A nickel but no dime

I haven't done much for myself or my projects this year. I wanted to go snowboarding more to improve my techniques but March was totally interrupted by me catching Covid19 - and it was surprisingly rough, with night tremors and fever, lack of smell, muscle pain etc. I went once more last week because, against all odds, there is still a lot of snow at high altitudes. I am a bit frustrated because, this being my 2nd season all-time, I believed last year I could improve enough to be confident to go to a bigger resort somewhere in Austria in 2022. Now I'm not sure that'll happen. But I'm investigating a summer alternative that looks like has good transferable skills: mountain-boarding. The problem is that... this would really hurt if you fell anywhere where there isn't grass and soft soil. I can imagine the bruises on asphalt.

I've been trying (well, tbh, a friend of mine keeps pushing me) to improve my guitar skills. I'm expecting a small amp from thomann in a few days (a Joyo Meteor) and an effects pedal. I hope that will boost the fun of learning.

Recently an order of 7 books arrived from UK. I was really excited and couldn't wait to get my hands on them, but knowing myself, this feeling will wear off quickly as I need to force myself implement a discipline of reading and applying knowledge from them regularly. They're mostly technical books.

Hands-On Machine Learning

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms

One of them is Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & TensorFlow. I've had my eyes on this since the beginning of last year. I could get it digitally, but I thought that this is the kind of stuff you need to really get your nose into (also literally, for some reason I love smelling books ). I'm not that hyped about machine learning anymore, as I was a few years ago, but I'd like to understand it better and not break my neck scrolling horizontally through a ton of resources on the interwebs. I hope this will help me.

Another one is Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms. I've watched a JRE podcast with Paul Stamets after seeing randomly a presentation of his. Don't remember how I stumbled upon the guy, but I had some interest for some time in Lion's Mane and recently started drinking mushroom coffee. Yeah it isn't magical or anything, if it has any effects it's very subtle. But anyway, the guy is really interesting and I just absolutely love to hear him talk. He's knowledgeable and, surprisingly, mycology seems to be quite interesting (mushrooms form seemingly intelligent networks). I will try to grow later this year some Lion's Mane at home, and if I succeed maybe other mushrooms as well (legal ones, haha :P, I know what you're thinking).

Speaking of coffee, at some point during winter I watched a lot of videos about making coffee, manual espresso machines etc.
(I reccommend James Hoffmann's YC).
So at some point I decided to buy a coffee syphon to impress my fellow office colleagues. It was the most expensive office impression as of yet. Still, this thing is quite interesting to watch, but I almost never use it as it takes too much time. It's more of a thing to put to work in a social setting, for a coffee ritual etc.Hope you'll have an interesting year guys and gals!
P.S. From my timezone's point of view, I should've posted this yesterday (an hour ago) :D.