I'm just getting busy though, I've been these last few days, last, well, almost a week now, I've been at it, just getting the podcast up onto YouTube. Yeah, I saw that, that looks good. Yeah, I thought, you know, give it a bit of a wide audience, you know, I watch a lot of YouTube when I'm working, so I'm sure other people do. Yeah.
Because one thing I like about YouTube, you can set up all these things on your wish list, not wish list, sorry, on the watch later list. You can queue up all these videos. And then with Chrome, I suppose in the Safari, it's all you can do this, but you can play YouTube and picture-picture mode. That's right, yeah.
You just have the floating window on the top. And I just normally make that fairly small, put it in the bottom corner, and then just have it running in the background when I'm working. Yeah, that's what I do as well, for you and Sandy. So I tend to listen to a lot of, not listen to, I tend to watch a lot of music videos, things like stand-up comedy, watch a lot of those, watch some gaming-related videos, and then they're related on social.
So if I can throw your podcast in there as well, you know, you don't need to look at it, you don't need to be visually standing or anything. But you know, you've got the audio as part of your place, though. Right. But it's just a long process, you know, converting more to video, just like eight is rendering it and then uploading it to YouTube, and then, but it's done now, you know, done the whole backlog.
That's good. So people can subscribe on there, and then going forward, they'll be good, because I've got a template set up now to just drop the audio file in, add a bit of text on the, any couple of bits of text on the titles, and then that's it, off, off you go. Cool. Yeah, set up the Facebook page as well, last week.
So have a really appreciate out to anyone yet, apart from like, yourself and a couple of other people. So I'm just, I wanted to get all these YouTube stuff out of the way first, and then get this, today's episode out of the way, and then, because I started doing a bit of Facebook promotion and stuff like that, and just start sharing it around with friends. So hopefully, yeah, a bit of conversation going there with listeners, community stuff like that. Yeah, definitely.
That's the idea. Good stuff, man. Yeah, so it's been busy week, even though I'm off, for pro, let's just chill out. We want to know the films.
Yeah, I did that the other day. We had an office business party on Tuesday, and Wednesday I was in no, well, I was completely messed up, like I couldn't function. So I Netflix day all day, I watched about five films back to back. Yeah, anything good to ruin?
Just old stuff, nothing new. I just put on some old films, man, like Transformers the last night. Yeah. Six underground, that new one actually.
Yeah, that's a new one. The Ryan Reynolds one. Yeah, the Ryan Reynolds one. Really good for one man.
Just full of just mind-blowing action. Nothing to really just focus on. He's just like, yeah, it's just action-packed. And a couple of others are quantum, but yeah, that was my Wednesday, man.
Yeah. I'll go up with John McThree, finally. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not seeing that.
That's good. I don't know if he was as as good as one and two. It was a good conclusion to the trilogy, I guess, if there's not going to be anymore, I don't know. Yeah.
I just felt like the first two had a bit more story, but hang on, it was just pure fights, all the way constantly. It was just non-stop. Yeah, there's part one you're like, who's this guy? You want to know his backstory?
You want to know what's going on? Yeah, one or two were brilliant. This one was up there, but probably not as good as the other two. Yeah, okay.
I watched another film yesterday called The Professor and the Madman. That's called Mel Gibson and Sean Penn in it. And it's basically about, so Mel Gibson's character, this guy called something Murray. It's he's the guy who wrote the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
And it's about how he came up with a concept of writing it. And then the sort of struggles he went through to try and define all these words and compile this book. You know, and I got a backlash from other people in Oxford, sort of high society and stuff like that. But really good.
Yeah, it took 70 years to write the first edition. 70 years? Yeah, it's a lot of words in there, isn't it? Yeah, that's right.
Good film. Yeah, I'm looking for that. Is that Netflix? No, actually, I don't know if it's on the current, then tell anybody.
But I don't think it's on Netflix yet. Okay. Oh, you can crack on. Yeah, let's go for it.
All right, so today we're approaching the end of the year now, pretty much two weeks left. Time to start thinking about those resolutions, plans and ideas for next year. Things you want to achieve, things you want to set goals for. So yeah, we both had a little think about this.
