The Now Page was invented by Derek Sivers in 2021. It’s a page on your website that tells people what you’re doing right now — what you’re working on, what you’re working towards, what you’re looking forward to, and what you’re enjoying.

If you want to be notified every few weeks when this page updates, you can subscribe to an RSS feed here. If you want to know more about who I am and what I do generally, take a look at my About page.

Now

Last updated on Monday 1 June 2026.

There’s just under four weeks of term to go, which means assessments and assessment marking and reports and report proofing. But the reward is three weeks of holiday at the end of it all. Easy.

Life

Weight loss continues slowly and steadily, as does the reduction in my blood pressure. All good.

I’ve also started making regular donations of blood plasma. In July last year, gay men became eligible to donate blood plasma; just a few weeks ago, we also became eligible to donate blood with no restrictions. I’ll continue to donate plasma, just because it’s important and because I don’t mind spending the additional time that plasma donations require. Plus I get chips and party pies afterwards.

School

School is fine. There’s plenty to do, but it’s not overwhelming or anything. Still enjoying the new Ørberg-based Latin course, which has now made it all the way to Year 11, whose students are currently making the difficult transition from textbook Latin to real Latin. Seems to be going pretty well.

Starting to think about taking long service leave again in 2027. I’ll keep you posted.

Podcasting

We’re currently recording the fifth season of 500 Year Diary, which will focus on the work of Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks. I’m learning new ways to appreciate him already. It will be nice to be editing and releasing a new Doctor Who podcast episode every week. We should be able to start next month.

Startling Barbara Bain is about to reach a milestone. Later this month, we’ll be recording our 24th episode and finishing our coverage of the strange, expensive, bleak and elegiac Season 1, before embarking on the much cheaper and dumber Season 2. It should be funny, if not particularly edifying.

And, as always, Untitled Star Trek Project continues unabated.

Websites

I’ve begun working on my Eleventy starter, which is a starter template for creating podcasting websites using Eleventy and my Podcaster plugin. But I’ve put it on hold for the time being, while I work on something else.

That something else is adding interactive transcripts to most of the podcasting websites I’ve created. On those sites, when you go to an episode page, you can open up a clickable transcript which is linked to the audio player. I wrote a blog post explaining how I did it. (Warning: technical.)

Now that I have transcripts, I can start adding full-text search to those sites. I have a very basic version of it working on a feature branch of the USTP site, but I’ll probably only get to work on it properly during the upcoming holidays.

What I’m enjoying

I’m currently reading Yeah the Boys by Holden Sheppard, the sequel to his 2019 book Invisible Boys. I’m enjoying it a lot — it’s not at all what I expected, but it’s still funny and angry and compelling. I got to go and see Holden himself at another book launch just a couple of weeks ago.

I’m going through one of my periods of only watching stuff I’m podcasting about, and spending too much of my time wandering around Hyrule beating up bokoblins. Which is fun. Vaguely looking forward to playing the new James Bond game First Light when it’s finally released for the Switch 2 later in the year.