2020 in review

In 2019 I zigzagged around Europe and even further afield. I thought this year would either be much the same, or completely different. It was completely different - but in an entirely different way than I what I expected. But that was the case for everyone, right?

I posted to my site 4,394 times. I posted 6,017 individual photos into 11 different albums.

tl;dr

Downsized to 35L. Travel stalled. Upsized in order to occupy a part-furnished flat.
I was the Best Man at my friend's wedding.
Did one Vipassana retreat, in Switzerland.
Got trapped by the pandemic for 5 months in Sarandë, Albania.
Returned to the UK for multiple reasons, then stayed.
Started the process for donating a kidney, but then wasn't needed any more.
Decided on something to invest my savings into, but still pending.
Read a lot and watched a lot of TV.
Stood for election to the W3C TAG.

Goals for 2021: Make the most of Fife. Spend time with my IRL friends again, IRL. Try to make myself useful in the local community, and online communities.

Words

I wrote 345 things. On my site I posted 282 short notes or commentary with photos, and 63 longer articles. I also logged non-blogpost writing 29 times. These all comprise approximately 59,593 words in total (9,010 off-site). That's a mean of 162.82 words and 0.94 posts per day.

I wrote about 156 different topics, with the most common being life (122), travel (74), week in review (49), food (40), albania (34), hacking (31), vegan (29), ods (27), coronavirus (27), crochet (24), covid19 (21), and uk (16).

My NaNoWriMo project was Dumping Sky. I didn't write anything else, or finish any previous projects. Again.

Travel

I stopped in an all-time nomadding low of 6 different countries, none of which I had never been to before. A long stay in Albania was a goal I overachieved on, with 149 nights in total. Pre-lockdown I spent 13 nights in Turkey, 2 in Greece, 3 in Bulgaria and 16 in Switzerland (11 of these on a Vipassana meditation retreat). And 177 in the UK by the end of the year.

I spent 6 nights in total sleeping on public transport (long distance buses). Apart from that I slept in 25 different places. I spent the most time in short-term rental accommodation - in Albania and the UK - which was 246 nights. I stayed with family for 52 nights, friends (including couchsurfing and housesitting) for 34, in Vipassana accommodation for 11 (but moved rooms twice..), hostels for 9 nights, and hotels for 8 nights.

Not the most effective year for travel. I'm pleased I was in Albania in March when the European lockdown hit, because it meant I was stuck in a sunny place, in a nice apartment, right by the sea. I try to avoid touristy hotspots or 'seasonal' towns in the main season, so I was also very privileged to enjoy Sarandë in the middle of summer but without the usual masses of tourists.

After overstaying my Albanian visa, I did make an attempt to get overland to Greece, and considered trying for North Macedonia. But ultimately I finally had to return to the UK; the unpredictable border closures (oh and the rampant coronavirus) meant travelling overland was next to impossible, so I had to fly.

In total I spent 1 month, 1 day, 7 hours, 9 minutes and 25 seconds in transit (this includes walking between places), logging 82 journeys. I took 34 train journeys, 34 local or long-distance bus journeys, shared a rental car 3 times (I didn't log car trips with friends and family), bought metro/tram tickets 3 times, took 2 ferries, 1 cable car, 1 taxi, 1 flight, and bought a bicycle!

When I wasn't on the move, I spent:

7 months, 23 days, 7 hours, 2 minutes, and 46 seconds at home;
1 month, 18 days, 19 hours, 58 minutes, and 10 seconds on an adventure;
22 days, 3 hours, and 12 minutes in a meeting;
10 days, 17 hours, 1 minute, and 21 seconds with logging off;
5 days, 20 hours, 30 minutes, and 19 seconds out getting food;
4 days, 5 hours, 13 minutes, and 8 seconds at an event;
4 days, 4 hours, 6 minutes, and 59 seconds out exercising;
14 hours, 33 minutes, and 36 seconds in my office;
6 hours, 16 minutes, and 31 seconds doing a medical thing;
3 hours, 18 minutes, and 7 seconds in a talk or seminar;
and was out helping with something for 27 minutes, and 5 seconds.

Work

Work hasn't changed much. I still work 3 days a week with Open Data Services Co-operative. I started trying out different patterns of engagement with internal Co-op-running work vs. development / client work and found that if I spent larger blocks of time on each rather than the 50% split each week I function a bit better. I was fortunate to see my colleagues in person in January, because all of our other in-person meetups were cancelled after that. I'm also fortunate that we collectively acted fast to enstate special provisions when lockdown started: including unlimited paid leave for any reason related to the pandemic and a guarantee not to reduce pay or cut jobs for a period of time. We were also fortunate to not have to transition out of an office like many people did, so for a lot of the time it was just business as usual (besides the baseline anxiety we all had).

I also continued to contract approximately one day a week for Digital Bazaar, working on things related to the Decentralized Identifiers Working Group. As last year, this came in bursts. This year though there were no conferences or face-to-face meetings to attend :(

I joined the W3C Inclusion & Diversity Community Group - which I'd been in before, but was booted when my affiliation changed and I forgot to re-join - and went to some meetings. I also started to get active in the Social Web Incubator CG again, and did some infrastructure/admin for the Credentials CG.

Code

Green squares from github

Github counted 946 'contributions'. This was 64% commits, 13% code review, 6% issues and 17% pull requests. I don't see any patterns or anything significant. As usual you can see NaNoWrimo in November.

Stuff

I purchased or otherwise acquired something on 495 occasions, spending a total of approximately €10,653.71. I used 9 different currencies (GBP, USD, ALL, EUR, HRK, CHF, RON, BGN, TRY). This is an average expenditure of €29.11 per day, €204.88 per week, or €887.81 per month.

I spent €5,021.09 on accommodation, and €1,449.62 on transit. I spent €1,557.15 on groceries, buying them 121 times. I bought food that was ready to eat on 147 occasions, spending €1,589.74; 56.5% of the time this was in restaurants and 42.9% to take away.

I gave €465.99 away in donations, or spent it on gifts (but I didn't log this accurately; only occasionally when I gave cash to people on the street, or my Patreon payments which is about $15/month). I stopped counting donations under my monthly budget, so they are not included in the overall total.

Some things I acquired the most often were food (147), groceries (121), restaurant (83), transport (79), takeaway (63), and accommodation (58).

On 35 occasions I got something for free. I expensed €109.13 of stuff for work. The most expensive thing I bought was One month's shelter in Kirkcaldy (€611.73) and the cheapest thing (which wasn't free) was - just like last year - toilet use in Arad bus station (€0.21). I spent on average €21.52 per purchase.

Money saved on eating out and living cheaply in Albania was rapidly reclaimed by the cost of living (and partially supporting my brother) in the UK. Even so, I came in under my €1000/month budget overall this year.

January: Cold

I spent the new year with new friends in Bursa (Turkey). After staying up all night, I got the worst cold I've had in years and couldn't get out of bed for a few days. The weather was cold and my house was freezing. Instead of going south, I went north back to the UK. First I met my Co-op colleagues in Manchester for our quarterly meeting. Then I arranged and attended a pre-wedding get-together (a "stag don't") in Perthshire. I found out one of my friends needed a kidney, and began the process of finding out how I could donate mine.

All January posts. Weeks in review:

February: Also cold

Then I was the Best Man at K and M's wedding in Cornwall.

I headed back to the continent again, stopping in Switerzland for a Vipassana retreat, and then spent some days with friends.

I had a route south planned through Italy, but diverted through Croatia at the last minute due to the impending lockdown in Milan. A good decision. Little did I know what the rest of the year was bringing.

All February posts. Weeks in review:

The Long March

Not long after I made it to Sarandë, Albania, the pandemic hit Europe. I had been expecting to stay for a month, but when April rolled around borders were closed and curfews were everywhere. I consider myself very fortunate to have been in a lovely apartment, right on the sea, in a fantastic climate. I managed a couple of relatively local adventures, and met a nice expat community.

There I stayed. I got back into crochet, and started baking a lot. As spring set in, I swam in the sea every day.

Finally, in July, my appointment for tests for kidney-donor eligibility was rescheduled to August. I broke the no-fly rule to return to the UK (if not foolhardy, it would have been impossible by land at that point, anyway).

All March posts. Weeks in review:

All April posts. Weeks in review:

All May posts. Weeks in review:

All June posts. Weeks in review:

All July posts. Weeks in review:

August and September: Still March

I spent precisely the last two weeks of my twenties in government-mandated isolation at my Mum's house in the Lincolnshire countryside. Turned 30, and reviewed the last decade. Then I spent a day at Nottingham Renal Center, having lots of tests.

During a window of eased lockdown, I spent more time in Edinburgh, house-sitting and visiting friends. Expecting to need to stick around for kidney donation, but needing to be by the sea, I made plans to move to Fife for a bit.

Then my friend got a kidney from another source. This was great news! I could leave, but.. European unpredictable border lockdowns made travelling more complicated than I fancied, and family concerns made me want to stay in the UK for longer.

All August posts. Weeks in review:

All September posts. Weeks in review:

October to December: Life in Fife

So I rented a flat with a (medium-distance) sea view in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and my brother moved in with me. I bought a hammock stand again, and had to get a bit of furniture. Fortunately the secondhand shops and Freegle network are here are great! We went on loads of hikes, and enjoyed surprisingly glorious weather and a coastline that leaves me regularly breathless. Bonus: I started to meet the local eco communities here, and have really fallen in love with the place.

My Mum has sold and is in the process of moving out of my childhood home. So I'm glad I got to spend some time there earlier this year, as lockdown means there's no way I'll be able to go back again before she hands the key over to new owners. I'm not that sentimental about it, anyway. I might have been not long ago, but these days I am an unfeeling orb of detachment :)

I took lots of time off in November to make more time for NaNoWriMo, and though I didn't end up writing much, having more time to rest after an a hectic and/or anxiety-filled few months was amazing.

Discovering newly available headspace, I stood for election in the W3C TAG, which turned out to be one of the most competitive elections ever. At the time of writing, voting is still open.

It got cold quite sharply mid-December, but an advantage of being in Scotland over Turkey or Greece at this time of year is that the housing is actually designed to handle it.

Renting for and feeding two has taken me regularly over budget in the latter part of this year, but it was offset by how little I spent in Albania. I'm working on a plan to rectify this in the medium-term.

All October posts. Weeks in review:

All November posts. Weeks in review:

All December posts. Weeks in review:

Reflection on 2020

Compared to the past

Maybe next year I'll make this table into a pretty chart.