We've got some design ones and dev related ones, just in general, general ones and business ones. So yeah, hopefully some of these can inspire some of the listeners as well to think of their own resolutions, but to hear what other people have got on their lists as well. Yeah. You want to kick it off?
Yeah. Okay, so the first one on the list is design related one. So this week I've actually picked up a design tool which probably quite a lot of people out there know about, it's called Figma. And I first heard about this like from yourself and you mentioned it a few times in our previous episodes.
And I did look into it, but I just thought, you know, I'll put down the back burner and I'll just carry on doing what I'm doing in Sketch. And you know, you at the adobe at Stee, I think it is the other one that I'm messing around with. But I started playing around with this week and really, you know, like the way it kind of like works and the user interface and everything. It's very, very clean.
And it's not as buggy as Sketch. I know it's that Sketch tends to just collapse sometimes. It just stops working, the whole Macbook reads is and it just like, you know, signs out. And then I found it's the three sort of like versions of an untitled document that I've been working on when I've already saved it.
So I get really sort of weird kind of, you know, things going on with Sketch. So I'm using Figma this week and it's been really good. You know, it actually feels better for some reason. I don't know why, I don't know what it is.
Probably because it's a new thing that I'm using. It's just that initial kind of feedback you get off a piece of software. But yeah, that's the thing that I'm using now, Figma. And so I spend some time learning it properly and understand how everything works, the workflow within there.
And yeah, just try and implement it with all the new projects that I'm working on in the new year. Yeah, same really. I first came across Figma probably about two years ago. And I don't know, I never really gave it a chance.
I just tried it out, mess around with some of the tutorial files that came with it back then. And the company I was working for back then as well, a few of us just sort of logged into one document at the same time and just tried out the collaborative editing capabilities of it. And we didn't really design like, you know, we just sort of drew some shapes on the screen and people commented on it and stuff like that. But I guess because I was using Sketch, or at the same time, I was actually getting into Sketch because I've always used Photoshop in the past.
And I looked at them both at the same time. And I think the thing that brought me off initially was that Figma was in the browser and Sketch was an application that you install. But just looking at the community and how the popularity of Figma has just grown in the last six to eight months or so, I think it's definitely worth giving it another go now. And obviously the application, I'm sure, has matured a lot as well.
They've introduced a, introduced extensions recently as well. So that's something worth checking out. You know, that's something that Figma never had when I first looked at it and Sketch had from the beginning. So now that Figma's introduced it, it's probably definitely worth looking at it again.
So yeah, I definitely want to look at it as well in any year. We use Sketch at work. So I don't know if I'll be able to introduce it into my day-to-day work, but I could definitely look at it in my personal time and any personal design work that does not work related. Yeah.
Well, we might as well just give that a go together and see if we can collaborate on something. And yeah, let's come up with a design. It's actually a workflow from Sketch to Figma as well, found online. So that we were looking into, and you can kind of like work with the two together.
I don't know how good it is, but then again, why would you, unless you've already got initial sketch documents that you might want to start importing into Figma and work with it. And you know, I think you've got the same kind of... I've got one sketch document for the podcast and all the artwork and all the logos and stuff like that. So good potentially put that over to Figma and use that as a little playground to come up with some.
Yeah, that could be a good start. Yeah, I do want to get some stickers printed on next year. So design them in Figma. That'd be nice, yeah.
Yeah, it's a good one. Yeah, yeah. Other design stuff. I don't do a lot of design work these days.
I haven't really got any sort of resolutions. I think it is just case of learning that tool, making sure that I've got a little bit of experience in all of the most used tools so that I can jump in if funny to on a different tool or I can get involved in the conversation with another designer about the tool that they're using if I need to. And just to know my way around, really. Yeah, and I think for anyone else out there who's doing design or if you're currently a front-end designer and you're still using Photoshop, there's quite a few people that actually know who use Illustrator.
I don't know why, I still don't know why. But pick up one of these new generation tools and just start learning them. And you'll never look back. If you're a front-end web designer, that's something you want to be.
And one of these tools is going to be really good for you. Yeah, definitely. I highly recommend. From what I've seen a Figma, yeah, definitely get involved with it and sketch probably the other one that you want to check out.
