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SMART goals

So this was originally something I came across while working in the civil service. I came across it years ago at the beginning of my career after leaving university and it's actually over 40 years old, but still we have people not doing this! I have also come across it in a CBT context for setting goals for self-help.

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Computer Games!

So I decided to blog what was going on with my life right now and what I have achieved recently. Well, it's not been a time of massive accomplishments. I've set up a residency in North London for Drag Bingo which has required a great deal of effort, but is quite fragile and transient. If you're around Palmer's Green check out drag bingo in the Fox.

Confidence

So people used to tell me to be more confident. I often get quite defensive about this. Because frankly I feel quite a lot of confidence. As I look back over myself I think I acted with loads of confidence. I went and did a Law degree with little to no evidence I would be able to do well in a subject that is not geared towards my strengths. I showed up a board games club I had never been to alone not knowing anyone there and made friends. I have done the same with kink events. Pretty confident thing to do if you ask some people. So what was encouraging people to suggest this? Well, my hang ups about my body were a significant part. I ended up wondering what people were referring to and listening to audiobooks and online Youtube videos about how to meet their expectations. I wondered if a person could write a pathway to confidence.

CBT Certificate

My old CBT certificate had expired so I worked through a Udemy course to get a new one. Not the best course in my opinion, but it newed my certificate so I am pleased.

Weight Loss

I recently hit my biggest weight ever. I was actually going hiking once a month and going to the gym three times a week, but I was still eating trash and I managed to weight gain. Some of it will have been muscle, but it feels like I would be kidding myself if I put down all my weight gain to that. I do seem to be loosing belly (albeit very slowly), but I was getting heavier. So I thought I would change up my diet a bit again try intermittent fasting and keep a track of it here.

Who I am?

Okay so this is a blurb for the Life Coach page, but to describe myself in a nutshell here's what I have to say.

Qualified Mental Health First Aider

I got myself qualified in mental health first aid.

Learn Mobile Photography Technologies For Incredible Photos

I just completed a great course on Udemy. I have been learning how to build my body confidence with posing for photos. Some people just seem to take better photos than me and often the pictures I take do not build my confidence as much as I would like, so I decided to undertake this course which is focused on Samsung phones.

Kindness Method

I am currently working through a book called "the Kindness Method" with the help of a friend. This is an incredible book! Shahroo Izadi takes ideas, which in hindsight seem really simple and obvious, but which are so heavily neglected in so much Life Coaching.

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WiX Toolset Course

So the WiX Toolset consists of 5 tools used to help software developers move easily between written code and windows installers. It consists of:

Learning Italian

Learning Catalan went incredible well. I reached 150 days of doing it on DuoLingo just before going on holiday. I was pleased to be able to speak to some shop owners and waitresses in Catalan. They seemed very pleased too, in fact, one thought I was living there and couldn't believe I was just there on holiday or that I had only been learning for a few months. Either that or, more likely, he was just being polite. But I feel it is less than polite to show up in Catalonia and speak Spanish, the language of what they view as technically a different country, a country that repressed and claimed to own them, particularly in a time when there is growing support for Catalonian independence.

Keeping Kung-fu stretching consistent

I want to get back on top of my kung fu game and I have wanted to do so for while now. I made a few recordings for me to listen to in order to make sure I'm working at a consistent rate and not forgetting anything.

Completed Clean Coding in C#

I completed the course Clean Coding in C# outside of work hours.

Learning Catalan on DuoLingo

I have always loved language learning and frankly, I want a job programming for language learning applications. The only reason I haven't gone and got one is basically I live in the wrong country for Rosetta Stone, MindSnacks, DuoLingo and Memrise don't seem to be interested in me. Well, it's their loss really because there's a level of enthusiasm and can-do attitude that is essentially unparalleled among my peers.

