This year was spent virus dodging. I met with friends, occasionally, going for walks with Margaret and sometimes Neil and Les. I socially bubbled with Richard, watching DVDs and the very occasional film. I keep in touch with some Contact friends either in person or on Facebook but, for privacy’s sake, won’t go into details.
It was the year of Zoom. The Tyneside Linux User Group met once a month on Zoom. Church services were run on Zoom. Even a Traveller session was run on Zoom.
I am the volunteer reviews editor for the ACCU’s CVu magazine which is published once every two months. Every time CVu is published, I send PDFs of it to my publishing contacts, who in turn contact me when they have titles they would like reviewed. I then arrange for ACCU members to receive review copies who in turn send me their reviews and I, in turn format the reviews correctly and send them to Cvu’s editor. Over the year, I have dabbled with Python, C, bash shell scripting, C++ and Makefiles. In particular, I was interested in how to learn programming languages and how to remain competent in them. I bought some blank revision cards from WH Smiths and created some revision cards for bash shell scripting. Late in the year I committed to reviewing “Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript”, something that I will be resuming after the Christmas break.
I continued to run the Computer Wombling Project, even though supply of unwanted computers was next to nothing. I’ve been helping Richard with his wombled PC that runs Ubuntu Linux and LibreOffice.
To counterbalance my I.T. efforts, I read at night. For quite some time I read about how to run roleplaying games. Then I read background material for running Traveller games. Then I started brushing up on particulars of the Traveller TTRPG (Table Top Role Playing Game). I have created a small library of fiction in my spare room, with the hope of returning to fiction one day.
October saw the publication of my technical article, “Stufftar Revisited”, in Overload magazine - available here - and I went on to experiment with the "tar" command. Throughout the year I reviewed these books:-
- “Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020.
- Software Engineering at Google : Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time
- Effective C By Robert C. Seacord
- Zero to One : Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future”
- How Linux Works: What every Superuser Should Know
- The Kollected Kode Vicious
- Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management
The reviews are online and the main page on reviews can be found here. I also dabbled with coding. In December I wrote a brief (438 line, 14 function) program in the C programming language for handling some statistics in Traveller.
I hope you have a prosperous 2022!