Laurence Andrews

Back in the 5k club 🏃‍♂️💪 34:07, so not exactly fast but I’ll take it! Legs were a bit sore still after the first run on Sunday but felt much better. Bright sunny 20°c here so pretty warm. Needed water! Enjoyed it! Ready for more!! 🏃‍♂️

Looking forward to our holiday in a few weeks' time. Ahead of that, decided that it’s time to start taking marathon training seriously. April next year is going to come around very, very quickly… To help decided to have a bit of a booze ban, at least until holiday. Wish me luck!

Yesterday I went on my first run for many months. Concluded that it is time to start getting ready for the London Marathon in 2024. My trusty Apple Watch Series 4 is no longer up to scratch, it works but the battery just doesn’t last long enough and 4km in to the run yesterday it decided to die.

I’ve been in a bit of a love/hate relationship with it recently anyway, especially after buying a traditional watch. I just don’t wear it every day and I don’t really find myself needing the features it has (most used function is pinging my iPhone when I’ve lost it!). When I do use it for running, it always seems to feel ‘good enough’ but not great and the heart rate data on it is pretty sketchy. Linking AirPods and playing music is fantastic though.

So to help get back into the groove I decided to get a proper running watch. Turns out they’re pretty expensive, of course… Love the look for the latest Forerunner and the Fenix 7s Pro looks really good too. Drawing back on what features I actually need, decided to settle on a relatively entry-level watch: Garmin Forerunner 245 Music. It was only £164 which is much cheaper than the flagships and it seems to be able to do everything I need - music, pairing headphones, heart-rate, GPS, bluetooth connectivity, etc. Love the fact the battery should actually last a lot longer too, so will hopefully not have to charge it constantly.

If it works out well then I might consider buying a better model in the future. This shouldn’t be wasted though, just becomes the backup watch for the marathon… 🏃‍♂️😊

Just finished watching Hijack on Apple TV 🫣 Absolutely loved every second of it! Such an exciting Thriller. Maybe not one to watch when you’re on or about to get on a plane!

Finally decompressing from the week. Enjoying a particularly lovely bottle of Malbec from Berry Bros.

Managed to tidy up the garden and took the kiddo swimming yesterday, which she absolutely loved. 😊

Just rejoined MicroBlog after a bit of a hiatus. 🎉Pleased to be back and off of the bird site. Thanks @semaj! Also, a bit of a tough day at work - so time for a glass of French Gamay 🙂🍷

Busy day today, but good progress getting ready for the house move. Took some junk to the tip, took down the Xmas decs, boxed up some garage stuff and dismantled all the shelving. Exhausted! Almost run out of boxes, house looks bare! 😳 Looking forward to the move🤞☺️🏡

📸 Merry Christmas Everyone! Hope you’re all having a lovely, relaxing day ☺️ Charlotte has had a very exciting morning opening all of her Christmas presents! 🎁 🎅🏼

Last day to purchase Apple Care for my new MBP. Still undecided. 🤔 Think it’s unlikely I’m going to break it, but if I do, then I’m really, really going to regret not having Apple Care. Ugh. IDK. 🤷‍♂️

Something with Mb or my theme keeps breaking. I’ve currently got 29 categories configured but they don’t all show up or function. Photos from certain posts are missing completely from the photos page. When I run an import of new If I force a rebuild everything comes back, but once left for a while it stops functioning again. No errors in the log. Seems to be no order to which posts/categories specifically stop working. Posts themselves are still working. Argh. 

Made some great progress with the migration to MicroBlog today. Spent some time configuring custom themes, learnt a lot. Now reasonably happy with how things look and are setup, it’ll need more tweaks, but good start. Hopefully move more posts over tonight 🤞☺️

Happy winter solstice everyone (who above the equator). It gets brighter from here! ☀️😎

Feeling much better and more energised today (despite Charlotte doing her best to keep us up all night), so yesterday must have been post-booster symptoms. 😁

Spent a little time looking at how I can get my historical posts and photos migrated to Mb. If I’m going to go all in then it’s important that I can keep everything in one place. This Mb help post shows how it’s possible to upload markdown files, which is good news (since this is how my current blog’s post are stored) along with what front matter is supported in Microblog (which is Hugo behind the scenes). 