	2017	2018	2019	2020
Posts total	4,656	4,817	4,974	4,394
Photos posted	n/a	9,520	9,032	6,017
Coffees (total / mean per day)	471 / 1.3	431 / 1.2	484 / 1.3	462 / 1.3
Nights on transport	n/a	31	17	6
Nights with friends	n/a	56	60	34
Nights with family	n/a	24	24	52
Time in transit	1mo 13d 23h 15m 45s	2mo 26d 6h 56m 21s	2mo 10d 14h 9m 12s	1mo 1day 7h 9m 25s
Time in restaurants	17d 2h 37m 3s	21d 17h 44m 22s	26d 16h 16m 9s	5d 20h 30m 19s
Time exercising	4d 9h 26m 58s	2d 1h 10m	2d 20h 8m 10s	4d 4h 6m 59s
Time in meetings	3d 1h 28m	6d 4h 45m 59s	19d 0h 13m 12s	22d 3h 12m 0s
€ per month	n/a	923.39	1,074.90	887.81
€ accommodation	n/a	4,175.61	5,080.86	5,021.09
€ per night accommodation	n/a	11.44	13.92	13.72
€ eating out	n/a	3,012.56	3,367.91	1,589.74
Words	~159,492	122,401	95,722	59,593
Topics (by tag)	237	217	153	156
Countries visited	13	24	22	6
New countries visited	4	13	8	0
Nights in the UK	~month	34	37	177

Exercise was up but transit and eating out was down... for some reason. Sarandë and Kirkcaldy got labelled 'home' pretty quickly, as is my Mum's house (where I grew up), explaining that massive bump. I started logging long hikes as 'exercise' so there may be a historical underreporting error rather than an actual increase in exercise. Because I certainly dropped the ball on running and yoga this year.

At this time last year, I was looking forward at 2020, expecting to either visit many new places around Eastern Europe, or go back to the UK to donate a kidney. I was not expecting to stay virtually stationary, make a potentially significant career move or find somewhere to invest all of my savings. Everyone who had plans for 2020 found their lives completely upended this year. I've got off pretty damn lucky.

Though I find myself pining for travel and idly browsing wikitravel or airbnb every few days, I also appreciate the extra mental energy I've gained from not constantly planning and moving. I am grateful for having been able to see friends and family this year, and in particular for being able to spend more time with my brother than ever before. I can hardly believe my good fortune at the geography and community I find myself amongst in a place I chose to move to fairly arbitrarily.

I've been able to live more closely in accordance with my values here: minimising waste and shopping locally. This can be hard in the Balkans, when there are limited grocery options, fewer recycling facilities, and old ladies at markets who force upon you plastic bags at every turn. It's also harder when moving frequently as I'm less able to buy in bulk. Shortly after moving, I got a supply of empty jars from Freegle and friends, and shop almost exclusively at the zero-waste shop in Burntisland, and the local high street market. Okay, I go to Morrisons as well, but only for absolute necessities (and cheap vegan cheese. Nobody's prefect alright).

I'm not sure if I've particularly missed eating out. It was quite a significant hobby when travelling, but since I also love to cook I haven't noticed much. I get takeaway from the local vegan-friendly cafes here sometimes because I don't want them to shut down. I've resisted the urge to look up how my favourite vegan places around Europe are doing because I expect to be distraught and find out lots of them are gone for good.

Last year I wrote that I wanted to start logging my journeys properly and generate a map. In the last week of this year I finally found time to tinker with sloph, and have done it! Data is up to date for 2020 and a smattering of existing logs from the past. It helped that there wasn't a huge amount to backfill for this year.. When I'm low energy I'll be filling in gaps from previous years, using my ActivityPub C2S-ish travel logging client.

2021

I hestiate to make predictions! Realistically I'm probably not going to be able to travel again until I can get a covid vaccine, though it worries me a bit how long that might be. And my brother isn't going to be able to go back to Japan any time soon I don't think. So I'll make the most of my time in Fife for a while longer. I've signed up to volunteer at the local community kitchen with Greener Kirkcaldy - I really hope that can start this month.

I'm going to move again, not far, but closer to the sea and further from town.

Whether or not I get elected to the TAG, I forsee my W3C related activities increasing a bit. I'll probably do more to help with infrastructure of the Credentials CG, and take a more active role in reviving the Social Incubator CG in coming months.

Hopefully as the vaccine gets taken up by the most vulnerable it will be safe to travel locally again, and I can hop on trains to explore more of Scotland. Even better, maybe I can spend more time with friends who I am now finally in the same country as.

🏷 travel life hacking week in review #cooplife w3c 2020 covid19 coronavirus albania uk sloph nanowrimo zero waste quantified self digital nomad ods year in review

Mon 4th of January 2021 at 4:48pm (+00:00)

Post created with https://apps.rhiaro.co.uk/no-ceremonies-are-necessary

2019 in review

In 2018 I travelled all over Europe, mostly alone, and got to know myself better than ever. 2019 was a continuation of this, with a few unexpected twists, new lessons, and reinforcement of things I discovered last year.

I posted logs or photos or blogposts to my site 4,974 times and posted 9,032 individual photos.

tl;dr

Continued to travel around Europe; visited lots of new places, and returned to places I know and love.
Met a few wonderful new people. Kept in touch or reconnected with many others.
Tested the limits of my sociability.
Did contracting work as well as my day job, but not enough to add up to full-time.
Went out of my way to attend RWOT conferences twice.
Looked after other peoples' pets.
Took a detour to visit Elizabeth in Zimbabwe for 2 weeks (broke the no-fly rule).
Had a rhino-related near-death experience.
A long, hot, Balkan summer; swam in the sea often, got a lot of migraines from the heat.
Learnt to read Cyrllic with ease.
Returned to the UK for Co-op and family stuff.
Did more exercise than last year. Not that the bar was high.
Fell in love with the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.
Won NaNoWriMo!
But overall wrote less than last year.
Overcame a bit my aversion to fire, through necessity.

Goals for 2020: more of the same really. But with more solitude.

Words

I wrote 321 things. On my site I posted 261 short notes or commentary with photos, and 60 longer articles. I also logged non-blogpost writing 34 times. These all comprise approximately 95,722 words in total (52,001 off-site). That's a mean of 262.25 words and 0.88 posts per day. That's less than last year; missed my 'write more' goal.

I wrote about 153 different topics, with the most common being travel (99), life (69), week in review (50), nanowrimo (29), writing (21), food (15), tourism (13), vegan (12), Bulgaria (10), ods (9), montenegro (8), and hiking (8).

My NaNoWriMo project was Quest for Brothers, but I didn't write much else.

Travel

I stopped in a total of 22 countries; I visited 12 countries for more than a couple of weeks, 5 of which I had never been to before, and passed through (with a stop of 12 hours to 10 days) 10 others (3 new). I failed my goal of not flying at all, having taken an unexpected trip to Zimbabwe in May, but within Europe I stayed ground- and water-bound.

Long stays: Bulgaria (new, 50 nights), Croatia (14 nights), Czech Republic (20 nights), Greece (54 nights), Macedonia (new, 31 nights), Montenegro (new, 30 nights), Poland (14 nights), Slovakia (21 nights), Spain (17 nights), Turkey (new, 19 nights), UK (37 nights), Zimbabwe (new, 12 nights).
Short stays: Albania (new, 8 nights), Bosnia (9 nights), France (3 nights), Hungary (4 nights), Slovenia (3 nights).
Transit-length/single day stays: Andorra (new), Austria, Italy, Monaco (new), Serbia.

I spent 17 nights sleeping in transit (on buses, ferries, trains, etc). Apart from that, I slept in 62 different places. I spent 151 nights in AirBnbs, 60 nights at friends' places, 57 nights in short-term rental accommodation, 37 nights in hostel dorms, 24 nights with family, 10 nights in hotels, and 9 nights shared AirBnbs or hotels covered by work.

In total I spent 2 months, 10 days, 14 hours, 9 minutes, and 12 seconds in transit (this includes walking between places), logging 201 journeys. I took 109 bus journeys (local and long-distance), 16 long distance trains, and 18 ferries. I bought tickets for local bus, tram or metro 27 times. I also travelled by boat 6 times, took 12 taxis, and made 8 journeys in a car (either hitchhiking or a ride with a friend). I took 4 planes: two each way to Zimbabwe and back. I utterly failed to ride a cable car in 2019. I'm not sure where all those taxis came from.

When I wasn't on the move, I spent:

6 months, 15 days, 4 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds on an adventure;
1 month, 11 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes, and 21 seconds at home;
26 days, 16 hours, 16 minutes, and 9 seconds out getting food;
19 days, 13 minutes, and 12 seconds in a meeting;
4 days, 19 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds at an event;
2 days, 20 hours, 8 minutes, and 10 seconds out exercising;
1 day, 13 hours, 23 minutes, and 49 seconds in an office;
and was in a talk or seminar for 11 hours, 58 minutes, and 11 seconds.

Work

I still work 3 days a week with Open Data Services Co-operative! Go me for keeping the job, and enjoying it. Co-op life involves a lot of meetings, and if you're comparing this year to last year, see above, you can see I spent considerably more time in meetings. I ended up going to more Co-op events in the UK than expected, again. Usually because they lined up with other reasons to go back.

I also contract approximately one day a week for Digital Bazaar, working on things related to the Decentralized Identifiers Working Group. This came in bursts, with busier times being during and after Rebooting the Web of Trust conferences. W3C WG and CG meetings add to my meeting count.

Code

This is my Github commit log:

Green squares from github

Github counted 783 'contributions'. This was 62% commits, 19% code review, 4% issues and 15% pull requests. I can't be bothered to list all the repos. This is a little bit less than last year. There are absolutely no patterns. Obviously you can see NaNoWrimo in November.

Stuff

I purchased or otherwise acquired something on 879 occasions, spending a total of approximately €12,898.77. I used 14 different currencies (TRY, GBP, EUR, BGN, USD, RSD, CZK, MKD, HRK, BAM, ALL, PLN, HUF and Zimbabwean Ecocash). This is an average expenditure of €35.34 per day, €248.05 per week, or €1,074.90 per month. I logged 1,340 meals or snacks, an average of 3.7 per day.

This includes most donations to charities/organisations/people, gifts, and buying other peoples' food or bus fare, but I didn't log it all well. This does not include ATM fees, bank fees and loss through currency conversion or the GBP diving.

I spent €3,006.08 on transit/transport and €5,080.86 on accommodation. I spent €849.34 on groceries, buying them 120 times. I bought food that was ready to eat on 339 occasions, spending €3,367.91; 78.2% of the time this was in restaurants and 22.7% to take away.

