Saturday, July 9, 2022
We’re a week into July now and my decision to write some personal objectives for the quarter to go alongside my work objectives is proving to be an interesting experiment. I’ve begun to try and build some new habits to help me achieve not just my personal objectives but also my work ones. The first of those habits has been to set aside the first 30 minutes of my work day to read and write.
Friday, July 8, 2022
We’re a week into July now and my decision to write some personal objectives for the quarter to go alongside my work objectives is proving to be an interesting experiment. I’ve begun to try and build some new habits to help me achieve not just my personal objectives but also my work ones. The first of those habits has been to set aside the first 30 minutes of my work day to read and write.
Monday, July 4, 2022
A year or so ago I moved my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll, going from a CMS powered website to a static site generator. The idea behind it was to make designing and building the site easier from my iPad, and in the hope it would give me a push to post more often. It didn’t work. So I find my self making another move and switching to Ghost to give that a try.
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Over the last few months I’ve come across a number of personal blogs which have been inspiring me and fuelling my own desire to blog more. One of those is from Arun Venkatesan. His most recent post about his writing process is fascinating and worth a read. I like how each of his posts is seen as a creative exercise about something he is interested in. It’s more of a slow blogging process than the stream of links and sharing that’s became popular in the mid 00’s and has lasted until now.
Friday, April 8, 2022
Chris Hannah with an interesting post about writing at work. I go through phases at work where I will write a lot to help me clarify projects and make sure the problems we are trying to solve are clearly defined. Chris highlights a few other reasons he writes at work, with this one in particular standing out: Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people.
Friday, April 8, 2022
Chris Hannah with an interesting post about writing at work. I go through phases at work where I will write a lot to help me clarify projects and make sure the problems we are trying to solve are clearly defined. Chris highlights a few other reasons he writes at work, with this one in particular standing out: Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people.
Thursday, March 31, 2022
This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to WordPress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog. When I moved the blog to Jekyll last year I made several decisions about the posts I would bring across. One of those was to drop several of the post types that I’d added over the years leaving only a normal blog post as the type of content I could post.
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Life is about tradeoffs. When we know what to say no to, and we know why, we can say yes with comfort and confidence to the things that matter. To the things that last. In conversation with one of my favourite authors Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday finished a post with this quote. They were discussing the choices between work, family, and scene, but I the sentence above can be applied to a lot of things.
Monday, January 17, 2022
Today, the third Monday of January, is commonly referred to as Blue Monday. It’s considered to be the most depressing day of the year. By this time people are feeling down because they have broken all their New Year’s resolutions and there’s still another week until pay day. Day’s like this that receive a lot of coverage in the press can be both damaging and helpful to mental health awareness. They can harm mental health awareness by giving the impression that depression or other illnesses only happen on particular days, but they can be helpful by bringing conversations up with people.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Part of my approach to the new year involved rediscovering one of my habits. I’ve been trying to write a blog post more often. I initially intended to use my Micro.blog and to post all my content there, but given the chance to reflect I realised I wanted my longer posts to live here. I’m not committing to a set number of posts per week, but I am committing to posting here more often.
Saturday, January 8, 2022
Over the years I’ve developed a few strategies to help get me in to the right frame of mind to work. One of the best ones is my time for work playlist, I put it on when I need to focus and it never fails to get me into the right state to focus on a project. I’ve worked out that the best albums for me to work to are film soundtracks.
Sunday, January 2, 2022
One thing I want to do more of this year it to write. Back when I started blogging in 2005 or 2006 I used to post everyday, often more than once. It might have been the novelty of being able to write something and have it appear on the internet for people to read that made it easier. It might also have been that the blogging community was in full force at the time, but one thing is for certain it was my hobby and I enjoyed it.
Thursday, August 12, 2021
This morning I found out that it's world elephant day. It's one of those facts which has stuck in my mind ever since for the simple fact that elephants are my favourite animals. My parents tell the story of when I was small and we went to zoo together for the first time. There was one animal I wanted to see, the elephants, but for little me they were terrifying. I had only ever seen pictures of elephants in books, where the scale of the images didn't communicate to me how big the creatures are in reality.
Sunday, July 4, 2021
As the title says, welcome to the eighth official version of my blog. This one has been a while in the making. It started as a new theme on Wordpress over a year ago, included a short holiday on Ghost before ending up being powered by Jekyll. That makes this the first version of my blog not to be powered by Wordpress and in all honesty it’s a refreshing change.
