I made some New Year's Resolutions and plans I want to try and stick to this year.
First of all, welcome to 2025! This is my first 'life' post of the year on my blog. I wish you a happy new year. At the end of 2024 I sat and had a little think about what's really important to me right now. I made a couple of decisions on what needs to change. Let's start with the basics.
Social media
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While my website states that one of the people who inspired me the most was Elon Musk, I now wholeheartedly dislike what he stands for and have decided that I don't want anything to do with him or his platform. It's not political; I just don't like him anymore. This means starting right now; I'm beginning to move from x.com to Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/jamiebalfour04.bsky.social), which I am hoping many others will do too, so that it can become the number one platform.
Second, WhatsApp. I rely heavily on WhatsApp, but for the last few months, I have considered moving away from WhatsApp and, generally, Meta. It came up in the staff room the other day, and it reminded me that I was thinking about this a few months back, so I added it to my plans yesterday. I want to move to Signal, a more open, privacy-centred chat platform. The problem is trying to convince others to follow suit.
Facebook is slightly more complex than the two previous ones. I've found some social networks like MeWe, which offer a similar experience to Facebook, but I'm not entirely sure about this yet. This is probably the hardest one out of the lot so far.
Life
I want to prepare myself for the next chapter in my book of life, and that is to move to somewhere new. I've lived in this area all my life (apart from 3 years living in Edinburgh when I was very young and living in Halls when I lived in Edinburgh for most of the year).
Some people who follow me on here know I want to own a boat and want to live on a boat at some point in my life. Narrowboating has been a dream but actually isn't so much of a dream now but something I could potentially do now. I've got more than £150k invested in my house, and the sale of that could give me a narrowboating lifestyle. I want to prepare for this because I want to start by the time I reach forty (that's still 7 years away, though!).
Job
I enjoy my job and think I'm pretty good at it (certainly my knowledge is!). But my passion is coding, and I feel that in the next couple of years, I need to get a new job back in the industry. My New Year's Resolution is to try and set down the building blocks to try and do this and find a new job. So, I plan to try to make this my last year of teaching (at least at the moment). If it doesn't happen, then I'm still okay with this, and I don't want to put pressure on myself to find that new job and I do like my job at the moment anyway.
If I'm going to be narrowboating, I want to have all this sorted before I move on with that.
I've had shares in Tesla since the middle of last year and bought them at approximately £144. Today, I decided to sell all 25. Each share was now worth £346, meaning a profit of £202 per share! This is only the second company which has been highly profitable, after selling my shares in AMD for five times more than I paid for them.
This is why I think it's important that when you've got some spare cash, invest it into big companies like this! The return I got today was incredible!
Though don't take my advice as I've messed up in the past with investments that didn't work out.
Today is my birthday. Today, I'm 33 years old. 32 was a very cool number, but 33 is also a cool number. I don't feel 33.
That's all.
My amazing nana would have been 99 years old today. Born on July 12, 1925, she was one of the most inspirational people in my life. She supported me and shaped me into what I am today. Although she was very tough on me when I was a teenager, this was solely for my good, and it changed me from being soft into a much more resilient person.
Tomorrow, I'll be 33; my mum is 66 years old, so I'm now half her age. But also, I'll be a third of what my nana's age would have been if she was still here.
May of this marked 15 years since we lost her. The last 15 years have flown by, and I still miss her very much.
I'm delighted with my new photo sorting tool, which I developed to help me organise over 20,000 photos from the last six or so years.
Today, I sorted just over 900 photos and videos in just over an hour. This would have taken a lot longer in the past and required a bit more thinking with the drag-and-drop process of moving files and previewing each image or video. Although this only runs on my MacBook and is pretty fixed to a folder, I've written it so that it could indeed be changed.
It's also been a really easy application to write and only requires a few lines of code, all of which are embedded into one PHP file. It does require a web server to run and knowledge of how to use symb links.
Once I'm done with it, I'll post the source code to my GitHub.
I turned 31 today at 10.30. It's been a really nice day, mostly, except for the fact that getting my new shed delivered resulted in my outdoor lights - which are less than a week old - getting broken.
