It's been an interesting week. It seems that everyone is working longer hours simply because they've got used to staying put in front of their machines. My general impression is that people are enjoying a drink at home in the evening and that generally, the mood is buoyant. Productivity is up to some extent. It will be interesting to see if this continues.

1. Quote of the week

The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTunes, i, i, i. When you're an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about 'I', you don’t do terribly well.

Jonathan Sacks

I'm not sure I entirely agree it is fair to pin everything on Steve, but Jonathan has a point about our culture becoming more self-serving. It is interesting to see the change in social climate at the moment with COVID-19. It has shocked the human race into examining what is essential and what isn't. Actually, we rely on a backbone of key workers to keep our country going.

2. What I've been enjoying

This week, I've been enjoying a glass of dry prosecco or red, switching off at 8pm to read or have a rest generally.

3. What I'm reading

I've parked Hogfather for now - I might pick it up this weekend. This week I started to read The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. Alan's material on philosophy and religion is available on YouTube, and it feels relevant for today's world. As a result, I find it hard to believe that he died before I was born.

4. What I'm doing in my free time

I am writing a course with a friend for Infrastructure Engineers. I might be able to talk more about this at some point but it's a closed project for now.

I finished the draft letters for my Russian Handwriting book. I now have the first 6 chapters done in draft - more or less. What it needs now is some hard graft on a practice chapter and then a complete edit and revision. There are definitely some issues to fix, and scarily the draft is out on the Internet already.

I bottled a Pineapple liquor made from brandy and soaked pineapples. Additionally, I'm using COVID-19 as an excuse to finish things on my personal list. This week I treated the BBQ for rust. "Exciting stuff", I hear you say, but actually doing so means the BBQ will last much longer. In the recent rains, the paint flaked off the BBQ caused a lot of rust on the body. This weekend I'll be gardening as well.

5. What I'm learning more about

In terms of self-development, this week has been a bit lacking. As soon as I get a moment, I will be starting the AWS Associate course on acloud.guru. I simply didn't get to it this week.