Some things I acquired the most often were food (339), restaurant (265), transit (200), transport (193), groceries (120), bus (109), and takeaway (77).

On 85 occasions I got something for free. I expensed €2,455.32 of stuff for work. The most expensive thing I bought was Asus Zenbook 14 (Cex) (€856.14) and the cheapest thing (which wasn't free) was Toilet use at old tree place (€0.15). I spent on average €14.67 per time.

I came in well over budget. I added a setting to sloph so I could track purchases I expensed for work without them adding on to my own expenditure totals. I used this for my new laptop as well (I didn't expense it, but it doesn't come out of my normal montly budget). Even excluding all of that (€2,455.32 worth), I spent €898.77 more than would have been ideal (about €75/month extra). It's easy to see how though. In August I spent about €300 in Split, feeding Dave and Juri on whatever their hearts desired, and another €100+ on my travel and accommodation there. August + Croatia (Split, of all places) + two kiddos with a taste for fancy seafood, steak, beer and ice cream = bankrupt big sister. That's okay though, it meant they could enjoy their holiday without worrying about money, because - despite my warnings - Split was more expensive than they'd expected as well. The other half of that was another €400 on flights to Zimbabwe, which was sort of offset by staying with Elizabeth and low cost of food there. Whenever I meet friends for a meal who I know don't have as much disposable income as I do, I pay for the food. Finally, I gave quite a lot away; to people begging on the internet, and IRL. I bought several strangers' bus or train tickets and if I have it, give cash to anyone who asks me for some, which I'm hit and miss at logging.

My gut feel was that I spent more on accommodation than I probably should have - €5,080.86 in total - more than last year's €4,175.61, but this still averaged out to less than €500 per month, so that works out. I spent a bit more on eating out than last year: €3,367.91 compared to €3,012.56. So I guess what really did it was transit: €3,006.08 compared to €1,891.64 in 2018! Is the cost of things going up? Am I getting lazier and taking easier/faster options instead of cheaper ones? Am I leaving it last minute to book and missing good prices? Probably a combination of these.

January: solitude and the sea

I started the year where I'd ended the last one: on the island of Lesbos, Greece. From there I moved to Syros, and spent even more time alone (besides the company of a fluffy cat, Zizi). I slowed right down; my apartment was comfortable, I had a proper toastie maker and a source for vegan cheese, and it was easy to be lazy. I had a good view of lightning storms over the bay. I did manage to join a local hiking group though, and went out with them a few times to explore the island.

All January posts. Weeks in review:

February: emerging back into the world

Arriving in Athens was a shock to the system. A huge city after two months on quiet islands. I socialised; I met people from Mastodon and friends-of-friends in Exarchia squats, and Jane and Felicity came to stay with me for a week. This helped me to ramp back up a bit for impending conference chaos. I dyed my hair light green, with purple roots.

All February posts. Weeks in review:

March: zigzags

From Greece I took the direct route to Barcelona - two ferries (Patras to Bari, Civitavecchia to Barcelona), three buses (Athens to Patras, Bari to Napoli, Napoli to Rome) and a train (Rome to Civitavecchia), with as little time in Italy as possible. My first Rebooting the Web of Trust conference was great and productive. It was nice to see old friends from the W3C Standards circuit, and make some new ones. After that I made my way back east overland via the sceneic route: stops in Spain (Girona), Andorra, France (Nice), Monaco, Slovenia (Ljubljana), Hungary (Budapest).

All March posts. Weeks in review:

April: offgridding

I met up with Felicity again in Krakow for a bit. I love Warsaw, and was super happy to have the opportunity to stay in a squat there as a guest of someone I met in Athens. I made the snap decision to visit Elizabeth in Zimbabwe, and fly out of Vienna. The stars aligned, and H (who I met at the Vipassana retreat in Austria last year) and B invited me to house- and pet-sit for them for two weeks in the woods of Dubravka, near Bratislava, in their homemade container house. Water came from a spring in the woods and wifi came from taking a tram to Bratislava. I took a few daytrips to Vienna as well.

All April posts. Weeks in review:

May: to Africa and back

I stayed with Elizabeth for two weeks in Harare, Zimbabwe. Bussing was not feasible, so I had to break the no-fly rule. I got chased by a rhino, lost Elizabeth's sunglasses and almost died, but it was worth it. I dyed my hair bright green. I returned to Europe and made a beeline to the Adriatic coast, socially exhausted and in desperate need of some alone time.

All May posts. Weeks in review:

June: by the Adriatic

I lived in a tiny studio in a small town on the Montegrin coast, a few minutes walk from the sea. Which came in handy as the temperature skyrocketed, and my AC cost extra so I didn't use it. I swam almost every day, and dried off in the sun, getting heat-induced migraines far too often. I daytripped to different cities in Montenegro, and at one point got lured to Sarajevo for an extended visit as well.

All June posts. Weeks in review:

July: Balkan summer continues

I reunited with Aida again for her annual yoga retreat on the island of Iz, just off Zadar in Croatia. This time I explored the island more, and meditated in the pyramid every morning. I was the only non-Bosnian speaker (though my time in Montenegro increased my level of ambient understanding greatly, that is, if someone interjected a conversation with "does she understand?" I could understand enough to say "no I don't"). We did TRE too, and a few of us took a wee boat to a wee island to swim naked.

I transited through Albania, stopping at Dubrovnik (ugh) on the way, and spending a week in Skoder which was lovely, and a weekend in Tirana.

In a misguided attempt to reduce the sun-induced migraines, I moved on for my next long stay to the landlocked city of Skopje, Macedonia. The upshot of this was I was perpetually too hot with very little opportunity to jump into water to cool down though. The city center has fountains for frolicking in, along with other general weirdness. I hiked to the nearby canyon for swimming and kayaking in its icy depths was a great relief. So was going to the air-conditioned mall to see movies.

All July posts. Weeks in review:

August: hot and hectic

A full 50% of Skopje's vegan restaurants were closed during my planned visit, so I extended my stay further into August in order to visit them. And also because I planned a couple of extra trips out to nearby places, and my house in Skopje was a good base to keep. I went to Pristina, Kosovo for a couple of days. I trekked to Sarajevo again, to pick up my new laptop from a colleague (and see friends of course), and then to Split, Croatia, where my brother and J were holidaying, so I could pay for all their food (half a month's budget in 4 days.. *poof*). And squeezed in a trip to Lake Ohrid too, for hiking and swimming.

I went to Bulgaria for the last week of August, better than not going at all, because the city of Plovdiv had been calling to me for no particular reason for months. It's lovely, and I had a restful time. Enough to charge a little before the next batch of conferencing. And I dyed my hair pink, purple and blue.

All August posts. Weeks in review:

September: identity and doughnuts

Prague, I can take or leave. But RWoT and the first ActivityPub conference were there, so I planned to stay a month around those. Since my last visit, there are even more great places to get vegan food, and I had a lot of fun organising the rebel conference dinners. RWoT was cool, we advanced some Encrypted Data Vaults work, and I got to see old friends again; and more at APConf.

Prague also has a good connection to London, with the RegioJet bus.

All September posts. Weeks in review:

October: back in the UK

Two Open Data Services Co-op events had been scheduled a week apart, and one more got set up a bit later when it looked like I'd be coming back for them. In between work trips to Nottingham, Sheffield and Stirling, I visited family in Lincolnshire and Brighton, and friends in Edinburgh.

All October posts. Weeks in review:

November: writing by the sea

I made it to Bulgaria in time for the start of National Novel Writing Month, with an urgent need to deflate after two hectic months of people and moving a lot. Sandwiched between week-long transit through Varna and Burgas, the 'big' cities of the coast, I found a lovely apartment with a sea view in the resort town of Obzor on the Black Sea Coast. Resort towns in the off-season are the best; there's nobody in them, nothing going on, and the beaches are gorgeous and empty. My hosts had a tiny but powerful dog who I looked after for a while. Other than walks on the beach, or occasional bus trips to other coastal towns, all I did was Co-op work and writing. It paid off: I wrote more than 50,000 words of Quest for Brothers! My first NaNoWriMo victory in 10 years.

All November posts. Weeks in review:

December: turkeytime

A long weekend in Istanbul removed the inditimidation factor that has had me always avoiding it; it's busy but quite manageable, with good public transport, and really great historical touristing opportunities. I took a ferry to Mudanya, near Bursa, and stayed in a small, old village called Misi (or Gumustepe) outside of the city. From my house I could hear chickens, goats and the Mosque. But the house was too big and too cold and the wood-burning stove and I did not get along. I moved to another house, around the corner, with central heating, but it wasn't warm enough for me to sit still in there all day. So I spent more time in the city than expected, which was busy and smoggy and so enormous; but the two vegan cafes were warm and friendly. I looked for meetups on CouchSurfing, and found the Bursa English Speaking Club, and people weekend-tripping to Uludag mountain. I joined them, and got roped into social event after social event, including New Year's Eve, until I somehow had some new lifelong friends. Turkish people are inspiringly hospitable and welcoming; I was blown away time after time.

All December posts. Weeks in review:

Reflection on 2019

Compared to the past

This is the third year I've done a comprehensive summary from my logs, so now I can make a comparison table!

	2017	2018	2019
Posts total	4,656	4,817	4,974
Photos posted	n/a	9,520	9,032
Coffees (total / mean per day)	471 / 1.3	431 / 1.2	484 / 1.3
Nights on transport	n/a	31	17
Nights with friends	n/a	56	60
Nights with family	n/a	24	24
Time in transit	1mo 13d 23h 15m 45s	2mo 26d 6h 56m 21s	2mo 10d 14h 9m 12s
Time in restaurants	17d 2h 37m 3s	21d 17h 44m 22s	26d 16h 16m 9s
Time exercising	4d 9h 26m 58s	2d 1h 10m	2d 20h 8m 10s
Time in meetings	3d 1h 28m	6d 4h 45m 59s	19d 0h 13m 12s
€ per month	n/a	923.39	1,074.90
€ accommodation	n/a	4,175.61	5,080.86
€ per night accommodation	n/a	11.44	13.92
€ eating out	n/a	3,012.56	3,367.91
Words	~159,492	122,401	95,722
Topics (by tag)	237	217	153
Countries visited	13	24	22
New countries visited	4	13	8
Nights in the UK	~month	34	37

It sure felt like I travelled a lot this year, but I spent less than half the time sleeping in transit. Maybe that's how I spent so much more on accommodation? Time with staying friends and family was about the same. I did more exercise! And spent even more time in restaurants! As well as in meetings, as previously discussed. Fewer new countries visited I guess means I'm running out of new places to go in Europe... Not really, still plenty left, it was just circumstance.

