On a fine sunny Fraday a few weeks ago, Mrs basil takes the dog to work with her like normal. At 11am she calls me to say something is wrong. Scout doesn’t want to walk, eat, or drink.

She calls the vet and then tries giving her a teaspoon of honey. A little while later the dog can’t really stand or sit, can barely hold her head up without losing her balance, and still wont drink anything. Then, after picking her up, she loses control of her bladder and pisses all over Mrs Basil.

To the Vets!

Mrs Basil makes and emergency appointment at our vets. They explain the uncontrolled urination could be kidney failure and they will run blood and urine tests. This sends Mrs Basil into a panic spiral. After getting a manic phone call I head to the vets.

By the time I get there, the results are back and, aside from ruling out kidney problems and a few other things, they are inconclusive. Scout still can’t sit or stand for more than about 15 seconds.

To the Hospital!

The vet is hedging, suggests she likely needs to be put on a drip for hydration, and maybe a neurological consult. They suggest we head to the 24hr animal hospital 20 miles down the road.

We get to the hospital at about 5pm. After some waiting around, and some neurological tests requested by the vet, they do some more urine tests, and finally, we get an answer.

Let’s go fly a kite

Positive for cannabis. The bitch was high as a kite.

The vets at the hospital are happy for us to take her home with the expectation that she will come back down to earth in the coming hours and hopefully start drinking again soon.

We head home with our £800 invoice and the dog starts to perk up a little and is drinking again before bed. By morning, it’s as if nothing had happened.

A week or so ago I saw a short video of 2 guys doing a taste test from a jar of pickled grapes. They seemed to enjoy them and I was very intrigued by the sweet and sour prospect.

After searching around for a few different “recipes” the gist was always the same with some small variations, so like I often do when I cook… I just winged it.

The Method

330ml of cider vinegar.
330ml of water.
100g of sugar.
Cinnamon, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, star anise, cloves, cardamom, bay leaves, just gan radge.

Heat it up.
Pour over a 32 floz jar chock full of seedless grapes.
Let it cool.
Chuck it in the fridge overnight.

The Verdict

I like them, but I don’t love them. They didn’t live up to the hype. I would happily eat them as a bar snack or an accompaniment to cheese, meats, pies, etc.

While they didn’t take a lot of effort, it was non-zero effort, they weren’t cheap, and they only last a few weeks.

Will I make them again? Maybe, but rarely.

Recently “The GIMP” had a new a major version released which has once again led to some increase in chatter about the name. I saw a poll on the fediverse that simply asked if you love it or you hate it.

A reply there asked what was this issue, implying they had missed any discontent. I took this on good faith and explained. I should have known better, they seemed to be fishing for an opportunity to dismiss said complaints more directly. It became an exercise in trying to stay out of a bad faith argument.

The name is a cringy and childish forced acronym that references a character of an adult scene in a very adult movie. It is at best, hugely immature and wildly unprofessional. Whatever floats your boat, but this alone is enough to make me think it’s idiotic.

Of course, the more acute issue is that to varying degrees in different English speaking cultures, the word is a huge slur. This is a fact. How much you think it matters is the only gray.

It is not a slur in my culture

Great, so what?

It is only a slur in English

No shit, so what?

It’s an English word. So are Gnu, Image, Manipulation, and Programme.

The devs named it after Pulp Fiction

Cringe, but so what?

They didn’t intentionally choose a slur. Just an inappropriate sexualised reference. But they were made aware of the problem long ago and decided they don’t care.

I’ve never met anyone that has a problem with it / nobody I know makes the connection

Good for you, I guess, but so what?

There are obviously many people that do have an issue with it and there are many that instantly make the connection it’s claimed never gets made.

Of all my friends and colleagues from outside the tech world that I have mentioned Gimp to over the years, literally zero had ever heard of it before.

Of them, those that were young men with a certain sense of humour laughed and asked if I was serious, then laughed some more. The rest were rather taken aback and either confused or, in some cases, a little repulsed.

Neither group had a particular desire to continue the conversation. They either thought it was funny and didn’t take the suggestion seriously, or they thought it was cruel, and didn’t take the suggestion seriously. I stopped making the suggestion long ago.

In jobs gone by I’ve either suggested it for use or asked permission to install it. Each time the conversation didn’t get past the name.

Context matters

Here’s the one they think is the silver bullet. The favourite of the gnupologists.

