Reviews on A Geek's Life

2020 Reading: #1 - The Practice of The Presence of God

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 13:06:50 +0000

The Practice of The Presence of God (In Modern English) by Brother Lawrence (Author) and Marshall Davis (Translator)

A classic which dates back to the late 1600s, this is a book that regularly makes it on to lists of great devotional books. This (newish) translation is by Marshall Davis, who has form for this sort of reimagining. Between this year being my year of delving deeper and plenty of time thanks to COVID-19, I finally got round to reading this! to read has ended up on my pile for years. The central characters are a French lay brother, born Nicholas Herman but better known as Brother Lawrence, and Father Joseph de Beaufort, the vicar general to the Archbishop of Paris. A perhaps unlikely friendship given their different stations in life, we have it to thank for the letters and conversations recorded here.

Quarterly Review - Q3 2019

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 16:59:27 +0000

Went Well

Transition to new role at work
Restarted a weekly Thankful Thursdays feature on here, in a bid to build an attitude of gratitude
Significantly increased my monthly run distance peaking at over 100km for July & August
Came through my regular BP checks in August without any need to adjust meds etc
Interviewed for AOC role, waiting to hear back on a potential offer, also waiting to interview for a senior M&C role at an oil major in the next few days.

Didn’t Go Well

Spiritual life is still out of sorts,
Suffered occasional bouts of panic, negative self talk and lack of self confidence both at work and my personal life. Need to get a regular meetup and support set up with an older wiser head/ mentor (eg Pastor W?)
Didn’t write as much as I thought I would. Need to establish a series of rituals to make this happen semi-automatically
Relationship with S appears stalled, with us both living our separate lives and not bonding as well as we should, current living arrangements being the primary cause I believe.

Year Objectives and Status

The 11 things:

31 Days Of Journaling, Day 10: The Hero's Journey

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 03:05:46 +0000

Photo by Brett Patzke on Unsplash

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The Hero’s Journey makes for interesting reading, showing how in 12 stages the boy becomes a man as he journeys through a life. Although based on myths, the underlying idea behind this framework is that these myths work because they represent how we understand how life happens to us. Vogler’s model, which the folk at AoM espouse, is an abridged version of the original in the Joseph Campbell book (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and identifies 12 steps (from the Wikipedia page) as below:

31 Days of Journaling, Day 7: A Reflection

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 15:55:49 +0000

Image source: rawpixel @ unsplash

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And so comes Day 7. Whilst those who believe in numerology think seven is the number of perfection, the past few days have been anything but perfect. What they have been though is an opportunity to flex thinking and writing muscles which I haven’t used in a while, which were to put it bluntly beginning to atrophy.

The general idea has been to try to block time out in the morning- between waking up, devotions and heading out to work- to pen a few words in response to the challenge of the day. There have been hits and misses along the way but thankfully I’ve managed to show up. Here’s to discipline winning through and birthing delight in the end.

31 Days of Journaling, Day 1: Why Journal?

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:45:57 +0000

Image Source: Heartwoods

It feels like a good time to try to develop a regular practice of journaling. For one there is the need to reflect properly on my latest attempt at rebooting, as well as the plethora of other more intelligent folk who think it is a good thing: David Sedaris, Austin Kleon, Michael Hyatt, Samuel Pepys, David Thoureau to name a few. The benefits are many, ranging from providing opportunities to reflect on life, a record of one’s day (both for the individual and for posterity) and also a source of material for future creative writing pursuits.

A good month of sorts...

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 12:30:00 +0000

Image Credits - Joey Rozier, Flickr

It has been a fascinating month of sorts on here - and also in real life where the issues which drove my sense of dissonance and the need to begin again have eased off. I would be remiss if I said I was out of the woods completely, but there certainly is a sense of significant progress and building traction in the right direction. The money numbers were pretty much bang on plan - just under £0.01 actual vs planned - which allowed me put away twice what I planned at the beginning of the month. I did spend more than planned on transport and purchases, main driver being the need to head down south for a weekend at short notice and the bits and bobs I purchased to support that. For the interested (waves at SisiOnABudget), here are two charts (by category, plan vs actuals) with a little more detail.

NaPoWriMo Day 29 - Giving Stars

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 20:26:23 +0000

[ Source]

Four stars for the Chelsea boots in brown; five from Wood, for their soft leather and inner cushion, for how easy they fit his wide feet and how they arrive in time for spring and the promise of new beginnings.

One star from Miles, for how they fall apart; split at the heel after seven months of use; for how they’ll harm your feet, and fall apart as though sawn in two.