C# Development Fundamentals Path Pluralsight

I really did not need to do this course. In fact, I teach it in person to my juniors better than this course teaches it. But while I have a Pluralsight subscription, I figured I might as well put it on in the background and see if I learn something. It was better than listening to Heart FM while I work, I tell myself.

LGB Alliance included in National Lottery Community

I am very concerned about the inclusion of the LGB Alliance in the National Lottery fund. So far it has only received £9000. It is a charity whose funds are frequently used in an attempt to defend transphobic people, who lose their jobs due to expressing trans-hate in the workplace. Yes, this group promotes transphobia in the workplace particularly as their leader was dismissed from her Chambres for transphobic comments. Their slogans seek to exclude trans people and promote hate toward trans people.

Drag Idol

Dolores appeared in Drag Idol! It was quite a nightmare to get ready for and very nerve-wracking to perform in front of peers. But it was done and achieved, she received some good feedback, but did not get far in the competition.

The Pragmatic Programmer 20th-anniversary edition

Do I really need to read the pragmatic programmer 20th anniversary edition? I mean I read the original one years ago and loved it. So why waste the time? Well to be honest because I loved it! Why not see what I forgot and what is new?

Correct English

I have recently taken action to improve my English. It has been a few weeks of work and for my own sake, it seems worth recording here, why not? A huge part of my spirituality is my obsession with self-improvement and communication is a skill that everyone needs to work on. So here, I am learning about English.

New iNCD Website

Doing some work for mum, re-thinking and mega simplifying her website. I also want to try and make it very simple for the Twitter generation. So far we created a great landing page video for introducing NCD.

Azure Services and Concepts

This is another notes dump. I'm working through a Pluralsight course called Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900). These are some of my notes from doing this course.

Assembly Language

So if you couldn't tell I'm actually a computer programmer by day. By night I'm a bit of a drag mother, who loves board games, mysticism, mystic artistic expression and to engage in philosophical and religious study. (Yes I am all over the place.) But ... computer programmer.

Adding Azure App Insights logging to Durable Functions

Firstly, when I approached this my question was "what are durable functions"? That question is best answered by beginning with what are Azure Functions. I need to prefix this with I am not someone who is in the know. I am making these notes as I learn things and I am no expert. It is likely this will contain information that is outdated or just plain wrong. Also I don't plan to keep it up-to-date, this is simply a dumping ground for my notes.

Primitive Obsession

I just learned this expression... I was complaining about the code using only basic datatypes and my boss agreed that it looked like "primitive obsession". My reaction: What??? there's a term for that???

Equivalent of a Computer Science Degree

Okay so I make no attempt to hide that I have no Computer Science degree. I am actually Law LL.B graduate. But why should a company hire me as their next developer when they have potential opportunities to hire someone who studied it at university? Well if this is the only criteria they can compare on then they shouldn't. Hopefully my years of experience as a developer where I regularly push myself to learn new technology should really be what stands me in good stead, but often that is hard to prove.

Stand-up Comedy Course

So the weird thing is I have actually written and delivered a course on stand-up comedy for drag queens and I use stand up for when I am doing drag. So why am I doing a course on it? Well, this really was my opportunity to check for gaps in my knowledge. I figure if someone is well received on Udemy for delivering a course then it must have some good content and I can use that to add any little extras to my stand-up course.

SRE

What is SRE?

These are just my notes about Systems Reliability Engineering. This is something I have chosen to study as part of my work for a company called BankBI. By all means read it if you will, but I'm not really writing for readability. This is just a notes-drop from various courses.

Couch to 5k

I didn't really want to post about this until it was showing some signs of success. But I began to work through Zombie Run 5k. I found it hard, to say the least. I began to cause knee injury and cause some muscular issues. But that's not stopping me. I have given myself space to recover, while maintaining a regular brisk walk daily for 30 minutes and I am about to get back into the saddle. It's been going on and off for months now. But having only done walking for a couple of weeks I am ready to go back to running again. However in doing so, I must recognise that my body is very unfit, I have high blood pressure and I need to take the course at a slower speed than most people because I need to achieve more changes in my body than most people do.

