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 Friday 2 October 2026.

Just one week of school holidays left, and just 7½ weeks of work left this year. Not a bad place to be.

Life

I’ve lost over 30 kilograms since May last year, but lately my weight loss has slowed a bit. Rather than increasing my Mounjaro dosage, I’ve decided to try to get more exercise, which means filling in all three of the activity rings on my Apple Watch each day. I’m very easily gamified — getting the 7-day activity badge at the end of the week is surprisingly motivating. And the extra exercise should help me improve my sleep.

I’ve got more long service leave coming up in 2027, and I’m already planning another trip. Greece again: more sitting by the sea, reading, drinking beer and eating souvlaki. And then catching up with people in the UK. Something to look forward to.

School

A short but eventful term coming up. Two important things:

Years 7 to 10 have examinations this term. In Classics, we have eleven exams to worry about, including the four Latin examinations, which are difficult (but fun) to set because of the amount of new Latin text that they contain. So the term will start with exam writing, proofing and marking, followed by report writing and proofing. I’ll need to hit the ground running.
The students who have been using Ørberg’s course Lingua Latina per se illustrata start their HSC courses this term, in both Latin Continuers and Extension. I think they’re well prepared to start extensive study of authentic Latin texts, and I think they’ll enjoy the challenge. I’m looking forward to reworking the courses a bit — shifting the emphasis from translation to comprehension and trying to retain our focus on reading and discussing the Latin itself, both in Latin and in English.

Podcasting

I’m currently editing the eighth episode of Season 5 of 500 Year Diary, and there are only three more episodes to go after that. We might try to sneak in a very short Season 6 around Christmas.

Untitled Star Trek Project hit its 200th episode a couple of weeks ago, and (depending on how you count) we have now covered 22.18% of the franchise in about 2.5 million words, according to the automated transcripts on the website.

And our most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain covers the first episode of Season 2 of Space: 1999. Normally I love Season 2 Episode 1 of a TV series, but this was a massive disappointment to me at the age of ten, and adult me is convinced that ten-year-old me was right. It’s the point where the show gets cheap and dumb and kind of ugly, and the stately weirdness of Season 1 is replaced by hokey B-movie nonsense. Mind you, I have a soft spot for hokey B-movie nonsense, so it’s possible I’ll be able to wring some enjoyment out of the remaining 23 episodes.

Websites

I’m working on a new homepage for this site, featuring more podcast and open source software content and motivating me (perhaps) to write more frequently. I have plans and ideas, but the implementation is still in its early stages.

Everything else has stalled a bit. I added indexes to the Untitled Star Trek Project website, which I find useful, at least, and so I might add them to the FTE and 500YD websites as well. Search also works well on the USTP site, which means that it should be easy to replicate on the wordier podcast sites.

I still plan to write an Eleventy starter for podcast hosting, but I won’t have time to work on it these holidays. Maybe at the end of the year?

What I’m enjoying

I have really got out of the habit of watching TV — I’m mostly podcasting and gaming instead — and so I have decided, finally, to start watching Reacher. Reacher is a very large, smart and muscular man who solves horrific crimes with a combination of preposterous Holmesian deduction and extreme violence. I’m enjoying it quite a bit (when I remember to watch it).