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 Saturday 1 August 2026.

It’s two weeks into Term III, and in just a few days Form VI are off to do their trial HSC examinations. The next holidays are six-and-a-half weeks away, and between now and then I’ve got work to do. So let’s get started.

Life

No long holidays planned right now, but I’m certainly thinking ahead. Sleep, exercise, weight loss and blood pressure are all doing pretty well. I hibernated for most of July, but now I’m ready to start catching up with people again.

School

As usual, I got a lot less done in the school holidays than I intended to, and started the new term on the back foot. There should be some time to catch up this week.

Term III is Year 11’s last term before their HSC course begins and Year 12’s last term at school. From a teaching and a pastoral perspective, these two groups have been particularly important to me, and so it will be a strange and interesting term, with some important farewells.

Podcasting

Publicity has started on Season 5 of 500 Year Diary, and the first episode will be out next week. I’m announcing it here, so I have to do it. We’ve got eleven episodes lined up, with only two more to record: Destiny of the Daleks and Planet of the Daleks, which we’ll get done next Sunday and the Sunday after that.

Editing an episode to release is about six hours’ work, including editing, writing show notes and doing the publicity. It’s a big commitment over eleven weeks, but I love doing it, and I’m lucky to be able to spend so much time on my silly hobby.

Untitled Star Trek Project restarted just over a week ago after a bit of a break. It’s easy to organise and easy to edit, so two podcast episodes a week is easily doable. Our next episode will be on Deep Space Nine’s One Little Ship, a Season 6 episode which does a fun and knowing job of mashing up traditional Star Trek, Deep Space Nine and the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage.

Websites

Search works beautifully on the Untitled Star Trek Project site. It searches both episode blurbs and the transcripts and highlights your search terms in the results. Give it a try!

I’ve been adding page transition animations to a couple of sites, and I’ve also been fixing some accessibility issues, which has inspired a blog post that will appear on the Podcaster blog quite soon. My previous blog post documented how I used Eleventy’s data cascade to calculate how many words have been spoken in the entire run of a podcast so that that number could be displayed on the site. Pointless, but sweet. Right now, Flight Through Entirety is 3,033,973 words, and Untitled Star Trek Project is 2,367,139 words.

No progress to speak of on the starter project for Podcaster. Honestly, it shouldn’t take too long now once I properly get started on it. Although now that I think about it, there’s probably quite a bit of incidental documentation writing involved. Next holidays, probably.

What I’m enjoying

Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is on right now. I love this version of Star Trek, although last week’s haunted ship episode was not really to my taste. Still, it’s lovely to sit down on a Thursday night to watch a TV episode every week. Like we used to.