Add up all the above, with the fact its the name of an image editing suite, then it’s clear and obvious from all the context available that the word is not intended to be the slur so why would that even occur to anyone.

I honestly evan had someone explain to me, as if I didn’t attend school past the age of 12, that the word “retard” has many legitimate uses with its traditional definition. So if an app was called The RETARD, then that would be ok as well, for the same reason. The context matters. If this was even halfway serious response, I fear for their mental health. I had to block them for the sake of my own, but enjoyed seeing someone else’s simple and pointed response - empathy matters more.

Another remarked that even the slur version of the word gimp was fine in some context, like “banter” amongst friends. This proving there is sliding scale of acceptability depending on our good old friend - the context.

Again, so fucking what?

It all just feels like bad faith contrary bollocks on stilts from the “can’t say anything these days” brigade. The people that fight the good fight against the renaming of git branches from Master to Main. Who reject pull requests that gender neutralise documentation or remove inappropriate content from code comments. Or the weirdos who ride to defend the king of the floss bros for his treaties on why pedophelia is fine, actually.

So, what?

The sensible and adult response from the developers would have been to say something along the lines of: “Oh shit, we never even considered that at all, I’m sorry. Let’s do a rebrand, who can help?” Alas, they did not. So, what?

No surprises here, I hate the name. Since its Inception it has been intentionally immature, embarrassing, and unprofessional. It has since become intentionally cruel.

It is their project, they can be childish and inappropriate with it if they want to.

• Do I reserve the right to tell them they’re embarrassing themselves? Absolutely.
• Do I judge people who use it? No.
• Will I be one of those gatekeepers telling people they shouldn’t use it because it’s offensive? No.
• Do I think someone should fork it again as a rebrand? No, I think it will wither and fail like before.
• Will I use it anymore? Unlikely, although I never need it these days.
• Will I ever recommend it or tell anyone about it? Absolutely not.
• Do I judge people that love the name? A little.
• Do I tire of floss bros and their immature macho bullshit? God, yes.

My mother has always been quite regimented. I wouldn’t say she was overly strict, but she was steadfast.

If there was a rule, then it was to be followed. If there was a plan, you shouldn’t deviate. A lot of this is likely just her personality, but I’m sure some of it comes from being a usually poor, often single, parent of 2.

It never bothered me too much, I’ve never been much of a rebel. My transgressions were minor or isolated. It’s just part of being a kid, getting bossed around, but I was still a kid, I often wished to be left alone to do whatever I liked.

The Tipping Point

I suspect there’s a point in many people’s adolescence when they realise the value of the mundane but steadying hand of a parent. Perhaps, for some, it’s more of a slow growing appreciation. For me, there was definitely a tipping point.

It was a point in my childhood when my parents were separated but my father’s location was known, he was in the country, was relatively sober¹ and had both a home and a job. This meant I was able to spend time with him. So one Saturday I go to spend the day with him and stay over.

No rules

He made a big thing about us doing whatever we wanted. I think we went to play snooker, watched some football at the pub, ate a load of junk food. I remember it being fun, despite feeling a little ill from the excess snacks.

After we got back to his place, he made Spaghetti Bolognese. I told him that he’d put in double the amount of red wine the recipe called for. He reminded me that there were no rules today and that the wine brings out the flavour, you can’t actually taste it. Then proceeded to add twice as much again.

Spoiler alert: you could taste it.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t really stomach the food, and after dinner we watched TV late into the night. He told me again, no rules. We can watch anything and watch it all night. For a while it was great. Gruesome crime drama on the telly. To hell with bedtime!

After a while, I was hungry, I was tired, I was cold. Dad was asleep and the weight of him slumped on me was starting to hurt. I eventually decided it was ok to free myself from the sofa and took myself to bed.

I got up in the morning to find him still asleep on the sofa, which now had huge hole in it were the cigarette fire had occurred during the night.

I decided that this is shit, actually. I collected my things and went home to my mother.

I started using Vivaldi many months ago and have been very happy with it. I took the time to customise the endless settings and it has pretty much been ideal.

Recently though, I’ve had 2 problems. The first with account syncing. The browser on my phone tells me sync is inactive and I have to enter my sync encryption passcode, but when I do this… Nothing happens. There’s no feedback at all, I paste in my passcode from my password vault, but there’s no button to save the value. Pressing the tick/enter button on the keyboard does nothing. So I don’t know how to proceed.