Alone time

I didn't get as much alone time this year as I'm used to, nor as I need. There were tradeoffs, there always are, but ultimately the pros of travelling completely alone outweight the cons for me. I love having a place to come home to that has nobody else in, and am finding it increasingly difficult to share my space. Nothing beats being able to change my mind about plans at the last minute without having to consult anyone else; deciding where to eat without having to compromise; to stay in bed or go on an all-day hike depending on how I feel when I wake up without worrying about how someone else feels. To bring enough snacks just for me; to budget according to my own priorities; to do only the amount of logistical labour needed for just myself. I have figured out my balance between planning and winging it, and discovered it doesn't always match up with other peoples'. I sometimes found myself taking care of other peoples' tickets or accommodation simply because I got around to looking up the information first. I'm frequently the only person in a group who bothers to look at a map or remember the names of metro stops, so I always end up navigating. It's several times more exhausting than when I'm doing it only for myself, because I have to keep other people apprised as well. And more often than not, nobody else contributes, not without being asked (also exhausting) and even then not effectively or efficiently. Even when someone else is in charge of the day, I can't help but need to know where we are and how we're getting there. If everyone around me suddenly disappeared, or had their memories wiped, I'd be able to get myself home again. It's exasperating that some people aren't doing that automatically. Anyway, enough complaining. All that to say, I'm a selfish traveller, and I know what I want, and I have little patience for other people getting in the way of that.

There's also nothing quite like experiencing the world, new places, new people, without the buffer of someone else. I focus more on my surroundings when I'm alone. And other people treat solo travellers differently. When I'm with other people I vocalise how I'm feeling more; whether I'm hungry or tired or my feet hurt. Which means I focus on it more. When I'm alone, that stuff falls into the background and I'm less likely to remember any discomfort from a day. When I'm eating with others I inevitably end up talking, and lose track of the food. Food is an important part of any experience for me, and I'm disappointed when I realise I'm not paying attention to it. Not that having conversations is bad. Just, tradeoffs.

My compulsion around a tidy kitchen has got worse. If I know there's a mess in a kitchen such that if I suddenly needed to cook something I wouldn't be able to without cleaning first, I have to clean it up, or I can't focus on anything else. Even if I can't see the kitchen. In hostels this often means doing other peoples' dishes, which I don't begrudge; others come and go, it's not a long term thing. If I'm sharing a space with someone else for a while and I end up constantly keeping on top of their mess, then I get annoyed. I know some people just have differently cleanliness standards to me. I've lived with plenty of other people in the past. And my preferred solution is to just not live with other people any more.

Blogging and logging

I stayed on top of my logs, but I dropped well behind on blogging about places and vegan food. I have a few half finished drafts. I was hoping to get them wrapped up and published before this post, but I'll get to them eventually.

Things I didn't do

Some things I thought I'd do this year that I didn't, include:

I didn't spend any time in Ukraine or Romania, and hardly any in Serbia.
I didn't make it to Belarus.
Not spending long in Albania and Kosovo; just transit-length visits.
I didn't attend any Vipassana meditation courses.
I didn't lose my EU citizenship... The Brexit date got moved twice.
I finished neither Of The Moon nor Milo's World, nor Birds. Didn't even touch them.

Things I did do

Some things I did that I hadn't expected were:

Dragged my butt across Europe and back for RWOT conferences in Barcelona and Prague.
Stopped off in Andorra and Monaco.
Visited Sarajevo a few more times than is probably healthy. (JK I love you Sarajevo.)
Flew to Zimbabwe to visit Elizabeth.
Revived my Fairphone 1 with the help of a second FP1 with a working charge port.
Spent a full month in the UK, co-working with my Co-op colleagues, and seeing family.
Changed my winter plans to accommodate a return to the UK in early 2020 for KitB's wedding, and was colder than ideal due to not being far enough south, and smoggy due to not being near the coast, but made some amazing friends in Bursa to make up for it.

I'm continuously astonished and thankful that my travel experiences are always so seamless. Especially as I hear stories of the bad things that happen to other people. I've never been robbed, or left my backpack on a bus. I have incredible luck with finding great places to stay for good prices. When I miss connections, I usually get where I'm going anyway, and don't lose a ton of money in the process. How can this be? I plan well (not too much, not too little), learn about places ahead of time, and am laid back and positive-minded (I naturally forget or downplay negative things where some people - I've noticed - really fixate on them, which affects how they react in the moment, and their perception of how a trip went after the fact). But there's an element of luck with all of this. Fingers crossed it keeps up.

I found a new pleasure this year in familiar places. I passed through a lot of cities I spent longer in the year before (or even earlier this year) - like Split, Sofia, Bratislava, Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Vienna. It's nice to already know the route from the bus station, and where some vegan cafes are and how the public transport works.

2020

Whenever anyone comments on my lifestyle - whether to say they couldn't imagine living on the road, or that it would be their dream - I always say I can't imagine living any other way. It's true. So the easy thing to do for me is to keep travelling. To keep bouncing, month to month from place to place, selfishly looking out only for myself on my own schedule, committing to nothing and no-one that I can't just do online. But for a very good reason, I would stop or put things on hold for a year. Such a reason is currently rearing its head. So the default is to keep travelling, but there's a small chance I might pause.

Going with the default, this year I'd like to spend substantive time in:

Albania
Belarus
Kosovo
Moldova
Romania
Serbia
Turkey
Ukraine

More time in Croatia and Slovenia would be also welcome. Another visit to Greece might also be on the cards. I have a feeling the call to revisit people in places I now know will be strong.

Once again, I'd like to not zigzag. There are no RWOT conferences or W3C meetings in Europe that I know of this year, so they shouldn't be pulling me off track. If Aida runs another yoga retreat in Iz (Croatia), I'll try to go. There's social pressure to visit Ayvalik (Turkey) and Lesbos (Greece) in the spring this year, so we'll see about that. I'll probably need to go through one of the Baltic countries to get a visa for Belarus, so I might spend some time in Latvia or Lithuania.

Again, I aim to complete least one more Vipassana meditation retreat. It's cheating to add this as a goal right now because I registered back in October for one in February in Switzerland, but it hasn't happened yet so I guess I could still fail to go.

I want to log my journeys properly, with start and end times, and make a visual map of countries I've visited. I have the backend data to do this, but the logging is arduous. I've also started work on a timeline view of my logs; maybe I'll finish it!

I've gotta stop staying in places where AC and heating cost extra, or are ineffective. Though I avoid AC unless I'm dying; actually I'm more likely to head to places this summer that don't get so hot so that shouldn't be an issue. I definitely will be triple checking the heating situation when I'm likely to be cold though, because I've been freezing in my home far too often this year and it just ruins everything. Also I need to remember to check the location of the fusebox at every place I stay before there's a power outage. And sort out a backup wifi option before that's an emergency too.

I've got to invest some of my savings into something. It's not that I am particularly interested in making the number go up, but the money I have sitting uselessly in the bank right now could be being used by someone to do some good in the world. There are lots of investment schemes for giving loans to co-operatives, housing projects, social enterprises etc. I'll be looking into that.

I've got my new backpack, a 35L RiutBag, which I'm excited to downsize my life into. It's hopefully small enough to go at my feet or over my head on a bus; not having to pack it under gives me one less thing to worry about, or potentially forget.

🏷 didwg writing food quantified self 2019 life year in review travel week in review digital nomad transit logs ods w3c

Fri 31st of January 2020 at 11:24pm (+00:00)

2018 in review

In 2017 I finished my thesis in Malaysia, flew back to Europe, got a job in Sarajevo and settled down there for a bit. It would have been easy to stay. Too easy. Being comfortable makes me uncomfortable, so in 2018 I became once more an everything-I-own-in-a-backpack no-fixed-abode full-time digital nomad.

I posted logs or photos or blogposts to my site 4,817 times and posted 9,520 individual photos.

tl;dr

Started travelling, around Europe, mostly. Did not fly.
Finally wrapped up the last Social Web WG specs.
Left OCCRP and joined ODS.
Drafted half a novel.
Went to a couple of conferences, for either fun or profit.
Refaced my website.
Made many new friends, some fleeting, some lingering on WhatsApp or Signal.

Goals for 2019: Proceed on current trajectory, but write more.

Skip to:

Words
Travel
Work
Code
Stuff
January: travel practice
February: re-finding my nomad
March: slow down
April: new experiences, and academia flashbacks
May: beaches and history and solitude
June: home again home again
July: off-route
August: back on plan
September: Lithuania is underrated
October: writing, stability, then a detour
November: I LOVE POLAND
December: to the sea, better late than never
Reflection on 2018
2019

Words

I wrote 437 things. On my site I posted 350 short notes or commentary with photos, and 87 longer articles. I also logged non-blogpost writing 34 times. These all comprise approximately 122,401 words in total (47,804 off-site). That's a mean of 335.35 words and 1.20 posts per day.

I wrote about 217 different topics, with the most common being travel (181), life (89), food (46), week in review (44), vegan (38), hacking (26), Georgia (the country) (13), sloph (13), tourism (12), Sarajevo, Bosnia (10), Poland (10), and nanowrimo (10).

My NaNoWriMo project was Birds, and I also wrote small bits of Quest for Brothers and Offcast.

Travel

I stopped in a total of 24 countries; I visited 9 countries for more than a couple of weeks, 7 of which I had never been to before, and passed through (with a stop of 12 hours to 10 days) 15 others (6 new). I achieved my goal of not flying at all, and have way better travel stories as a result.

Long stays: Austria (18 nights), Bosnia (49 nights), (new:) Estonia (26 nights), Georgia (15 nights), Greece (26 nights), Hungary (16 nights), Latvia (23 nights), Lithuania (27 nights), Poland (51 nights).
Short stays: Bulgaria (2 nights), Croatia (7 nights), Czech Republic (12 nights), Finland (2 nights), France (6 nights), Malta (3 nights), Serbia (2 nights), Slovak Republic (8 nights), Slovenia (3 nights), UK (34 nights total, not consecutive), Ukraine (4 nights).
Transit-length/single day stays: Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey.

I spent 31 nights sleeping in transit (on buses, ferries, trains, etc). Apart from that, I spent 77 nights in short-term rental accommodation, 71 nights in AirBnbs, 69 nights in hostel dorms, 56 nights at friends' places, 24 nights with family, 23 nights at Vipassana meditation centres, 8 nights in hotels, 5 nights shared AirBnbs covered by work, and 1 night camping.

