Exit 2025, Enter 2026

Twenty twenty-five was another long year and January 2026 also looks to be a long demanding month. In 2025, I spent most of my free time doing professional development, something I’ve spent too much of my life doing for too little return on investment. Assuming I finish my next certificate, in a month or two that may be the last one, or perhaps I triple down and do yet another one. Regardless very little time was spent on hobbies or traveling in 2025, the latter I will rectify in March when I return to Japan.

Professional Development

I spend very little time looking at Google Analytics these days and I never did much profiling of my meagre readership, but I doubt the people who come to read these year-end wrap-up posts want to hear about professional development, but considering how much time I sunk into it in 2025, that is where I’m starting. I did manage to finish the CFA® Institutes’s Data Science for Investment Professionals certificate but it didn’t really change a thing, so I started the other certificate that I’m on the mailing list for. That one is going to take another month or two of weekends to complete, but once I have the Certificate in Python for Finance I may have to initiate some change.

Hopefully you can hear the embedded playlist because if you read the entire post, you’ll learn it remains a struggle to embed YouTube videos in my blog.

Fitness

My fitness is not what it was ten years ago. However I still go to the gym, but you’d be hard pressed to know that. Moving to Calgary hasn’t been the greatest for my health, COVID-19 threw me off my routine and fitness once lost is tough to regain especially now that I’m ten years older. However just like Apple Music and Flickr, I do pay for a fitness app and Jefit sent me this summary so I thought I would add it, as improving my fitness is definitely a goal in 2026.

Apple Music

Although I think only people who subscribe to Apple Music can hear the entire playlist or the entirety of each song, I literally spend all year cultivating playlists on Apple Music. This Replay 2025 one is automatically generated. It isn’t 100% accurate as I think Apple only promotes songs they have the rights to whereas I can listen to music I own that I may have gotten from another source than Apple such as Bandcamp.

Officially, the artist I listened to the most was the Dreadnoughts who I actually saw play in Calgary with the Real MacKenzies in 2025. I was deemed to be one of their 500 biggest fans at least on Apple Music. I was also among the top 500 fans of Left Lane Cruiser and Joshua Ray Walker. I only managed to make the top 1000 for Murder By Death but this was one of the biggest years of their career as they decided this would be their last major tour ever, which I of course caught in Toronto.

I’ll include one video for each of those artists later in the blog post. If you look at my replay you’ll see as the year came to an end I was big into the Heavy Eyes, so I’ll include one of their songs below as well, as they did not make the official playlist.

Blogging

2025 actually marked the twentieth year I’ve been maintaining this WordPress blog. I never thought I’d make it this far, but I’ll try to hang on for another five years, get to a quarter of a century. Most of my blogging took place in the few weeks between when I finished the first professional development certificate and started the second one. I still have not finished redoing my blog taxonomy, that will be a priority when I finally finish the Certificate in Python for Finance.

The trend in the blogosphere, is people abandoning it, they stop posting, they stop commenting and they stop following people’s RSS feeds. The other trend is towards longer posts. AI is also being used to crank out what people have dubbed “slop”. No AI has been used on Muschamp.ca, though technically I’m studying it, because we want to leverage it more at work. The ChatGPTs of the world can only regurgitate and summarize, they can’t access all of human knowledge and they’re trained mainly on that paragon of virtue, reddit. AI can also not have an opinion on what songs or artists they like and what art resonates with them. AI also can’t paint miniatures as well as a human either, so assuming I survive, I’ll blog more about my hobbies and personal interests going forward and leave the regurgitation to the slop spammers.

Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc.

I think I posted once, maybe twice to Instagram all year. This reflects how many miniatures I painted in 2025 which was zero. I also think I played zero Games Workshop games. I did play some Sid Meier’s Civilization VII in my few weeks off between professional development certificates. This is why I’m really reluctant to commit to another program that takes six months to three years. There are professional development courses you can complete in a manner of weeks, but I doubt they add much to my resume or my career at this point. I’m tempted to study Japanese or just guitar, I finally bought a new guitar in 2025.

I don’t think I pinned a thing, that website has changed and miniature painters seem to use Instagram as do fitness influencers and musicians etc. Twitter which I apparently refuse to call “X” is the social network I still use the most, but I refuse to pay to get analytics, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Twitter is useful for breaking news, including in the world of sports, but it is also used extensively in tech and finance so I need to maintain an account for professional reasons, but many people have quite it entirely since it was taken over by Elon Musk, It has definitely changed, I do not like the inline blog posts masquerading as tweets, but I still check it multiple times per day.

Flickr

I do pay for Flickr, but you wouldn’t know that by how much I post. I think I posted a few dozen pictures at most in 2025. I do take pictures on my iPhone and share them in chats mainly, but in 2026 if I return to travelling and painting miniatures I’ll add a lot more pictures to the Internet. I haven’t had the time or energy to upload pictures, categorize them, or tag them. Sorting them takes time and I don’t even do any post production. My Flickr analytics are not very interesting, the same photo remains the most popular.