Few take aways..

I’m going to lose my tags. This probably isn’t the end of the world as actually most of my tags should probably be categories anyway. Most of my posts have many tags as the original idea was to help identify any relevant posts on any number of topics. Some basic testing shows that if I try and import a post with several tags as-is then it is processed and shown in Mb as one long category (see image below), this is probably because I just use spaces rather than commas to separate tags, which works fine in Jekyll. Nothing major in the blog relies on tags, there’s a few links, particularly the country page of my blog, which directs to a page with all any posts tagged with that country, but I can restructure that and achieve the same result with Categories. So in the below example, I will remove all tags except Finland. I could keep all tags but I will end up with hundreds and hundreds of categories. 

Re-tagging/categorising will help clear things up a bit too, although there’s going to be some element of manual work. Hopefully it’ll help me reduce the number of categories I use to keep things simple. 

Another piece of front matter I use is ‘redirect_from’ which I setup because the slugs from my old blog don’t correspond to the Jekyll blog. I can live without these, they're not particularly important. I don’t have any logs from Github pages so I don’t know how much they’re used, but I’m guessing they’re basically not used at all anyway. 

I’ll also lose two custom fields I setup, one called ‘history’ which I used to indicate the date of the activity within a post in addition to the publish date, since the two can differ quite a lot. Along with ‘location’ which I intended to indicate where the post is relevant to. Neither is linked in any way. Location I ended up using quite widely, history isn’t used anywhere at all really. The below post about my trip to Belgrade shows both in action.

Another observation is that for images to upload to Mb I need to format them to be absolute URLs, which they are not at present. This should be relatively easy, I just need to run a find and replace for '/assets/' with ‘[andrews.io/assets/'](https://andrews.io/assets/') and we’re good to go. I only use assets for images, so that’s easy. 

Unfortunately many of my posts have the main image as front matter rather than in the body of the post, see below example. This doesn’t see to import right, so I will need to link the first image where this is the case in the body for it to upload properly. 

Another link issue is that there is a fair amount of cross-linking between posts, see the example below. I’m going to need to give this some thought as the uploaded post in Mb takes on a complete new slug format (e.g. micro.andrews.io/2018/11/13/helsinki.html). Keeping these links working isn’t the end of the world, but there is a reason many of them are there. I think I might have to just upload everything, then export a list of these links and go and manually correct them with the correct slugs in Mb. Eventually I’m going to want to move Mb from micro.andrews.io to be andrews.io and so that needs more thinking still. Ugh. 

Last, I really quite like my Archive format. I would love to be able to have an archive page which lists ‘titled’ posts in a similar way in Mb. I use the Archive a lot to look back and quickly reflect on some of the things I did each year based on the title. Maybe this is possible, it’s a bit beyond my knowledge at present. Perhaps I have a category named ‘Important’ or something that then lists these. 

Of course… Design is another topic completely, but one which isn’t at the top of the list. If I can get everything migrated properly I know I can change the design as and when. 

I don’t know how, but somehow I was not aware of the Micro Monday podcast series. Just listened to my first episode, 107: Manton, aka @manton, on new Micro.blog features. Loved it! It’s stuff like this that really makes the Mb community so great to be a part of. 

Sun setting over The River Medway on the shortest day of the year. Glad to get out of the house for a chilly walk with the 🐶after a busy day at work. Looking forward to some time off tomorrow ☺️

Had a bit of a mess around and now migrated 2021’s posts from my main blog over to Mb, was actually relatively painless. Sorted my categories out, although they’re still behind the scenes. Images are all moved, couple of hiccups but all okay. Think I’m going to stick with just using categories for ‘titled’ posts in Mb. 

