Questions at SIIB

SIIB Class of 2022

Thank you for spending the time to interact with me this morning (16 July 2020).
I find myself wishing we had more time and I would be happy to do a follow up session later today or later this week if the institute can schedule it.

I know that we had a lot of questions and we ran out of time, so please post your questions in the comments to this post and I will try and respond to as many questions as I can.
The plan is to write a blog post in response to each question.

Please include your name if you can, but this is not mandatory.


I look forward to meeting with all of you soon.

365

I have actually managed to average a post a day for a full year.

This would be a good time to thank the many friends who have been following this blog every week, if not every day, for their encouragement. I would also like to thank all those who would post comments or even call in when they disagreed strongly; these have been thought provoking discussions and I have often had to recant in a subsequent post.

I would especially like to mention one person who on the very second day of the year posted on my facebook page, "What are the odds that this will happen for the full year". I need to thank this person most of all for cementing my resolve to stick with it. 

It has been an interesting exercise, not only in trying to improve my writing style, but also in discipline. There have been days when I have seriously contemplated admitting defeat, but the humiliation would have been more difficult to handle than the ordeal of writing every day. Coming up with topics was the toughest part of the project and I learned to use my time commuting to listen to audiobooks. These have been a great source of food for thought and topics to write about. 

As for the writing style, I daresay I see some improvement, but then one always tends to see one's own effort through rose coloured glasses. Friends have called in to tell me when they felt my writing had improved rapidly across a few days only to plateau out again for a few weeks. I suspect progress in most things follows just this pattern. There were days when the writing flowed, and there were days when it was clearly contrived. I can look back at the 364 posts and quite easily tell which ones I enjoyed writing and which ones were done under duress of commitment.

It has taken me a good part of a year to figure out that going public with the commitment to write a post every day was not the best approach I could have taken if the objective was to improve my writing. I intend to write to a private blog going forward and perhaps once in a while, if I feel particularly thrilled or riled about something, I might post it to this public blog. I trust this will make a number of people happy; some of whom have made no attempt to hide their irritation at my facebook posts announcing milestones of achievement. 

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to work on my fitness levels. I was looking through some old pictures of a handsome young man from a couple of decades ago and I intend to regain that level of health and fitness in the coming year. I am counting on my friends to call me out if I start to slip in my commitment.

Thank you for staying with me through the year and here's wishing you a great 2016.

30 December 2015