Martin W Smith

It’s coming to the end of the sixth week of lockdown and we’re still doing ok. I’m still in work which is great, we are spending much less money than usual, which means if anything does happen with my contract we should be ok for a few months. If I do manage to keep my contract through this crisis, we will end up in a much better state financially than when it began. Not that things were bad before, but we should have more savings behind us than we did.

The diet and exercise has been going well. I’ve been doing on alternate days, 20 minutes of jogging and 40 minutes of exercise in the house. I finished the 100 pushups app I was doing. Wednesday was the last day and I did 250 pushups over about 8 sets. I’m not sure why the app is called 100 pushups when you do a lot more than that. I can now knock out 30 or so pushups in one go pretty easily and I’ve noticed an increase in the size of my upper chest and triceps. I’ve lost roughly 1.5 pounds, I’m now down 2 stone 10 pounds since January. I want to lose another 1.5 stone or so. If nothing else, by the time we get out of lockdown I should be thinner, fitter and stronger.

I’ve been learning a lot too, cracking though the online courses on data science. I have found though that I’m starting to forget some of the stuff I’ve learnt already. I’ve enrolled on another online course this one is called Learning to Learn. It teaches effective learning strategies so that I can retain more of what I learn. In an effort to do this I’ve been using the skills I’ve been learning in my day to day work and in Kaggle competitions. I’ve also started taking more notes, something I’ve never been very good at in the past.

Other than all that I’ve been helping the kids with their school work a bit, my wife has been handling that for the most part though. I only really get involved when there’s maths questions. We’ve also been having movie night on a Friday for the past couple of weeks. We bought a big box of snacks from Scott Cinemas which included a massive bag of popcorn.

That’s it for another week, what’s everyone else been up to?