Singing Course

So anyone that knows me. I sing... a lot. But my singing is mostly average. I find I often get moisture in the lungs, probably from being overweight and the impact this has on the heart. So I have to deal with a few issues. I hope to use this article to record my work as I go and keep me aware of whatever the last thing I was doing when I come back to the course. I find blogging helps me keep focused somehow and I like to be open with people about myself so I might as well publish the results.

Human Computers

I have always been fascinated by the novel and the universe of Dune by Frank Herbert. One of the concepts in his novel is that a long time ago AI rose up, enslaved mankind and mankind freed himself. So it is based in a time where computers are banned. Interestingly enough human computers exist called "Mentats". These are people expertly trained to do calculations.

Training in Usability

Naturally for someone in my position where too often I find myself writing a web UI, it would be really useful if I could say I have some skills in Web UI Usability. I am hoping to achieve this through reading a couple of books and an online course. That should be enough to qualify me as at least knowing more than average Joe off the street. I will leave my notes here from my studies along with my own experiences.

Reading “Being Geek” by Michael Loop

So sometimes when I am reading a book I write a little review of it and summarise the information. For some of the books I'm reading they're just not relevant to the other blogs and page I write so, well they might end up dumped here for the sake of having some where to put them. Hopefully they will be relevant to what I am doing with my life and my career.

Basic Websites for Family

Spent a few days setting up some basic websites for some family of mine. So while my mum's website suffers mostly under the hand of people who think they knew how to run a website changing and she desperately needs updating I'm avoiding the unsurmountable task of updating her NCD-UK website with no media to put on it.

Reading Dune Prequels in Spanish

So I learned some Spanish when I was young. I used to be quite good at it, thanks to Michelle Thomas Spanish and the odd bit of practice with my Grampa who retired to Spain. I would like to chuck out all my old learn Spanish books and to do that I want to officially say "I speak, understand, read and write Spanish as well as I could ever want to". I think that if I could say I have a 10,000 word vocabulary and I have read a few novels in Spanish then that would do and would help me clear out some of my old books, CDs and cassette tapes (yes I've had some books for learning languages since when Cassette tapes were still a thing).

Machu Picchu

Me and my best friend Charita are up for climbing Machu Picchu we have set our sights high and it's quite a lofty goal to go along the Incan trail. We have never done anything like it before. In the mean time we are looking at climbing in the UK starting with Box Hill on 22nd March 2020 and Blencathra on 3rd April 2020.

Third Kung Fu exam

So I completed my Third major Kung Fu exam on Sunday 2nd February 2020 and passed! I'm very glad. I am mostly impressed that I have kept this up consistently and I'm now well into my third year.

Learning Arabic

I always wanted to learn Arabic which was a family language as a kid. I had great difficulty learning the Arabic spoken by my family as a kid. Everytime I had a book to help me learn, my grandmother would always say the same thing "no that's not proper Arabic. The Egyptian Arabic is the proper Arabic." She was mostly wrong, but the truth was I didn't really want to learn MSA, I wanted to learn my family's dialect so I could speak to my cousins and family.

The student surpasses the master

Okay, he hasn't surpassed me just yet... but I wrote in March about having a junior called Gareth. I look forward to the end of the month, where I not only celebrate his birthday with him, but also his second month in a programming role! Well done to Gareth who got his first programming role.

I have a junior!

So You may have seen my "I made it" post in 2016 when I joined the ranks of programmers, something I had been trying to do for a while. Well, it is time to turn around and give back to the communities I have formed around me and give them the opportunity that I had to seize for myself.

Dragged Around London: Christmas Charity Event

For the second year in a row, Dragged Around London has announced it's Christmas Charity event.

This year the Drag Queens of Dragged Around London are holding it Upstairs at the Ritzy Cinema, Brixton.