The second is disappearing tab groups. Twice this has happened. I have put some tabs in a couple of groups to save for later. Mostly shopping stuff, e.g. birthday gifts for Mrs Basil. It keeps them out of the way of normal browsing and all grouped together for later.

Until one day, I open my tabs and they’re gone. I put this down to a glitch and forgot about it, but yesterday, it happened again. Very frustrating.

I read 6 books last year. Whilst I know several people that would do so in 2 months, I can’t remember the last time I finished that many in a year.

Two of them were novella, but still, let me have this.

Catalyst

It wasn’t a resolution or goal I set out with, that’s not how I roll. The Kobo Libra Colour was released, I got one, I started reading. (There was a hiatus for a few months when I had to return the device after it died).

I tend to get my books form ebooks.com or Hive then load them in Calibre before using various add-ons to modify and transfer them to the Kobo. I found it pretty confusing to set up, but now it just works.

Conquests

My 6 books were all fairly enjoyable. Nothing amazing but nothing too far towards mediocre.

• All Systems Red - Martha Wells
• Artificial Condition - Martha Wells
• I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman
• The Redemption of Morgan Bright - Chris Panatier
• Prophet - Helen Macdonald & Sin Blanché
• Winter’s Bone - Daniel Woodrell

I think that “I Who Have Never Known Men” is probably the pick of the bunch but they were all decent in different ways.

My final book of the year was “Spitting Off Tall Buildings” by Dan Fante which has been abandoned at about 40%. There’s a chance I’ll revisit, but I wasn’t really enjoying it.

I’ve moved on to Leviathan Wakes.

Logging

I haven’t decided if I’m going to track/log my reading. Bookwyrm is tempting but I would much prefer to keep it on my blog as a first port of call. Maybe I can POSSE to bookwyrm. I am very undecided.

All in

I had a Kindle Keyboard which I loved and used a lot but after I broke it by sitting on it, and getting a Paperwhite v1 (which was a hideous device), I turned my back on ereaders.

Buying the Kobo was a great choice. It definitely encourages my reading habits, and as long as I can steer clear of both Amazon and DRM then I’m happy.

I think I’ll still buy the dead trees as trophies when there’s a book that I adore, but otherwise I’m all in on ebooks.

There have been a few posts bouncing around the fediverse that dredge up the old “html is programming” discussion.

The driving force this time is beyond technicalities. It’s that any work that is non-programming, to a lot of idiots, implies non-skilled. I agree, this is complete nonsense.

I’ve never really considered document design to be programming, nor the SQL query work I spend most of my time doing (I don’t really have enough knowledge on the semantics to hold an opinion of any strength), but what I do feel is that the solution to the above situation is not to redefine all skilled computing tasks as “programming” in order to have them valued.

Layout, typesetting, accessibility, semantics, these are all difficult tasks, tasks that I can’t do to any reasonable standard. So are the many aspects of things like system analysis, UX, schema design, query optimisation, technical writing, network design and management, and all the infosec stuff I don’t understand.

I think we should fight the temptation redefine any skilled work as “programming” and instead we should recognise all work for its inherent value and the skill and dedication that goes into it. There will always be people and tasks outside any broadening definition so we should constantly challenge the idea that “programming” or any other type of work have some de facto supremacy.

These poisonous hierarchies exist in all professions, I have zero doubt, since this is a problem with people and our perceptions and is almost certainly systemic.

I have ended up in dependency hell. For once this has nothing to do with npm.

We hired a tester because I told my boss if he wanted things to improve in that regard, it needed more attention than I could give it.

The CTO insisted we hire a contractor so we could have an expert in temporarily and then see what we need thereafter. The contractor the company hired (via an outsourcing company) was worse than useless, so after a few months I convinced my boss to get rid.

We spent 6 months looking for someone permanent. And after sifting through mountains of identical CVs (and even more AI slop) from people who obviously didn’t know a damn thing about anything, we finally found a couple of ok people. Unfortunately for me, we seem to have made the wrong choice.

Red Flag 1

His first task was to spend a few weeks learning about Playwright and tell us if he was happy to use it over selenium. After one month, the total of his work was to complete the introduction to playwright exercise and say “yeah I can work with this”.

