We Were On A Break!

So, wasn't you waking up to the past year? You know, man, all kinds of stuff. Mainly work and just kind of digging into just finding things I've always wanted to do and kind of cracking on with it, you know? Stuff that we spoke about, I guess, last year, the last time we kind of spoke about anything.

Shall we sort of kick off with, like, why we had to be break? Yeah, let's do that. Well, especially for anyone who's still listening, you know, first of all, thanks for thinking around and keeping us as one of the subscriptions. Yeah, definitely.

But, I don't know, it just, it just, life just got in the way of the podcast, I think. There was a lot of disruption because of COVID. Well, from my side anyway, there's a lot of disruption in our setup at home. I had to give up my desk.

Yeah, I think a lot of us had to do that, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, kids are at home, so they needed a place to study. Then wife was at home, she needed a place to put her laptop, and then I kind of got relegated to the sofa for the first, I don't know, about five months.

Until we managed to rearrange the house a little bit and get a second desk in. And because of that, you know, all this, the microphone, the recording equipment, everything that's normally on the desk, I had to get back away to make space for schoolwork and homework. And it was like, we could have still recorded, but it would have become, it would have, it was a lot of hassle to save thing up and then back it would have wigg. Yeah, it's the same for me.

It's all kinds of stuff going on. You know, I could have, like personally, I could have just remained at my office where I had, you know, desk space and the freedom to kind of, you know, working my own environment without being disturbed by anybody. But, you know, I just thought because of the situation with COVID and stuff, and because there was an outbreak in our building, this is a crazy thing. I kind of just thought about it again and said, you know what, it's probably just best to just get out of there, stay at home and just not kind of get involved with anyone or anything else kind of thing.

And yeah, it was difficult because my office at home was literally taken over by my wife and she kind of, you know, bought a stationary holder and all these bits and pieces and, you know, took up the whole space on the desk. But it was perfect for her. It just wasn't working for me anymore. So I had to kind of move down into the kitchen and work from the breakfast bar.

And that was my spot for a number of months. And yeah, just not ideal to get any kind of recording done, to put my boom and mic and everything away and just setting it all up again. It was just proving to be too much of a hassle of getting it already for regular sessions. So yeah, man, that's the main reason behind it.

But you know, I'm just happy that we're able to get this going again. I mean, we spoke about it a couple of months, you know, let's get something going again. The fact that we've actually sat there and, you know, started it is, for me, it's a positive thing. It's really good that we're actually back.

Back on it. Yeah, I think that's the main thing, you know, we're both in a position where we can schedule this back into our lives and, you know, we've got our routine set now. We know what to expect week to week. Obviously, it cannot change at the top of the hat, but hopefully not.

Hopefully things will just get better and better. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Good stuff. So, you know, personal life, everything's been okay for the past year, I suppose.

You know, we're both here, we're both well, we're both still working and still fighting and everything. That's the main thing. Have there been any sort of challenges or anything that you've faced over the last year? Yeah, I guess for me, I think the main thing in my personal life was things that I was used to doing.

So things that I loved doing, which you couldn't do anymore. So I think number one for me was a gym. I'm unable to go to the gym that environment with those faces that I'd like seeing at the gym, people that I'd like speaking to and working out with. I just started to marshal lots, mix marshal lots before COVID hit, and I was on a buzz, you know, going into my first MMA lesson.

I was on a proper buzz, and then all of a sudden we're told, you know, all of these places are going to close up. That was a big downer for me. So I kind of just thought, you know, I'm just going to train. I'm just going to sit around at home and not bother with it and just kind of just get my head down and probably do some other pieces.

So I got into my art a bit more. I don't know if you've seen that. I've been sharing it on Facebook and Instagram. So I started putting a lot of time and effort into drawing, sketching portraits, abstract stuff, just getting into the flow and just finding the loveful art again.

Been doing a lot of that. And crypto started to pop up, and I started to kind of look into my wallets again and get into cryptocurrency. It's been really exciting because I've seen some serious gains on certain things that we're seeing there, and I just totally forgot about, you know, things that we'd invested in like years ago, and all of a sudden, they were a bit of money now. So that's been interesting.

It's been a strange year for me, doesn't it? It has really strange. Yeah. It has been absolutely mental.

So that kind of came back into my life. So that's like to keep, you know, get things on track from keeping me kind of going. And then I just thought, sorry, now I'm, you know, feeling a lot better about myself and just kind of doing things now. I just purchased some gym equipment and I started training at home.

