Monthly Review: July 2015

I tend to think of time in weeks rather than months, so most of my months become somewhat meshed together and lately I have found it a bit difficult to remember things that happened within a specific month. Work has also been keeping me on my toes – let’s see how I go this time.

The three things I’m most proud of from this past month are:

  1. Learning JavaScript by doing an online course, which helped me sharpen my skills. I didn’t give up when it came to doing a JavaScript related task at work – it was very challenging but it turns out I did it in a shorter time than people expected and they were very impressed.
  2. Finally cleaning up my archives page and making some changes to my blog. I’ve got some more updates coming. :)
  3. The photographs I took at Blur’s concert.

The three things I’m most grateful for from this past month are:

  1. Colleagues’ help at work.
  2. Apple Music. I’m still on the free trial now, but I have to admit that it has been giving me marvellous recommendations and new music to listen to in the ‘For You’ section.
  3. People who you may never have met, but lend a helping hand for you regardless. In particular, I’m referring to some of my trouble checkers in the categories I am staffing at TFL.

The lesson I learned and am carrying forward with me from this past month is:

If many people tell you that you are doing a good job – you’re doing a good job. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

Because I am brave and wonderful, here are three new/scary things I will do in August:

  1. Meditating.
  2. Oil pulling (look it up!).
  3. Learn some Dutch on Duolingo.

Comments on this post

Hi Georgie! Well done with learning Javascript and the concert photos were crisp and vibrant. Love it!

I’m still ambivalent when it comes to the Apple Music. I’ve been a Spotify user for like 4-5 years and I never looked back. I’ll probably check it out just for curiosity’s sake :)

Thanks Charles! :D

I have used Spotify for the last year-and-a-half. It took some convincing for me to get into the music streaming thing, because I loved organising and buying my own music in iTunes. Spotify and Apple Music have their differences – I am missing the shared playlists in Spotify and the ability to revisit your ‘Loves/Likes’. Apple Music has just done a terrific job with the recommendations. The one thing I already don’t like is that you have to save your liked music to your library manually (you can’t look at all the things you have clicked the love heart on). Also, the ‘Connect’ thing that artists have is like a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram feed so at present I don’t see anything super special about that particular feature.

True, that we are often too hard on ourselves, which I am also guilty of, but it’s nice to be reminded that compliments go a long way. That they are extremely beneficial to everyday life, and if someone gives you one, then there is a good chance that you’re doing good things, so just accept it.

I think that’s a wonderful concept to remember and take with you.

Good luck with your goals in August! ^^ Certainly a new month to do new things!

Man oh man I have been considering trying oil pulling! Please write about your experiences when you do it! I’m trying to figure out if I should use sesame oil or coconut oil.

Will do, lady! I have heard that coconut oil has added benefits. I don’t have any at the ready so I might be trying olive oil first up. If I get really into it, I’ll try other oils. Don’t want to buy a whole pot and dislike it to all hell and have a random pot of coconut oil sitting there for no reason… :P

:) This is such a great idea to see the things that you have done in the previous month and to hopefully be proud of yourself as well. :D I think you’re awesome, so I hope you do too. :D

Love reading these monthly reviews. Well done on the JavaScript and the concert pics :) And I’m also someone who is hard on themselves/a perfectionist. It sounds like you’re doing really well in your job though. :D Be proud – you’ve come a long way :)

Ooooh, I’ve been learning a bit of Turkish on Duolingo, it’s a pretty good site actually. It uses a lot of repetition but i think that’s a good thing. ?yi ?anslar! (Good luck!)

Haha, the font you’ve chosen obviously doesn’t have certain Turkish letters. I said ‘iyi shanslar’ except capital i (I with a dot on top) and they have a specific letter for the ‘sh’ sound :D

The font is still the same. :) I think it might be more of an encoding problem rather than a font problem.

I noticed Duolingo does a lot of repetition but the education centre I used to work in asked children to repeat their worksheets at least three times. Rather than seeing it as repetition they saw it as ‘practice’, haha.

Ahhh yes, I see!! I have a friend in Turkey that I speak with and he told me that the dotless i letter in particular breaks computer systems lol….

Yes, it’s definitely good practice! You’ll notice that you can strengthen modules once you’ve done them, so then you’re not forgetting things so easily. :) I have been a bad girl and need to strengthen quite a few of my modules :/

Congrats on JavaScript! I feel like it is a never ending learning curve, but I love it. I have been working on jQuery lately, since I learn JavaScript in two university courses I have (one from last year and the next one this year in winter term). I feel as long as the basics are understood and I know how things work I can figure out syntax from there.

I have not tried apple music yet, I use the free version of Spotify (I do not mind commercials) and I still download the songs themselves because Christopher usually want’s CD’s for the truck and car (both 2006 so no bluetooth capabilities :( )

I think they way we grow is by challenging ourselves, we just have to learn what is a healthy challenge and what is not. I am a perfectionist (therefore I constantly tweak my blog and posts themselves) and so I need to learn to chill on that. Better now that I was in high school though.

I signed up for Nicole’s newsletter too once I saw your last month round up. I really love these PDF’s she emails out.

I have the paid version of Spotify because Nick gifted it to me, I don’t think I would be missing too much if I had the free version though. I did once get the same advertisement four times in a row though, hahahah.

Apple Music does have a trial going, but most of the reviews are not very good. I would say it is still worth trying. I buy my own music and still like to get CDs every now and then, and I also took care of my iTunes library meticulously, putting so much time and effort into it – so the ‘music streaming’ hasn’t completely rubbed off on me yet.

I am a perfectionist myself! We definitely learn as we grow older, but sometimes we need to be less hard on ourselves – I know I have often been stressed out because of that.

That’s good to hear – Nicole writes a lot of inspirational stuff and emails quite regularly, too!