Yep. Yeah. All right, that's off development related. My main goal for next year is to do some more work with React.
And especially when I try our Gatsby as well. Now, the Inspector website and my personal website, they both built using Jekyll, which is Ruby-based. But I like that because it's a static site using Jekyll as the static site generator. But I would like to try converting one or both of those to Gatsby and just see how it feels to basically create the site in React.
I'm doing a lot more React that work as well. We've got a few projects coming up next year which are going to be React-based as well. So yeah, I think next year I'm going to get a lot more exposure just to React on the whole really. Although I've been using it a lot, I haven't really taken a very deep dive into some of the newer things that I added to React, especially hooks.
I mean hooks have been around for a while now, but I haven't really done much with them. And I don't really keep fully up to date with what's being added to the language. So that's the plan. Just to try and keep on double things here.
Yeah, this is what I knew to me, although I know about it and I've read into it, I was going to try and get into it this year, but I never really got a chance of doing it. And that's definitely on my resolutions list for next year. It's something I want to get involved with. And I want to set myself a task to build a simple application.
Maybe we can share that on the inspect site. I think something really, really simple. I don't know yet, but I want to learn it. So it's definitely on my to do list.
And the outcome of the learning from the first, I guess the first of the basics, I guess is to just build something very, very simple. So I want to get involved with it and start pushing it. Yeah, after struggling thinking of what to actually build in the first place. This is the thing, because this is where I get stuck at.
And I don't know how to approach it. Yeah, you can follow tutorials. And most tutorials will give you an end product at the end. But the thing with that is that, because you are following it, the chances of you getting things wrong is pretty slim.
So what I would say is if you can find a tutorial for something that you like, like let's say a tutorial for a movie database, sorry, for example, like IMDB, for example, then you could maybe take that concept and convert it into a music database rather than movies or where you'll be dealing with different types of data, different fields in your database. You'll have to introduce maybe audio clips and stuff like that. So just make a slight tweak to it. Or if you can find like a to do list application tutorial, instead of it being a to do list, it could be something else where you check items off.
It doesn't necessarily have to be things like that you need to do. It could be, I don't know, can't really think of what else could turn into. But just taking those cool concepts and just molding them into a slightly different project. Yeah, I like the idea of ticking things off and maybe rearranging the order of things.
And I was looking at maybe a fitness related application, just something really, really simple as, choose your exercises and once it performed, maybe a timer function and there was something, I don't know, adding the number of sets and reps. And it's already been done. There's tons out there, but it'd be really nice to be able to all of that together. Yeah, that could look.
A list of exercises which you can choose from. And then when you go to pick your, like start your workout, you can maybe select those five to 10 exercises that you want to do, arrange them in the order you want to do them, hit start. And then once your timer's done, then they'll maybe ask the app can ask you, have you completed this one or not? And then you can take it off the list and then, yeah, go through your workout like that.
Yeah, that sounds like a good one. Yeah, so that's every end of this. Oh, obviously, you know, we're actually in a round for a few years now. So to start learning it now, who knows what's going to happen next year?
You know, there could be another framework that comes out. And then this reactor will become redundant. Exactly. I think it would be, I think it was the ground for a little while and I think it's going to continue to grow.
Especially with like Anglo, it seems to be on a bit of a downward slope at the moment. People just divide by get. I mean, this isn't really based on fact or anything. I'll get that people are moving away from Anglo a little bit and people are sort of sticking with react and view.
Yeah, because I spent some time trying to figure out which one to choose and there's a lot of conflicts, you know, opinion between the different camps and react was the one that kind of stood out and the voice is really loud about it. And view as well, they're saying, if you want to then react, just pick up view and you'll kind of get the whole idea behind reactor at the same time. So, okay. I don't think it really matters too much of which one you pick.
You can achieve everything with all of them. Yeah. It's just a different way of thinking really. But you know, I've got some experience to react.
I'm pretty happy with the way it works. And I think it's fairly easy to pick up. And if your JavaScript skills are reasonable, you know, you have to be expert, but as long as you understand some of the modern JavaScripts concepts then you should pick up react pretty quick. So if you're learning JavaScript as well, then it goes hand in hand really and then you might as well pick up react at the same time.
