G'day {{contact.first_name}}! Sunday Surprise incoming (22Aug21)
Aug 22, 2021 1:31 pm
G'day !
Hope you're staying safe where ever you're reading this from. Melbourne is still in lockdown and has crossed the 200 days total in lockdown just last week. 😖 The silver lining is that vaccination rates are finally picking up with Australia adminstering something like 300,000 vaccines/day. Anyway, more ramblings below...
As always, a small favour? Could you forward this newsletter to just 3 people that you think would like one of the articles? It helps A LOT! If you're the friend reading this, click the link below to join! Glad to have you here!
In this week's email...
- Week in the Life - read on the blog
- Charity - Help Afghanistan
- Gadgets & Tech - Notion (free)
- Read - One hotdog takes 36 minutes off your life (3min)
- Watch - Why fish are dropped out of planes in Utah (~3min)
- Quote - Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
Week in the life
Having had most of the week off, it's been a nice change in pace and also just very relaxing not having to check my calendar and see where I'm meant to be for the day. Most of the time, a week feels like long enough a break. Not this time though! I think I left it waaaaaayyyy too long and hence I'm already planning the next one!
During this time, I picked up learning programming yet again with Python as the language of choice. There's an awesome course that I've been doing which breaks down the concepts simply to the point where a beginner like myself can jump in and learn the basics quickly.
While it's hard to see on the low quality GIF above, this is the few lines of code I was proud of yesterday. It basically is an algorithm that lets my little red robot start from the far left bottom corner and "jump" over the random hurdles to the finish flag. It seems to give me immense satisfaction seeing some of the coding work!
The cats have enjoyed having me home but more on that over on the blog...
Charity
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-21/how-to-help-people-in-afghanistan/100393916
Apart from contacting your member of parliament, if you're in any position to do so, consider donating via the charities listed in the article by the ABC. I personally am contributing through the UNHCR and Care.
One of my friends, echolily is a musician who is contributing all the royalties from Spotify towards this crisis. So maybe check out her music and help by listening to some cool tunes?
Gadgets & Tech
Notion (free)
It's a bit of a mix of Evernote, Google docs and to-do list. It's super power is the fact that you can use it for writing and task management in one app AND allow shared editing etc and all for FREE!
Overall, I've really liked using it and will likely use this to manage any bigger projects going forward.
PREVIOUS/OTHER PRODUCTS
Some previous things that have been featured:
- TirTyl Eco-friendly soap - Environmentally friendly hand soaps that minimise the impact both in terms of compact/essential packaging and chemicals!
- ZeroCo cleaning products - Eco friendly cleaning solutions that has other household products that also diverts ocean bound plastics.
Read
One hotdog takes 36 minutes off your life (3min)
It divided the foods into ones that would increase or decrease your healthy life expectancy. Hot dogs with their high amounts of processed meats equated to reducing your health span by 36minutes per hot dog!
Now with all these studies that try to have associations, there are a lot of assumptions and should be taken with a grain of salt, but this was a novel way of expressing food choices!
Books I'm currently reading
Stories of your life and Others - Great book of short stories with a sci-fi theme that are just long enough but short enough for a quick read before bed time
Watch
Why fish are dropped out of planes in Utah (~3min)
Turns out in the years before planes were used for this process, they sent park rangers with water flasks full of fish on horses to do the same process!
I found the most interesting thing about this process to be just how much thought was put into not harming the fish or the local environment.
Quote I'm pondering
"Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth."
- Muhammed Ali
This quote was a good reminder that there are countless people less fortunate than you at any given moment. The world has had people in past in far dire circumstances but generally, we've helped one another. As a species that is probably our only super power since we're definitely not the strongest or fastest animal.
So in these uncertain times, I'm hoping to remind myself to be more of service. On that note, if there's something that you think I can help with, let me know, ok?
On that note, , I hope you're staying safe and sound. Let me know what you thought of this week's newsletter as feedback is always welcome!
Bye for now!
- Raffy
PS - What was your favourite part of the email? Let me know with 1 click! Every week I'll go and check the feedback and tweak things as requested!
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