What have you been doing during lockdown?

Everybody seems to have their thing. Be it exercise, meditation, gardening, general self improvement, whatever. The general weirdness of the last few months has left everyone with a lot of spare time on their hands. Whether you've been working from home (which I have - IT support doesn't care where you are as long as you have Internet) or not, the reduction in the amount of time spent wandering shops, eating out or going to the pub (😢), means you're spending a lot more time in the house looking for something to fill those spare hours. It might be something meaningful, it might not. Who cares.

I've tried to focus on a couple of things.
Firstly, for quite a while now I've wanted to move out of generic IT support into a more security based role. The problem with this, which I'm sure many people can identify with, is that having a full time job, and a family that I actually enjoy spending time with doesn't leave a lot of time for the required learning...So, now that I have rather more free time on my hands I've started ploughing into as much training as I can. The Internet can be a wondrous place, and it doesn't take much effort to hunt down a veritable mountain of free training resources. Some of it is utter crap of course, but at least someone has taken the time to put it out there. Combine this with online training from various vendors/partners that I'm already in touch with through work, and you suddenly find yourself with plenty to keep you out of trouble. I've looked at all sorts over the last few weeks - going back to basics on security fundamentals, revisiting coding (which I haven't done since university) by starting to learn Python, and I have material lined up to start getting me up to speed on SQL and databases in general, which is a rather glaring hole in my skill set at present.My main achievement over the last few weeks, which I'm quite proud of myself for, is becoming a Sophos Certified Architect for XG Firewall. This involved about 10 hours of learning, along with another few hours of lab work, followed by a pretty meaty exam.
Having looked at the various security roles out there, I think a god place for me to start would be as a SOC Analyst, maybe moving to a Security Engineer post from there. We shall see.
So, the main places that I've found useful resources so far are:
https://app.cybrary.it/ - Cyber security and networking. Most of the courses are paid for, but they do a range of interesting courses for free every month.https://medium.com - A blogging/publishing platform where you can find community written courses on just about anything IT.https://www.udemy.com/ - A paid for platform, but they have regular sales and a good catalogue.https://youtube.com - Obvs
My second quarantine activity is of a totally different theme. Houseplants. I've been interested in outdoor gardening for quite a while, but houseplants always seemed like a bit of a faff. Now that I'm spending extended amounts of time in the house, working or otherwise, I'm finding it really nice to have something to distract me that is nothing to do with computers at all. It doesn't need to be an expensive hobby as long as you're happy to start out with smaller plants, but the difference a few plants make to a room is incredible. Having something beautiful trailing over the side of a book case, or brightening up the corner of the room makes a big impact. Science says its great for your mental health too.
I've bought the bulk of my plants from a local business who do an excellent weekly doorstep delivery service (https://www.theplantworkshop.co.uk/ for anyone in the Tyneside/Teeside area of the UK) and the quality is always excellent. I've had a few from online stores, which have been pretty good. Amazon, not so much. I've had a couple delivered from there, and they don't seem to package them very well.
Anyway, enough rambling. I'm going to be trying to keep this blog updated with stuff that interests me (IT stuff, plants, cars and motorbikes, maybe some cooking thrown in), and see where it goes...