More and more news reports about another possible lockdown in UK, esp since NL & DE have done so. Who knows..! Either way, the Andrews' are ready and doing our best to avoid going anywhere. Hopefully people will be sensible and we’ll avoid legally-imposed restrictions. 🤞🎄

Can somebody please tell me what’s going on in the world of baby formula? It is so incredibly confusing. Much like the unnecessary situation of having a hundred different options for clothing detergent the same exists in the world of baby formula. Difference is that a decision on the former results in different smelling jeans and a decision on the later seems to affect the physiological development of a tiny human. 

We were told in our NCT antenatal class that all formulas are basically identical as they must meet common nutritional regulations, established by law. So am I trusting some ancient government regulation on our baby’s upbringing? I understand there’s also all sorts of special rules around them not being something that can be discounted in a shop. But what does that mean?

This document on infantmilkinfo.org shows the volume of different products on the market and the pages here list the composition difference between all of them. Am I supposed to understand this? Does everyone not just want their baby to develop properly? Should I be picking the most expensive or the cheapest? Do we need to try them and see what baby prefers? Is the posh one going to give us a better child once she's all grown up?

We’ve so far opted for Aptamil 1st Powder, because it was the nicest looking tin, but it seems (once we looked into it) that the difference in composition is minuscule between that and the Cow & Gate 1st Powder, both manufactured by Danone. The cost is not, the Aptamil is £11.50 and the Cow & Gate is £8.75, that’s a 30% difference! We’re going through baby milk like you wouldn’t believe and so £2.75 a tin is going to add up pretty fast. Is baby going to be better off if we buy the cheaper one and then bung the £2.75/tin info a Junior ISA? Or is that completely irresponsible?

Then there’s the Aldi option, called Mamia which is £6.79 a tin (for a 100g more). That’s a LOT cheaper. It scores essentially exactly the same on it's nutrition chart as the Danone options but is essentially half the price. Only difference is that the Aldi option doesn’t have 'Linoleic acid’ or 'Alpha-linolenic acid’ and a higher whey to casein ratio - is that what matters?

The whey:casein ratio of the protein element does seem to align with pricing, as below, but protein element is only 1.5g of 100ml of milk, so that difference is surely incredibly marginal. The internet informs me that breast milk is around 60:40.

- Aptamil is 50:50
- Cow & Gate is 60:40
- Aldi Mamia is 70:30

Perhaps the other consideration is environmental, both Aptamil and Aldi list Palm Oil on the ingredients list, but Cow & Gate doesn’t. Maybe let’s not go there..  

The answer is, I don’t know! I think we’re going to use up what we have in the cupboards which is the rest of a tin of Aptamil, then two tins or Cow & Gate (which are on order for delivery tomorrow) and then switch to the Aldi option provided that’s fine after Christmas. The saving is pretty significant and it seems silly to spend money on a more expensive option that is essentially the same.

Hopefully we’re not being irresponsible parents. 

Bleh. Not feeling super great today, not sure if it’s the after effects of the Booster on Saturday or something else. Exhausted, achey and struggling to focus. 😩👎 (LFT is negative) Two days of work left until Xmas, not long, I can do it!!

Had my booster jab first thing this morning, I rescheduled from yesterday. Very fast - there was a short queue outside, once in, my name was crossed off the list. Another short queue inside, into a room, check name/DOB, check ok, jab, see you later. 😁💉🦠 Done!

Still can’t decide if it’s worthwhile continuing to host my full blog at andrews.io and then having a separate micro.andrews.io via micro.blog. There’s a fair few things I’d miss by moving all to Mb but it’s really annoying having two places for everything.

Booster booked for Friday! 😁💉🦠

Thank you to a colleague for suggesting this: ezifeed.com

Fingers crossed that it lives up to the hype 🤞😁🍼

In the pub to calm down. Bleh.