But definitely learn JavaScript more first. You know, make sure that you also up to date with some modern JavaScript stuff. That's it. That's another one on my list.
So that's something that I'll be working on continuously throughout the next year, anyway. And yeah, I know that it lends itself really well to react and they're both, you know, it's all very, very similar. I think the other one I didn't mention in the day on my list was a computer games development. It's just something I came across recently on using Unity, the Unity platform development.
And it's just really, really similar to, you can code in any language you want. And the main one people use with gaming C-shot and it just looks really, really similar to working with JavaScript or, you know, any other dev language that we're using at the moment. I was trying to understand the principles behind it. And the Unity platform's really, really powerful.
And it adds in all the physical, you know, the physics stuff and the mechanics of the game for you. And you just literally just got to deal with the coding part of it and kind of, you know, make things sort of like work and stuff on the screen. It's just really interesting. And I haven't put it in the list, but it was something I was looking into that earlier this week or last week.
And it is interesting stuff. Something I might want to just like get involved with and create something really simple, really, really simple game maybe from mobile, I don't know. But that's definitely there. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's make it on and that. Yeah, definitely. Cool, cool.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it in terms of development side of things. Obviously I want to just keep having like career progression and just keep on top of the industry of what's happening. But in terms of literally focusing on one day, yeah, I'm going to definitely focus on React a little more. And you know, just obviously keep on top of things so that hopefully we can talk about them on the podcast as well.
You can't talk about things until you actually know about them a little bit. Yeah, definitely. Right, well, speaking of podcast, obviously I've got to keep growing this. And I mentioned earlier about saying on the Facebook page and the YouTube page.
So I think I've got all bases covered now. We're a Spotify as well. Set that up about two weeks ago. So the podcast is on all the major platforms now.
And the idea behind the Facebook page, like I mentioned earlier, is just to get to know some of the people, maybe build some sort of community, hopefully get some conversations going, some comments and stuff on particular episodes. And just to get to know some of the listeners and just grow the audience as well. So we've been doing this now. This is what episode 30.
So not bad. I mean, it's not like we're coming out every single week and we've been going for a couple of years, but it's just enough. And it'll be good to just see it growing up a lot more. Yeah, definitely.
It's got me into the flow and it was something I went to do earlier this year, just, you know, start my own one. I just really didn't know what to talk about. It was always stuck. But now I've got a list of ideas that I've just put down.
And it's not going to be anything too late about what we're talking about here when they're waiting together on respect. But it's definitely something I want to be doing. And I think it's going to be more business related with regards to people who want to start businesses and especially online business. And what to think about when you're getting a website and the pitfalls and things that people might overlook and just generally trying to help people decide on the next steps, you know, before to start diving into an online business.
Because the number of times I get clients who've not thought things out properly. And, you know, when I give them a proposal with a quotation and they just run off and have a heart attack, you know? So things like that, what to expect, what to be prepared for and how quotations work with different kind of people with freelancers with agencies and things like that. And all that kind of stuff.
I'm what to avoid and, you know, all of that kind of good stuff. So, and potentially even just provide some kind of feedback from the freelancers who, you know, trying to build themselves up. Yeah. How far into the process of this?
What else are you? Well, I've got about eight to 10 topics down already. So this is a case of just sitting down and just running out there. What I might do is just do video one as well.
So just recall it as a vlog and put it up on YouTube. So it might take that route. It will just be me talking to the camera, I guess. And potentially, you know, get people on board, you know, people that I'm working with, I'm a digital marketing guy, maybe other people in business, people who have launched multiple businesses or freelancers who, you know, do the same thing that I'm doing, but on a smaller scale.
How's your video? A video editing ain't touched in a while. So, yeah, it's going to be one of those ones. We'll see how it goes.
Long process, but it's quite doable. That's the thing. Unless you, yeah, it'll be quite creative, obviously. When you, because you want the videos to be short and punchy enough to not lose interest, but then, you know, you need to keep in all the meat of the compensation as well.
And it's not easy. It's not that difficult, but to get a good flow in videos, it's tricky. It's tricky. You need to really think about it.
