Weekly notes 07/2025
Table of Contents
Thumbnail image: Bradfield Park is a small park just off Milsons Point train station featuring a statue of a dog. Occasionally, the dog is known to carry sticks or frisbees.
What’s been happening #
It’s been another hot and humid week. On Tuesday, we had a massive storm - something to the tune of getting a month’s worth of rain in an hour and half. It was incredibly windy as well - I had gone to the gym to train when it was just about to start raining and by the time I was done, the storm was in full swing. I had to wait for a while before I could leave the gym. Looking at the forecast, more rain was on the horizon so I decided to walk back - there’s ample awning on the buildings so I thought I wouldn’t get wet. I was wrong. The wind was so strong that it was blowing the rain sideways and I got drenched. We didn’t have rain for the rest of the week though.
I found out that Hans Zimmer is coming to Sydney in April and I was pretty excited about it. I’ve always wanted to see him live and glad that I managed to get tickets for the concert and can’t wait for it.
My workouts have been going well. I hit some personal bests, managing to do 65kg barbell deadlift, 15kg on dumbbell bench press and 12.5kg on a dumbbell shoulder press. I’m happy with the progress I’m making. I’ll probably work with the same set of weights for a couple of weeks before I increase them. My trainer also got me to do tempo squats - 3 seconds down, 1 second pause and 3 seconds up. It unlocked a new pain in my legs that I didn’t know existed. My trainer believes it will help me with my squat form and strength.
Work was busy this week - as the scrum master I had to work to get the next sprint planned out while running the rest of end-of-sprint ceremonies. I also had to work on some things that came up unexpectedly.
Our guitar classes started this week. I’d barely practiced in the past few weeks, so I wasn’t hopeful of doing well! We started our class with PIMA movements and then did some practice for some basic chords. Luis, our instructor, taught us about blues structures, the chord progressions of a blues song and we also played a blues song. Our class has overlap with Luis' advanced guitar class students and with the combined class, we played Eric Clapton’s Wonderful Tonight couple of times - once with the chords and the other with just the melody. My fingers still hurt after this class - need to practice some more and maybe get the guitar tweaked a bit.
After the classes, Jo and I picked up some fruits from the North Sydney Produce Market and were wondering what to do for lunch. We initially thought of going to a cafe near the North Sydney train station but I asked Jo if she’d want to walk a bit further towards Kirribilli and check out the taco place and she agreed. After lunch, we walked a bit more towards the Kirribilli Lookout and then walked back home. It was a nice walk and we got some good views of the city.
What I’ve been playing #
I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization VII this week. I completed and won my first solo game - getting a science victory with Himiko, Queen of Wa as my leader. I also started another multiplayer game with Kush and Abhay. I’ll have a longer post on my thoughts on Civilization VII. I’m having fun with it, but there’s a lot of papercuts that Firaxis needs to address.
And of course, I have to give a shout out to Kush for this amazing meme he made to my comment on “We should get Patali’s headshot in game”
What we ate #
El Classico Tacos, Kirribilli: A taco place that Jo has been meaning to go since a while now, but never got to. We ordered the pork tacos, chicken quesadilla and jalapeno poppers. The food was pretty OK, nothing awesome. Mexican food in Australia still manages disappoint us. We will probably not return to the place.
Bon Pollo, North Sydney: Came across this small Lebanese place when we were on our evening walks, we visited the place first last week and really loved the food and wanted to go back. The Adana Kebab is probably the best lamb kebab I’ve had, and the grilled chicken and hummus was pretty good as well.
Music of the Week #
I love it when YouTube throws recommendations from a decade ago out of nowhere. This live performance from MGMT covering their Electric Feel is pretty good.
Link of the week #
I came across this nice series of articles from Adrian Cockcroft on how he built his career. The series is called What Adrian Did Next and makes for a good read.
This week last year #
One of the reasons I started writing weekly notes was because it was nice to know what I was doing last year around the same time. Last year’s weekly notes reminds me we had just moved over to North Sydney and were busy packing/unpacking. Here’s the weekly notes from last year.
Thanks for reading. #
Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.
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