How I Am Surviving the UK Lockdown

I just wanted to share how I am surviving the current lockdown. If it doesn’t help anyone, at least I have it documented for myself.

Exercise

As it’s important that I keep up with workouts. This is how I’ve been spending my time when it comes to my physical health. These are all activities I have tried. I need to increase the frequency of some of these as that’s not something I am proud of.

I am looking to start the Couch to 5K training plan to encourage me to wake up at a better time each morning and to also go to sleep at a reasonable time.

Social

As someone who is introverted and have forced myself to be more outgoing throughout the past year, I initially thought this would be an amazing time to lock myself away and slip back into my comfort zone. Oh how I was wrong! After just two days I really began to miss socialising.

There’s never been a better opportunity for me to get back into gaming. I’ve recently started playing the following with friends with some sort of group chat functionality.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to host games of Jackbox Party pack via Discord screen sharing with great success!

Activities

I’ve done what everyone else has done during this lockdown and decided to bake. Admittedly my baking is free from eggs and dairy so that presents some interesting challenges. As well as getting back into meal preparation now that I’m no longer stopping in hotels and eating at restaurants and from deliveries all of the time.

I’ve baked myself a chocolate cake, a coffee cake, chocolate crunch, brownies, cookies and have even attempted to make custard from plant based milk (it went very well thank you very much!). Now the supermarkets are out of flour and I can’t do much more baking.

I have also been experimenting with foods I’ve always deemed “too time consuming to prepare”. Well, now that I have nothing better to do with my time, I have been playing around with making Southern Fried Chicken style seitan burgers. After a few attempts I think I understand the process a hell of a lot better.

Work

One of the biggest challenges I initially faced when working from home permanently is distractions and the jump from working with a nice 22 inch dual monitor setup in the office, to a single monitor and a laptop screen at home.

After a week of my new permanent working from home setup, I was beginning to get pretty frustrated with the size difference, difference in screen resolutions etc and decided to take the plunge and treat myself to a new pair monitors to go with my existing setup. Of course, everywhere I looked monitors were sold out due to the rest of the UK facing the same situation I was.

I opted for the HP EliteDisplay E243 to go along with my ancient HP 2159m and I am more than impressed so far.

I currently have a small PHP project to implement additional authentication methods such as LDAP and Keycloak into an existing off the shelf (GitHub) file manager product. This is to provide customers with a method to transfer files between two different networks via their web browser without using shared credentials thus turning its internal users into roles and then mapping the user to a role via LDAP groups or client roles.

I also performed a live demo of my work on this application to a group of around 20 people via a bi-weekly show and tell session. So that’s a big win for me as I managed to try and attack my fear of public speaking.

Learning and personal development

Currrently my learning and personal development has been on hold, as it is mostly work related and I feel it would be difficult to maintain a good work/life balance.

With time I will pick up on these again. In the pipeline I have

I have however picked up where I left off with my Japanese language studies and focusing on those during my lunch break.

I would also be looking to contribute directly to the PHP project’s repo, however, I need to clarify with my employer with regards to that.

Home Tech

Not a lot has gone on in this space and now that I’ve actually wrote down what I have achieved during this lock down so far, I understand why.

However, I did add Emby into my Kubernetes cluster and upgraded to the latest version of Traefik.

Summary

I think I’ve just talked on and on. It’s nice to be able to clear out my mind and talk about what I’ve done. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, living alone during this time is a lot easier than I thought it would be.

#covid-19 #mental-health #physical-health #gaming #baking