Avian’s Blog

What can I say about the last year that hasn't already been said a hundred times over? It's been a year of restrictions, lockdowns and changing habits. I'm immensely thankful that everyone close to me has managed to avoid the pandemic so far. It has not been easy for anyone. The quickly changing information on the virus was a constant source of doubts in what was a good balance between keeping safe and retaining some resemblance of normal life.

I don't feel I have much right to complain though. Compared to other personal stories I've heard I'm lucky. I don't have many responsibilities that would require a lot of personal contacts. I work for a company that has recognized the seriousness of the situation very early on and switched largely to remote work where possible.

It's been a year of sitting alone at my home desk. I've never been a particularly social person and I usually enjoy working alone, but the isolation this year sometimes felt painfully strong. I feel like the social distancing didn't just apply to physical contacts and we've all grown further apart even with all the video, voice and text communication within hand's reach. It was easy to get unreasonably angry over people holding different opinions on what risks they were prepared to take with their own health and the health of others.

Reduced work and the general chaos interrupting other plans meant that I worked a lot on personal projects. I've expanded the instrumentation in my home electronics lab: I've finished my home-brew curve tracer for non-linear device measurements. I didn't write much about that on the blog. I still have some unpublished notes on an interesting detail of bipolar junction transistors, which was the original motivation for making the instrument in the first place. Maybe I'll find the time to write it up next year.

On the other hand I did write a series of posts on RF vector measurements. I'm very happy with how my SDR-based system turned into a small, versatile instrument. With a NanoVNA available at perhaps a tenth of what I spent in total it might not look like the project made much economic sense. However I found that my instrument complements it nicely, with better characteristics in some places, worse in others and much more flexibility. It seems to fit nicely between the extremely low cost NanoVNA and the astronomical price of a professional instrument. Not to mention that I learned a lot while making it and refreshed my knowledge from the under-grad microwave engineering course I took long ago.

I've again drawn a lot, more than any other year despite the arts classes being interrupted. It was my almost daily activity in the evenings after I got fed up with electronics. In May, my comic Social distancing won the second place in its category in the Life in the time of coronavirus competition organized by the National Museum of Contemporary History. With the bird flu epidemic hitting local bird populations later in the year, my two quarreling crows might have been an even better allegory for the times than I originally intended.

In general I wanted to give some more meaning to the illustrations and characters I've drawn this year. This led me to write a few short stories. Looking back, these were probably more things I needed to do for myself to deal with various frustrations and anxieties. I've only published one so far here on this blog and even that was quite an internal struggle to do. I don't know about the others. I still like the pictures that go with them, but the text would need significant editing before I would be comfortable with putting them out in public.

The web was full of people cheering for 2021 to come as quickly as possible, as if viruses and other such things pay any attention to the numbers on the calendar. I have some ideas what I want to do next year: I want to keep drawing and, considering I'll be using my home desk as the company hardware lab for some time yet, I have some further ideas on new instruments I want to make. However I can't shake the feeling that the freedom to pursue my personal projects in relative idleness during lockdowns was on borrowed time and that I'll have that much less time for such things in the future. We'll see. If we all remain healthy it will be a good year.