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February 2024 In Review | posts | /2024/03/04/february-2024-in-review/ |
It was a pretty typical February for us this year in the sense that it was pretty rubbish and both myself and Mrs R were sick for a lot of it.
Flu February
Regular readers may have noticed that I've not been posting much this month. Towards the end of the first full week of Feb I was stricken with Flu. Now, I've heard people say "it's not real flu unless you think you're dying" and laughed it off and I've had heavy colds before. Now, I've had real influenza I really do get it. On the first 2-3 days I had very high fever and muscle aches. Then, I had those symptoms plus nausea and sickness for a further 3 days. Normally if you get a stomach bug it passes within 24 hours. After 3 days solid of feeling this way you really do start to think "am I dying?"
Thankfully, I started to recover after about 5 days and now, almost 3 weeks later I almost feel human again. However, the struggle has been real. One of the interesting things was that do get the flu vaccine on an annual basis so I guess this year I was just super unlucky and got a strain that I was not protected against. Or, perhaps, as my doctor said, it would have been even worse without the vaccine (I almost can't comprehend how bad that would be).
Back at Work
After a week off and a second week doing half days and sleeping throughout the afternoon, I returned to work "as normal" last week.
We are currently doing some interesting work exploring few-shot and zero-shot models for classification in use cases where we would normally be looking to collect large volumes of data to help the client train their models. The trade-off is that many of these models are quite heavy to run compute-wise so I've been doing some work looking at Huggingface Optimum to quantize models so that they can run in less memory and with fewer CPU/GPU cycles. I've also been playing with Nvidia Triton for deploying models.
Take Note
I've been exploring personal knowledge management (yes again sigh) and playing with some tools and approaches. I have started experimenting with Silverbullet which has a steep learning curve but provides some pretty nifty features out of the box and plays really nicely with other Markdown-based PKM systems like Obsidian and Foambubble. I've also set it up so that any notes that I set as public: true in the frontmatter are automatically published to my digital garden. I have added some sensible exclude and ignore rules so that I don't publish anything I want to keep private.
I was playing with the idea of moving away from wordpress for my main site again but I don't want to sink loads of time into re-designing my main website - especially since I only did it 6 months ago.
At Home
With both of us being sick, we haven't had much opportunity to achieve much in our family life this month. However, we did book some holidays and trips for later in the year. Being deathly sick allowed me to lose a further 2kg I'm now 97kg (down from 105kg at my heaviest) which I am pretty happy with.
While I was at my sickest I couldn't even bring myself to watch TV or read but either side I did manage a few things:
I finally finished Consider Phelebas which as I mentioned previously I had been struggling to read. At some point the pace picked up and I started to gel with the characters but honestly, it was a real struggle to get there. When I did finally finish the book, I found the ending utterly unsatisfying and it made the whole book feel a bit moot and pointless. I think that might be what the author was going for but it's made me think twice about picking up any more of the culture books. I've since started reading The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky which I'm really enjoying.
I finished Avenue 5 which is a sitcom about a bunch of idiots in space with some heavy hitters (Hugh Laurie, Josh Gadd, Zack Woods, Lenora Crichlow, Daisy Mae Cooper). I really enjoyed the show and I was sad that it got cancelled after two series.
Hopes for March
I'd love for March to not be another write-off due to sickness. Last year we got a bunch of coughs and colds from about Mid-Feb until the end of March and then I got COVID over easter.
This week we have some friends and family catch ups and UK Mother's day. Next week I will be delivering a guest lecture on Software development best practices at Warwick Business School and then the next day we will be going up to Edinburgh for a mini-break and to explore the city.