I delivered a lot of writing work this week. Left me in a high. But, this did not overflow to other writing. No blog posts. No newsletter. No other writing.
I am probably going to focus on one and not on both. I stopped the badminton middle of this week. I am going to focus on cycling.
I cycled for a day for about 11.3 km.
YouTube
Twitter
All of you #space#isro enthusiasts who wanted to know why the C25 Cryo stage of LVM3 now sports a white colour, as opposed to the usual black/grey… the reasons are environmental-friendly manufacturing, reducing Solar absorptivity and using a light weight material.. read on.. https://t.co/CpSAMqhlq2
How did an ordinary estuary fisherman become Kerala's dreaded 'Ripper Jayanandan'? Is he really the dangerous killer the police have made him out to be, or is he truly innocent as he claims?
The lower volume of work completed in Week 9 meant that more work-related writing got done than anything else. I did not write any blog posts. I did not publish the weekly space newsletter. I did not attend the RozWrite sessions.
I did not publish the weekly space newsletter. I did not attend the RozWrite sessions. The contribution to the work writing was lower as well because of power cuts and fever.
OTT
I continued watching OTT. I moved from watching Malayalam and to other languages:
The Law According to Lidia Poet (Italian, English voice over)
Triptych (Spanish, English voice over)
I especially liked the alternate rock intro music and music interlaced in a period drama in Lidia Poet.
The writing done this week other than work was disappointing.
I only published one edition of my space newsletter. This, too, was simply a round-up of space news from India and did not feature a deep dive.
I wasn’t able to attend any session of RozWrites for the Long Form Writing Cohort 3 that I am a part of. This contributed to the lack of output this week.
I’m happy to share that I was able to start reading blog posts, fiction and non-fiction books again. I’m presently reading:
Listening on Audible: 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Reading on Kindle: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
In the blog post that I wrote in December 2022 called Note Taking 2023, in the section on Plain-Text productivity I had referred to Cal Newport having a system of using a workingmemory.txt file. I decided to read the blog post about it in detail and implement it at work. This led me to the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
Cal Newport referenced Burkeman’s book during his appearance on the Tim Ferriss’ show. Ferriss then posted a snippet from the book on his blog. While Nathan Lozeron has a fantastic summary of the book on YouTube, I decided to pick the book to listen to it.
Cycling and Badminton
I did not get any cycling done this week. This was a major source of disappointment for me.
I started playing badminton and was able to play Monday thru Thursday.
I am playing again after a really long time and it feels really weird to play as an adult.
I am part of a Long-form Writing Cohort-3 (LfW-C3). We are a group of people interested and encouraging each other to write long form. The group organises something called RozWrite (daily writing) at 10 pm each night. We keep the video on and the audio on mute and write together.
I wrote about the Star Party that I attended with my daughter on Monday. I wrote about the cycle I bought on Tuesday. I wrote my newsletter on Wednesday and a little on Thursday outside of RozWrite hour. I missed attending the RozWrites on Thursday and Friday.
OTT
My wife and I got back to watching Malayalam films on OTT this week. We watched:
I drove two stretches of cycling on Sunday (when I purchased the bicycle) and then again on Wednesday. I drove 11.7 km on Sunday and 10.2 km on Wednesday. I only plan to drive Pachu two days a week to begin with.
YouTube
Re-discovered the song again on YouTube, especially the melody at the 2:44 min mark.
Raj Shamani has an interesting podcast with Sahil Bloom on how he got to meet Apple CEO Tim Cook and some very interesting relationship advice.
I enjoyed watching the trailer of the Malayalam movie, Romancham.
I travelled with three colleagues to Kakinada on a business trip. We went there on February 5 and returned on February 9.
I clicked the above pics from my phone at Hyderabad. One is a picture of the city when we were flying from Hyderabad to Pune. The other two are the aircrafts that flew us from Rajahmundry to Hyderabad (ATR-72) and from Hyderabad to Pune (Airbus A320). Most of this week was spent at the base.
I missed writing the post for Week 5 of 2023 as I was finishing work in preparation for this trip.
Newsletter
Pradeep’s Space Newsletter has been on hiatus for a long time. It comes back online this week for the second edition. This time, I am working to add more context to the stories and will be more picky in the number of stories that I will cover. But, I need someplace to dump the rest of the stories that I follow to write the newsletter. That may probably land on this blog or it may go into Roam Research.
YouTube
I have reduced my consumption of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. I hang around Mastodon much more but have not been posting there. But, it has increased my consumption of YouTube. After watching this video (covered in Weekly Notes 2), I had hoped to blog more here but it seems to be endless stretch of these Weekly Notes.
I’ve been doing a deep dive of the FreeFinCal’s YouTube channel. I had followed his blog way back in 2015 but stopped following him thinking him to be very conservative in his style of investing. He makes much more sense to me now. I got back to him after watching this interview on Labour Law Advisor’s YouTube channel.
I also enjoyed Ali Abdaal’s two Deep Dive interviews with Cal Newport and Ryder Caroll discussing Slow Productivity and the Bullet Journal Method respectively.
I enjoy listening to Saurabh Mukherjea talk. He has an interesting basis for his investment thesis that he outlines in this talk. He says that India is networking and linking up as the United States did and as it happened in the United States in the 1880-1930’s, so it will happen in India that as India networks, it would lead to creation of monopolies.
Draft Posts
There are two blog posts in my drafts column. One is on analog and digital note-taking. The other is on the Star Party that I went to on January 28. I have no idea when I will be able to publish them.
This edition of the Weekly Notes is almost a week late. There isn’t much to write home about this week. It was spent being busy at work and looking forward to the Star Party.
I have been reading Thejesh’s Weekly Notes for more than a month now. I think this would be a nice way to round-off my non-work stuff.
Bullet Journal
I have kept a bullet journal since 2017. I have followed the dotted grid journal since I started. I bought three dotted grid journals last year but was disappointed by the quality of the dots. Some were too bright. Some were too light. I decided to switch to a square grid journal. I am enjoying journaling in this journal.
The square grid also helps with my eyesight.
Personal
Kid 2 has been keeping me busy. This week I wasn’t able to support my wife with night time child care as I had a throat infection which led to a case of cough. This also kept me away from work for the first three days of the week. I was mostly sleeping.
Tweets
This section may not survive long. When I stop tweeting, I get emails from Twitter which point me to a few interesting tweets. Over the weeks, the emails have become much better at pointing out what tweet I might read. So, I mostly read those tweets only.
I watched a bunch of stuff on OTT which I have still not compiled here. I will put them together in a different post and link to it here in the future. I will remind you about it next week, in case you forget.
Parallel Spirals 