Because I've really over really pushed one video to YouTube bit, which is that headphones review that did. And yeah, I saw that one. I did two versions of it. There's only one of them is live, but I did one version.
And the final edit was something like just over 20 minutes. I think it was. And it was just a little bit long. It just felt a little bit like I was waffling on a little bit.
Because I didn't unboxing and then I did a review. And I left in the whole of the unboxing, but literally opening the box, taking bits out the boxes for that. And I showed it to a couple of people and they said, you know, it's good, but it's just, it gets a bit boring. You know, we don't need to see you literally opening the box.
So then I did a second edit and I cut out loads of stuff. And, you know, even like little pauses in my, in my, while I'm poking any little, any pauses that were longer than a couple of seconds, even trimmed those out. So I made a very sort of punchy. And I got the final edit down to around about 14 minutes or something like that.
So cut a good chunk out. And then I added a little bit more music to it and stuff like that. Added a title screen, all the little things that didn't add the first time around. And it made it a lot better.
It's got a lot of views. But, you know, I see everyone following a template on YouTube with these kind of videos. It does work. Very punchy.
Yeah. It does work. Definitely. So I'll see how that goes.
You know, let's see. I'll do a solo podcast and then I'll record a video. Well, it could just be the one thing and I can extract the audio and just release that, you know, if the video is terrible, then you know I can do it that way. But yeah, it's something I want to do.
Let's see. Let's see how that goes. Yeah, I was actually thinking of maybe editing this, this talk that we're doing because we're recording the videos or let's edit that and make a video for YouTube. But I don't think I will.
I'm not this episode, maybe next year. I think what I was going to say to you was in the new year that you should pop down to my office and I can hire at a day office and we can just set up a little set up in there with a camera and everything and with the desk mics and just record. Yeah, we do that on the other side. We can just hire it for the day and just record as many as we can.
Possibly, yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah. But, of course, in real life.
Mm. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely do that at some point. I think when you're sitting with the person, it definitely has a different flow as well.
Yeah, it does. But it's pretty good. Over a video called the Flow Shredid. It is.
Yeah. All right. Something look forward to. So yeah, just yeah, that's the plan next year.
Then grow this podcast so you can introduce your new one. So we look out for that one. Help grow that one as well and get some community going and get some conversations with some listeners. So you get out there listening, get in touch.
Get in touch on Printer. Inspector Fem, he's getting in touch on Facebook now as well. The username on Facebook is also Inspector Fem. In fact, it was Inspector Fem everywhere, apart from Instagram.
Hopefully one day I'll get that one as well. Get that handle. No one's using it. Yeah.
Yeah, I can't register it. But it says, that's sort of taken. So someone must have had it in class and then they deleted it. They've got a couple of options.
Yeah, it hasn't been released yet. So I'll keep an eye on it. Yeah. That's cool.
That's cool. All right. There's stuff. Yeah.
Well, it's got next year. I've got. So I was doing, I did see I've done quite a lot of digital art. So I got hold up a wack on tablet and started drawing again, which is really fun.
And I started setting myself challenges. Whereas before I was doing the drawing and everything, I was spending a few days, weeks on a particular piece of art. So I just had the time to do it. And I was forcing myself to draw to complete the work.
And it wasn't fun. I didn't really quite enjoy it. And I was making mistakes. So what I'd done recently, I just set myself a task to draw, it's a portrait of Wacom Phoenix from the Joker film.
And I completed it within, I guess it was just two hours. So I set myself like a time to know about two, three hours bank. Let's see how we get along without thinking about it too much and just let it flow. And yeah, I don't know if you've seen it, but.
I've seen it. Yeah, I just knocked it all out in about two hours. And I was really happy with the end product. And it just felt better.
There was something more real about the drawing, because I didn't spend too much time correcting it. It was me. It was literally my style. And all this time I've been trying to find a style that I could reproduce on different pieces of work in digital format.
Whereas if I was doing it on paper, you'll see my style there. It's very easy to do it on paper. But on a drawing tablet and in Photoshop, it's got different types of brushes and the amount of pressure that you use and the flow and the direction. It takes some time to get used to that.