So I bought some Olympic plates, an EZ bar and some bands. I managed to just, you know, do some training two days a week maybe, if that, but started to get back into my fitness or regime as well. So although it started from a bit of a downer, I was kind of worked my way back up a bit and, you know, it's got to a point where I'm back in the gym now. And it feels all good.

It feels good. It's good. Yeah, the diet went off as well. I think a lot of people were in that zone.

Yeah. Everyone was in the same boat. Yeah. I think I was just like, let's just wait for this thing to kind of like, you know, calm down a bit and then I'll get back onto it and, you know, have.

So, yeah. And one of the other sort of downsides to, you know, what was going on was in a life court COVID and that was a bit of a bummer. So having to deal with that and isolating and, you know, her being locked up in the loft, you know, you know, in our bedroom and me having to sleep downstairs for, I guess it was about almost a month. On a blowout bed kind of thing, you know, very different, you know, having to prepare food, clean up, sanitizing, all of that.

You know, it was crazy. And yeah, man, that was like, I just wasn't expecting, you just don't expect it, you know, into your home. Like you hear about it on the news, people, you know, in hospital, people dying and stuff and then it just hits you like, damn. Yeah, I think this was a problem for a lot of people as well.

For in the early stages of COVID, it was always, it always felt like it's happening to other people. And that was obviously part of the problem because then a lot of people didn't take it seriously. And then it got to a tipping point where, you know, you started hearing about people closer and closer to your own circle, of caught it or, you know, even worse. That's when, you know, we haven't had anything in our sort of immediate family.

So nothing really affected us. But just, yeah, as the time went on, we just had normal stories. It's a pretty tough time. Yeah, so just like, you know, this recap on my personal life, yeah, it's been upside down, really, but it's getting better.

That's the most important part. Yeah, I mean, it's getting better now. So yeah, about yourself. Yeah, for me, things have been fairly, fairly stable, I would say.

The first couple of weeks or months were a little bit up and down because of the whole school working from home situation. Schooling from home was probably the most challenging part, just trying to get a routine, a good routine. But once we had nailed that, then things were pretty smooth, saying that I was supposed. Health stayed good.

Obviously couldn't go out anywhere. And I wasn't really missing the social aspect. Quite having just been at home and, you know, having video calls with people. Obviously, you want to see your family and everything else?

You want to see your friends every now and then? But it was never an issue that we couldn't go to restaurants or go to the pub or go to any day out or anything like that. And we just made the most of it. And we're quite fortunate we've got a nice big garden where it was good throughout all of summer.

So, you know, we made use of that. I spent time teaching, but I had to ride a bike. And then, you know, it's something that may have taken months we managed to nail in a couple of days because we just had to find and do it. Exactly, yeah.

You know, we live in a fairly quiet area, so just totally fine riding around on the road. Which is good. So, there was a lot of good that came out of it, I would say. I didn't have to commute to work.

I used to have a long commute to work. I might be this joke. We'll get one to work in a second, because I've changed my job since then as well. So, that was an experience.

But I used to have a long commute. And, you know, having that taken away from you is just give you two, three hours of your life back every single day and you take that as granted. So, really appreciated that extra time. Challenge-wise, like I said, the main thing was the homeschooling, giving up my desk.

That, you know, had its toll on the things on my posture because I was using just my laptop, I had to give up my screen. And then, because I was using my laptop, I had to give up my keyboard and mouse as well. So, it just changed my way of working for a while. And, you know, I'm having to sort of readjust myself now.

Now that I'm back on my desk, I mean, it's not a recent thing. I've been back on my desk for a few months now. But, I've kind of molded into the sofa shape. And now, I'm having to mold myself back into a good posture.

I had the same thing. I was sitting at the breakfast bar on a stool. You start slouching a lot and then... Quite amazing how quickly your body picks up the bad habits, but then doesn't want to let them go.

It's taken a long time to just sit straight again and feel comfortable in a desk chair. So, that's been a funny one. Otherwise, you know, I think we're quite fortunate, especially in our industry. We didn't have to give up work.

We went furloughed. We weren't made redundant. Didn't have to go and work in retail and be facing the public all day. We could work from anywhere.

And obviously, we got an internet connection. It was very easy for the company to just adjust. And, I think it's pretty unanimous across the industry really that this is going to become the way we're working now. And people aren't expected to go back in full time.

Even when things are fully open again. I know the company I'm with now, I know that they're quite keen to have people working from home quite often. At the moment anyway, things might change, but at the moment things are pretty good. Yeah, I agree with that, definitely.

So, like I said, I trained my job during this time, which was a tough decision. Because, you know, just to know what was going to go on all around you. Hearing people, the company's closing down. People being made redundant and stuff like that.

