2020 – A year in review

Here’s a general look at my year of 2020.

The year that started off with epic bushfires in Australia, the Taal volcano in Philippines erupting and will be known as the year of Covid19. There was the massive explosion in Beirut, even brain eating amoebae in a part of the US water supply, the Arecibo observatory collapsed and a whole lot of political shenanigans in USA. Although at least Trump is on his way out, even if he’s flailing about as he goes. Thankfully the year hasn’t ended with an Alien invasion or something crazy.

This year. It’s been an interesting one. Certainly a start of the decade worth remembering.

For me, the main highlight of the year is that it’s when Xavier Jayden Cabahug Kubler was born, on the 15th of January. My first born Son and the start of me becoming a father and having a family with Jen.

It’s the year I declared my plan for helping transition to a Post-Scarcity society, with the next 5 years being prep and then 30+ years of transition.

It’s the year I started working on the Gather Together video analysis system that’s aimed at helping Stock Footage content creators keyword their content.

I also started but haven’t been able to work much on an app with my Sister for helping parents dealing with their kids medical needs (more to come later).

Unlike most people, the lockdowns barely affected my work. I have been working remotely for a few years now and it’s been working well. I’m still learning about myself and developing new coping mechanisms or better procedures.

Today, New Years Eve the 31st of Dec 2020 is the day when tomorrow is next year.

It’s been:

  • 933 days since Jen and I first met (2.6 years).
  • 676 days since I moved to the Philippines and started living with Jen. Also more than that since I’ve seen my family except via video call.
  • 351 days since Xavier was born (making him 50.1 weeks or 11.5 months old).


Family:

  1. The big obvious thing is that Xavier was born.
  2. I’m still living in Pasig, Metro Manila, Philippines with Jen, Xavier, our pug dog Maui, and our fish.
  3. It’s been amazing seeing Xavier grow up. He can now walk some steps unassisted and nearly says mumma and dadi. He’s very feisty and I hope he’ll grow up to be geisty.

Work:

  • I’m still doing web development for Mozzler. I’ve tracked at least 1,047 hours of work and I love working with Chris Were.
  • Worked on Viterra, Drakes, Drivible and some other projects. Mostly Yii2 with our own framework extras, but also some NodeJs. I’ve got 745 contributions listed on GitHub
Github Contributions
  • I started work on my own video analysis platform. The core works but I’m still not yet ready to release it. I’ve worked about 128 hrs on it this year, mostly some Sunday’s since July.
  • I have been working on stock footage creation in the mean time as well. Currently have made USD$503.73 in total from BlackBox submitted stock footage.
  • Been meaning to do some work on a mobile app with my Sister but other work and family commitments kept me hectic.

The Zeitgeist Movement (activism):

  • Helped put together the Aug Newsletter
  • Helped Cliff with the global Zday 2020 event, despite me being in the Philippines and it was in Iceland.
  • Did some work on the TZM global website.
  • Helped remove someone from a position of power whose actions were both bad for himself and the community.

Gaming ~200hrs worth:

  • Destiny 2 – I played about 46.4hrs of this, but most of it was in 2019 with only a tiny bit at the start of 2020.
  • Doom – 25.6hrs played back in January whilst waiting for Xavier to be born.
  • Borderlands 3 – 12hrs it didn’t really draw me in
  • MarZ: Tactical Base Defence – 2.5hrs of a turret defence game that wasn’t as mindlessly fun as I was looking for.
  • Reprisal Universe – 10.7hrs played of the spiritual successor to the first Populous
  • Doom Eternal – 33hrs in July.
  • Terraria – 3.3hrs according to Steam, but it certainly feels like I played it for a week and enjoyed it, but wanted to play Minecraft with RTX enabled instead (but that wasn’t released to the public yet, just teased)
  • Serious Sam 4 – 23.4 hours of fun. I loved this mindless game. Played in October
  • Star Wars Republic Commando – 6.4hrs An old game I was playing a little until Cyberpunk.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 – 75.2hrs played since it’s release, 41.8 of those hours in the last 2 weeks. It’s a great, immersive game similar to GTA but in the future and has Keanu Reeves. I’m aiming for 100hrs with this.