Monday, April 12, 2021
Yesterday as I was sat on my sofa watching the Sunday morning church service on YouTube I had my MacBook Pro open on my lap to make notes in Obsidian. After the service had finished I spent a few minutes to tidy up some formatting and make sure the correct bible verses were being referenced, I realised how much I am enjoying using the app. It got me thinking about why.
Thursday, April 8, 2021
Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Israel. Racism has been in the news a lot of the last year or so, and yet we hear very little of the fact that anti-semitism is on the rise. I have visited Israel twice. It’s a place that quickly won my heart with it’s beauty and history. Last time I was there was in 2014 and I was able to visit Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
Sunday, April 4, 2021
I’ve been continuing to seek out a notes app that works for me as well as I would like it too. A couple of weeks ago I posted about what I’m looking for and since then I’ve been giving a couple of the contenders a try. When I wrote that post I had been using Craft for around a week or so. It’s a very good app, I like that it is native on all my devices, has good shortcuts support and is a pleasure to write in.
Thursday, March 18, 2021
For the last 6 months or so I have been using Roam Research as my notes app. The daily note turned into my home from home allowing me to capture things throughout the day. Thoughts, feelings, meeting notes, tasks, articles I read, videos I watched, everything got noted down in the daily note. Using the service has encouraged me to read more wisely, making notes from articles that are useful and capturing highlights and thoughts as I read books.
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
On my lunch break today as I sat reading some RSS feeds, I came across a [Daily Blogging Challenge] that started on the first of March. As I clicked through to the organising site to find out more I discovered that each day they are sharing a prompt word that everyone taking part should use to kickstart their post for the day. I'm not going to commit to taking part everyday, but I liked the prompt from 1st March, [routine].
Friday, February 26, 2021
I’ve recently made some changes to the hosting for my blog and other websites as part of the consolidation of my many websites in to one. I had been aiming to have one website to rule them all integrating my portfolio and my blog into one site. I’m in the process of creating a new theme to help accomplish that, but I realised that for a long time I’ve not wanted to post the short status posts and images on to this site.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
We have been in Lockdown 3 for a few weeks now as Covid-19 continues to spread through the population. The government issued stay at home notices again, but this time people don’t seem to be following things quite as closely. It’s both frustrating and annoying seeing so many people still meeting up with friends, even travelling across cities to meet in the park for birthdays. Everyone it seems is able to find a way of exempting themselves from the rules.
Sunday, December 6, 2020
Over the years I’ve amassed a number of domains for various websites I’ve wanted to create. A few of those are related to my former freelance business, and two relates to blogs. This week I got a notification that 3 of them are up for renewal in January, it’s left me questioning if should renew them all or if it’s time to let some go. I have the domain for this blog, philbowell.
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Today has been a grey and foggy day, it’s felt like a real reflection of the mood of the last month. As I’ve driven around Cheltenham today doing some bits and bobs, I’ve seen more and more people starting to put up Christmas trees and lights. It’s been nice to see them emerging out of the gloom. Today marks the start of Advent, with the first candle being lit in churches across the country we are reminded of the hope that comes from Jesus.
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Today is Thanksgiving in America, and despite being a Brit I thought it would be good to try and post something I’m thankful for this year. I started to write this post at lunchtime, and struggled, I couldn’t zero in on something. This evening after my counselling session I realised what it is I’m thankful for this year. I’m thankful for all the people who have helped my family navigate through the year.
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
I’ve had this blog in one form or another since I was 21, earlier posts have been lost in the many transitions it has made but it’s always been there. A hobby that taught me how to design and build websites that has since become my career. At the moment I think I am in one of the longest streaks of not posting to the site that I’ve ever been on.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Feeling the itch to redesign my blog for the first time in a long time. Might use it as a way to establish my own base theme as a starting point and then design on top of that.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Trying to limit myself to only having two books on the go at any one time this year. One fiction and one non-fiction. Part of that will mean deciding to stop reading a book if I’m not enjoying it or getting anything from it.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
How good would it be if we could attach Shortcuts to notification types? For example, if I have a shortcut that makes it easier for me to add purchases to YNAB, I could attach it as an action to Apple Pay notifications so that with one touch the shortcut could take the value and vendor, fill in the right fields and let me categorise the transaction. It would be so useful.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
On a somewhat related note, I have two draws of DVDs that I never use. I feel like I should get them on to some storage and make them easier to watch, but not sure if it’s worth the effort or cost.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Had a productive yet restful Saturday, managed to sort out a load of paperwork and do a grocery shop. Lots of my flat feels pretty organised now, but I still have a few black holes that become dumping zones. Those need to be sorted and reviewed.