But, you know, time came for me to make a change. And, yeah, all the way down the end. So, I just thought a new job, did the whole interview process, induction, and onboarding and everything all remotely. And since then, since like the tail end of last year, I hope it underthink of us.

I've been into the office once since then. Just went to collect my laptop. And then since then, I've been in once to meet about 10 people in the team. Out of 100.

So, there's so many people in the company who have never even met Facebook. Obviously, we see each other every day. We've got a day of these wind calls and, you know, we're on Slack and all sorts. And we've called all the right tools to communicate.

It hasn't been as bad as I thought it might be. I didn't actually think it would be bad. I knew it'd be different, but it's been a good different, rather than a bad different. Yeah.

It's work for me, I think, similar to yourself, like, the benefits of not having to be anywhere. Like, I've got an office space because it's professional and clients come to see you and all that. And when you do have employees, team members, people you're collaborating with, it's a good place to kind of meet and work and stuff. It's been seamless for me, work-wise, you know, just using Zoom, Slack, Trello, click up all these tools to manage tasks, working alongside people.

Like, back in, I think it was in November, I'll hide in Intern. I'm not sure if I remember telling you about it, but I was looking for a digital marketing intern because I started taking on quite a lot of digital marketing work. So, I got someone on board for three months and, yeah, she done really well. She helped with a lot of the workload that I was dealing with.

So, I had to kind of adjust my daily routine with regards to work. So, I wasn't just doing client work anymore. I had to prepare work for this intern and kind of teach her on how to do certain things and make sure she understood what she was doing at the same time. So, there was like a learning aspect and a teaching, learning aspect aspect there as well.

So, my whole dynamic changed and it was new for me. So, although I've done it before, it's been a while since I've actually started, like, teaching somebody how to do certain things, like, you know, how to create a social media post, how to carry out a website, all the way to, you know, set up an AdWords campaign, things like that. So, yeah, it was difficult at first, but then when I got into the swing of it, you know, I was really happy with it. And she was with me for three months as she moved on, and because of the workload it increased, I had to find someone to come aboard to kind of replace that intern.

So, yeah, I got someone else on board who's been here for two months now. And again, you know, just going for the whole teaching scenario and I've got to learn things myself now. So, I've got to stay ahead of it and then teach her, you know, everything that I know and kind of just make sure she understands everything on a day-to-day basis. So, there's that going on as well.

My business has been growing steadily. A lot of new clients came on board because of COVID. A lot of people who were made redundant had literally, you know, approached me and said, you know, we're starting up our own firm now. We want a website, we've got funding for it, or we've got a budget ready and we want to go with you.

And I had quite a few of those. I think it's five to six projects came on board. Yeah, there's been a lot of innovation, I think, during the whole COVID. Just across the industry as a whole, you know, people pivoting their businesses and starting up new businesses.

Definitely. Just finding different ways to make ends meet or just innovate and keep up with the times and service their customers even. Yeah, but what do you think of how the whole industry has handled it? Industry-wise, I don't think it's affected the industry.

I've added in, I think the industry's boomed because of it. Just like a video calling, for example. That's blown up. Yeah, I mean, if anyone shares in Zoom at the beginning of 2020, you probably rolling in.

Exactly. Yeah, all the like video recording platforms have, you know, introduced new features, made features free. I think Google Hangouts, they made their thing completely free for everyone. So, I think it's probably just still in the dog ages, but, you know, Zoom, their platform is solid.

What we're using today around is a new one that we've come across. Yeah, this one's a good one. So, I've actually been pulled in now as part of Teams. Okay.

So, it's part of the native kind of video calling infrastructure, but that has blown up Teams. So, it's literally become the biggest thing out there. Yeah, for special education. It's like every school in the country is all the time.

Yeah. And it's really good for education as well because, you know, you've got this whole, like, assignment section where the teacher can set assignments for the students. The students can scan in their work or take a photo, upload it to Teams and then submit it and goes back to the teacher. Yeah.

And the most useful things I've found in the past year is obviously learning how to use Teams and having a desk set up for my daughter and having a PDF scanner app on my phone is, obviously, it's been invaluable. We're paying for it because, I mean, for months, I was just like every day taking photos of her work to make these scans. So, if you're not going to go buy a scanner. No, no.

And then from the app, I was then sharing it and uploading it directly to her to my daughter's Microsoft OneDrive account. And then from there, it would sync to her laptop and then you would use that to then, you know, post it into Teams and submit it to her teacher. Yeah. So, you know, fortunately, you know, Dad's worked in IT a bit of a geek and managed to get this nice workflow.