Miniature Painting

As mentioned above zero miniatures were painted and zero games played in 2025. Maintaining a blog keeps you honest about things like hobby goals or professional development. Here are some of my miniatures posted to Flickr.

One of these days I need to figure out a fix to my WordPress theme to handle custom HTML embeds better, of course if I never used them, this problem would just go away. Part of the problem seems to be the fact I use a much bigger monitor than I used to use on smaller screens which most people use, I think this post looks better.

Travel

As I did not leave Canada, it seems I barely travelled and I did not even make the minimum number of suggested days off until the final month of the year, when I made a DIY long weekend which I think I spent doing professional development. All that said, I did travel to Toronto for the first time in my life, that is a blog post I already linked to above. I made two trips back to British Columbia and my mother and sister again came to Alberta which is when we went to Drumheller, so I can share a few more pictures I put on Flickr.

As you should well know, blogging is thirsty work.

Beer & Whisky

As you may have guessed a lot of beer was consumed in 2025, something I’m going to have to cut down on, but after my tour of Japanese whisky distilleries obviously. Untappd did a year-end roundup but I cannot seem to embed it. My fitness app did one too, but I didn’t get to the gym as much as I would have liked, though I did make it over 100 times.

My favourite beer in Alberta remains Hefe, so I really should get out to the Turner Valley again, this time when the Fahr brewery is open. I also worked hard to make the Ship & Anchor my local. As for whisky I don’t log it, but I did have people over in December for some tastings and I’ll be attending and hosting a few more in 2026 obviously.

I also unexpectedly toured a whisky distillery in December, the Shelter Point distillery has long been near my sister’s house so we went for a tour and a tasting. I’ve now toured over a dozen whisky distilleries in three different countries, I’ll have to get to Kentucky and Ireland someday and of course back to Scotland.

Books

I should have finished another book last year, as it was I did not reach my goal, but I watched a lot of online videos for professional development and read numerous PDFs. The book I just finished is by Rob Miller the co-founder of Bloodshot Records, so it was great reliving some of the 90s and early 2000s music scene, or at least the music scene Rob was involved in first in Detroit then more famously in Chicago. Travelling to the States to see gigs is definitely something I want to do, though I may just have to move to a city that gets more tours again as Calgary gets so few.

GoodReads is another niche online social network I’ve been using. My sister’s friend came to a conclusion that I must be in the top 1% users of Untappd, maybe in 2026 I’ll drink less and read more, but given how many writers were borderline if not outright alcoholics I doubt that. I got a nice cold Leffe Blonde going as I type this.

I think I should centre every image, but embedding from Flickr or some other website makes it more complicated, so sometimes I just include extra text to help browsers render things better.

Gigs

I got to very few musical performances this year, but I did get asked to join a band, some people at work even assumed I was already in a band. Professional development isn’t conducive to going out late to music venues and my guitar playing ebbs and flows, but I’ve really been working on some weird right hand techniques including the not terribly weird Travis picking. As mentioned previously seeing the Dreadnoughts and Murder by Death was great, but I went to both shows alone, maybe in 2026 my friends and I can get our schedules to sync and we can see some summer tours. I will work on my battle vest.

YouTube Videos

Now I must pause Apple Music, which I’ve been listening to as I’ve been writing this and find five videos I can successfully embed one for each of my top 4 artists according to Apple Music and a bonus video of the Heavy Eyes. My new theory is I must publish the post to see if the videos can be embedded, why they won’t show up in the WordPress editor is a mystery.

The Dreadnoughts

This is what is so frustrating, I find a video, shot in the DTES where I worked in 2008, yet never crossed paths with this band and I can’t embed it. The whole video was shot within a few blocks of BOB’s office on Main and Hastings. It seems the embedded previews are not working and I must basically publish this blog post to see if the videos can in fact be embedded.

Left Lane Cruiser

Next up is Left Lane Cruiser, who I know I’ve embedded a video by before, maybe YouTube has decided to prevent most people from sharing videos, perhaps I need to sign some revenue sharing agreement, don’t they know this blog earns zero revenue, it is pure unadulterated cost.

Joshua Ray Walker

Joshua Ray Walker is another artist I discovered this year. Let me link to one of his videos too.

Murder By Death

I know I have embedded videos by Murder By Death and I know I’ve done it this year, but tonight I had to first link. Then when I published I decided to experiment more and finally got them all to work.

The Heavy Eyes

These guys are yet another recent discovery given to me by the algorithm. I had a video picked out for them of what is probably their best song “These Men Are Wolves” hopefully you don’t have to click through to listen, but if you do, then you do.

Next Year

I’ve already written about my biggest plans so far for 2026. I plan to finish the Certificate in Python for Finance and after that to travel back to Japan, including visiting Toyohashi where I lived over twenty years ago. 2026 is also my fiftieth year on the planet so there will be some celebrating. I also will likely have to make some big decisions as I’m tired of going around in circles and Calgary is cold and getting lonelier as I devote more and more time to professional development. If you have thoughts on the New Year, professional development or why I struggle to embed YouTube videos in my WordPress blog you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on January 5th, 2026, it was last edited on January 18th, 2026 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Blogging, Professional Development, Social Media.