Another day of confinement and we are now reaching 2 weeks with more to come! Last week has been a tough one for Europe with Italy and Spain death toll reaching new highs. While the rest of Europe seems to fare better, this is far from over and we have to be ready for more sad news.
In addition to that, one of my favorite cartoonists passed away last Tuesday from a heart attack. He was the father of France’s most famous Gallic characters: Asterix and Obelix. Together with Tintin, those characters have made my joy when I was younger (and they still do).
And given the phenomenal success of those cartoons internationally, we were not the only ones in France to enjoy the stories! And as my children can attest, the stories are as relevant today as they were when I was a kid. So thank you and Mr. Uderzo, the sky has fallen on our heads but your stories are immortal. Hopefully you are now having fun with your good friend Mr. Goscinny, the other father of the indomitable Gauls.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I continue to work on Stress Management in this tough period. While I continue my meditation practice, I have focused every day on the Wim Hof Method I mentioned previously. 10 days of breathing and cold showers in a row so far!
I will write a specific post on this as I believe the method can be helpful to others. It will also force me to make more research on the topic.
My journey with the Python language continues as my small GitHub repo can attest, but there is nothing worth blogging about yet. On the other hand, I am progressing on building a small MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) prototype that I will describe soon in an upcoming blog post. This is a way for me to build an infrastructure from which I will extract data for my courses at the University of Oxford on Data Science for Internet of Things.
Given the current situation, I have increased my readings and decided to focus on my “one book per week” challenge which consists in finishing one book every week. The three books that I am currently reading (and I need to finish one by the end of the week) are:
- The essays of Warren Buffett by Lawrence A. Cunningham (though most of the texts are from the legendary investor, extracted from his letters to shareholders)
- The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell
- Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy
They will probably be the topics of upcoming blog posts when I will finish them. That will help me to capture the key points while not having to read the books again ;-).
I still haven’t defined a precise routine for my workouts except that I try to run two to three times a week early in the morning with my dogs. Yesterday I decided to challenge myself and did 1000 step ups on 50 cm high stool with a 9 kg weighted jacket.
This took me 59 minutes and a lot of sweat! While that sounds extreme, this is nothing compared to the challenge some of my Crossfit friends did last week: 1000 burpees. But I also discovered this morning that the real thing is not with 9 kg but with 22,5 kg!
Time to sign off and get back to my MQTT prototype!