But imagine that would have been quite difficult for a lot of people to get that flow. But, yeah, Teams is invaluable, really. Yeah, definitely. Never a fan of Teams from a, from a work perspective, but for the education market is really good.

Yeah, that's the thing for me. I've never been, I did try, I thought, you know, everyone's jumping on it. Now, let me have a look and see if I can use it, like I would use Slack, but I just couldn't get used to it. Yeah.

Because it's like it works better for our industry, I think. Teams is more about smaller groups and it works for great for like a classroom structure. So, yeah, Slack's been good. But yeah, really, I'm liking this new video, so it's all using.

So it's called Around. I've heard about it on a couple of other podcasts in the past couple of weeks. And it's just got this nice interface, you know, traditionally using Zoom or Skype or Teams or whatever. You have this big window which takes up the whole screen with lots of little faces.

But with Around, you get these floating heads. It reminds me a bit of, you know, Facebook is to have their chat floating heads in the app before they introduce Messenger. Yeah. Which is actually quite good.

You know, in hindsight, you just have these little faces just sitting on the side of your Facebook app and you know, you could just drag them in when you want to talk to them and just flick them out of the way. Yeah. So it's quite a little bit more so interface. So we'll keep trying it.

So far, so good. Very stable. We're only using it for the video. We can't actually record audio with it.

So hopefully they'll introduce that at some point. It's pretty good. Yeah. I think I'm going to try this out with my internet tomorrow.

Yeah. Zoom, I've noticed a few bugs with Zoom. It's just, you know, when you set up or schedule a call and then that time comes you start up the call. And the person who has joined it, they're actually joining another one.

And it's for nothing to do that you set up. And it's weird. I'll get that sometimes. I don't know why.

Things about how many people are using Zoom day in day out across the world. You know, they probably have to ramp up their capacity massively and things like that are going to happen. But I think on the whole it's been pretty solid. But I think, you know, just generally the industry is handling really well.

You know, there's so many companies that have accommodated for the changes that COVID brought around. Whether it's just like allowing them to release to it from home. Whether it's giving them a budget like to sell to their home office, and then my company did. It's really good.

I bought a nice new chair that gave us a budget to buy screens or headphones or whatever we need to make our work life easier. And, you know, doing that for the whole company is, you know, it's really nice gesture. And just being flexible, you know, allowing people to sort of come and go as they're pleasing, not expecting them to be at their desk nine o'clock, nine to five all day every day. And being like sympathetic to the fact that, you know, you might have a couple of kids at home now that you need to watch.

You know, you need to make sure that they're keeping up with their schoolwork as well. So, I thought that was good. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think, you know, one of the other things to come out for me is, you know, especially with kids using all this tech now.

I'm familiar with their age. We never had any of this stuff. We weren't really, you know, involved in using stuff like this. Now, they're becoming really savvy with all this technology and video calling and all these apps and gadgets that you can get.

Yeah, it's funny, like pre-COVID. It was always like, it doesn't spend too long with your iPad. No, it doesn't want to see you do long. Get off your laptop.

And now it's like, make sure you log on. Make sure you know how to use it. Make sure it's charged. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like my daughter's laptop skills have massively increased. You know, I don't think she would be anywhere near where she is if she didn't have to do homeschooling because they don't use a laptop at school. Apart from your IT list, otherwise everything is done by hand, of course.

I'm just hoping that this doesn't impact stuff like handwriting and their ability to work without a computer. Don't become too reliant on it. That's the thing. I guess, you know, we had that balance.

We'd probably be writing in a textbook in class and then, you know, those of us who are PCs at the time, with a giant monitors and everything, you know, we'd use like Windows XP or wherever it was at the time. Windows 3.1 to type our essays and stuff instead of writing them down. I remember some kids bringing in their work printed off like, and I was still writing when I said, well, hang on, I was like, damn, I need to invest in some software or PC or something. But now kids have got all this stuff.

They can email it to the teacher. It's not a thing now. But before it was... An outro that would really struggle with this.

Yeah, I know I struggle writing when I have to pick up in a paper. My handwriting is all over the place. It's just absolutely good. And I think it'd probably be good to go, like, with the drawing stuff.

That's all cool because that's never actually gone away. But for some reason, my handwriting has been really badly affected. I think it's only ever really self that reads it, right? As long as you can understand it.

Then I think it's fine. It's not great. I wish my handwriting wasn't even as well. But I'm quite strict with my daughter about that.

Making sure that her handwriting is neat because I don't want her to be in the same situation as I am. It looks like I'm screwing with my left-handed looks like. Yeah, same here. Obviously, I'm right-handed.

