Personal - Sam Hardacre

Personal

A collection of 30 posts

Life in Numbers

Life in numbers: January '23

The On The Side community has been pretty active this month with lots of blog posts and links to pages on personal sites which cover off ongoing stats for things like health and fitness, films and podcasts. While I debate whether to set up my own dedicated stats page, I

Bound to books

A discussion in the OnTheSide Slack community was prompted by a post by Sam King about getting rid (or keeping hold) of physical media like CDs and DVDs. The discussion also turned to books with some members getting rid of books after reading them but I really struggle to do

Reclaiming my Likes playlist

It was a number of years ago now and I can't quite recall the exact circumstances but there was a period of time when Spotify limited the number of artists/albums I could save to my Library. Maybe I was on a free account at the time? I dunno... Anyway,

2023 Goals

Today I recorded an episode of Make Life Work with Si and Mike and the focus of the episode was a bit of reflection on 2022 and looking ahead to 2023. I've already set out my reading goal for 2023 (which, I forgot to mention on the podcast!) and the

Reading goal for 2023

I didn't do too badly in 2022 for reading, at least when it comes to comics. I had a steady flow of reading material throughout the year but I wasn't really paying any attention to logging what I'd read and when so aside from a few notable reads, I can't

20 in 2020

In the years prior to 2020, my reading habit had taken a bit of a nose-dive. I'd pick up a book every so often and work through it, but I wasn't reading nearly as much as I wanted to. With 2020 being a nice round number, I decided to aim

All alone

I've had this on my "to write" list for a while. I honestly don't know why I feel compelled to write this, I just do. My late father-in-law's ashes are buried in a cemetery in my wife's hometown. He passed before we met so as long as I've known her,

Re-discovering Nirvana

Yesterday, I was looking through Spotify for something to listen to and decided to stop on Nirvana. As I posted to Twitter [https://twitter.com/nocturnalmonkey/status/1282761099838992386], I was excited to discover Nirvana's Live and Loud set is now available as an album. When I was a kid, some

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

Last year, I planned to read more [https://blog.nocturnalmonkey.com/2018-reading-list/] and failed miserably. I used to read a lot and the last few years it's tailed off a bit so this year, I wanted to try again and not fail. This time is helped by Lu also taking

Re-thinking my podcast habit

I'd like to start by stating this is a very personal revelation. You're probably going to read this and think "Duh, you've only just got here?" so don't say I didn't warn you. I've been listening to podcasts for years and my app of choice for a good chunk of

Couch to 5K: about half way

Couch to 5K: about half way

Since we found out we were having a baby, fitness kind of fell of the radar a bit. When the baby came a long and we were sleep deprived zombies, doing exercise wasn't an attractive prospect when compared to a few quiet hours of rest. Fast-foward 4 years and things

Back to blogging

Back to blogging

It's been a while since I last tried to define what this blog is about. Going back through the archives, it's moved around in it's focus as my own focus and interests have shifted over the years. It's even fallen into neglect with huge gaps of time between posts. I

Self-improvement

Challenge for August

I'm very happy with the progress I've made in the last year, going from reading next to nothing at all to reading something, be it articles or part of a book, every day. As I'm a glutton for punishment and feel I need to make a dent on the backlog

Self-improvement

Making some changes

Back in December I wrote a resolution blog [https://blog.nocturnalmonkey.com/resolutions-for-2012/] post with some intentions for the year. So far they've not really come to fruition aside from learning a little more French than I thought I would while in Paris and I really want to be able

Living the good life

Some friends has kindly allowed Lu and I to use a patch of their land to grow some veggies. We've been wanting to do so for a while but our garden isn't really equipped so we jumped at the chance when offered. Before any planting could take place we needed

Leaving DC

It's been a fun 9 months working for Digital Consortium (DC) but as of today I am leaving the team. To psuedo-quote The Godfather, I've been made an offer I couldn't refuse. I've been invited by an old friend and colleague to join his company based over in Hebden Bridge.

Final day

Our final day in Paris and we had nothing planned other than a river tour. We headed out of the hotel around 11 and made our way to Pont de l'Alma where the boat tour casts off. The tour took us from the Eiffel Tower down river, passing under every

Headstones, scammers and artists

By some amazing gift of foresight, our plans for Thursday involved less amounts of strenuous walking. We left the hotel between 10 and 11, heading towards the East end of Paris where Père Lachaise is situated. It's the largest cemetery in Paris and is the resting place of many well

Wet Wednesday

Yesterday morning started much like the previous day. We got up, got ready and went for breakfast then headed out for the day. First on our list was the Louvre. We first tried to enter through what appeared to be a gate on the Eastern end of the building but

Le deuxieme jour

We're just about done with day two. Right now we're relaxing for a while before we go out to get some sushi from up the street. Before we do I'm going to write up our day... After a busy first day, we rested a little later than we had planned

First day in Paris

It's 8:24 local time here in Paris and I've just woken up. I'm pretty much sore everywhere after our afternoon walking around but just wanted to jot a few things here, mainly as a reminder to myself because I have a memory like a sieve. Due to our travel

Honeymoon begins

First leg of the honeymoon sees us heading to Kent to stay with Luisa's Mum for a few days then Monday morning we'll be heading to St. Pancras, then Paris!

Ready for Paris

We've pretty much packed all our stuff, save a few final items. We've got our tickets, passports and all that jazz and now... we have a travel journal. I figured this is our first holiday as a married couple so it'd be cool to keep a sort of scrapbook. The

Health & Fitness

Dry 2012

I'm not much of a drinker these days. I sometimes have a few pints on a Friday and occasionally go on a night out but despite having a laugh going out drinking with friends, I've recently been finding drinking less and less enjoyable. Also over the last couple of years,