His second task was to throw away all the shite the contractor had done, and create a base automated test suite for our flagship project that was well structured, observed playwright recommended practice, and took care of any global oddities caused by our system.

After another month it became very clear that his month “researching playwright” had not been time well spent, and that this level of programming was far beyond him. It was a shame, but I wasn’t too bothered about this at the time. Whilst he’d clearly oversold himself in his interview, he’s not a developer, and we had been actively looking for someone that was stronger on the theoretical and manual testing side of things.

I had some spare capacity, so I took a couple of weeks and I created the test suite and wrote up some documentation on how to build on it and extend it in future. Problem solved.

All Aboard

Shortly after this, full scale development restarted on our flagship project, so Pull Requests start to arrive that need testing.

The system is basic form a technology point of view, but a bit tricky in terms of business process. Everyone in my team has each had a tough first 6 months getting to grips with it, so I knew the tester would be no different.

I spent 6 months helping him with every PR. Explaining every bug and backlog item. Showing how he could test it and what gotchas were in store for him.

At the same time I trained him on the horrors of manual formal testing in the old fashioned GxP CSV world. Showed him our current best efforts at manual tests that struck a balance between ease of maintenance/execution and that were acceptability according to the quality assurance auditors.

It’s a lot to take in, so I paired with him every step of the way. Every script written and executed, we did it together.

We finished testing and the release went out on time. I was exhausted from doing 2 jobs but considered it a good time investment for next time around.

Red Flag 2

Along comes the next phase of development. I was looking forward to doing less testing. This has proved misguided.

I figured I would continue to lead the risk assessments and collaborate with him on a test plan, then mostly leave him too it, helping (regularly) when needed.

Unfortunately, and I don’t know how else to say this, he doesn’t actually do anything.

An example

We agree a new bit of functionality needed 3 formal test cases. After having that conversation I go back to my work. Two days later he asks if I’m free in the afternoon for a call about the testing. I agree and he calls.

Tester: “I thought we better get started on this test script” Me: “Ok… What have you got so far?” Tester: “Well, you know nothing much yet, I thought best we work on it together”

I’m perplexed and a little cheesed off, but it is what it is, if he’s stuck he’s stuck… But he hasn’t even created an empty test case or done any of the other admin grunt work.

So, we spend 3 hours on teams setting it up, drafting some prerequisites and the first test case. I add a whole bunch of comments to the document saying things like “Make another case exactly like this but for the happy path and another one with an admin user”. I tell him he just needs to do what’s in the comments and then we can go over what he comes up with together.

Wednesday the next week, I get the same message, am I free this afternoon? I make time, it shouldn’t have taken him 4 working days to do 2 hours work, but he’s still getting to grips with stuff.

I jump in the call.

Tester: “I thought if best I set up this call to get this done sooner rather than later.” Me: “Yeah definitely, let’s have a look”

I open the document and nothing has changed. The last modification was mine, he’s literally not opened the document since last week. Again he says he thought it best we do it together.

Variations on this story play out for the next three months. Whenever I ask him to do something, however small, one of two things happen:

• He says sure, then just doesn’t do it, and I find out later and have to rush the task at the last minute.
• He says sure, then asks when I have some free time to “go over it”, and by “go over it”, he means have a teams call and do it for him.

Planning what to do

At this point I’m giving serious thought to how best I can break this cycle. My default friendly, understanding and, helpful approach isn’t working but also, I don’t want to overcorrect.

Last Friday, my team get an email from our manager saying don’t forget today is the deadline for filling out the self assessment section of our annual review. So I’m wondering what the hell I say in my review about how the testing is going. I’m certainly not for grassing the lad up for being completely useless. This is a problem I need to solve on my own, so I need to think and choose my words carefully.

Final Red Flag

While I’m pondering all this I get that familiar message from the tester. Am I free for a call? I’m wondering what he could possibly want, he’s had nothing to do for 3 or 4 days aside from exploritory testing, maybe he’s found a bug, finally something useful.

He calls me, says hi, and starts sharing his screen. I honestly can’t believe my eyes or my ears. The screen shows his annual review form. He says to me “we’ve worked together so much I thought we should do this together”.

I gather myself as quickly as I can without falling off my chair and I give him general guidance about the questions and some obvious points to mention. “How do you think I should phrase it?” he asks, caret blinking at me from inside the empty text box. He’s waiting for me to dictate to him the words for his self assessment.