In total I spent 2 months, 26 days, 6 hours, 56 minutes, and 21 seconds in transit (this includes walking between places). To travel long distance or internationally, I took 52 bus journeys, 18 long distance trains, 9 ferries, and made 8 journeys in a car (either hitchhiking or a ride with a friend). I also bought tickets for local bus, tram or metro 44 times, took 10 taxis, and had 3 rides on a cable car.

When I wasn't on the move, I spent:

5 months, 13 days, 10 hours, 7 minutes and 7 seconds on an adventure
1 month, 24 days, 1 hour, 49 minutes and 38 seconds at home
21 days, 17 hours 44 minutes, and 22 seconds out getting food
20 days, 15 hours and 55 minutes with logging turned off
12 days, 13 hours, 1 minute and 33 seconds in an office
6 days, 4 hours, 45 minutes and 59 seconds in meetings
3 days and 6 hours at an event
and was out exercising for 2 days, 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Work

I worked remotely one day a week for W3C through January, in-person 3 days a week for OCCRP from until February then remotely for OCCRP from February until May flexibly between 10 and 40 hours per week. I joined Open Data Services Co-operative at the end of May, and work 3 days per week with a fully remote team, with a couple of trips back to the UK for in-person meetings. Towards the end of December, I picked up an extra one day a week of spec-writing contracting work with Digital Bazaar.

Code

This is my Github commit log:

Github counted 790 'contributions'. This includes commits over 27 repositories, 10 of which I created (in 2018).

This is significantly less than last year. Which I think means I successfully did less work, which was one of my goals.

Here is the list of repos (expands inline). I'm too lazy to link them. Some of these are private.

alephdata/aleph
alephdata/flexicadastre
alephdata/followthemoney
alephdata/memorious
csarven/articles
csarven/lr-thesis
linkeddata/dokieli
linkedresearch/linkedresearch.org
occrp-attic/exactitude
occrp/tech.occrp.org
open-contracting/extensions-data-collector
open-contracting/kingfisher-scrape
OpenDataServices/cove
OpenDataServices/developer-docs
OpenDataServices/fireproofbox-standard
OpenDataServices/lib-cove-web
OpenDataServices/sedldata
openownership/cove-bods
perma-id/w3id.org
rhiaro/admin
rhiaro/birds
rhiaro/cashcache
rhiaro/ch-seco-sanctions
rhiaro/evieblue
rhiaro/homeiswherethehammockis.com
rhiaro/ocds-memorious-crawlers
rhiaro/pym
rhiaro/questforbrothers
rhiaro/salvage
rhiaro/sloph
rhiaro/sloph
rhiaro/unknown-sample
rhiaro/vocab-logs
rhiaro/zulip2md
w3c/activitystreams
w3c/credweb

Stuff

I purchased or otherwise acquired something on 928 occasions, spending a total of approximately €11,080.72 for the whole year. I used 13 different currencies (EUR, RSD, BAM, PLN, GBP, CZK, UAH, GEL, TRY, BGN, HRK, USD, HUF). This is an average expenditure of €30.36 per day, €213.09 per week, or €923.39 per month. My rough budget for everything has been €1000, so I call this a success.

This includes donations to charities/organisations/people, gifts, and buying other peoples' food or bus fare. This does not include ATM fees, bank fees and loss through currency conversion. It would be too depressing to try to add this up.

Naturally the things I acquired the most often were food (435 times), restaurant (345), transit (147), groceries (143), takeaway (98), and leisure (75).

On accommodation, I spent €4,175.61 in total, averaging €11.44 per night, and €347.97 per month. I spent €1,891.64 on transit (buses, trains, etc).

I spent €763.49 on groceries, buying them 143 times. I bought food that was ready to eat on 435 occasions, spending €3,012.56; 79.3% of the time this was in restaurants and 22.5% to take away.

On 43 occasions I got something for free. The most expensive thing I bought was 20 nights shelter in Tallinn (AirBnB) (€597) and the cheapest thing (which wasn't free) was Old Oyster card refunds (x3) (€-27.49). I spent on average €11.94 per time. 97.4% of my acquire posts have photos attached. You can see them all at /stuff

January: travel practice

I woke up on the 1st of January 2018 in Malta, with a resolution not to fly at all this year. I made my way back to Sarajevo by two ferries and four buses, over three days, via Catania and Napoli (Italy) and Zagreb (Croatia). Did some touristing in Bosnia, this month, in the environs of Sarajevo (Goat's Bridge, Bobsled track), and to Visocko pyramids and Mostar. Watched a lot of Star Trek the Original Series, which was a slog. ActivityPub finally made it to W3C Recommendation, and so did WebSub.

19 January posts. Weeks in review:

February: re-finding my nomad

My last Sarajevo adventure was to Vrelo Bosna. I convinced nice people at OCCRP to let me go remote, and said farewell. I made plans to head south to Montenegro, then promptly changed them and went to my Mum's for two weeks. There was a wee bird and a Grandma who needed a bit of looking after, and I got to catch up with old friends and deflate a little. And let my Mum cut my dreads off, and then shaved my head. I saw Bown, Laurel and Jamie in London and Pete and Alan in Lincoln.

I took a bus to Prague (Czech Republic) via a day in Amsterdam, and spent the final few days of the month freezing my ass off there.

24 February posts. Weeks in review:

March: slow down

The month started with a long weekend in Ljubljana (Slovenia), visting Elizabeth and her family.

Then I headed to Budapest (Hungary) for the rest of the month. Naomi came to visit, and we went to thermal baths.

23 March posts. Weeks in review:

April: new experiences, and academia flashbacks

From Budapest I got a ride to the mountains near Mariazelle, Austria. I served on a 10 day Vipassana retreat, working in the kitchen to prepare food for 175 people every day, which was some of the most fun I've ever had. I got a ride back to Vienna, then took a bus to Bratislava (Slovak Republic), where I spent a week. I had a comically tiny flat, and immediately fell in love with the city.

My sister turned up for the weekend, and then together we went back to Vienna. She had a conference, and I bummed in her university-sponsored AirBnb for a week. I dyed my buzzcut purple, blue and green.

After that, I headed to Brno by bus, and met my roommate Petra from the earlier Vipassna retreat. I stayed for a week with her and her family in South Moravia, in the Czech countryside. We meditated and did yoga and went on walks in nature and that was lovely. We spent a night at her friend's in Prague, and then I caught a bus to Lyon (France).

I stayed there for TheWebConf, chaired the Developers' Track, and helped out with the Researcher Centric Scholarly Comms workshop. It was nice to not be seeking something from the conference, no need to further my academic career or make certain contacts. I could just hang out with cool people, and complain about the food.

I bussed from Lyon to Munich (Germany) and spent a day there before continuing to Krakow (Poland).

Then Open Data Services offered me a job, though I wouldn't start til June. I thought I might take a month off, but worked another month for OCCRP anyway.

43 April posts. Weeks in review:

May: beaches and history and solitude

I spent a couple of days in Krakow, before taking a train to Gdynia in the north. Here I settled in a shared flat for a month. There was a heatwave, and I got to spend my downtime hiking astonishing white sandy beaches, dunes, and wild pine forests. I walked the Hel Peninsula. I also learnt more about the history of Eastern Europe from museums in Gdansk and Gdynia than I ever learnt at school.

I met Adam at a CouchSurfing meetup and he drove me far enough that we could walk along the beach to the Kaliningrad (Russia) border with Poland, we got caught in a rainstorm, and then I introduced him to the marvels of vegan pizza.

I bussed back to London (via Amsterdam where I saw the Soton crew at WebSci) for my induction into ODS and some training.

42 May posts. Weeks in review:

June: home again home again

I spent a couple of weeks in the UK, met ODS colleagues in London and saw family and Tigo and Laurel, TomSka, Polly, Chloe, Doc, Oli. I went to Edinburgh to catch up with friends as well.

I went back to Sarajevo via Vienna and Prague for a couple of weeks. Handed off some work, swapped my work laptop back for my personal one, and of course saw friends and enjoyed Sarajevo in the summertime. I spent the last night on the sofa in Prana Yoga Studio, then rode with Aida (my yoga teacher) and others to Croatia.

29 June posts. Weeks in review:

July: off-route

The first week of July was a yoga retreat with Aida on the beautiful island of Iz, just off the coast of Zadar. It was hot, the sea was clear, and the hotel was all vegetarian and there was no wifi in the rooms. I took most of the week off work and relaxed, and talked about yoga and veganism and Yugoslavia with Juliana and Amila (and Sofia).

I stayed another night in Zadar, before bussing to Sofia (Bulgaria). There I spent a few days in a hostel, and met Franzi.

I bussed directly from Sofia to Istanbul (Turkey), bought another ticket and waited a few hours, then went all the way through Turkey to the Georgian border. Unexpectedly the bus didn't actually cross the border, but dumped the few remaining passengers at Sarp, the most chaotic border crossing I've ever seen. It was hot, there were hundreds of people, many carrying giant carpets, and actual fights broke out in the 'lines'. After passport control the Georgian side was airconditioned, and more civilised. I don't know where all the people dispersed to. I caught a marshrutka to Batumi, a city on the Black Sea, and spent some days there in a hostel. It's a very strange place, but in a nice way.

Then I bussed to Tbilisi. I was advised to take the train, but left it too late and there were no tickets left. I stayed in Tbilisi with Jason and Elspeth for a little over a week, and attended the Open Governence Partnership conference. I met some of my ODS colleagues I hadn't met yet IRL, as well as some folks from OCCRP, and it was pretty fun. I met Eric, Jason's vegan friend, and Georgian food blew my mind. We went to the Rachuli mountains for a long weekend after the conference.

I took a train back to Batumi, spent a few days deflating in a nice apartment on the seafront, and absorbing more Batumi weirdness. My ferry out was postponed a day, and then delayed another day after boarding. Eventually it left, and I spent two days traversing the Black Sea to Ukraine on a hand-me-down Lithuanian vessel crewed only by people who spoke Russian, with all the customs forms and other documents in Turkish. It was a bit weird.

I arrived in Odesa (Ukraine), which was hot and as weird as Batumi but in different ways. I stayed in an awful hostel, and took the train out across the country to Lviv.

56 July posts. Weeks in review:

August: back on plan

I spent a few days in Lviv in a lovely hostel, in the company of some of the amazing and generous people (Sasha and Roman) who work at Quinta Group with government procurement data.

My explore-the-Baltics-in-the-summer plan was a little delayed, but eventually I made it to Estonia. Almost a week in Tartu to begin with, and then on to Tallinn for the rest of the month. I started out by almost immediately getting locked in the City Library. I had an AirBnb to myself, and spent my time wandering beaches and woods and wildlife conservation areas and touristy things. I met Vandesh at a vegan picnic in the park which I found through CouchSurfing.

