What I am doing now

Updated: 27 July 2025

Achilles rupture

I fell off my bicycle ten days ago and tumbled down a small banking into nettles and bushes, near the old walls in Berwick-upon-Tweed. It was a pretty innocuous fall as I was going so slowly, but when I stood up, as well as nettle rash on both arms, my back and my ears, I immediately felt a massive pull in my left leg like a wire had been tugged taught by a tuning peg in my knee. After a few days of mis-diagnosis, ice-packs and Ibuprofen, I was eventually confronted with the reality of a ruptured achilles tendon in my left leg. I’m now wearing an “airboot” and will be doing so for up to four months whilst - hopefully - it stitches itself back together.

Emacs

I’m currently back on Emacs for org-mode. I’m also working hard to optimise Emacs for Python coding, using eglot, elpy and others. Emacs is already the best environment for Lisp programming (learning Common Lisp and continuing to learn Clojure and Clojurescript).

AI

Still wrangling with AI. It degrades my programming nous but is undeniably useful for either a) writing tricky or boilerplate code and b) learning new patterns. Google’s Gemini models have been my go-to, via the great CLI tool, llm, by Simon Willison.

[This page is created under the wise instruction of Derek Sivers….]