It’s at this point I realise I’ve been underestimating the scale of my problem and I’m even more worried than before. I’m bamboozled, I repeat the things I’ve just told him and make an excuse about needing to jump on another call.

I’ve no idea what I’m doing

I don’t know what I do from this point, but I need to do something. I’ve learned I’m obviously pretty damn awful at onboarding team members and I’ve created a colleague who can’t function alone.

I know I can’t keep doing both of our jobs. That’s about all I do know at this point.

For the WeblogPoMoAMA Keenan asked Annie “What’s the most consequential decision you made in your life that lead you to this moment?”. I love a good sliding doors moment, so this is mine.

In my final year of 6th Form College (High School), as part of my vocational IT course we had to go on a 2 week work experience placement. We told the placement officer what we were interested in doing and they tried to find us somewhere to go. I, along with one other classmate, asked for something in web development.

The placement officer comes into our class one day and hands everyone their placement details, finally he tells us that there is only one placement for web development and a placement at the local university that will have maybe a day or so of “web stuff” amongst other IT work. They ask if either of us would be willing to take the university placement.

The decision

A few moments of silence pass. I’m not enthused about being an IT dogsbody for 2 weeks, but I figure the other lad probably wants to go and do web development more than I do. And heck, there’s a chance I’ll be attending this university so it could be good to get a feel for the place. I let the other kid take the placement and I head off to the university.

The consequences

I have a fairly boring placement helping some nice folk with their Access databases and Excel formula and they offer me a full-time job over the summer and part-time hours once I start my studies.

I make friends with a lot of people in the open plan office. I get on very well with a Scottish woman who sits opposite my desk and likes a drink after work. I meet her girlfriend and all their friends, including a larger than life Maltese woman who is studying a Masters in crime scene science. Over the next year we become good friends.

Not long after she graduates and goes home to Malta, she sends out a group email to all of her university friends. She is giving a lecture at the University of Malta, is very nervous, and would anyone like to take a trip to Malta and come along. Obviously, people can’t, they have plans and responsibilities. I don’t, I’m a 20 year old boy and I want a cheap holiday, so I don’t hesitate.

My first morning there my friend invites me to lunch to meet some of her friends. I make my way over to the restaurant in Spinola Bay and I meet my wife.

I have 2 traits that keep biting my on the arse.

I Have No Memory of This Place

I am apparently incapable of taking sufficiently detailed and coherent notes about literally anything. If I take notes at all, they’re almost worthless.

I start doing some hobby project, usually some (what many would consider trivial) computer or web tinkering, and I’ll spend days of weeks where it’s all I can do or think about in any of the spare time I have. Then sometimes when I’m “finished”, sometimes when I’m not, I’ll down tools for anywhere between 6 months, 2 years, and forever.

If and when I do return, I really do wish that past Basil had taken some sodding notes.

Always Follow Your Nose

I usually figure it out eventually… Maybe that’s why I keep doing this to myself. The consequences are just temporary confusion and wasted time.

Anyway, I need to look at some source code I can’t remember writing.

In the last week I have started watching The Expanse. If I continue, this will be my 3rd watch. There aren’t many shows that I can watch again, fewer still more than twice. It got me trying to remember what I’d re-watched.

Several Viewings

Shows that I’ve seen 3 or 4 or more times, start to finish.

The West Wing

I’ve seen The West Wing at least 7 or 8 times, but possibly more. The kind of re-watchable TV for me. Perfectly entertaining actively watching or background TV. A new benefit is that it doesn’t startle the dog, if anything it seems to calm her down. I almost know every episode back to front at this point. It’s not my favourite show, but it is my most watchable.

The Wire

Everything else is far behind… I think I’ve watched The Wire 4 times and might be due another viewing soon. Truly wonderful show. I love how it’s shot and the characters are unrivalled. I admit that I’ve skipped the final season on a couple of run throughs.

Firefly

A bit of a cheat since there’s barely anything to it. A wonderful show you can get through in no time. If anything, it’s re-watchability is hurt by how memorable the episodes are and how few of them there are.

Parks and Recreation

Starting off as a Mrs Basil’s Re-runs (see below) but becoming something I would happily watch by choice so it gets its own entry here. The classic US comedy cliché: Season 1 is tripe.

