November goals

✔️ 2 social events

October goals

✖️ 1 dead hang chin up

I recently wrote about the 2019 15" MacBook Pro I bought and how I was finding it. A very high-level summary: the keyboard was okay, I hated the TouchBar, and the bluetooth was awful.

When the 16" MacBook Pro was announced recently, my 15" was less than two months old, so I was able to talk Apple into letting me return it so I could buy the 16". I'm really lucky—lots of people who'd had theirs a little longer than me weren't able to get a return, and after trying the 16" I'm extremely glad I didn't have to stick with that 15" for the foreseeable future.

In 2015 I bought a used, mid-2013, 15" retina MacBook Pro. I was upgrading from a 13" MacBook Air, which was feeling cramped as I was spending more time on development than writing.

My MBP served me well until 2019. Its battery life had declined over time, but a few months ago it started going to sleep when the battery indicator still said 15% or more. I was getting around an hour of battery life out of it, but because the battery indicator wasn't accurate, I had no idea when it would suddenly go to sleep while I was working.

Highlights

• Australian Realness. We always make a point to see new plays by Zoey Dawson, since we've loved all her previous works. This one might be our favourite so far. We both thoroughly enjoyed it.
• Drums! I rented an electronic drum kit to learn on, since buying a kit outright is expensive and I'm not sure if I'll stick with it. So far, so good, though!

Although I'd like to get better at this still, I've made some changes over the past year or two to decrease how much waste I create. Mostly this means finding reusable alternatives to disposable items I use often, and avoiding unrecyclable plastic when I can.

In case they inspire you to make a change too, here are some of the things I've changed so far.

I've been rating my mood in Exist for more than 5 years now. That's a lot of data about how I've been feeling.

I keep saying I'd like to blog more but being out of the habit means I'm lacking ideas. (Having ideas often prompts more of the same.) So, to get back into the habit, I've been browsing my own blog's archives, and writing updated versions of old posts, like my "Stuff I like" posts. This one is a collection of some of my favourite personal blogs. I'm happy to say the current list includes more women than last time (the original list was 100% male).

Highlights

• Come From Away! I'd decided I would probably skip seeing this musical during its Melbourne run because I couldn't afford it, but Josh kindly bought me a ticket, and I'm so glad he did. It was enormously fun and touching. Highly recommended.
• A visit from my sister who lives interstate. It's always nice to break up daily life with a visit from someone I don't see much.
• Augie March and Grand Salvo. We very nearly piked on this show because it was a bit of a hassle to get to and very late for me (I normally go to bed around 8:30, when the show started). But I'm glad we ended up going because we both had a great time.

Highlights

• Josh's birthday! We saw a Melbourne Theatre Company play and had dinner from our favourite local burger place.
• Geelong game at the 'G. I was lucky to make it to two live football games this year, but this was the only one I saw with my dad, who got me into football in the first place.

I've written a couple of posts in the past about physical items I enjoy using. Since the last one was in 2016, here's a list of stuff I've been enjoying more recently (no affiliate links):

Brita fill&go Active water bottle

For the first time in a few years, something I'm super excited about was announced at WWDC. I can't wait to get my hands on SwiftUI and try it out in a real project. I'm concerned about how well it will work on custom, complicated layouts, but I'm still excited to give it a go. And how much more productive will we be with live reloading?! I know this has technically been possible in the past, but I've never managed to get it working, so I'm looking forward to trying it when it's easier to work with.

I save all my favourite moments and media for my end of year review, so this is just a quick check-in on my goals to see how I'm going and whether I need to adjust my priorities for the second half of the year.

Let's look at the goals I set for 2019 in January:

Highlights

• Twelfth Night at MTC. I wasn't sure about seeing this show, and put off buying tickets for ages. Eventually I bought a cheaper, under-30s ticket right before I turned 30, and I'm so glad I did. I loved this show, and was sad I couldn't see it again (I couldn't really afford to, but it was also sold out for the last week of its twice-extended run).

Recently I released a new side project, called ExistAPI. It's a Swift framework to make working with the Exist API in iOS apps much easier. It's available via Cocoapods and the source is on GitHub.

The year I turned 30.

Things I did this year

Last month of the year!

Highlights

Just spent ages figuring out that URLSession will just time out your request if you try to use an uploadTask but don't specify the HTTP method. Such an obvious mistake, but an error would've been nice!

Last year I wrote about the internal debate I was having over which planners and journals to use in 2018. This year I had much the same debate, but didn't bother writing about it. I've finally committed to my 2019 setup, though, so I wanted to share what I've chosen.

But first, a quick look at how my 2018 plans turned out. I chose a Jibun Techo Mini for my planner and logbook, my passport Traveler's Notebook for a journal with just brief highlights in it, and my regular Traveler's Notebook for journalling.