I got a cool sideshave haircut, and bleached my hair blonde, aiming for white but not quite getting it. I also applied for Estonian e-residency.

I took the ferry to Helsinki in time for the MyData conference.

45 August posts. Weeks in review:

September: Lithuania is underrated

I didn't attend the MyData conference, but bengo let me crash in his AirBnb and I went to the social events. We went back to Tallinn, which I had planned to leave immediately but struggled a bit and stayed an extra night. I managed to drag myself away eventually, and stopped in Parnu, Estonia's seaside town.

I spent a week crawling my way around the Baltic coast, aiming for Klaipeda (Lithuania). I took a bus from Parnu to Riga, then Riga to Kolka (Latvia). One night on the beach of the Cape in a barrel-house in one of the most beautiful places ever. I hitched a ride from my barrel-house-neighbours, Tomas and Eva (from Warsaw), around the coast to Ventspils, then on to Liepaja, where I stayed in a hostel for a couple of nights.

I took a bus to Klaipeda, and spent a week there. I cycled the Curonian Spit, but could only manage one way. It was beautiful.

Then I spent two weeks in Kaunas, in a super friendly small hostel. I met Paul, who worked there, and they started referring to me as the "long term resident". Kaunas is a highly underrated small city, with oodles of river and nice places to walk, as well as a cute old town. The Pope also came by while I was there.

I went to Vilnius for a week, by train. Stayed in a hostel over a giant club, and had either attend or sleep through a rave or two. Cafe worked and touristed and treora showed up for a few days. Spent a day in Trakai too.

59 September posts. Weeks in review:

October: writing, stability, then a detour

After a month of hostels and buses, it was time to slow it down again. I spent the whole month in Riga (Latvia), with a studio apartment AirBnb to myself once more. On the first weekend, Claire (who I met in Malaysia, in Wholey Wonder) came to visit. I lied, I didn't spend the whole month. At the last minute I decided in the third week to head back to the UK for the ODS OGM in Nottingham, and had just enough time to squeeze in a visit to my family before heading back to Riga. Some touristing, and mushrooms!

I did NaNoWriMo, a month early, managing over 43k words of a story I love despite the travel and work and guests. I picked up my Estonian e-residency from the embassy in Riga.

The weather started to deteriorate.

24 October posts. Weeks in review:

November: I LOVE POLAND

I went back to Poland, where the weather was much better. I spent a week comprehensively falling in love with Warsaw, and then went out into the countryside to sit a 10 day Vipassana retreat. I had made no onward plans, and got a ride to Wroclaw, which I spent a week comprehensively falling in love with as well. There are lots of islands, rivers, bridges, but the weather was getting colder still.

There's a direct bus to Bratislava (Slovak Republic), so that's where I went next. I met up with Helmut, who I met on the Vipassana retreat in Austria, for an afternoon and evening. I still loved Bratislava, but it kind of pales in comparison to Poland.

I went to Vienna, then on to Sarajevo (Bosnia i Herzegovina). Logically this is not a sensible thing to do in the winter, but if you zoom the map out really far it's sort of in the right direction. And of course I saw Elizabeth and Almedina and jen and Edin and Rysiek and Czesiek and Aida and whomever happened to walk into the Data Team office at OCCRP while I was hanging out there. And unexpectedly I bumped into Juliana (are you paying attention? I met her at the yoga retreat in Croatia in July).

22 November posts. Weeks in review:

December: to the sea, better late than never

Then it got smoggy. Really smoggy. I carved my way through the air to East Sarajevo bus station, and left for Belgrade (Serbia).

I spent a few days in Belgrade, because I hadn't been there in quite a few years. I'll never love Belgrade, but it's alright. Bus ticket negotiation was tricky by email and the web, but in person I was helped very well, and went directly to Thessaloniki (Greece). It was a relief to reach the sea, and the threat of freezing temperatures was finally abated.

After a week of cafe working and very gentle touristing, I went to Kavala for a day, then caught a ferry to Mytilene, Lesbos. I took the bus across the island to Petra, when it eventually left, and settled in to a studio flat right on the sea front. The town is very small, and quiet in the off season; most cafes and restaurants are closed down. My host, Eleni and her family are extraordinarily generous, and I'm really being looked after. Lesbos is an island rich in variety of flora and fauna with beaches and mountains of all kinds to explore. Local olives are great, and Greeks are generally a hospitable, if loud, bunch.

Got one day a week of Web standards related contracting work. Should be fun, but 3 days a week suits me well so not sure if will live to regret an extra one, we'll see.

I got a great haircut, and dyed my hair dusty grey-purple.

39 December posts. Weeks in review:

Reflection on 2018

A pretty successful year, I think. My tl;dr goals were "write more, travel more, work less." I achieved all of those, right up until this month where I picked up some extra work, but still not enough to make me full time.

I aimed to sit another Vipassana retreat, and I managed to serve one and sit one.

I focussed a lot on conscious eating, reduced the amount I eat, and waste I produce from takeaway food.

Some specific things I didn't do were:

Set up a real travel blog style website. Instead I improved my photo galleries and general display of rhiaro.co.uk though.
Complete a draft of Quest for Brothers. I did a little bit of writing and editing, and a lot more planning and world building though. I guess I thought I'd write QfB for this year's NaNoWriMo, but I wrote Birds instead.
Write endings to Of the Moon and Milo's World. Just didn't happen.
Write a short story every month. I managed one month and then dropped the ball.
I didn't go to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro or Romania, and I only passed through Bulgaria, Serbia and Turkey.

Some things I did that I didn't expect were:

Changed my job, which was a very tough decision but I'm pretty sure I made the right one.
Zigzagging so much to visit the UK and Sarajevo for work and Georgia and France for conferences.
I went to Georgia, Ukraine and France, and spent more time in Austria than expected.
Took a ferry across the Black Sea. I was saving that for a future braver me, but it was fine.
I read much more fiction than I expected, I think.
My Fairphone made it to December! But it's on its very last legs, and as of the beginning of Dec I'm only turning it on in emergencies because the batteries are pretty fucked and charging is agony.
Came in well under my budget for the year; months I overspent were still outbalanced by months I spent little. This is definitely thanks to spending about 4 months total rent-free with friends and family or on Vipassana retreats.

I've become a lot better at understanding my own needs and rhythms. I have a good idea of when I need solitude, or when it is going to be bad for me, and what I should do to feel better if that happens. For most of the year I roughly alternated between staying in hostel dorms, with friends or family, and getting a flat to myself. I mostly got it right, but there were times when being with people too much or being alone too much got to me.

I continue to meet people who are astonished that I travel alone, and this reminds me just how important it is to me. Of course it's nice to spend time with friends and friendly strangers, even long stretches, but ultimately I still need my day-to-day to be completely untethered from anyone else. I appreciate never having to compromise, being able to make decisions and change my mind and never having to explain myself or convince someone else. I know how to plan a day for me, the kinds of places I'm willing to stay, how fast I walk, how long I spend in museums, how much effort I'm willing to put in to find a vegan restaurant with a wrong address on happycow; throwing someone else into the mix makes that impossible. Even someone I think I know well, or someone with whom I have a lot in common. Call me selfish, but never having to check in to see how someone else is doing is absolute bliss.

I discovered, or perhaps for the first time managed to vocalise, the feeling of arriving in a brand new place I know nothing about. I felt it a lot this year, and very distinctly on some specific occasions. It's easy to get swept up in the rhythm of travel. No trip feels special when your whole life is making trips. Things become a haze of movement, bus schedules, logistics, finding food, taking photos, pretty landscapes, walking tours. But I take it as slow as I can, and stop to appreciate the rush of being somewhere for the first time. Especially somewhere I know nobody, and nobody knows me. And every time I do, nothing compares.

Sort of related is enjoying making do with what's available in a new place. My diet changes every month based on what local food I can buy, and how I prepare meals and coffee changes because of the kitchen facilities I can access. I've stayed in places with only microwaves, only stovetops, only grills, or no kitchen at all, and figured out how to make meals. I learnt at least half a dozen different ways to make coffee, and that a great many different household objects can be re-purposed as a rolling pin.

Having a low-pressure job and working 3 days a week is enormously good for my mental health. Writing code is often frustrating, and often boring, but I don't miss academia or deadlines at all. Having a schedule that ensures I have time to hike, to read fiction, to hack on my own stuff, to write, and most importantly to just be with nobody expecting any outputs or results, is amazing. I really appreciate having a flexible job, where I can switch days or hours around if I need to for travel reasons, or if my head just wasn't in the right place to be productive on a work day, I can make it up another time.

It's been well over a year now, but I still feel the lightness of being free from you-should-be-writing guilt. Of course, there is always more to do. But I don't feel bad about not doing it. I could be a hundred times more 'productive' if I wanted to. But I don't want to. And that's okay.

I also value being part of an amazing remote team now. Checking in by video call has become a habit; one I thought would be too social for me before I started, but I have acclimatised. Text-based communication is still my preferred, but seeing the faces of my colleagues every workday morning is.. just nice.

I thought a lot this year about how to provide safety and comfort for people who need it. My Vipassana kitchen experience cemented in me that I want to one day open a pay-as-you-want hearty healthy vegan kitchen, and my social media timelines full of people who are having a hard time and just need a place to go has had me thinking about how a pay-as-you-want hostel/shelter might work. One thing I miss while I'm travelling is not being able to offer people a place to stay. It's a way off, and I have no idea yet where that would be, but it's on my mind. Meanwhile, what I can do is donate money to organisations who can provide these kinds of things, or to individuals who ask for help on the internet (or sometimes in person, on the street).

In the medium term, I would definitely not mind transitioning away from tech.

2019

I plan to continue to travel in the same way through 2019. How much time I spend in EU countries may depend on Brexit and like wow, really who knows how that's going to go. It may have no effect on my travelling at all, or I may suddenly be hit by a need for visas or uncertainty at borders. Really no idea. Not flying is now baked in to my psyche, so I don't expect that to change.

But hopefully I will spend at least two weeks in the following countries:

Albania
Belarus? Maybe
Bulgaria
Greece
Kosovo
Macedonia
Moldova
Montenegro
Romania
Serbia
Turkey
Ukraine

It could also be nice to spend longer in Croatia and Slovak Republic, if the opportunity arises.

I should exercise more. No, I will exercise more. I still hike a lot, but I only did yoga this year in the presence of Aida (and she knew it) and I stopped running (except with my sister, in Vienna, and once in Tallinn). So there's that new year's resolution cliche.

I refresh my aim to sit at least one Vipassana course.