Not trying to discriminate against left-handers. Yeah, I don't know. My non-dominant hand, shall I say? Yeah, I think overall industry has really benefited from this.

Even my clients out there who spoke to myself for guarding integrating video calling with their websites, or how can we use video calling to do a distant, like a one-to-one session, like personal training or podiatrist and things like that. You know, consultations about tax advice or things like that. Rather than phoning someone, how can we integrate video calling? It's just a dividing advice.

It's as simple as that, really. It's helped. So let's just look back at one of our previous episodes, the goals that we set for 2020. We set these goals on the Wednesday episode, probably the early part of the year, the 2020 goals one.

It must have been. Yeah. Well, it's probably the end of the previous year. Let me just check.

December 2019, actually. We had an episode of our 2020 goals and the plan was to hit these targets, but then the world changed. So, I don't know. Do you want to just have a look back and see how we've done and did you achieve any of those?

Yeah, I guess so. Like from that episode, I remember I had listened to it earlier today, and the things that stood out that I've kind of managed to grasp and managed to actually get working on and working with part of my design process was using Figma. And I think at the time I was kind of dabbling in it and just trying to figure it out while working with somebody's own tools at the same time. But it's become a core part of my design process now.

So everything and anything that I'm designing with regards to web and apps is done in Figma now. Prototyping, you know, prototyping it, showing it to the client within Figma. Yeah. And I'm very happy with the progress.

I'll move with that. Yeah. I kind of followed through with that as well because I was a sketch user as well. This time last year, one of this time, early part last year.

And then as we worked on a couple of projects last year and I saw that you were using Figma for everything. I just started exploring it as well. And I basically switched over, converted. And the fact that I'm on Windows now as well, you know, it's worked in my favorite, really, because otherwise I'll be stuck.

Yeah. That thing might have crossed that form. And yeah, I'm really enjoying it. I'm just on a free account.

So I'm limited to what I can do now because they've introduced their new pricing scheme recently, which I don't know. It's made, I think it's a little bit too limited for the gift for free, but who am I to say? It is. It is like, I paid for it because I needed space for more projects.

Yeah. I'm going to have to pay for it at some point, I think. Because design is not my primary job function, I guess. I could probably make do for a quite a while yet with just a limited number of projects.

Yeah. You could use it like in a really clever way. So you can just be really creative with the way you're using your projects. Yeah.

Just put all of your design for everything into one file, basically. Exactly. That's what I was doing. I decided to chuck it all into one file.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

It forces you to become a sloppy designer. That's the problem. That's it. Yeah.

I think it was good as I adopted it fully. One of my things was to work more with React. But like I said, I've changed job. And the company I'm at now, our app is Angular.

So I've actually stopped. I haven't written any React in a long time, actually. Because I've just been sort of learning and picking up Angular along the way. I never did any Angular before this.

Yeah. And it's quite different. It took a while to just change my way of thinking. But kind of getting there now.

And pretty comfortable with it. So I suppose my goal for this year, the rest of this year is to keep building on Angular skills. Just turning into Angular developer, I guess. Yeah.

I remember mentioning looking at React. But then I did say that I'd go and look at Flutter and Dart. And did you? Because we did an episode based on that.

And I did. I started getting into it, learning it, reading it. I've even paid for courses on Udemy as well. OK.

Yeah. But then it kind of will stop because of the workload. Did you build anything? I was building like an organization.

I was just organizing items. So it didn't have any use case. But it was just the graphs, the whole thing around creating folders where you can just drop items into. And the items could be anything.

That could be a jpeg. It could be any type of file, text file. So just kind of just a simple thing. Very, very simple.

And like a to-do list. Which is one of the most basic things you could probably do on a start there. You've got to start there. Yeah.

So that's pretty cool. And the good thing about Udemy is that you get on there and you purchase your course. And it's yours. So you can always refer back to it.

And you point your one. So I'm really happy I did that. And I also picked up JavaScript again. And bought a course.

And there was like crazy sales going on Udemy with all these courses. And why not? Yeah. It was a perfect time to do some learning really, if on Sing At Home.

People had a lot of people had time on their hands. Workloads got reduced. If not, it could be disappeared. So yeah.

It was good not to learn. Yeah. So I'm happy that I managed to pick them up and started getting on with it. Yeah.

Yeah. So you know. But that worked out for me. Did you read through Eric's book?

Flutter book? Just for reference, we did an interview with Eric Windmill who wrote a book called Flutter in Action. It was episode 33. So if you want to learn about Flutter, then it's a good episode to go and listen back up.