And yeah, so I just kind of thought, forget all about that. Let's just sit down and just draw and see what happens. I've been following this stuff for a few, well, over the last year, I could definitely see a theme. Yeah, yeah.
And especially the theme and the type of people that you're drawing, you're drawing a lot of Avengers characters. You just have America, you just have Thanos, there's a couple of Iron Man, I think you did as well. Iron Man, there's Black Widow. Yeah, I was just like a portrait study.
Just studying faces. And I thought fan art's quite a big thing. A lot of people like it. And it gets a lot of likes and follows and things like that.
So, well, don't we start with that. It's a very controversial area, fan art. I thought it was just trying to start with that and see where it goes. But I'm enjoying it.
So the idea is to sell the prints on canvases or things like Chrome Deluxe, like some metallics or finish prints. They're pretty expensive. So I need to think about that and see if I can find them cheap anyway. But that's the idea.
And it's not just going to be fan art because I know it's a murky area with regards to copyright and things like that. It's going to be other things as well, like animals, like lions, sharks and landscapes. You know, stuff that I've taken photographs of, you know, around the world where I've been. Places like, you know, I went to the Amalfi Coast and for Tocquevo, quite a few, you know, nice locations over there.
So things I might want to just replicate on a digital canvas and just, you know, just try and sell it. So build a site for it and get a nice quality of work out there. And not too fast about how much I get out there, but the quality's got been really, really good. And yeah, and then just try and sell it.
Yeah, that'd be good. I hope you had an interest in any of your pieces that you've done so far. I've had one commission, well, it was two, I remember that. One commission.
But literally that guy was like, you know, he liked the whole Ironman Captain America, that bigger image that was putting together. So it was a case of I want that. So just put full Hulk and, you know, a couple of more characters in there. And, but I'm not in any rush to take it off you.
So the price has been agreed, I think, but it's just a case of another time to finish it then, you know, or, yeah, but that's all it's been so far. I haven't been looking to sell anything, but this person just came for Instagram and said, look, I want that. So, okay. So something for me to work on and to complete at some point.
Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Keep keeping an eye out for that. Cool.
Yeah. My only other thing really for the year is something I've already done really is just health, general health. I started the Joe Wicks, 90 day plan. So I don't know if you follow Joe Wicks and, well, he's known as the body coach.
And, yeah, he had a black Friday at the lawn on his program, so I thought, yeah, why not? Now's a good time is then each get started on it. And, you know, December's probably the worst month of the year to actually start this sort of stuff. Yeah, goes out the window.
Yeah, you've got to leave your Christmas and parties and all sorts. But, yeah, started it two weeks ago and I've been pretty consistent with it so far. Been doing, you know, sort of working out four or five times a week. They're just 25 minute hit sessions at the moment.
And so that's what the first month is and then the second month I'll find out in a couple of weeks what that involves. But it's a killer. You know, I haven't done really, I've never done hit sessions before. I've done weight training in the past, but never done hit cardio and, yeah, it's been killing me.
But I've noticed, after about three days, I noticed that it wasn't really a struggle anymore. And although I'm tired, I managed to get to the end. The first couple I couldn't even finish. But yeah, it's going good.
So the plan is next year to obviously keep that consistent. This is only a 90 day plan that's going to take me up until the end of February, early March. But the plan is to then replace it with other programs, fitness workouts, and just do healthy living plans for the rest of the year and for the rest of the many years to come. It's just something I've put off for so long.
It's just one of those things. It's really hard to first get started and then be consistent with it and then continue with it. Because it's very easy to make an excuse. I'll do it tomorrow.
And then it will be that tomorrow. It will come along and be that I'll do it tomorrow. And then you fall into that very, very easily. So it's good to get yourself into that consistency going now at this time of year as well.
That's really good. So I've got a rough plan for the next two weeks of which days I'm going to be working out and which days I'm going to be resting and fitting that in and around Christmas, New Year's and other family commitments and stuff like that. So hopefully I'll be able to stick to those days. And if I can, if I can get through the end of this year and into Jan on that cycle, then I should be able to stick with it going forward as well.
But the good thing about this plan is that it's not very, very strict. It's got quite a lot of wiggle room. It's not like you have to do the first cycle, which is supposed to be days. You don't have to do that within days.
