I’m excited!!!! I’ve booked myself to do this creative writing workshop at the wonderful home Mulberry Hill, of writer Joan Lindsay (author of Picnic at Hanging Rock) and artist Darryl Lindsay. WORKSHOP: WAYS OF LOOKING Saturday 17 February 202410am – 3pm Created for writers, this is an interactive workshop where participants encounter a work of […]
Virtual Tour Day 2: Onwards to Rimes
I decided to head to Rimes today. There’s 6 direct trains every day at a cost of 27 Euros and the trip lasts for an hour and a half. Of course, as it’s a virtual tour, I’m going first class. Really, there’s no need for train travel on this virtual tour in all honesty, so […]
Reflections Of The Year Post-Work: What I’d Like to Do Next
It’s been a little over a year now of not working. At the time of resigning from my previous employer, Rapid Circle, I had been planning to take the year off and then decide what it is I wanted to do. However, truth be told, the plan was never to return to the kind of […]
From the Diaries: What is Your Most Overrated Virtue?
I’ve been writing in journals since I was 15 and have my entire life and reflections written in thousands of pages over the years. It’s been exactly a year since I left working and decided to go through some of the pages I had scribbled to review how much I have progressed in that time. […]
A Year Since I Last Worked
I can’t believe that a year has already passed since I resigned from my last role as a community manager in a tech company. Around the same time, I also gave up and deleted all my social media accounts and felt that I had walked away from another part of my life to start afresh […]
Nothing Wrong With Starting with Grammar When Learning a New Language
I watched this interview with D’aria talking about how she learned French and it struck me that we both started the same way. Many people on YouTube and other articles online advise NEVER to start with grammar. However this is wrong. I started like her. I bought the Practice Makes Perfect books and methodically over […]
Activate Learning in the Post-Work Years
So it seems that I’m not the only one in my circle of family and friends who decided to retire early. It must be a “thing” now. Chatting with them, the main reason for retiring early are mainly related to changes in their job circumstance. Others I spoke to who are still working, have all […]
My First Day of Summer School
This morning was my first day of Summer School and I was like a little kid. I did all my morning chores and even went into the garage to pump up my bike tyres. I hadn’t cycled in years but as the University of the Third Age in nearby, it seemed wrong to use the […]
No More Screens After 5:30PM
So one of the things I’ve started doing (and which I hope lasts for a long time), is going on an “intermittent fast”. If we can do it for food, we can do it with our screens. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that when I’m in a gathering of people, there are […]
Dabbling With Stable Diffusion: A Puzzle for You
I started playing around with this text to graphic AI image generator called Stable Diffusion. The program allows you to create different images you can use without the need to use copyright images (although I wonder if these images would be repeated if the same search terms are input by others? 🤔) Here’s some images […]
A Lesson For Me on Posts Written By ChatGPT
Argh. 🤣🤔 I read this post by David Hopkins and it resonated with me wholeheartedly. Until I read the bottom line that it was written by ChatGPT. 😳 Geez. It was good. It pulled at me heart strings because it resonated with my own experiences with blog writing! My lesson? Despite the sentiment and similar […]
AI Tells Me What To Do With My Life
I asked ChatGPT (I should just give it a name because I’ve been asking it all sorts of questions) about what to do with my life before I “formally” retire at 65. I’ve still got about 12-13 years to go before society deems me retired in the formal sense. It’s also the time the filter […]
I’m Doing a Descartes
I’m undertaking the Coursera Course: Know Thyself: The Value of an UnExamined Life by the University of Edinburgh as something to pass the time in my day and it’s been interesting so far. Certainly, I’m not doing this for any accreditations but merely, learning for myself…because why not? (In all honesty, I wanted to do […]
Know Thyself
I have started a MOOC on Coursera called Know Thyself by the University of Ediburgh. I’ve always been a fan of these online courses (despite a lot of people bagging them out) because as a self-driven learner, I like how the course is free – and that it is set out in a way that […]
My New YouTube Channel Causes Me To Radically Rethink Everything About What I Put Out There
I’ve customised my YouTube channel to remove ‘activate learning’ and to just be Life Lessons Through Books. Some time ago, I asked the question Should I Get Off YouTube? The reason is that after getting off social media, I’m reflecting on every single aspect of my working life and my output that I have shared […]
Should I Get Off YouTube?
To be fair, I don’t do my best thinking at 2am. This morning, tossing and turning and trying to get back to sleep, my mind started to wander. Sometimes I get up at this time and read a book before sleep overcomes me again. Other times I lay there thinking. I noticed my thinking at […]
University of the Third Age (U3A)
Today I went around to my parents as is my usual weekly routine to catch with their news over a cup of coffee or a wander in their garden. My father asked me about the University of the Third Age and how it was set up. I knew that it was an international not-for-profit organisation […]
Short Story….Submitted
Well today I finally submitted my short story (2363 words) for our local council’s My Brother Jack Creative Writing Award. It’s taken a long time to come up with the story and the character. However, I found the setting quite easily. I imagined what my street would have been like in 1942 and back then, […]
Top Tools for Learning 2022
It’s that time of the year again to submit for Jane Hart’s Top Tools for Learning. I’ve been doing this every year since 2012 she created this annual program which has now become a record of how the tools for my personal learning have changed over the years. This year has been a complete flip […]
My French Learning Update
I’ve written many posts here in my blog about how I’ve been learning French then integrating this language into my life as much as possible. It’s immersion by stealth. If you can’t visit or travel overseas to the country, we are spoiled for choice using technology and other ways to ensure we are surrounded by […]