But Eric gave away some copies of his book on that episode as well and gave us a couple of copies. So yeah. You managed to make use of that. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely. Just to get an understanding. Because he explains it really well in that book.

Yeah. And it's probably the best place you're going to get to grasp with Flutter and Dart and everything. And yeah. I'm always referring back to it.

So when I get some time, once I've got some downtime, which is coming up fairly soon, I'll be, you know, they'll be back into that. Cool. And we can just pick up all the work left off. Yeah.

That's good. Yeah. I mean, other goals for generally were to sort of grow the podcast. You know, we've discussed how that kind of came to an end.

But in the first few months of 2020, I did set up the YouTube channel and did set up a Facebook page. And, you know, I've managed to put the podcast onto a few different networks, but I'm just Spotify put it onto a service called WhatPods. It's on a few other ones as well, which I still need to add to the website. But yeah, there seems to be like new podcast services.

Yeah. Hopping up to all daily, really. So many of them. Yeah.

I mean, but we're obviously on the main ones. Yeah. That's the important thing, definitely. Yeah.

I think I touched on games development as well. And I actually did get into that. I actually started looking at Unity and create a very kind of like basic game. And then that died pretty quickly as well because I was like, I'm even going to do, you know, Flutter, Dart, JavaScript, all game stuff.

And it's very easy to just go off and attend with games development. You can really go down a rabbit holes and you just get lost. But I just decided to just put an end to that and just leave it alone. And yeah, you know, I'm happy I looked into it.

But yeah, I probably won't go back to it, to be honest with you. Yeah. Fair enough. I don't know.

What about the remainder of this year then? We've got any goals in mind? What do you like to do? Reminder of this year.

I think just continue with the learning development side. So like Flutter, Dart, JavaScript, and also my own personal podcast, which I've started planning out now. So I'm planning out themes and topics and things like that. So watch this space.

That'll be coming up very soon. And I think the rest of it is literally obviously focused on the business. Grow it. Try to scale up as much as I can.

And the digital art side of it, of you know, things I'm really passionate about. Spend more time with that. Do more pieces of art, which I can start showcasing online. Because I've got a Deviant art page and I've got a Facebook page now.

And I want to regularly start pushing content out there and people can kind of, you know, see what I'm doing. I probably do some live drawing as well. So use Facebook Live or maybe Twitch or something like that to kind of show people, you know, me actually working on a piece of art and they can ask questions about, you know, what I'm doing and what I'm doing, etc. So yeah, definitely the digital art is a huge one moving forwards.

Nice. Yeah. For me, one of the things I started doing a lot more of during lockdowns was DIY and woodworking. Just like spending loads of time just in the shed, just, you know, building stuff.

Just putting stuff on my Instagram. I think too big at the moment. I've done some shelves for the house. I made a coffee table.

I've made some like speaker stands for my desk. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. And I saw and also a little like riser shelf for my screen.

Just bring it up to the right height. So yeah, looking to carry on with that and sort of take it sort of semi seriously, sort of a couple of pieces of stuff I've made. So yeah, I wouldn't mind taking on some custom projects now and seeing if I can turn it into a little side business as well. But one thing I have started doing again is after a long, long time long break is I started making music again.

So I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on the podcast at all, but you know, back in late 90s, early 2000s, I used to DJ. And when I went to university, I was like to produce music. I used to make drum and bass, mainly drum and bass. And yeah, I think 2009, maybe nine was the last time I actually produced a track and released something.

Well, not released. Nothing actually released in the charts, but released out into the world onto SoundCloud. And then I took a massive break from it. You know, got married, had kids and just moved house several times and stuff like that.

And then I had sold off all my equipment. But just recently, in the last few months, I've just been getting an itch for it again. Just because I've been listening to a lot of music recently and just watching other producers on YouTube and stuff like that. So yeah, I've just got back into it.

So just slowly getting my set up back in order, the laptop, keyboard speakers and all that. Yeah, I've got a couple of tracks on my belt so far. My goal is to try and finish off about 10 tracks by the end of the year and then release it or digital album or something like that. Maybe just push them out one at a time, but trying to really take it seriously again.

Because my daughter is quite interested in music as well. And she plays piano and we listen. I try and introduce a lot of variety of music into her life as well. So it'd be interesting to think as well.

So it'd be good if I can introduce a bit of music production and a bit of playing music and stuff like that in the house. She'll pick it up as well and become a bit more of a passion for her as well. Yeah, definitely. Sort of underlying goal really.

And that's great. That's great man. Looking forward to that man. Just hearing some of the tunes.

Yeah, watch this piece. Obviously, it's out. Yeah, I think one of the things I forgot to mention was regarding my digital art side of things. Yeah, I want to sell it.