It takes you 40 days, 50 days. It's fine. And instead of getting it five times a week, you can feel it forward. It's fine.
So it's not too strict. But it's just the stricter you are and yourself, the better results are going to get right. Yeah. You know, you get in, you get out and you put in and if you stick with it and you go in wholeheartedly and get the best results.
Definitely. That's another thing on my list. Just continue with it. I've been at it for the last year, two years.
It's been an offer and they've been changing my routine regime and everything. Diet's been fairly solid this year. It's one thing I've been happy about. The diet's been good.
Food's been good. Everything's been homemade. I've been prepping my lunches and my dinners and everything like that. But over the last couple of months, it's kind of like being going downhill.
It's been over the place. There's been alcohol phoning there as well. It doesn't help. But again, it's that time of year.
And trying to enjoy Christmas period and call it the holiday period. You know, you've got to be able to enjoy it and try not to get to work up about it. But I want to try to hit the gym a couple of times I think the next week or so. Before the new year.
But be able to relax as well. But yeah, I think the whole fitness thing, I've done really well this year. But you know, like you, I think, just be really, really strict with it and be very, very, very consistent. And especially with the diet side.
Is that something you've been looking into as well? Yeah, it's part of the plan as well. It comes from the diet. I haven't.
I picked a few things off it. So it basically just gives you some meal ideas. And it's up to you where you fit them into your day. That's cool.
They're not like these are your breakfast, you're lunch, this is your dinner. It's not like that. That can get pretty boring, pretty fast. Yeah, so it's given like maybe seven or eight different breakfast options and same for lunch options, same for even meal options.
And it's up to you, which days you have them on. And you know, if you're going to stop the lunch and the dinner around, that's fine. You know, if you want to have a cheat day in the middle of the week, that's fine as well. But it's like, it's a plan, but it's not a very strict plan.
And it's a lot of the, the onus is on the individual. If you don't do it, you're not going to see the results, right? Yeah. So I think a few things out of his meal plan, obviously I've got the vegetarian plan.
But a lot of it contains eggs, which I don't eat either. So I've had to just make some substitute to, you know, just treat the recipes a little bit. But yeah, so far so good. Yeah, December's been a pretty healthy month, probably the healthiest month of this whole year so far.
So yeah, that's great. It does make a difference. Once you're in that mindset of working out and training, it does have an knock on effect for everything that you're still doing. You know, you do start thinking, you know, I need to drink a little bit more or I'm not going to have this, you know, this cake or this chocolate, whether I'm going to skip it.
Whereas when you're not working out, you don't really think like that. No, you don't. Yeah. So I know everyone's going to have a new resolution, getting healthy.
You know, Jim's generally in January, you know, probably the busiest time of the year when they're holding out for the year, don't they? But I'm going to try and avoid signing up to a gym for a while, because based on this stuff that I've been doing, you actually don't need to. You could do it all at home. But at some point next year, I probably will.
But definitely not in January. No, it's the worst time. It's definitely the worst time. But you know, it's probably better off being your own thing.
And, you know, the dough weeks things, you know, sounds good. Yeah. So make the resolution to get healthy in January, but definitely don't join the gym in January. Yeah.
One final thing I've got on my list is I've been working on a talk for a conference talk. I've been playing around with ideas for a while. And I've got a general concept in my head, and I'd like to be able to finish that off and then give that talk at a conference of some sort. And I probably start off with some local meetups and just test the waters out there, you know, and then tweak my flow a little bit.
And then, you know, by the end of the year, I would like to get on stage at one of the bigger, well-known conferences and just, you know, speaking for up for Crowd, which is why I started the podcast. And the first place is to get that confidence to do that. So now the podcast has been going for a while and fairly comfortable talking to one of Mike, just needs to translate that now to being in front of Crowd. See how it goes.
Yeah. That sounds really good. It's one of the things that we really encourage to do at Web. It's part of our sort of creative development and personal development to speak in front of Crowds and speak at meetings and give talks to the company and stuff like that.