Mrs Basil’s Re-runs

This is not counting the shows that Mrs Basil likes to watch over and over and over again, as a form of anxiety treatment. Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, Friends, Schitt’s Creek, etc.

Double Viewings

The Expanse

Soon to graduate up the list. I love the political complexity of the show and the near-ish future and semi-believable baseline of the world it builds. Clunky acting aside, I find it hard not to enjoy getting lost in it.

True Detective S1

A bit of a cheat, but each season lives on its own, so I decided it counts. I re-watched this for the first time last year and was blown away again. Forgot how just incredible it is. I will probably watch it again but likely not for many years.

Band of Brothers

I remember being blown away by this the first time. I’ve only re-watched once but another soon might be on the cards. Although I’ve never seen The Pacific so perhaps that should happen first.

The ones I’ve forgotten about

There’s almost certainly some I’ve forgotten about.

Sort of Double Viewings

Kind of almost more than one viewing, but not really.

The X-Files

I “re-watched” this recently. I’d seen most of it in my childhood but on terrestrial TV so likely missed plenty and forgot even more. A lot of it was like watching for the first time. Will I ever re-watch again. I’d say probably not.

Yes Minister

I’ve probably seen most episodes more than once, but never at once or in any kind of order.

Black Books

I’ve seen most of this at least twice and the bulk of the first 2 seasons 2 or 3 times, but I tend to cherry pick favourites nor and again.

I’m using this month’s topic for indieweb carnival as an excuse for full scale reminiscing. Reminiscing about the relationships I’ve had that have been largely or wholly digital and how technology affected my analogue relationships.

The good old days

Internet service availability started to become ubiquitous in this part of the world as I started secondary school in 1996. I think I started to use the internet daily in ‘97 or ‘98. Either visiting a friend’s house or in the computer labs¹ at school. My internet use was mostly browsing at this point, finding anything interesting or funny and sharing it with friends². I joined a few forums but mostly lurked.

During those years, my digital / online communication was pretty much exclusively with people who I already knew. IM via MSN Messenger or SMS messages at 12p a time³ with the Nokia 3210 that every single teenager owned.

First online community

It wasn’t until 2001, in 6th form college and armed with a PC to call my own, that I started to post a little more on forums and chat with fellow pirates on Napster. This was also when I embedded myself in an online community for the first time and started to forge some fuller digital relationships for the first time. I joined DeviantArt and jumped in with both feet. I spent almost every free evening there, or talking with people I met there.

This all fell by the wayside when I went off to university. Leaving home and living with 5 of my closest friends lessened any motivation for finding a community elsewhere. The emergence of MySpace, and later Facebook, made internet socialising an accompaniment to my existing relationships rather than a conduit for making new online friends.

I’m about to carry a bag of sand

Around the time I graduated, microblogging was being born. Sometime around 2007 I signed up to Jaiku. There I found a community of nerds and spent many an evening interacting. I stumbled upon the Linux Outlaws community and was indoctrinated. Google came along and bought Jaiku, and not waiting for Google to inevitably do what Google does, the community I had become a part of moved, almost completely en masse, to identi.ca.

Here is where, for the first and probably only time, I made some honest to god, full fat digital first, friends. I spent an enormous amount of my idle time on Identica from 2008 until probably around 2012. Entire evenings spent abusing a microblogging platform as a public chatroom (the XMPP support certainly helped). It was a really great and amusing time, and the only time I’ve ever been to the pub with people I’d only interacted with online.

All good things come to an end. People moved on as the platform struggled with some technology changes and my online life once again reverted to the mainstream social networks, meaning news consumption on Twitter and sharing posts with real world contacts via Facebook and WhatsApp.

ActivityPub & Indieweb?

Roll on 2017 and I hear about Mastodon, that it might be the natural successor to Identica. I dip my toe back in, as do many Identica old-timers, but obviously it’s not the same. Slowly I have started to build up a decent timeline… perhaps sped up by lock-down, and definitely enhanced by independent blogging and participation in things like 100 Days to Offload.

After a post lock-down lull, I am definitely in a phase of high online engagement by my standards. Not to the same extent as my Identica peak, but certainly more broad. With Discord communities around football podcasts, proactively trying to curate relationships via independent blogs, and recently signing up with omg.lol. I’m always on the lookout for my people these days.

I like to hope I’ll maintain this effort but I do seem to be prone to pendulum swings in this behaviour. Time will tell.

