Doing Something Every Day of 2024: COMPLETE

In 2016 I started a project to learn something every day of the year, eventually evolving into a life logging habit that I’ve kept up since then, which includes these year end review posts.

I usually manage to post these updates around new years day, but for reasons both practical and motivational I didn’t manage to pull that off this go around, so it’s a bit later than usual.

Part I

The first half of the year went pretty well…

I learned a bit of Go programming.

I took a walk in the early spring from our apartment in Asaka, Saitama to Ikebukuro in Tokyo, which is something I had been wanting to try since we moved to the area. It took about 6 hours including stopping for lunch break and taking pictures along the way.

For most of this year, from spring through the fall, our building complex was doing exterior renovations, re-sealing, painting, etc. which meant that for the entire growing season, our little patio garden was unusable due to being covered in scaffolding and regularly populated with workers stomping around doing their thing. It didn’t end up being as dark and gloomy as I had worried it might be due to the covering they wrapped the building in, but it did end up being frequently noisy and unpleasant during the day from the drilling, grinding, and sound and smell of generators, etc.

I did still manage to grow another batch of Japanese Maple seedlings from seeds, they lived in the window sill until all the construction was completed, which also (mostly) protected them from the summer heat which I had lost several of my previous batch to.

Made some good progress on De-Googling my life.

In the summer my focus was on finishing up and shipping the game Seasonspree which I had been doing contract programming on. It’s always nice to finish and ship a project, and a small miracle every time it happens.

Part II: And Then I Got COVID

In mid-August I got COVID for – to the best of my knowledge – the first time. Not only was I “out sick” for a couple of weeks, but the lingering fatigue, brain fog, and disruption to routines pretty much wrecked the rest of my year as well, both directly and indirectly.

For a few days I had a high fever. After the acute symptoms wore off I was still left with much less energy and difficultly focusing, it was difficult to get anything done, as well as being kicked off my regular routines of Japanese study, walking regularly, etc…

Even now, 5 months later, I can still feel the difference in my level of focus and short term memory. Not as bad as the immediate weeks following fortunately, but I wonder if some of that loss is likely permanent.

Lots Of Computer

I stopped getting out as much, and most of the rest of the year was full of gaming, reading, and some off-and-on computer projects with whatever focus I managed to muster.

After one false start, I managed to upgrade the sunny.garden Mastodon server from a shared VPS to a dedicated server, which has greatly improved performance and reduced the amount of time that I need to spend thinking about how to tune the server to keep it running smoothly, for not that much additional cost.

In 2023 I published Part I of my tutorial Game Programming Basics in Lua and Love2D and while I didn’t complete Part II this past year, I did at least make some progress and published the first section actually dealing with Love2D and basic graphics.

A satisfying little DIY project was replacing the battery in my Sony wireless headphones, which had started draining after only 20 minutes or so.

After resetting my WaniKani (Japanese kanji) progress back to level 20 last year and working back up to 24, I made intermittent progress this year up to level 26 or so. COVID really killed all of the focus I had for any kind of studying though. With any luck, I will be recovered enough to pick things up again in the new year and stick with it.

We did manage to get out for some short overnight camping trips a couple of times in the fall at least, which was a nice break from all the being at home. No hiking, so pretty easy going.

Too Much Computer

About those indirect effects…

As it turns out, I really should have made a point to get out and be more active as soon as I was able – instead of continuing to sit at home – because the physical idleness and bad posture eventually led to me having a miserable Christmas, unable to sleep, or sit, or do much of anything, with a herniated disc in my lower back…. from Too Much Computer.

A white on black medical MRI image: the lower 3 lumbar and top 3 sacral vertebrae. The disc between the lumbar and sacral vertebrae is compacted compared to those above, and a red arrow indicates the fluid ballooned out from the back of the herniated disc.

The bright white vertical band getting squished by the blobby bit is my spinal cord. This is not what you want to happen.

I honestly had not expected that to be a possible outcome, but live and learn.

After a couple of trips to the clinic, some x-rays, an MRI, and some painkillers, I was feeling much better quite quickly. Back to low impact daily routine (but with less sitting and more walking), and gradually improving.

By the numbers:

Worst year so far for sticking to goals since I started this project.

Onward 2025

Take better care of my spine, and the various things attached to it.

Take frequent breaks from the computer.

Walk regularly.

Bonus

Close up cluster of 8 cherry blossoms against a very dark and rough bark of the tree trunk. All of the petals are fully open, mostly white, but pink near the centre with dots of yellow pollen on the stamens.

A few layers of dark branches covered in bright pink petals that droop down in small clusters, mixed with small green leaves. The shot isn’t really focused on anything in particular, but overall it’s a pleasing mix of colours and shapes.

Two white-cheeked starlings, (small grey-brown birds with darker heads, white cheeks, and orange bills and feet) stand facing each other on a branch out over the river. One on the left is slightly hunched and it’s bill is open in a squawk to the one on the right who is squawking back with a bit less enthusiasm. The background is a completely flat dark grey of the river behind them.

The leaves of two Japanese maples fill in the left and right side, framing the peaked roof of the temple in the centre, and the blue sky beyond. The low late afternoon sun peeks through the leaves on the left which are mostly red, while the leaves on the branch to the right still have a lot of green, but are fringed with red as well.