I've done it a few times this year in the local, sort of networking sessions that they have. Those are different people who organize them and they all set around with my offices so they don't have the high street in cafes or in bars or private, sort of like, you know, studios and things like that. And as soon as you turn up, you stand up and, you know, the floor is yours basically, and you spend about 60 seconds explaining who you are, what you do and what you aim to achieve by being there today kind of thing. And I've been to quite a few of those.
So they did pretty cool. And what I wanted to do was set up one, which helps people who own online businesses to, well, not even online businesses, but own businesses to come in and meet me for like a clinic, if you like, like a group session where they can learn the basics of how to use it. And how to use, you know, MailChimp and how MailChimp can make your website, you know, much more powerful than how to, you know, start up a marketing campaign using MailChimp or other tools, active campaign, you know, things like that. So just getting absolutely strangers in one room and just, you know, talk to these guys and explain, you know, how they can go about doing business online in a better way.
Yeah. But, you know, again, there's, you know, it needs to be broken down, right? So you need to be, everything's got to be planned out beforehand. There's a lot of work involved as well.
Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah. You want to be sat there and you can ask the question you're like, um, it's not even that because you can't expect to know the answer to everything, but you want to be able to, you want to host the event if you're going to be running.
Yeah. That's right. I don't want to get a bunch of people in the room and say like, what should we talk about? No, you need to have an agenda and the agenda's got to be there beforehand.
Yeah, they need to know what's going to be talked about at what time and you don't know what sort of people will turn up. So you've got to be in a position where you can take, take the floor for the whole event as well. You know, you end up with a room full of quiet people who don't really want to contribute, but just want to listen. So you need to have enough content that you can really control it.
Yeah, definitely. All right. Anything else you've got? I've got just general business stuff launched a new improved adult website.
My website has been stale for over a year now. It's still getting queries through it, which is crazy. And people always saying how much they're looking for you. And it's like, I'm like, you know, you mad.
You know, I haven't touched that thing in about you in a half. It's so outdated. But I am working on a new version of the site and it's almost done. It's ready to go live very, very soon.
And then also build up on that with a marketing campaign. So stuff that I'm being for other clients and use it for myself and my own business to generate leads and new customers. And just trying to scale the business up. You know, I've been working.
Well, I've had a social media intern come on board this year and spent the first couple of months teaching her how everything works and setting up like a project plan with Intrilo teaching how to use Trello and all of a sudden she's using herself and setting up project plans on their by itself and working with the client directly. So that's pretty cool. I want to build up on that and try and get that person on full time or punk time or, you know, just provide enough work for that person to be there, you know, on a consistent sort of like a level. And then maybe get a designer involved as well because I've got a developer who's working on a freelance basis.
He's working with a few projects at the moment. And I was thinking, if I get a front end designer on board, you know, that'll be three sort of elements there. And then I can just, you know, go out there and find new business and just monitor things and kind of be more hands off rather than hands on. And everyone kind of like get on with stuff.
That's that's part of the plan for next year. So we'll see how that goes. Should be hopefully an exciting year then 2020 new decade. Yeah.
Yeah. I know we've been in the last 10 years. Please. Yeah, it's meant to.
All right. Well, good stuff. I think we'll probably wrap up there. So that's a wrap for this year and this episode.
And we're kind of going to take a little wrap on this season as well. Although we never really sort of split the podcast up into seasons is what we're thinking is going to take a short little break. We gather our thoughts, come up with some topics and, you know, get some, get some notes down and, you know, do some recording and then come back in sometime in the new year, maybe around February, March time with another set of episodes. And maybe have a theme to those episodes or something like that.
So we've got a few things planned for next year. We've got lots of topics in our list that we could, you know, we can choose from. So, yeah, that's something to look forward to. But, you know, obviously the full archive of all the current shows is still available.
So if you want to listen back to anything, then you can do that inspect.fm and we'll still be active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and all sorts, all the other different channels while we're off as well. So having a little break, come back refreshed and you're ready to go again. Definitely. Yeah, that sounds good to me.
Yeah. All right. Well, we'll catch you in the new year. So have a good holiday, have the break, enjoy your years and I'll speak to you in 2020 now.
Yeah, we'll speak there. Yeah, nice one. Yeah, take care. Bye.
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