Arduino Programming

Most of the coding I do is very high level and so far removed from the physical technology I often feel like I don't actually know the basics of what my code is doing on system level. I feel like I want to round out my programming knowledge so I'm working with a fun Arduino and I bought a collection of LEDs, resisters, capacitors, a bread board, a motor, a sensor and I think I'm going to have a little bit of fun!

Dragged Around London is Family

Probably not one of the best pictures of us, but an indication of the effect a group of people can make working together yet encouraging each others diversity. Together we brought attention to the Outside Project and raised awareness of them and frankly we will never stop doing that so long as they are continually supporting the community.

Kung Fu Foundation Complete

After months of hard work I finally managed to get my red belt. That means sparring and harder work to come. We are all very proud of ourselves and I want to take this moment to state no matter what someone's size or physical fitness if they truly want to they can set aside some time to learn a sport. Even someone like me!

Dragged Around London Ticket system

So as you may have gathered Dragged Around London is a company that I helped form, of which, I own half. It has lots of potential to put on the books and we hope to have more and more tours and events coming up.

Psycho spender

I am looking into the psychology of money. It's an interesting minefield which I don't know why no-one looked at this before. A silly movie called Confessions of a Shopaholic briefly touched on the subject, but didn't look at it much at all. I feel like this is something that should be taught at schools. I know people with real spending problems. I'm a major psycho-spender at times!

Piano

Also in the new year, I took up piano. I was able to race through my first grade 1 sight reading book from years ago with relative ease, but the more advanced exercising in the grade 2 sight reading book gave me trouble. I'm much further behind where I was as a 16-year-old kid, but it's clearly like riding a bike stuff keeps coming back to me like I already know it. Even things I found difficult as a kid are easier now.

Dragged Around London

So I did drag what seems like a long time ago... well more came of it than I ever planned. I am now the proud owner of Dragged Around London. A company that provides drag-queen-lead tours of London. Business is picking up faster than I expected and it's hard to keep it as a part-time project in my spare time. This could be big, but I doubt it would be lucrative.

I made it!

After a year of continuous work I managed to secure a job in IT doing what I wanted to do: development. The road isn't over yet as much as I wish it was. I just need to convince this company that they really want to keep me as a programmer and in order to do that I am taking a lot of work home.

Oracle Certified Java Programmer

So it doesn't sound exciting but it is more exciting than it sounds. Basically I've been coming home from work every night and working hard until 11 o'clock at night to pass this professional exam. Studying... groans... but the truth is, this course is harder and more intricate and more complicated than anything on a bachelor's IT degree and I am conquering it. My result of the first half were 93% when 60% was a pass. I am clearly meant for this type of work!

Drag Queen in the making

So we have been watching too much Ru Paul's drag race and my ex partner decided to come up with a birthday idea that we dress up as drag queens and do lip syncing. Well if you know me, you would know I don't lip sync; I sing!

Learning to Drive!

Finally I have passed my text. 10 years ago I failed and now I have conquered.

E-commerce venture

A new small shop in Glastonbury is looking to get online with E-commerce capability and I'm helping them. I'm very happy to use WordPress to give them access to their own Website to write what they like on the pages of their website and I'm going to use OSCommerce to provide the framework for the online shop.

Yale Old Testament course

I am currently working through an incredible course published online by Yale University. It appears to be mostly the efforts of Christine Hayes who demonstrates a vast understanding of the culture within which our western religions grew up and matured. She balances many different views concerning the origins of biblical texts and presents views that many religious zealots avoid. These views often seem potentially heretic or deviating from standardized Judaism and Christianity but they are views based more on archaeological discovery than most other forms of religious doctrine.

iNCD website

iNCD and NCD form a unique company in which my mum is on the board, so I am honoured to have the opportunity to work with them and humbled by their acceptance of my advice. I would not have had the opportunity to work in such a leading role on the marketing strategy of this company, if it wasn't for my mum noticing my extensive knowledge of digital products and their use in the marketing process.