Tomorrow morning Mrs Basil is heading off to Rotterdam for a week to attend the “Rotterdam Lab” at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

It’s a 6am flight, her hotel doesn’t allow check-in until 3pm, and the event begins at 2pm and lasts until late evening… She’s going to have a bit of a day.

That’s on top of her usual anxieties when attending professional events like this. It will be a rollercoaster of emotions for her as ever.

Seven Dog Day Afternoons

Me, I’ll be left dealing with my shithead chaos goblin or “Our dog, Scout” as Mrs Basil likes to call her.

Tomorrow I might try in vain to take her out to some pubs. She’ll ruin almost every minute of the experience but I’ll try anyway.

By the end of the week I’ll be tired, bored, frustrated, and miserable.

Here’s to the next seven days.

After seeing it crop up a few times, either from people I interact with on the fediverse and/or folk who’s blogs I read, I’ve signed for an account with omg.lol.

I don’t really know what to describe it as… A “small independent hosting collective” is the best I can come up with.

I thought I’d perhaps use it as an un-anonymised alt to my usual semi-anon online presence here.

As part of the £15 a year membership you get some light web hosting (a profile page, a now page, a basic markdown blog, a very old school microblog), a text pastebin and image pastebin, a mastodon account at social.lol, an email address (cutts@omg.lol), plus a few other bits and bobs.

Given how elaborate and daft my main website is, and how likely any alternative is to sit dormant, requirements for said alternative would be:

• be super basic
• be close to free
• be near zero maintenance

It ticks these boxes and has the added benefit of being a bit daft and fun.

Also I’m looking forward to telling someone my email address is Cutts at oh em gee dot ell oh ell.

In Other News, It’s Windy

A storm arrived in the UK and all the usual British things happened. Wheelie bins and trampolines littering the streets, etc.

Our barbeque, thanks to it’s rain cover I’d imagine, took a little trip but stayed in the garden. Other than a few panels of the greenhouse, no other damage as yet.

The fence, however, is not long for this world. It may have seen its last winter.

I accidentally ended up being too helpful at work and it’s backfired.

I’ve been lumped with a load of work that never seems to end, without the authority to actually make any decisions about it. Happy days.

The work in question is the configuration of a complicated web app (A validation lifecycle management system).

Four things are making it difficult:

• the system is maddeningly complicated and bizarre
• the system and its configuration is poorly documented
• the configuration file is an Excel workbook
• our computer system validation process, which is being computerised, poorly defined and muddled.

The folk who will be the primary users of this system were really struggling with it and making next to no progress on it, so I decided to help out. Sure enough, now it’s become my responsibility to make any progress at all.

I can’t wait to put it behind me. Of course, the original deadline was December 2023.

It’s often amusing watching people try and define their processes within the restrictions of an existing system. It really does often highlight that the process is largely bollocks and that they are mostly winging it.

I’d suspected as much of this particular process, so it’s nice to have it confirmed at least.

Huzzah! It works.

I finally have obsidian-git working on my phone. Meaning I can blog much more easily without my laptop.

Zettle Notes

Until now I’d been using Zettel Notes to push changes to my site, it’s a pretty impressive little app, but as a day to day tool for blogging it simply doesn’t work. First because the UX is a bit clunky, and second because I rely too much on my obsidian configuration for adding content.

In the end I was simply using it for ad-hoc tweaks and fixes or, very rare, high friction blogging.

Assumptions

To be honest, for the longest time, I didn’t even try to use obsidian on my phone. I just assumed that the obsidian-git plugin wouldn’t work.

When I did happen to look over the docs, there were some instructions for setting up the plugin on obsidian mobile, so I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. However, upon following the docs, obsidian would crash every time I tried to clone my repo.

Once more unto the breach

Today I decided I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Met with the same problem, I downloaded MGit from F-Droid and used that to clone to my repo to my phone.

Once done, I was able to set up an obsidian vault and pushing and pulling the repo with obsidian-git worked just fine.

So here we are, in obsidian, on my phone, writing a daily note.

I had one of those painful family tech support moments today. It involved a parent and a printer. The horror.

Thankfully, last time I was with my mum, I had written instructions on how to request remote assistance in a text file. And I was confident, because my mother can work a computer. She used to be a typist, she taught me how to use MS-DOS and Word Perfect.

