29 Jun 2025
Another few weeks have passed and some more things have happened in my life. I'll start with the most recent and most interesting: me and my lovely partner took Friday off to stay a night in Margate and go to see HAIM play at Dreamland. Dreamland is a great outdoor venue and the gig itself was fantastic, I remember being blown away at just how loud everybody was singing along to every word. It turned out to be their warm-up gig for Glastonbury but I won't complain at a great live music experience and some time by the sea.
England has seen some very high temperatures throughout this year and this weekend was no different, the two of us melting in the 30 degrees sun (we made full use of the Slushee machines at Dreamland!). We did get to have a dip in a tidal pool, but not before managing to get quite badly sunburnt. All of the heat really makes me very thankful we have air conditioning, something that is quite rare in domestic properties in the UK. I really struggle in the heat so having our home be the temperature of a refridgerator is a huge relief and I think genuinely make a massive difference to my comfort.
Otherwise there's some quite mundane things that happened this week, like after literally months of me trying to figure out what I should do about it I finally gave my old jeans that still fit me to the drycleaners to get repaired, gave a whole bunch of T-shirts that don't fit me to a charity shop and also dropped my old jeans that don't fit me to a fabric recycling bin. It's a little embarassing to admit how long it took me to find the time and effort necessary to get it all sorted, and perhaps more so now that it is so hot again I haven't even worn jeans in weeks. I try not to beat myself up over that sort of thing though, I've got a wonky brain and the world isn't made for me.
Perhaps this is a little too "behind the scenes" but sometimes when I need to remember what has happened since my last blog post I'll take a look through the message conversations between me and my amazing partner. In scrolling through I read a message from her that read "activism is stickers and maps" and there isn't a whole lot of analysis I can add to that because as I get older I realise that simple things like maps and stickers are rebellious. Signage and pictograms can be positively revolutionary.
We visited the roof garden at the Southbank Centre, on another punishingly hot evening. Although we stayed for a drink, a walk around the garden was quite pleasant, and as my multi-talented partner has turned her hand to gardening it gave us all sorts of ideas for things we would like to try in our garden. Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy gardening, and I very much enjoy the fruits of her labour, quite literally in the case of our dwarf mulberry. I do plan to make some more wooden planters at some point, I bought myself some right-angle clamps and even invested in a new drill to prepare for the next one.
This was supposed to be a vaguely tech-related blog but the only thing of interest I can talk about is I had a sort of business idea that I think could probably work. The problem is that I'm not an entrepreneur, have no desire to be one, and I have no experience in anything related to running a business. I'd also need a lot of support, and quite possibly funding, to get it off the ground so it will probably just die on the bonfire of okay-ish ideas.
31 May 2025
It's been a little while since my last blog post so I'll once again forgo the tech rambling and focus on the life rambling. The most exciting thing that happened was probably that I made a planter out of wood we had lying around. For someone who hasn't done any woodworking since secondary school I am probably more proud than any man should be over a rectangular box with legs.
I also worked with my partner on a very strange issue where her GitHub account couldn't connect to the Visual Studio Code installation. The problem turned out to actually be that Microsoft doesn't package Visual Studio Code as a proper MacOS app installation, but as a sort of portable application. Removing that and installing it through Homebrew instead resolved that issue. The moral of the story is that Homebrew is an absolute necessity on MacOS, I think.
I attended the London Web Standards GAAD event, along with my amazing partner. The talks were interesting and energising, giving me plenty of ideas for how to improve my own website. I was asked why, as a cloud engineer, I found the London Web Standards talks so interesting. I think it's because you have a great group of people committed to both doing things the right way and also being fun and silly. There isn't an awful lot of that in the cloud infrastructure world!
I was also mercifully bullied about not being able to figure out Mastodon. I took some time to figure it out a bit more and have come to a different conclusion: I just don't like it. Searching doesn't seem to really work across instances and it just isn't as nice to use as Bluesky. I know some parts of Bluesky aren't practical to self-host unless you have a spare bare-metal server in your larder but I prefer it, so that's where I am.
We took advantage of the bank holiday weekend to do a little getaway to Yorkshire. With Weird Walk, The Old Stones and a few Google Map searches as our guides we visited The Druid’s Temple, The Devil's Arrows, The National Video Game Museum, Mother Shipton's Cave, Thornborough Henges, and even found time to visit a couple of garden centres and Sheffield Central Library. My collection of library cards grows ever larger.
This week I had a day off to experience The Suffolk Show. It was a very pleasant day out, and any day I can eat a massive bag of pork scratchings and a couple of bags of fudge is a very good day indeed.
I find myself writing this on Saturday, my copy of Worms W.M.D. has arrived in the post (after playing Worms 2 at the National Video Game Museum it gave me an itch and my partner seemed interested) and there are a few projects I'd like to finish so I'll bring this post to a close. I promise at some point I'll talk about actual tech stuff!
08 May 2025
I usually try to write these blog posts on a weekend, but with the long weekend and being quite busy throughout it I've had to write this mid-week instead. The long weekend was filled with trips to the garden centre, trips to birthday parties and trips to the football. The trip to the football was the one I probably enjoyed the least, it's hard being a supporter sometimes.
Our solar panels were fully enabled last week and the sunny weather has meant all the graphs were looking good for producing more than we were consuming. Now that things are a bit more overcast the graphs are looking... less good. We don't really mind that, though, we got the panels to reduce our reliance on the grid and to be more eco-friendly. From what I've heard you don't really make that much money selling back to the grid, but sending a bit less money to the electrical supplier is no bad thing.
Last week I had a quite involved conversation with my partner where I insisted that I was using "grid" layout in the CSS for this website, only to find out I'm actually not. I am using some CSS statements that made me think that I was using it - but I actually wasn't. I think the way that CSS and HTML is so forgiving, so even if you specify something incorrect it would produce something that was correct, is probably what confounds software developers about it. It's actually a huge positive, but obviously if you compare them to programming languages where if it isn't correct it won't compile, then I can see why some developers are so confused by web technologies.
This blog post has now been written over two days, with some delicious homemade rhubard crumble to push me over the line, courtesy of my amazing partner. She shared with me some very fun indie websites that have me envious and inspired. I'd like to first redesign the CSS on this website to make full use of grid layout, and maybe even grid templates if I can figure them out, and then do a bit of a redesign of the site structure. I don't seem to have much time these so maybe even that is ambitious - but if not then making it a bit more silly and fun would be a nice target. Lots for me to look forward to, I think!