KPIs and Reviews - June 2014

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 18:56:42 +0000

2012 - The Year of the Detox

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:07:30 +0000

Although a year and some ago I thought I had truly gotten over the pain of the EJ debacle, I still managed to spend Christmas stateside attending a wedding, hanging with mutual friends and kind of hoping I would run into her. Neither happened, and when push came to shove I couldn’t bring myself to take the short hop across town to the city where she now lived. Coming into 2012 then, the targe t was to resolve a number of the other friendzoneships I had somehow gotten sucked in over the years.

114 days in...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:19:56 +0000

This year I decided I would only have seven focus areas - from which twelve things for 2012 were derived. Interestingly, whilst there has been progress in some areas, quite a few other areas have been the equivalent of a Lagos traffic jam for progress. 114 days in, here’s my review.

Develop a daily practice of prayer and meditation: This has come along in fits and starts. there definitely has been some progress, but nothing sustained so far. I’d rate myself as ‘poor’ here.
Lose 20 kg: An epic fail here. I suspect I may have actually gained half a kilogram!
Read and review 25 books: Currently on book number four. No real reviews have been completed so far. I’ll need to decide a format and start progressing these ASAP.
Call Parents and siblings at least once a week: I’ve made some progress on here with phone calls, but again not on the level of consistency that I’d be hoping for.
Save £1,000 each month: One of the areas where I’d say I have performed very well.
Get Chartered Engineer Status: In progress, I hope to send in my initial applications this May and kick start the process of getting C.Eng registration through the IMarEST.
Get a Driver’s Licence: A couple of false starts here. The intent is to get the CEng application done and dusted and then focus on studying for the theory test and passing it in May 2012.
Resolve long term settlement options: Canada featured heavily in the plan for a while, but at the moment it’s looking like the UK is the base plan. The intent is to sort out the CEng status and then take it from there.
Resolve my dating issues: Not quite progress here. Met Q who ticks a lot of the boxes (geek, recovering bookworm, under 31 yrs of age, Nigerian with the added benefit of real life mutual friends/ connections). The one quirk is she’s very into the Grail Message thing which ended up scuttling my dalliance with EJ from back in the day. I’m not quite sure I can risk lettnig my heart go when there are these issues.
FAN integration/FOL Service: One word, abysmal.
Find a mentor: Some progress, O’s essentially become my non work mentor what with his interest in getting me married and his listening ears, and the three gorgeous kids he’s got. :) On the work front, I’m getting along quite nicely with the QNX* team now - RG seems like a good candidate for a work mentor. Getting him to sponsor my CEng application cxould be the key.
Finding a hobby: New item on the lsit, thanks to pressure from CS & NP at QNX and my buddy Chizz. I’ve signed up for the company touch rugby team - hopefully that pans out nicely.

All in all, there’s been areas of progress and some of none. The top targets for Q2 through end of June are getting the CEng application through, passing the theory test and heading off to Nigeria.

The Dating Wrap

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 10:06:17 +0000

Ninety one days into the new year, I do not appear to have made any significant progress on the one thing on my 2012 to do list which my mother is most interested in - finding myself a potential wife. Following on a review from late last year, I decided a multi-pronged approach would work best - fusing online dating with physical meet ups and the occasional introduction from mutual friends. Arguably, there have been opportunities with potential, even though the bulk of them have not been. In any case here goes the journey so far:

2010: The Year in.... Cabs

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:05:04 +0000

I think cab drivers are a microcosm of the larger society and that if a sufficiently large sample is analysed, one can gain critical insights into the mind of a city. This has to be the year where I used cabs the most. Tight deadlines at work, atrocious weather conditions, moving houses and a few late night jaunts around town conspired to leave me needing cabs at various times this year. The downside was largely financial – I ended up racking up significant costs on renting cabs over the year. On the plus side, I think I gained a window into the mindset of this city.

Living Dangerously...

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:34:56 +0000

Talent is the desire to practice…..It is that you love something so much that you are willing to make an enormous sacrifice and an enormous commitment to that, whatever it is – task, game, sport, what have you.

- Malcom Gladwell

Last year I closed out a fair bit of my plans - at least I was waaay above the average 12%. This year, I decided I would only do one thing - Live Dangerously.

In Retrospect...

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:13:33 +0000

This has been one hell of a ride. There was change aplenty - the good, the bad and the iffy. In hindsight, maybe some decisions in 2008 were hasty, maybe they were not…Bottom line is that I survived..

Call them random occurrences, put them down to luck or whatever – I think it was Divine Providence that pulled me through some really difficult times. It had to be – from getting THE opportunity after it had closed, to significant delays on bus timings that enabled me catch the train that got the ball rolling, to having a friend leave her house at the just the right time I needed a new house to stay in a new city (P you totally rock!), to getting Brooke Fraser’s Shadowfeet at the time things felt the bleakest, there had to be some orchestration behind it all. The plus side is I learned a few hard lessons - still learning even newer, harder ones.