So I thought I’d have a quick look at how I’m doing with my goals for 2022. Goals I will/should achieve: Well I already achieved the being paid like a senior engineer goal by time I finished writing my goals. So that one is done. Roast to-do list should get to under 50 – I’m at …

You might assume that I’m ambivalent to the environment – after all, I was a climate change skeptic until recent years, at least until Donald Trump helped to persuade me that there might be an issue after all. Most of the skeptic in me is that I don’t believe the doomsday crap about the world is going to end in 20 years or whatever the latest string of nonsense is coming out of environmental terrorist groups. And I certainly don’t believe that a warming planet means that we now need communism – environmental damage is not an excuse for the …

Copenhagen. Or Copenhahahagen as I was soon to rename it. For some reason I’ve wanted to go to Copenhagen for a little while, but I couldn’t quite remember why. Maybe it was the pretty houses? Originally the plan I had in my head was to go to Copenhagen for a couple of days, then get the train to Sweden for a couple of days – maybe go to Gothenburg. But as time went on, it was proving difficult to find an Airbnb in either Copenhagen or Gothenburg – or any other Swedish city closer to Denmark. In fact, we couldn’t …

Like Theresa May’s attempts at a Brexit deal, I thought I’d set out my red lines and demand what those selling houses and providing mortgages need to offer me What The Flat Needs: Basically, I want to be able to watch thunderstorms, wearing only my pants and whilst playing minimal techno at a half-decent volume. Granted, we never get decent thunderstorms in London. Affordability: At the moment I’m paying £600 a month rent. Yeah, I know, it’s crazy cheap, but I cannot play music 9-5 during the week or walk around in my pants, unless my housemate is away. She …

I’ve been feeling fairly flat this week. Not down, not miserable, just flat. A slight struggle to motivate myself, for example to do healthy things – I sit here with a beer, bread and butter, and a large bar of chocolate which is unusual for a Thursday evening. I’m still doing stuff. Still working. Still doing the washing up. Still writing roast dinner reviews. Still researching where next to throw money away on the stock market. Just with less enthusiasm – well, no enthusiasm. To give it a football analogy, I’m grinding out 0-0 draws in the hope of staying …

My sister recently announced that she had 3 holiday days left to take at work and wanted to go somewhere – I said I’m up for a holiday and we ended up booking a trip to Zadar. We had quite tight time schedules so wherever we were going to go was going to be a flying visit – after some research I had a shortlist of Naples, Bilbao and Zadar – all places we could fly to on the Tuesday after work and return on the Friday. But Zadar was the clear winner – who can resist £68 return flights, …

Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve accidentally ending up saving enough for a deposit on a flat. Well, thanks also to living in a shared house in Harrow so therefore paying cheap rent, and also thanks to my insight 10 years ago to get into a career with a huge future demand, software engineering, which went even more in demand over the pandemic and hence means I can demand large pay rises. So, yeah, thanks to the guy/girl who in Wuhan Institute who let the bug out the building in November 2019. The easiest way for me to buy a place …

Las Vegas was over, and it was time to get in the car and drive to San Diego. Why San Diego? Well, again, my sister had suggested it as she had already been to San Francisco – I might have chosen the latter. But as soon as I did the briefest amount of research on San Diego (basically finding out that it was the craft beer capital of USA plus lots of Latinos), I thought that it might really, really be my kind of place. And we did very limited research beforehand, as we both thought there was no point …

I’ve never really been that bothered about going to Las Vegas. Well, maybe when I used to play a lot of online poker, say 15 years ago, but that was more the dream of qualifying for a major poker tournament in Las Vegas, than actually going to the place. I always had it in my mind as a bit pretentious, a bit fake-glam – and that isn’t me. If I’m going out to a bar, then I’ll always choose a graffitied shithole, over an Instagrammy glam bar. And the same applies to my holidays – they are booked in places …

Gutted to see the invasion of a sovereign state start this morning, by the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin. I honestly didn’t believe that he would invade. Well, a part of me was unsure, but I was 80/20 convinced that he wouldn’t invade. Why didn’t I think he would invade? Well, I thought it was far too risky an operation. I didn’t see how the Russian people would support an invasion of a neighbouring country and the likely deaths of thousands of people – including from the Russian army. In 2014, there were protests in Russia from the mother’s of …

Right, time to set myself some goals for 2022. Maybe I can get this post written before April? Most of them are in my head anyway. But until I put them down in writing, they aren’t proper goals, are they? Big Life-Changing Stuff Be paid like a senior engineer. Well, this was in the pipeline and was finally confirmed before I even starting turning this from draft comments to an actual post. Though at the time of writing, I still hadn’t actually been paid at the new rate. Maybe there will be a company-wide pay rise or a software engineering …

Time for a little lookback at the moments of 2021. They are mostly highlights, but I didn’t want to totally forget the more difficult times – it feels easy to forget the misery of the first 3 months of 2021 when we were in perpetual lockdown. So, starting with… 17. That miserable lockdown I remember thinking during the first lockdown how lucky we were that it happened in spring, especially given how glorious the weather was. I also remember realising around November 2020 that the upcoming winter was going to be really difficult. It was. It was long and often …

Yes it is that time of the year where I look back at what I achieved in the first 3 months of the year whilst I was on detox, and then talked about doing for the next 9 months, with a review of my 2021 goals. So the way this will work is that I will copy all the goals from my 2021 goals post, italicise the original goals, write about what I didn’t achieve beneath that and give myself a score. Fun, huh? Well I like doing it. HEALTH Lose 10kg. I can do this. I think I will …