And did I mention? Write more. I will strive again to draft Quest for Brothers, finish Milo's World and Of the Moon, and now I have Birds to finish as well. I wrote half of it in one month, surely I can write the second half in another month.

🏷 transit logs food year in review quantified self writing week in review 2018 travel life occrp sloph ods digital nomad

Tue 1st of January 2019 at 8:10pm (+02:00)

2017 in review

tl;dr

Turns out I packed a lot into last year. Seemed worth writing up. Highlights include:

Travelled a bunch, Asia, Australia, Europe.
Became Dr Amy Guy: finished my PhD thesis, defended it, did corrections, graduated.
Went to a bunch of conferences, won an award, got an article published in a magazine.
Got a job at OCCRP, moved to Bosnia.
Drafted a novel.
Published some W3C specs.

Goals for 2018: travel more, write more, work less.

Words
Travel
Work
Code
Stuff
January: adventures
February: food and procrastination
March: instability, productivity
April: the pit
May: a mental shift, and closure on many fronts
June: hard work rewarded, and a new start
July: an interlude, and resettling
August: summer in Sarajevo
September: anxiety and relief
October: time with friends new and old
November: rediscovery and creation
December: ending as I mean to go on
2018

Words

I posted to my site 4,656 times.

I wrote 275 things on here. 173 were short notes, 102 were longer articles, and they comprise approximately 59,492 words in total. That's a mean of 162.99 words and 0.75 posts per day.

I wrote about 237 different topics, with the most common being travel (105), life (63), food (36), phd (34), thesis (29), hacking (27), Bali, Indonesia (25), week in review (24), vegan (24), linked research (23), nanowrimo (20), and sloph (19).

I also wrote (or contributed to) 3 academic papers:

Observing the decentralised social web (one telescope at a time) (Web Observatories Workshop, WWW2017)
Linked Data Notifications: a resource-centric communication protocol (ESWC2017, Best Student Paper Award)
Decentralised Authoring, Annotations and Notifications for a Read-Write Web with dokieli (ICWE2017)

And:

a W3C Recommendation: Linked Data Notifications (May);
a W3C Working Group Note: Social Web Protocols (December);
an article in a print magazine, NetMag: Web Standards Column: Linked Data Notifications (July);
an unfinished draft of 30k word novel: Of the Moon (November);
and a 70k word PhD thesis: The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web (April).

Travel

I checked in 1,819 times. I spent the most time at home, which was 5 months, 13 days, 13 hours, 5 minutes, and 36 seconds, followed by 2 months, 10 days, 8 hours, 46 minutes, and 5 seconds on an adventure. I also spent 1 month, 13 days, 23 hours, 15 minutes, and 45 seconds in transit; 1 month, 17 hours, 31 minutes, and 56 seconds in my office; 17 days, 2 hours, 37 minutes, and 3 seconds out getting food; 14 days, 2 hours, 32 minutes, and 45 seconds at an event; 4 days, 23 hours, 10 minutes, and 5 seconds out helping with something; 4 days, 9 hours, 26 minutes, and 58 seconds out exercising; and was in a meeting for 3 days, 1 hour, and 28 minutes.

I visited 13 different countries and 25 different cities (/islands/regions), and travelled by plane, train, tram, bus, car, ferry, boat, scooter and foot.

Work

I worked remotely for W3C one day per week all year, in-person for OCCRP ~3.5 days per week for six months, and spent two months in a vegan kitchen for a cafe in Malaysia. I did two hours of remote consulting.

Code

This is my Github commit log:

Github counted 1,362 'contributions'. This includes 1,198 commits over 40 repositories, 17 of which I created (in 2017), and I opened 85 issues. I closed some too but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to count those.

My favourite part is the end of April when my thesis was due, and then I immediately went offgrid for a silent meditation retreat. Most other grey patches coincide with bursts of travel. November is full because of Nanowrimo. It sort of almost looks like I maybe sometimes had weekends though.

Here is the list of repos. I'm too lazy to link them. Some of these are private.

alephdata/aleph
alephdata/exactitude
alephdata/fingerprints
alephdata/followthemoney
alephdata/ingestors
alephdata/memorious
alephdata/xref
csarven/articles
csarven/dokieli-rww
csarven/ldn-tests
csarven/mayktso
Devcember/devcember.github.io
hreeder/botbot
linkeddata/dokieli
linkedresearch/linkedresearch.org
occrp/data.occrp.org
rhiaro/alephbox
rhiaro/as-ns
rhiaro/as2-reports
rhiaro/bookmarks-to-as2
rhiaro/dkdata
rhiaro/homeiswherethehammockis.com
rhiaro/indieweb-identity
rhiaro/ldp-ns
rhiaro/ldprints
rhiaro/observing-decentralised-web
rhiaro/occrpscripts
rhiaro/ofthemoon
rhiaro/olmparser
rhiaro/probe
rhiaro/profiles
rhiaro/sloph
rhiaro/tachyon-scanner
rhiaro/thesis
rhiaro/tmp-dokieli
w3c-social/social-web-protocols
w3c/activitystreams
w3c/ldn
w3c/Micropub
w3c/websub

Stuff

I acquired things on 855 occasions, and used 10 different currencies (EUR, BAM, GBP, USD, DKK, HRK, JPY, MYR, AUD, IDR). 492 of these occasions were food.

I logged 1,446 meals or snacks, an average of 4 per day. The thing I consumed most was coffee (471), followed by bread (363), vegetables (327), fruit (313), and tea (183). I consumed coffee on average 1.3 times per day.

January: adventures

I accidentally got a job in a vegan cafe, Wholey Wonder. It was delicious. What with CSers, the Wholey Wonder crew and my Malaysian Mum, I quickly accumulated a Penang family.

Chinese New Year is loud and on fire and constant and lasts for two weeks. I needed a break. I took the ferry to Langkawi, beachbummed, couchsurfed and slept on beaches. I finally got to put my hammock up between palm trees. I met GJ who came back to Penang with me. Various vegans came and went and on Mondays when Wholey Wonder was closed we tried to hike and go to further flung beaches.

On one such excursion I got stung by a jellyfish. My leg was on fire, I got a migraine, and threw up in the car. The Wholey Wonder crew rehydrated me and saw me safely home. I slept for 24 hours and was okay again. The itching lasted for weeks, and I still have a scar.

I met Isaac, who tried almost everything on the Wholey Wonder menu, and told me about Vipassana.

I finshed Voyager and started Deep Space Nine.

34 January posts. Weeks in review:

February: food and procrastination

Wholey Wonder and the Penang vegan food quest continued to persistently distract me. bengo showed up and we did the Penang Hill Forest Challenge. I had some cooking and baking successes and failures.

February is full of celebrations in Penang. After Chinese New Year finale was Thaipusam and the balloon festival, and Kek Lok Si Temple light shows.

I met Dani and we found old men in a treehouse hidden in plain sight in the middle of George Town.

I put a call out for a ride to KL, and Krishen took Dani and I as far as Ipoh, and generously hosted us in his Mum's house for one night, and took us to visit some temples. On the way we had a flat tyre on the highway and had to wait for resuce. I took the bus the rest of the way to KL, and flew to Bali.

20 February posts. Weeks in review:

March: instability, productivity

I promised myself I wouldn't make any friends or let myself get distracted in Bali. At the airport, I met Ninni, who was also writing her thesis. Hers was about vegan food, and motivations for diet change. We agreed to be thesis buddies when she got to Canggu.

The hostel I had booked for the whole month had bedbugs. They were very nice, and let me leave after a few agonising days. They fumigated the dorm and cleaned my stuff for me. I moved into a twin room at an eco yoga guesthouse with Ninni for a week. We cafe-hopped and ate fancy vegan food. Ninni's sister came, and I moved back into the hostel.

There were still bedbugs.

I moved into the dorm of the eco yoga guesthouse. I had pool access and a discount at their mostly-raw-vegan restaurant. Score.

I did yoga every single day. I learnt to do yoga sweating, in heat. I was almost making headstands unsupported by the end of the month. I learnt from a variety of different teachers.

I spent the last couple of days in the south of the island. This hostel also had bedbugs, but I noticed before getting into bed. The staff were awful. Four of us from the dorm moved to twin rooms in a hotel down the road. Instant new friends, English, German and Brazilian. Bad review for the hostel, who wouldn't refund us and accused us of lying.

I flew to Perth.

37 March posts. Weeks in review:

April: the pit

I spent a few days getting a handle on Perth, before WWW2018. Good workshops, good chat, good vegan junk food. Constant gnawing in the pit of my stomach about the thesis. Wendy and the SOCIAM crew conspired to bring Sarven and I to Southampton in the summer.

I moved in with distantish relatives in the suburbs. There was not much to do but sunset runs by the beach and write. Also hiding in my room and crying for days. There was no way I was going to finish this on time. I asked Ewan for an extension. He said I could do it. I didn't do it. I did a bit. I cried some more. I watched Star Trek. I wanted to be sick. I tried going to different suburbs to work from libraries and cafes. I tried to hide my stress. I got to know my interesting and unusual second cousin Tim when I needed a break from crying alone.

No yoga, but ran every other evening by the sea.

Got baaaad RSI.

Mastodon became a thing.

I had expected to send my thesis off, then jet back to Malaysia. I managed the latter, but not the former. Ewan helped me concoct excuses for the graduate office.

27 April posts. Weeks in review:

May: a mental shift, and closure on many fronts

Argh! The drama continues. I found myself homeless in Penang, before the Whole Wonders Tammy and Jon put me up in their tiny apartment and supplied me with a constant stream of hearty vegan food for a couple of days while I frantically alternated a few hours sleep with finishing my thesis. I handed it in two days late, and jumped in the pool.

I met Malaysian Mum for breakfast, then embarked on a ten day silent Vipassana meditation retreat on the side of Penang Hill. I didn't want it to end.

It did though, and when I found my voice again I took several fellow meditators back to Wholey Wonder with me afterwards. I made a few dreads, ate everything on the menu, then bussed to Kuala Lumpur. A few hours sleep, a few new bedbug bites, some Indian food and an interesting late night chat with a Syrian guy later, and I flew to Tokyo.

When I got to Dave's house it was late, and Dave and J were both dead to the world. Fortunately all his doors were unlocked. They awoke to find me asleep in the closet. Surprise! Dave and J looked after me in shifts. I made lunch ready for when Dave got home, so we could eat together before he dashed off again. I hung out with Mike, Nao and Zen for a little while. I returned to Dave's to find Juri making up errands to keep me out of the house. Eventually she let me in, and she had prepared a romantic, candlelit vegan dinner. We spent a lovely evening girl-talking, and the next day they both accompanied me back to the main station.