And I don't know if you've heard about NFTs. They've kind of just exploded recently. Yeah, I can't say that fully understand what they are. I kind of know what they are, but I just don't see why they're selling for such ridiculous prices.

Yeah, it is crazy. So I've just gone and got around to the understanding of it. And then I've opened up a account with Oconsea which is a marketplace for NFTs. And I think it's the biggest one out there.

There's probably others, but this is like the one that really stands out. So I'm going to do a series of portraits of 80s, 90s hip hop artists. And this all kind of came off the back of DMX's death. And I did a couple of hours to do this portrait of DMX.

And I've not done anything that quick before. I like spending some time on it. But I was listening to some of these albums and I was just putting it all out there. And just finished this piece of work in a couple of hours and I just shared it online.

And quite a few people reached out and said, why don't you NFT that? And just get it out there. And it's a gamey idea. Why don't I just do these portraits of these amazing rap artists from back in the day?

And yeah, just convert them into NFTs and just whack them up in the marketplace and see what happens. So we're going to have to do an episode about what the hell NFT is and you don't have to explain that. I think we do. I mean, I know the basics of it, but there's a hell of a lot to kind of understand.

Yeah, I read up on it a little bit when the news of what's his name, People? The People? You got a soul of it for millions, whatever the figure was. It was high.

And then I did a bit of reading about one of the NFTs. And I get it. Okay, it's basically owning the license to a distro piece of artwork. But I get it.

I get what it is. I just don't get why. It's I think maybe I'll miss something completely. But that's the thing with cryptocurrency and NFTs, you have to be in there to you got to take the risk with it and just roll with it.

Everyone else is just thinking, oh, I wish I did that. Yeah, I don't want to be that person. So I'm jumping on it and I'm like, I just want to get it out there and see what happens. Why not?

I've got a friend who's I mean, I haven't spoken to him in years, but he's a 3D artist. So he does all these 3D visualization animation and things like that. And he's creating a few NFTs which have sold some people on Facebook and mentioned his name. And saying, you know, I bought these guys like, you know, work as an NFT.

I'm like, oh, wow. Okay. So he's out there. So it's as easy as that.

Okay, interesting. Yeah. Definitely one for another time. But yeah, let's do some research and yeah, if you can do an episode on it and explain it, then that'd be good.

Yeah, why not? Definitely. Well, I think, you know, that's a pretty good wrap up of what's been happening, why we've been away. You know, we were on a break and let's just say that some of it was self-inflicted, some of it was on us.

But hopefully, you know, things are settled and we're back and we'll have some good episodes over the next coming weeks. And, you know, we've got some, we've got some decent ones planned. It's just a case of you just keeping up this consistency now. So show us some support and we'll definitely keep at it.

Yeah, definitely 100% this. Let's try and keep this going. See what we said we end up. Cool man.

Yeah, we don't, you know, we should do recommendations. Oh, yeah. I want to say what would you recommend since last episode because it's going to be in the right now? Anything that you, it's got your eye or you want to share?

Right now. We don't as well because we didn't discuss this. Yeah, it's hard to say. Oh, I'll go first.

I've got a couple of things, right? In Netflix series because obviously the whole world is just watching Netflix at the moment. So one's comedy of just recently finished, Shits Creek. Okay, yeah.

I've seen that one, yeah. You've watched it or you've just know about it? No, I know about it. I saw like a trailer or something.

It does look interesting. Okay. It's a bit of a slow burner, right? The first couple of episodes, because they're quite short episodes, very, very dry humor.

But it's brilliant. I was hooked. There's six seasons, about 13 episodes per season, but they're only about 20 to 25 minutes each. So you know, you can get through quite a few in an evening.

But it was brilliant. It's like one of the best series I've seen. So it's kind of thing to compare it with because it's very different to a lot of comedy. I suppose maybe it's got the similar humor to like the office.

I was just going to say it's got the office vibe about it. Yeah, but a bit more edgy, not so sarcastic or awkward. It's not an awkward humor, but it's dry and they put fun on themselves and stuff like that. But it's also got quite serious message underlining it.

It's all about like, rich as to rags, sort of sorry, where this rich family lose everything and then they learn to appreciate the simpler things in life. It touches on stuff like relationships and especially like their whole LGBTQ, I don't know if that's the full acronym. Forgive my ignorance, but it touches on that in a really good way as well. Acceptance and stuff like that.

So it's just really well-rounded, like comedy series. It's definitely worth watching. I've definitely looked at that, definitely. And also another one that we're watching is called Criminal, you know, at Kingdom, Criminal UK.

