It's already November?

Sometimes time flies by quickly and somehow the last month was one of those times. But a lot happened the last few weeks, so let me get into some of those things:

SoaPatrickEight

As you might have noticed, some things changed slightly around here, I added a key visual on the right side which kinda hints at what I’m going for with this new design. The bubbles, yes bubbles, are a throwback to an old SoaPatrick Logo and a design idea I also incorporated into the Intro I once created (I just realized, both are not included in the Soap Factory, need to do that). Now I’m not done with that yet but it gives me ideas on how to finish it when I actually use it.

I also change the navigation on mobile devices, gone is the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen and it’s now moved to the right side. This way I can add more menu items without worrying about space. There’s an idea to have a setting where each can individually choose the placement of the navigation bar, left or right side, depending on if they are left or right-handed.

But for now, I enjoy those changes, makes things fresh around here.

Covid-19

Because a friend of mine got infected with Covid-19 and because I had contact with that person I isolated myself for 10 days. I never had any symptoms but staying at home for 10 days straight sure was strange. I mean I love my home and I love just staying at home and chilling or doing creative stuff, but having to stay at home and not being able to shop for groceries was different. But I’m still healthy and for that, I’m very happy.

But I am more careful now because I go so close to the virus and I think really dodged a bullet there. I mean I now know people who got sick, people who stopped smelling or tasting anything. I mean I always treated the virus with respect but now I do so even more.

Private Vlogs

During those isolation days, I started doing video journals or vlogs, I did that once already, way back in 2010 actually, but only for a short time and back then with the MacBook webcam. Nowadays I have a Sony a7III as a video camera, so I was excited to use the camera and the whole lighting equipment I have to actually make it look good. Another reason for that step was my mac mini which didn’t have a microphone or video input and with home-office being a big thing today, I had to find a way to make that work so I can easily have online meetings.

So I bought some additional equipment to make that work and the idea now is to record daily videos (yeah I know, me and daily tasks and I already missed one yesterday, damn) and in order for me to actually do that, the whole setup needs to be simple. With the current setup I have, I can record a video with a good lighting setup and excellent video and audio quality. within two minutes. With such a setup, I see myself doing that on a ‘daily’ basis.

Now I’m not sure where this will lead, maybe someday I will actually start a podcast, who knows, but for now, I’m using my camera and recording videos and it replaced my daily blog posts actually because I now talk into the camera about stuff that I’m working on.

I’m actually already thinking about an intro video, a logo, and lots of other stuff. And everything I’m thinking of gets recorded, vlog-style. So I’m excited about where this will lead.