Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 0 & 1

Well, the sabbatical began. Your protagonist set off with a song in his heart and the freedom to roam. And all that.

So what did I do? Well, initially I spent some time finishing up the handful of things I hadn’t managed to do before 1 October came along. Tedious but probably inevitable. If I forgot something you were waiting for, sorry – you may need to remind me…!

I then finally gave up on trying out new editors – I suspect the problem was largely me not them to be honest – and spent some updating my emacs configuration because giving one’s tools a clean and polish occasionally seems a worthwhile thing plus it eased me into a life of not attending committee meetings. Having done that for a while, I rewarded myself by finishing off a little bit of Python code I have called bibtox for processing my BibTeX files so I can keep them well-formatted as well as produce HTML output for this website. And I finally got typst installed, began to learn how to use it at least a little bit, and started writing. I also spent a few days travelling connected to some external work.

So– perhaps not the most spectacularly interesting first week. But I made a start. So there’s that. The plan for week 2 is to finish polishing my configuration and probably blog about at least some of the updates – emacs has moved on since I last looked – and then do some writing in earnest. Let’s see how I get on :)