There's also Criminal Spain, France and another country, Criminal, but it's basically this series about a police interrogation room. And it sort of centers around the mirror that you have in an interrogation room. The two way mirror. The one way mirror.

It's called a two way mirror. It's one way, isn't it? And it basically revolves around that way. You've got this interview happening in one side and then you've got the rest of the team watching in from the other side.

And just the dynamics of that. It's a short series that's at five or six episodes in the UK version, which we just watched. So we're going to check out the European versions as well and see what they're like. But the European ones, we've had a quick flick of the trailer and it's the exact same set up.

It looks like it's done in the same studio almost. So it's like, you know, it's been sold to different countries like this. The rights to it. But yeah, it's brilliant.

Brilliant. It's got some familiar faces, but they're not like, they're not a celebrity sort of thing. They're just like some famous people in the episodes. Like, the episode one's got David Tennen in it, for example.

Okay, yeah, yeah, he's pretty well known, isn't he? So stuff like that. Really good. Cool.

I'll definitely try and watch that one. Yeah. Yeah, one thing I really liked about is like, if you've got an appreciation for good cinematography, then it's worth watching. Because you've got this mirror at a central focus point, right?

But you don't see the camera in the mirror at all, obviously, because that would be silly. But it's just really clever the way they filmed it to have the camera walking past the mirror, showing the reflection of all the people in the room, but taking the camera out. And they make really good use of angles so that you can see a lot of what's going on, on both sides of the mirror at the same time. So you can see like the person in the interview room looking at themselves in the mirror, but the other people looking at them and they also line up to form this group shot.

Just really clever, really good cinematography. Yeah, that's cool. That's the kind of stuff I like. I've watched the one recommendation.

I don't know if you've seen it, um, tenet. I've watched it once. I need to watch it more than once. I've watched it three times now.

Yeah. And each time you watch it, you pick up on something else. Yeah, I'm going to imagine. After the first time I watched it, I actually found an article which explains everything.

Okay. Right. So it's a proper, I'm not going to throw any spoilers in there, but the article actually, you know, really does, you know, does really well in explaining what's going on. That blew my mind.

Just seeing that feel really just, I had to watch it again. A lot of people were complaining about it because they said that, you know, the audio was a problem and then the story is too complicated. And I can see that. I didn't watch it in cinema.

Obviously, I don't think anyone did it. Didn't comment in cinema. I think it got like a small release, but yeah, I watched it on Amazon Prime. Yeah.

So I watched it with subtitles on this because we tend to watch most things with subtitles on anyway, even during the day. Yeah. And watching with subtitles and I think it was easy enough to follow along. It's just, it is a complicated story and it's definitely a two or three times watch by some go back around to it.

Similar to Interstellar, you had to watch that again. Yeah. To get the concept of what's trying to be told and the message behind the whole movie. Yeah, Tenet was highly recommend that to anyone.

And, you know, I love my gaming, right? So I've been, you know, I started streaming on Twitch. I got involved with a few people playing called a Jewie warzone. You know, that was fun.

And then I kind of just went away from it for a bit and I got hold of it was a present really, Ghost of Tsushima, which is set in like feudal Japan. Unbelievable game. And it's open world and it's set in this place called Tsushima. And you're literally like this samurai and you're traveling on a horse around this map, you know, carrying out quests and tasks and, you know, beating bosses and all this kind of stuff.

It's just got everything that you want from a game. It's got everything in it. And one of the interesting things that came off the back of that was the gaming community who loved that game have actually helped to kind of fund a project to kind of help that particular place because it's a real place in Japan. So the place, you know, it's very, you know, people know a lot of people know about it.

And there's some backstory behind it, but you know, it needed some help and support and the game developers and the game community have kind of come together and kind of, you know, raised awareness and money, etc. for that community who are out there. So, you know, just getting involved with that game and just, you know, learning more about what was going on in feudal Japan at the time has been, you know, really interesting for me. And they're actually going to make a movie now.

So that's like the next thing, like it's just got me really hyped up that this thing slowly kind of becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. Oh, of course. Yeah, man. So, yeah, I love it.

Ghost of Tsushima. I highly recommend it if you're a gamer. All right. Well, that's a wrap for this one.

You know, it's been good to catch up again after so long. Good to see you face. We have hardly seen each other in the past year either. But yeah, this is going to be a long day thing now.

So we're back. We are back. Yeah. All right.

Good stuff. And if you're still here and you're still subscribed, thank you for sticking around. If you're not subscribed, go and do that now. All the details on the website.

Yeah. All right. We could catch you next week. Yeah, we'll see you then.

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