James Zhan in real life.

Weeknotes #1, July 20–26

Writing my response to Michael Harley’s blog post arguing against the merits of weeknotes has, ironically, had me think more about weeknotes and seek out more weeknotes to read. I’d toyed with the idea of creating my own weeknotes for a while and, rather than dwelling on it endlessly, I’ve decided to just give it a try and see how I like it.

I enjoy reading other people’s weeknotes; even though many are just self-reflections and happenings of the bloggers’ lives, I’m inspired by the conscious act of thinking out loud and documenting. Often times, I do get something out of people’s weeknotes—could be something that amuses me, some new knowledge or some new links.

Ever since I retired from my audio engineering side business, I’ve been living a pretty relaxed life. While that has allowed me to take the time to do things I enjoy, sometimes I feel that I don’t fully know how I’ve spent my time or how I’d like to spend the “upcoming” time (e.g., the upcoming week). In other words, I think I’m living too much in the present sometimes.

I hope that writing weeknotes will help me bring more intention and awareness of my life overall and document noteworthy things for me to look back. I don’t have a solid idea of exactly what to include—I will figure it out as I go—but one section I do want to have is:

What brought me joy

Damn good Canadian blueberries

I love blueberries and I eat them as part of my breakfast almost every day. I often go to bed thinking about eating blueberries (and brewing coffee) the next day. The quality of the blueberries that my go-to grocery store stocks can unfortunately vary drastically, so finding a good batch means I have several days’ worth of tasty blueberries to look forward to eating.

New coffees arrived

new coffee beans

I ordered some coffee beans from 2 roasters I’d never tried before via Eight Ounce Coffee. One was roasted by Sorellina and the other Prodigal. I’ve been meaning to try both for quite a while. They arrived on the same day I finished the current bag so I got to brew one of them immediately—I was so happy!

Discovered and fell in love with a typeface by an indie typographer

I was lurking on Future Fonts as usual, and Missive Serif caught my eye. I love the slanted crossbar in the letter “e”, the wavy diagonal stroke in the capital “N” and those terminals are just gorgeous. I decided to test it on my blog and I was immediately blown away by how great it looked for not only headings and UI elements but also body text. It was as close as I’d ever seen to how I’d always envisioned the typography of my blog should look like. Missive Serif is only available in Light and Bold styles for now, as it’s a font family in progress. I bought a license to support its development, and implemented it for the blog site title and the UI elements in the nav and the footer. I’m really happy with it and eagerly waiting for more styles to drop!

Catching up with my cousin

I only have 1 relative from my side of the family in Canada. C lives in Hamilton, which is a ~2-hour commute to Toronto via public transit. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of years so when she told me she’d be in my neighborhood, we arranged to grab some coffee. We had a nice time catching up. She went through some tough times a few years back so I was very happy to see that she’s doing well in life now.

Octarine redesign

I’ve been using Octarine for personal knowledge management and really enjoying it. This week, the dev released a major redesign that not only addressed some of the pain points I had, but also made the app look much, much nicer overall. I’m a sucker for great design and aesthetics, and this redesign brought me so much joy.

Watching my wife play Chrono Trigger

This game is one of my wife’s all-time favourites; she’s raved about it to me for years and so when she decided to replay it, I joined to watch. We’re more than halfway through the game now, and we’ve had a blast! Such an intriguing story, and the soundtrack is amazing.

Piano

Two weeks ago, I decided to finally get back to practicing the piano. I hadn’t practiced at all for 7 months by that point, and I was starting to get small panic attacks from the worry of losing all my muscle memory for all the pieces I painstakingly learned before the hiatus. And then I had reached a phase where the more I panicked about it, the more I had wanted to avoid it.

Somehow I found the means to haul my ass onto the piano bench. Thankfully, I didn’t lose much progress, but this time I don’t want to fall off practicing the piano again, and so, to help encourage myself to practice consistently, I started a Piano Journal page here to track the habit and log some reflections after each practice. It’s been working well so far and I hope to keep it up!

Blogging

I finished and published my opinion piece, “‘No AI’ Statements Are Much More Than Mere Statements,” arguing for “No AI” statements in creative works. I worked on it for multiple days and went through multiple revisions—I had so much fun! It really brought me back to my English major days writing many argumentative essays; it felt good to exercise those writing skills I learned, especially when less and less people nowadays can write well thanks to over-reliance on AI.

But what really shows the magic of the indie blogging space is that I first discovered the basement blog through Bear Blog’s discovery feed, which then led me to discover the basement community (I’m only 30 and I already miss that kind of traditional forum—discord can’t hold candle to that), and then just a few days ago, I connected with the creator behind those two sites on the topic of learning Cantonese—such serendipity it was!

Other stuff

Upcoming week

Reply via email. Subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.

#weeknotes