Health:

  • 1,758,072 Steps for the year. 1,499.7Km walked/run for an average of 4,817 average steps a day (less than I’d like the aim is 5,200).
  • Lots of running. Some great trips a decent number of 12km runs and even a 20km run. A total of 524km run, with an average of 10km a week.
  • Got a skin rash, likely triggered by my latex allergy. Also a ringworm like fungal infection.
  • Very little in the way of colds and flu this year. I remember feeling a little under the weather for half a day. The face masks and now face shields are helping.
  • Had some issues with emotional

Articles and videos:

I’ve posted 8 posts on my kublermdk.com blog if you include this, plus some posts to Medium, most I cross posted.

The main ones being:

Travel and experiences:

Obviously it’s hard to get out with Covid19 and a baby boy so we only did 1 main trip.

A trip to Amami beach resort in Puerto Galera for my Birthday. I still need to write up info about travelling in a time of Covid. Thankfully it was a great trip and Jen organised videos from my family, which made me cry.

Deaths:

  • Mario Matiev – He was a friend and fellow TZM member. We’d been Skyping regularly for over a year when he finally died of kidney failure after being on dialysis for a rather long time. I miss Mario and he was working on some great stuff.
  • Paul Parker-Benton – Technically my older brother-in-law but someone I only met a handful of times. Still, his passing affected the family and it was weird seeing a funeral via live stream.

Items and things:

They say that for a happy life you should focus on experiences not materialistic goods. But when you can’t travel much and you live and work at home in a one bedroom unit shared with your partner, baby boy, dog and fish, sometimes things can be useful.

  • New Huawei GT2 Pro smartwatch. This was a great Xmas present from Jen and great timing as my Garmin Forerunner 235 died between Xmas and New Years Eve. The watch doesn’t just track my heart rate but also stress (based on Heart rate variability I think?), it has nicer sleep graphs, even if it’s opinion is that we should be sleeping from 10pm until 6am. The graphical touch display is awesome, the watch has it’s own speaker and I can play music on it or even use it as a mic source for calls (I think, haven’t tried this and I don’t think it works with Whats App, etc..). The watch has 2GB of space, even has a calculator app, torch mode, Air pressure, Compass, etc.. Jen had to sell off her old phone and use all her money from selling bags and things, but it is a very elegant and nice watch. It helps that I got her a Garmin Fenix 5 smartwatch.
  • DJI OM4 smart phone Gimbal – I got this a few months ago for capturing better stock footage but also for filming family stuff with Xavier, etc..
  • eBike – Jen organised a decent enough eBike also for my xmas present
  • Live Broadcast microphone setup – Jen got me a full microphone with pop filter, sound mixing deck with sound board and the ability to make people’s voices sound like chipmunks amongst other things. I hope to do some good audio recordings with this one.
  • Washing Machine – After the full lock down started just after we got Xavier home we couldn’t go to the nearby laundromat and had to wash our clothes by hand. So getting a Washing Machine was one of the first big things we did after the Covid19 hammer was lifted (and replaced with the dance).
  • 10TB HDD – I got a WD RED 10 Terabyte hard drive to keep some of my footage safe. Along with the 8TB drive, some 4TB drives and the files I upload to BackBlaze, Degoo, Dropbox and Amazon S3 to ensure I have copies of my important data.
  • A big 72L fish tank – We were given a big aquarium for free a month or so ago as the people who had it moved out and left it behind. It took us a while to get the bacteria working properly and lost some fish in the process as we were too eager to buy more. But it’s working well now.

Others:

Was affected by 2 Typhoons barely a week apart. One when we were at Amami beach, the other when we were back home but there was major flooding and the power went out both times. We somewhat slept through plenty of other typhoons but those two were more than just a storm to keep inside for.

During the strict lockdown time we had our toilet cistern spring a leak and our bathroom sink kept trying to fall off. It was nearly a month of dealing with it before stores opened up that contained what we needed to fix it.

I still am worried about the sink falling forward, but really want to take the toilet working for granted as having to bucket water into it just isn’t fun.

Hopefully 2021 will be an interesting but less onerous year. As I posted on Facebook, I hope it’ll be less like a bad sequel and more like Endgame was to Infinity War, a great end to a 2 part series. Although with the way US politics is going it might be more like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.


Some videos of the year:

By Michael Kubler

Photographer, cinematographer, web master/coder.

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