Tag: coronavirus

  • Summer 🌻

    Summer 🌻

    I’ve really enjoyed the past few months; being able to spend some quality time with my daughter, enjoying the sunshine with friends, getting back to the office for work, and cycling through the city to see the sights and sounds of Oslo.


    My iPhone tells me I have had about 5 hours each night in bed, on average, for the past month. And so, I’m pretty tired / exhausted some days and I’ve heard that’s just the life of a parent – but I think I’ve been dealing pretty well with it so far. Spirits are high in the Vestengen-Cox household. And so is the pile of washing in the laundry basket and dirty dishes by the sink.

    It’s not long now until I get a really decent extended leave from work. For sure, I have 19 weeks parental leave guaranteed. Any vacation from this year (around 2 weeks remaining) and what I’ll gain for next year (around 5 weeks?), I could potentially tack on to the start and end of the parental leave. That’s almost half-a-year of paid leave to spend with my daughter. Bliss.


    Today, I got my second COVID-19 vaccine. This will hopefully mean the family will be in a better position to travel over the coming months and we can, fingers-crossed, see my friends and family back home in Manchester.

    Also, a holiday to somewhere like the south of France or Italy would be nice… but that might just be a dream whilst we are busy saving, trying to find our way onto the housing market. Oslo is expensive.


    Thanks for reading this short, rambling post. Hope you, dear reader, are keeping well and looking after yourself – physically and mentally.

    Don’t be a stranger.

    Feel free to start a conversation on Mastodon, hit me up on Matrix at @matt:gossip.land, or on your favourite messaging app of choice.

    ✌️

  • 34

    34

    For some reason, having spent the vast majority of my time indoors and in front of a computer screen, I’d anticipated that I would update my blog more regularly than once a month. Alas, it was not to be.

    Here I am, over one month since my last post, with some random musings:

    I am now 34.

    Not so long ago, it was my birthday. The event passed without much of a fanfare, but then 34 is such an irrelevant age to be. The highlight was a surprise breakfast-in-bed from the good lady wife.

    The following day, I went for an eye test. Turns out I’ve aged so much that my vision is a bit wonky and now a set of glasses are in order.

    I’m really looking forward to wearing glasses, to be honest. My face could do with a refresh and a nice pair of specs will look great.

    I got an iPhone.

    For many years I refused to get an iPhone. The customization options that Android offered were way too enticing and being unable to change the default web browser on iPhone was a big thing for me.

    Well, I finally caved in and bought one when the screen shattered on my Samsung Galaxy S8. Now I own an iPhone and I quite like it.

    Also, I understand why iPhone users have cracked screens so often. I can be place the iPhone on what I’d previously consider a safe, flat surface – then 10 minutes later you hear your phone hit the floor.

    I’m usually very careful with phones. My Samsung lasted four years before it smashed – and that was only because the cat knocked it off the table. But I’ve had the iPhone less than 90 days and I already have either a hairline scratch or crack on the screen. What a nightmare.

    Coping with COVID-19

    As mentioned in my previous post, I think I had coronavirus. Probably. My wife and I both got symptoms associated with the illness and, although we haven’t been tested, both believe we had COVID-19.

    But, we are fine and well. We stayed home for two weeks and avoided all contact with the outside world. Fortunately I had just done “a big shop” prior to getting symptoms, so we had supplies to see us though.

    It took me about 3 weeks before symptoms disappeared and maybe an additional week before my sense of smell and taste was fully restored. My wife recovered quicker than I did.

    Staying home when you are ill is easy. You are ill. It’s tougher to stay home now I’m fully recovered and there is glorious weather outside.

    Having to work from home can be nice some days, and absolutely horrible others. I go through phases of being very happy and content between the walls of my apartment and then some days really feel like I’m going crazy spending so much time indoors, in front of a screen.

    My mood is greatly affected by the state of the apartment. If it’s clean, I’m less likely to feel stressed or depressed. The obvious answer here would be to spend some time cleaning. However, work demands so much time and attention now we are all working “remotely”, that it’s a struggle to balance that work-life balance.

    I’m sure I’ll cope. First world problems, I guess.

    If you made it this far, thanks for reading my ramblings. I hope you are keeping well (physically and mentally) during this COVID-19 era.

    Stay safe. Be good.

  • Links of the week: don’t touch your face, online card games, coronavirus painting

    Links of the week: don’t touch your face, online card games, coronavirus painting

    In a week where half the world is taking the advice of their respective governments and staying home a lot more, I have been sat at home coughing, fending off heavy headaches and wheezing my way around the apartment.

    I’ve not been tested, but can’t help but wonder if I have had the newly-famed COVID-19 or not. Either way, things will get better.

    In the meantime, here are some new things to look at with your eyes and minds:


    An animated gif showing coxy touching his face and a website alerting him not to.

    Don’t touch your face

    As this beautifully made Kurzgesagt video explains, touching your face is sending germs and viruses on a highway to the inside of your body. That is why the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommend that you don’t touch your face.

    But not touching your face is hard. I touch my face all the time without knowing it.

    Do Not Touch Your Face (dot com) is a website which checks your webcam and will tell you to not touch your face when you touch your face.

    The geeky rundown is that it uses machine learning based on TensorFlow.js code. You give the algorithm a one-time lesson on when you are touching your face and then it works it out itself from there.

    “No!”


    A photo of a sealed packet of cards from the A Game Of Thrones: A Card Game expansion pack

    Play the Game of Thrones card game online

    Quite a few times throughout the history of this blog, I have mentioned the card game A Game of Thrones. I love it and have spent way too much money on it.

    I recently discovered that there is a free online version of the game and so during the past week have played a few games.

    The design of the site is pretty confusing and the game isn’t the most straight-forward game to play. But once you’ve learned the ropes, it’s very fun.

    If, during these self-isolation times, friends of mine wish to hop on a Skype call and play through a game together – give me a shout.


    A screenshot of Brave web browser for computers

    Blocking ads but still rewarding content creators

    Whilst I’m a big advocate of Firefox web browser, I have been attracted by Brave web browser recently – purely for the integration of digital cash. It’s interesting.

    The app has a wallet for digital cash. You can top it up with money yourself or get paid BAT tokens (10 BAT is worth about $1.20 at the moment) for seeing adverts.

    The great thing about this is that if you have digital cash in your wallet, then each month the browser divvies up a handful of cash between the websites you have visited. Provided your favourite websites are signed up as content creators.

    There are many sites registered as content creators – including the likes of The Guardian, Wikipedia and Archive.org.

    This means that even though I’m blocking all the adverts The Guardian want to show me, I end up throwing The Guardian some BAT tokens out of my Brave wallet each month for the content I viewed.

    It’s clever. Maybe I’ll do a full blog post about it in future. In the meantime, you can check out Brave yourself.


    And finally;

    This painting depicts a coronavirus just entering the lungs, surrounded by mucus secreted by respiratory cells, secreted antibodies, and several small immune systems proteins.

    A painting of coronavirus from a molecular scientist

    The image used at the top of this page has been crafted by molecular scientist and artist David S. Goodsell. The painting depicts a coronavirus just entering the lungs, surrounded by mucus secreted by respiratory cells, secreted antibodies, and several small immune systems proteins.

    Goodsell has declared the image as “free to use” and published a super high-resolution version on a little thing you might have heard of before: the internet.


    Thank you for reading. Subscribe for future updates.

    Be good.

    Bye.