The day was generally lovely though. For starters, my mum took me to Costa for breakfast which was really nice and unexpected. We then went back to my place and enjoyed the weather from my garden for an hour or so and then my mum headed home. Mid afternoon my mum and my aunt came across to have tea and enjoy my garden with me before heading down to the Longniddry Inn for birthday dinner, which again was really nice.
And that was it, my 31st birthday!
I miss my nana very much having lost her now 13 years ago. She was a remarkable lady who felt like an unstoppable force and was my inspiration for a lot of reasons. I miss her very much and I've never done a tribute like this to her.
Newbattle High School, where I've been working for the last two years, has been to date my favourite job. I've met some amazing people, kids and teachers, that have made my time there the most enjoyable two years of my life. But it's time for me to move on.
As a posted in a previous blog post, I have for a long time wanted to get a job at a specific school and now I've got it. I've been waiting for a position at that school to come up and it's taken a long time (8 years I've been watching for the job to come up), but now that I've secure it I'm moving onto my next chapter in my life.
Today is the first step towards that - at 12.56 today I was no longer a teacher at Newbattle High School. It was a very sad moment to leave such a great place with so many great teachers and kids wishing me good luck for the future. Throughout that time I was reminded by many members of staff how great a relationship I've got with many pupils, which is also very clear from all the cards I've had telling me I've been the best teacher they could have ever had. I tried my best to catch everyone that I could to say a final goodbye and I've just been in tears most of the afternoon.
Newbattle not only was an amazing place to work, but it was also the job that allowed me to buy my house, I passed my driving test whilst there and it was my first job as a Fully Qualified Teacher. It will always have a special place in my heart.
But onwards and forwards, my next school will hopefully be just as exciting a journey for me and hopefully I can continue to build good relationships with staff and pupils just as I've done at Newbattle, push digital more and more, and continue on this upward trend.
At 30 years old, I'm hardly a young driver, but I have at last passed my driving test.
I first started to learn in 2013 when I was 21 but unfortunately had to stop due to issues with my instructor. My next instructor, Miranda, was friendly, supportive and very calm which really helped me. I took on Miranda after one and a half years of not driving. I then sat my first test in January of 2016 which was a pretty good result but still failed. I got no minors and a single major which my instructor said was something that I'd never do but could see it was down to stress. I left driving for a while.
Fast forward to 2019 when I decided to pick up driving as I had a little more time and money. I went for three lessons with an instructor but decided the best way to go was to save money and practice with my mum. I started that in late 2019. Unfortunately, COVID came along and I also needed to now redo my theory test but it was delayed and delayed by months at a time. I eventually got my theory rebooked for December 2020 and passed again. Next was the driving test, which I ended up booking for May 2021. Unfortunately, COVID affected this too, with my test being postponed to mid-July - a time which actually was very unsuitable for me. I then got it rebooked for September of 2021, only to get COVID myself. It was rebooked for November, again unsuitable for me as I was still struggling with COVID.
I managed to get it booked for February 2022 and felt really ready this time. Unfortunately, I failed. And it was so silly. Two minors and one major. And the major was for the emergency stop and if I'd been a half-second quicker I'd have passed. This was unfortunate and it really upset me because it was a silly mistake and one that I could have fixed easily.
Now, on the 17th of May 2022, still feeling ready to go for it, I passed. I got four minors, all of which were very minor and minors I was very aware of after but I felt like I deserved to pass anyway. I'm very happy that I've managed it at last!
The collapse of People's Energy is very sad for me personally because I was there right back at the start interviewing for a job over a cup of tea with David when the company was only just starting up and was one of the first to apply for a job at the company.
The job was for a website developer but also as a kind of senior role in charge of others which would have been really good fun. I do not remember how I came across the job, but it was all very top secret at the time. I remember bits and bobs of that day, for example, visiting Falko's restaurant in Gullane for the very first time and also that they mentioned that the company wasn't approved at that point by Ofgem (which I have looked up and actually it was the case).
The job, which I applied for after leaving MagLabs in July 2017, was for someone to develop a web-based interface to manage their systems.
I ended up having to say no to the job if I remember correctly, simply because I had already accepted another job. It brings back memories and who knows what I would be doing now if I had gone with them.
