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.