I flew from Tokyo to Venice. Venice was too expensive, so I met KitB and we took the bus to Trieste. We spent a pleasant week eating and wandering in the sun.

27 May posts. Weeks in review:

June: hard work rewarded, and a new start

I took a minibus from Trieste to Piran, for ESWC. Sarven and I ran a workshop and won a best paper award for our LDN article.

I went on the train to Rome for ICWE. I did Rome touristing, and discovered a surprising amount of vegan bakeries. I took the bus from Rome to Ancona, then the ferry from Ancona to Split. I spent a day and a night in Split.

I took the bus from Split to Sarajevo, started at OCCRP, moved into my little cheap flat, and fell in slightly love with the city the more I roamed.

I became pretty quickly overwhelmed with working 5 days a week. I didn't have energy, social or otherwise, to do anything but hide in my flat at weekends. And I wanted to see things.

I explored and ate and started yoga at Prana; I dug into learning some new tech, and about investigative journalism.

32 June posts. Weeks in review:

July: an interlude, and resettling

As arranged in April, I went to Southampton and Oxford to visit SOCIAM. No flights; it took three days to get there, via an afternoon and a night in Brussels to see my PhD bro Michael. I also got four hours to race around the sights in Frankfurt. Everything was late, but I made it in the end.

Sarven and I worked with bblfish and others to reimagine scholarly communication with a Solid-like architecture. I drafted ldprints. On the Friday we went to Oxford, joined forces with Timbl, Wendy, Nigel, Max, Jun and all manner of other cool people to discuss what we'd done over the week.

Net Magazine printed an article Sarven and I wrote about LDN; it came out that week, so I went out of my way to buy it from WHSmiths to show to Timbl. Ended on a high.

I spent the week carefully not tweeting about being in the UK. Then I surprise-visited Mum. We watched movies, and cooked lots of things. My wisdom teeth got infected again and I went to a dentist. I saw Grandma, and Polly, and met Dad for chips on the beach.

I returned to Sarajevo by bus, this time with four hours in Brussels across midnight. Not recommended. I managed to see quite a few London peeps, and eat quite a lot of London food.

I recommenced OCCRP (part time), and met Ishka the cat, who comes in when I leave my windows open.

Finished DS9.

17 July posts. Weeks in review:

August: summer in Sarajevo

At the last minute, I wizzed (get it? Wizz Air) back to the UK for a weekend to surprise Dave and J who were visiting Mum. It was wonderful. I took them for a day in London, then flew back.

I went with Edin and friends to Skakavac waterfall, and for a long drive to Sutjeska Valley and for a swim in an artificial lake. I tried krompirusa for the first time; my world changed.

Boudicca came to Sarajevo, I met Renee, and had the opportunity to put my hammock up between trees on Trebevic.

I applied for my Bosnian residency permit. I went to some of the Film Festival, parts of which were rained off.

I made some great food. I started hanging out with Elizabeth a lot.

Started Star Trek: ToS.

10 August posts. Weeks in review:

September: anxiety and relief

Having spent the entire summer not thinking about my thesis, I thought briefly about preparing for the defense, but instead went to a weekend yoga retreat with Aida and others from Prana Yoga, on Jahorina. It was exactly what I needed.

I flew from Tuzla to Luton, and took a night bus to Edinburgh. I arrived bright and early in time for my viva. It went really well. I passed with minor corrections. I cried in Ewan's office. I ate a lot of Edinburgh, saw the Edinburgh crew, and returned by the same route. I brought my dinosaur onesie back to Sarajevo, tied around my waist for the flight as I had no baggage allowance.

I climbed to the peak of Trebevic with bengo. We had a few almost-failures, but made it after far too long. The view was worth it.

13 September posts. Weeks in review:

October: time with friends new and old

I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving with Elizabeth and friends and pancakes.

I panicked about my thesis corrections. I pulled an all-nighter. I got a 24 hour bug, vomited my way through the last of them, and got most of them to my examiner before he got on a plane to Australia. They were approved. I filled in forms, finally wrote my acknowledgements, and got the thing printed in time to register for November graduation.

I spread my work days out so I could take a long weekend in Copenhagen. By long weekend, I mean I took a bus from Wednesday evening to Friday evening (via Berlin, including a ferry); stayed with Ninni from Friday night to Monday evening, walking and eating; then returned by the same route from Monday evening to Wednesday morning. Ninni had a party with like 100 people to celebrate her Master's thesis. It felt like a party for my thesis too, even though I didn't know anybody there. The bus to Berlin (and back) didn't have a working toilet, and most of the service stations in between cost 50-70c. This was particularly inconvenient as I was travelling between two non-Euro countries, and wasn't carrying any Euros.

I got my Bosnian residence permit.

My Mum and Julian graced me with their presence in Sarajevo. They tolerated sofabeds and spiderfriends in my small flat, and we raced around the flea market, Trebevic, forts, the old town and the War Tunnel in a few drizzly days.

I bought winter clothes.

I went to a potluck at Prana yoga studio, and met Nick who introduced me to a Sarajevo running group. I managed to join them once.

Started Star Trek Discovery.

18 October posts. Weeks in review:

November: rediscovery and creation

I stayed in Sarajevo for almost the whole month. Nanowrimo is why! I wrote over 30,000 words of a new novel draft, Of the Moon. I'm pretty proud of that.

The Social Web WG took ActivityPub to PR. At last.

My database was broken for two weeks. Nobody noticed but me. I kept logs on paper.

November was also marked by people leaving Sarjavo; Renee and Jason moved on for pastures new, though I more than expect to bump into them again.

I wrapped up the month by heading to Edinburgh (bus to Munich, flight to Edinburgh), meeting my parents, putting my hair up high and a funny robe on, and finally receiving my doctorate.

23 November posts. Weeks in review:

December: ending as I mean to go on

I spent the first few days of December in Edinburgh, eating my way around the new vegan food scene. And seeing friends I hadn't seen for a while, and may not see again for another.

I boxed up the tigobird, and took him on the train to my Mum's house. There I spent another couple of days, saw my Grandma and Naomi and Tizzy.

After a brief jaunt to London, I took a bus to Ghent, where I spent the day, then on to Cologne, then finally back to Sarajevo.

The Social Web WG had its last meeting, and I published Social Web Protocols as a Note.

A cold, snowy, static two weeks later, I took the bus to Leipzig for 34c3.

After that, a bus to Munich and a flight to Malta, to ring in the new year with Liz. By 'ring in the new year' I mean we watched a movie in bed til we fell asleep, then distant fireworks woke me and I woke Liz so we could run to the balcony, see some brief flashes across the bay, then went straight back to sleep. Perfect, really.

14 December posts. Weeks in review:

2018

In 2018, I will live out of a 45L backpack. Anything that doesn't fit, doesn't come.

My goals are to visit the following countries, and spend at least two weeks in each:

Albania
Bulgaria
Czech Republic
Estonia
Greece
Hungary
Lithuania
Latvia
Macedonia
Montenegro
Poland
Romania
Serbia
Slovakia
Turkey

I'll probably pass through or make a shorter visit to:

Austria
Croatia
Finland
Slovenia

And I might make it to (or these might wait til 2019):

Georgia
Moldova
Ukraine

I aim to take zero flights, except in emergencies. Hopefully there will be no emergencies.

I will do at least one more Vipassana meditation course.

I will make my travel blog function as a travel blog, and include pretty route mapping, and an interface for certain people to be able to figure out where I might be next, and when I'm free to work.

I'm going to eat more consciously. This means eating things that make me particularly happy, or are good for me (these two often overlap, but not always). I'm not going to stress about spending money on healthy/happy food, but I'm also not going to spend money on non-healthy/happy food. I'll err towards going without rather than eating crap. I'll eat slower, and not overeat. I'll reduce waste associated with food, so I'll eat in rather than takeaway, where possible, and hold takeaway food in my hand rather than have it wrapped in a bag or a napkin if it makes sense. Eating or drinking coffee in rather than taking away also slows the process, heightens the importance of my surroundings, and increases the likelihood of new acquaintences.

I will write the endings to Milo's World and Of the Moon.

I will write one shorty story a month at least. These may or may not make it onto the blog.

I'll finish a draft of Quest for Brothers, my 2010 nanowrimo.

I expect my Fairphone One to give up the ghost this year. I'm going to try really hard not to replace it. That means if you communicate with me on WhatsApp and nothing else, you need to find something else (Signal, email and Twitter will work, in that order). If you have any decent pointandshoot camera recommendations, or a non-phone device that functions well as a map/GPS, let me know..

🏷 stats lifelogging 2017 year in review life travel week in review phd work

Wed 17th of January 2018 at 4:31pm (+01:00)

My year in review is delayed because part of it includes a summary of everything I spent. I used six different currencies this year, and juggling them all into one so I can add them up (and then total per category, etc) is proving to be a pain. All APIs which have enough different currencies available are rate limited for their free tier, and I'm exceeding them very quickly. I need a new plan.

Sneak preview though: I spent more than expected, and more than I should have :(

🏷 late year in review

Wed 4th of January 2017 at 12:34am (+08:00)

Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph

year in review (5 out of 5)

2020 in review

tl;dr

Words

Travel

Work

Code

Stuff

January: Cold

February: Also cold

The Long March

August and September: Still March

October to December: Life in Fife

Reflection on 2020

Compared to the past

2021

2019 in review

tl;dr

Words

Travel

Work

Code

Stuff

January: solitude and the sea

February: emerging back into the world

March: zigzags

April: offgridding

May: to Africa and back

June: by the Adriatic

July: Balkan summer continues

August: hot and hectic

September: identity and doughnuts

October: back in the UK

November: writing by the sea

December: turkeytime

Reflection on 2019

Compared to the past

Alone time

Blogging and logging

Things I didn't do

Things I did do

2020

2018 in review

tl;dr

Words

Travel

Work

Code

Stuff

January: travel practice

February: re-finding my nomad

March: slow down

April: new experiences, and academia flashbacks

May: beaches and history and solitude

June: home again home again

July: off-route

August: back on plan

September: Lithuania is underrated

October: writing, stability, then a detour

November: I LOVE POLAND

December: to the sea, better late than never

Reflection on 2018

2019

2017 in review

tl;dr

Skip to:

Words

Travel

Work

Code

Stuff

January: adventures

February: food and procrastination

March: instability, productivity

April: the pit

May: a mental shift, and closure on many fronts

June: hard work rewarded, and a new start

July: an interlude, and resettling

August: summer in Sarajevo

September: anxiety and relief