Weeknote 2024-07

It’s been half term this week. So I’ve had a couple of days off with the kids to cover while Liz was working. I didn’t do much with those days as we decided to start toilet training Elliot this week to get him out of nappies, so I wasn’t brave enough to venture far.

It was lovely to just hang out with Phoebe and Elliot though, hanging out at home playing and not doing much of anything else.

I introduced the both to Monster Hunter…

Jim, my brother-in-law, gifted me a camera last weekend, which was lovely of him.

It’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF3; a 12MP, Micro-four-thirds compact system camera from 2011. The specs are nothing amazing given it’s now 13 years old; it takes the same lenses as my OM-5 which is cool. However this camera is a bit special: Jim’s done an infra-red conversion on it.

This process involves dismantling the camera, and very carefully cutting the UV/IR filter away from the front of the sensor and replacing it with an IR passing filter that will let certain wavelengths of Infra-Red light into the camera that previously would have been filtered out.

This camera has had a 650nm filter applied to it. I don’t know much about IR photography (yet), but from what I’ve been reading this should allow me to take some interesting “false colour” photos as well as make black & white photography have more contrast.

This weekend I drove down to Brighton for my friend Matt’s birthday party. Matt and I met when we both started working for the same company, and then realised we lived round the corner from each other. a few years later him and his family moved to Brighton, and we moved to Canterbury - so we don’t catch up as often as we used to.

It was really good to be able to hang out for his birthday. I had a hotel for the night, so I could stay the duration, and he had hired the cellar bar at The Brunswick and put on an evening of music. Him and a few of his friends did solo slots, and then his band, and another local band played the rest of the night.

I haven’t been to a gig for literally years! And it was a really good time.

I’ve been to Brighton a few times now, and there seems to be a fantastic beer scene there. I don’t think I’ve been to a pub that hasn’t had a really varied selection of modern and traditional styles from around the local area.

I don’t know if this is a Kent thing, because of the long history of more traditional hop-growing in the County, but whenever I go into a more local pub to me, I’m usually dissapointed in the absolute lack of modern, or alternative beer styles. All you seem to be able to get is a couple of lagers, and a couple of cask bitters, and Guinness. If you’re in a really bougie place you might find a couple of pale ales too, but that’ll be it. I’ve basically stopped going to pubs because of it.

So it’s great to visit places outside of my home County and actually find beers I want to drink on the taps.

I renamed the main source file for my literate Emacs configuration from init.org to README.org. I did this purely so that It renders the actual config files on the landing page of the Github repo.

And because I am a nerd. Mostly because I am a nerd.