However, my confidence was misplaced.

The first 3 steps in the instructions were as follows:

1. Open the start menu
2. Type “invite”
3. Click on “Invite someone to provide you assistance” that should be at the top of the menu

We were unable to progress to step 3 without a WhatsApp video call. I’ll spare you the rest.

Mrs Basil has been out of the country for work (In Jordan, to be specific) and so I have been a single dog dad for a while. She returns home tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to not having to constantly deal with the dog.

I always get a bit glum when I’m stuck on my own for more than a few days, I feel like I just get in a rut. Wake up, tend to the dog, go to work, walk the dog, back to work, walk the dog, feed the dog, cook dinner, eat, wash up, settle the dog, rest for an hour, go to bed, repeat.

Was able to meet some mates in the Pub on Friday night, which was grand, and a BBQ on Sunday but I am looking forward to a return to some normalcy.

Even prior to this week I was having a little break from my site… was probably spending a bit too much time on it, I’ve never been good at self moderation so going to try and pick it up again but not as intensely.

Yesterday, I was able to bunk off work early, which was helpful, because I needed to go and do some auditing of parts of the National Cycle Network for Sustrans. I’d allocated the task to myself at the start of the month, but then July of the never-ending rain began.

I’m a shadow of my former self

I thought I’d be able to get this all done in one big ride, but after loading the route in my cycling computer, I was informed that it was 80km. Which, with current functional equipment and levels of fitness (plus stopping to do the actual auditing) I figured would have taken me about 6 hours.

So I did 40km of the planned route and it was still a slog, a very humbling ride, that took over 4 hours. I was consciously taking it easy and I was riding an inappropriate bike, but even so, I could feel that it was more difficult than I was used to.

Moreover, in order to cut the loop short, I had to ride across a valley. I knew the climb that was in my path, and already knew it would be beyond me before I got there, and so it was. When I arrived at Clockburn Lonnen I gave what I had, but inevitably… “Sometimes hiking, always biking”.

I felt ok in the aftermath aside from having very sore arms and hands. That is, until I had to do a few hours work in the garden, and now I am actually deceased.

Tinkering with Zotero

Today, aside from killing myself in the garden, I’ve been playing around with my “knowledge base”. Specifically, having a look at Zotero, which I had an inkling that I’d seen before and ignored because of it’s intended use case - researchers tracking references.

However, given I’ve been reading How to Take Smart Notes and thinking about how I can apply a subset of what it talks about to just hobbyist nonsense, I took a longer look at Zotero than I otherwise would have.

I quickly figured it would be a good place to record the books I’ve read, if nothing else, and it can link well into obsidian. I then realised that you can add web pages to its database as well as books and journal articles.

This got me to thinking, I could maybe use it as a tool for tracking blogs / online articles that I’ve found interesting or think I might find interesting. I’ve tried and failed doing this before, of course, from del.icio.us to pocket and everything in between. Perhaps now that I’m making a conscious effort to read more and write about what I’ve read, this could be a great tool… Folly? Almost certainly.

I had a little look on the internet to see if any other non-academics were abusing Zotero in this way, and pretty much the first link I find is this blog by @jbaty. It’s always funny to see a familiar face in a search result but it made me realise… it’s likely that I had seen Zotero before, and that this post is likely the reason why.

Today’s work was mundane, more boring tasks revolving around computer system validation documentation. More on-boarding of a new contractor.

I have a call with the new contractor tomorrow to give them a walk-through of the system we want them to write a test suite for. I am dreading it because I find the communication so difficult.

One depressing element to this particular ongoing task, is that he is based in Odesa, and so I was genuinely worried about his safety after he didn’t reply to an email this morning.

X

The main news in the online world was the half arsed twitter re-brand with what appears to be a Unicode character. Musk’s obsession with this brand name seems really rather unhinged. We’ve all sat on domain names that we always wanted to use for something really good, but this is a bit extreme.

I just saw the new logo referred to as a sans-serif swastika. Which may be the winner for joke of the day.

Delivery Curse

I’ve had a lot of issues with online orders recently. I can’t remember having many issues before now, the odd delivery here and there over the last few decades.

Lately, seems I’m cursed, four of the last five things I’ve ordered have been either incredibly delayed or have gone MIA.What are the chances? (As an old colleague would say, the chances are 50/50, either it happens, or it doesn’t)