Friday, 10th June, 2022
Bought some colour film today. 6 boxes of Kodak Color Plus 200 (24 frames) - it was on sale for £6 each which is pretty much the cheapest colour film has been in ages. Only 24 frames but nevermind. A single portra 400 is £17.50. If I never buy any film, I’ll never be able to shoot it. I do like black and white but as it’s the summer time, it’s nice to make use of colour stocks - I also like colour too and the grain and look are unmatched. Color Plus isn’t the greatest but it’s not that bad.
I have taken some photos with my digital camera, although still haven’t even transferred them onto the computer let alone figured out how I’m processing them. I’ll just save them to folders on the server for now. Btu I’ve not really been in the mood to take many pictures, certainly not with film. Although nothing “special” has happened, which is why I’ve not even reached for film. This is a shame. Past 2 years I’d take it with me just going to the play park with the kids. Oh well.
Sort of thinking of setting up a static site for my main site. This is a reoccuring thing which ends in wasting 3-5 evenings looking at themes thinking I can just pick one and be happy with it. Turns out I can’t “just pick one and be happy with it”. Doesn’t stop me looking at all the same theme web sites again, hoping that something will be different this time.
I like this guy’s website/blog. Very simple style and format. Also has a daily element as well as main posts. It’s not quite clear what the daily entries are of - they seem to be links to other sites and a summary or copy/paste of the other site. Maybe just items of interest. I also like the archives by year in the footer. Very efficient use of the page. His site is powered by django but could easily be a static site, which is interesting why it’s a django site, but maybe because it has been for years and years - django pre-1.0.
I got a notification that my 2H 2022 Hobonichi has shipped. I’m intrigued to see what the paper is like, and the book as a whole. Not sure if I’m using it for work or for home or both? Both is unlikely as I’ll either forget to bring it back and forth or won’t really want to whilst cycling. I haven’t been writing in anything at home on a daily basis, so could be good for that, but that also risks just never being written in. I’ll see when it arrives.
Work was a bit meh today. In fact this whole week has been bleh. So good job it’s over, except now that it’s over I’ve realised I wasted a lot of time - well it wasn’t wasted, I was doing stuff that needed to be done, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. Although some of my todos have been on my list for 3 months now. I still want to do them but are they ever going to get done?
Speaking of frog eating, I did write up a little summary of May’s expenses. It’s funny how once you start doing something you realise that you didn’t exactly know what you wanted when you set out to do it. Least I found that. I’d thought a layout of the month’s expenses would be obvious but I’m not sure what I want. But I did something. Top ten expenses, excluding bills like mortgage, utilities etc, and groceries made the list more interesting to make. I did it on a wiki I have and was going to make it one page per month, but now I’m thinking it should just be one page. Or maybe it should be both. I could make a list of the top ten expenses of the year, and a running total of income vs. Expenses, something like that. I previously said I’d write it in a Field Notes I have so I could flick between the pages to compare months. This flicking is not really present online so that’s why I might duplicate the info (transcluding even). But maybe I just want a graph for the year, and the top ten list. Not quite sure. 🤔
With my filtering, the top ten purchases captured the essence of the month quite well. I didn’t compute it exactly, but those ten probably made up about 70-80% of the non-essential spend. We did buy some furniture and I bought a new GPU, so maybe months without those will be more interesting to look at. Although I feel that every month there are some “one offs” of some form or another…mostly me buying things…
I use Money Dashboard aggregator to collect transactions - now the UK banking system is required to provide APIs to your accounts, so that “fin-tech” companies can make new products. Okay they sell my transaction lists to people who’ll try and sell me credit cards etc. but it’s convienent and importantly safe. It’s a lot more practical than typing them into a plain text file or GNUCash or something. I can just assign categories on my phone (if it gets it wrong) and then look at the summary or download a CSV each month. I am wondering about downloading all the transactions and keeping in something for my future reference. Or at least some script or something to process the data for my top ten filtered and other items. It’s not a huge amount of effort but maybe useful later on. It’s not going to replace the hand written/typed effort as that is what actually gets me to think about it and realise what’s going on.
I feeling a bit anti-computer at the moment, and thinking “if I hadn’t just bought a new computer I could’ve got rid of mine”. Which is a bit silly as the computer is a useful device.
