I admit I am writing this retrospectively in 2020 and setting the publish date back to 2019, the context of these words.
A change in work was much needed, and I turned a redundancy into a sabbatical, the last months of 2018 It was de-stressing and an opportunity to explore some tech outside of my day-to-day. I studies VR applications from a user point of view, having got hold of an oculus Go and it was fun to launch my dad into space. I spent some time working through LinkedIn Learning courses on Unity and Blender, to get a feel for the development steps involved in getting an application onto the Go. I enjoyed the experience, however the application build times were enormous on my old 2008 Mac. I wrote up a few notes at the time. I also found a fairly comprehensive Product Management course on Udemy to work through: Become a Product Manager | Learn the Skills & Get the Job.
As we entered 2019, it became clear that my father’s cancer journey was taking a turn for the worse and after a frankly horrible time for him and those closest, we lost him this summer.
My sister especially put a huge amount of time into building the family tree on ancestry. My contribution mostly taking the form of PhotoShop restoration and repair of old family photos, many I hadn’t seen before. It was quite an emotional journey, with resulting images I am quite proud of, only saddened to be unable to share them and hear the tales first hand from those pictured. For example:
An important photo including my grandad and grandmother prior to a flight to the Isle of Man on a de Havilland Rapide in 1938. I took an experience flight in a similar aircraft in May of this year, flying out of Duxford.
