Even this self-checkout thinks I’m eating too much chocolate.
Kind: Notes
Four OpenBenches
Despite Google making it harder for me to do so 🤬, I managed to add not one, not two, not three but four new memorial benches to the OpenBenches database during a dog walk this morning.
A particular excitement was adding my first bench with two plaques.
It’s the little things.
Note #29064
How kind of the humans who constructed this sofa to leave a perfect dog-shaped nest in-between the cushions. Our pupper is appreciative.
Watch it twice
Something’s gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household’s film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition…
Note #28940
Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️
Black Belt
It’s been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is – going many others, mostly older and larger than him! – finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞
Chicory Battlestation
Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It’s nice to sit at one again, even if it’s only a ‘chicory battlestation’.
Moving the Internet
The “regular” house’s Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.
Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven’t yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!
Ghost of a dartboard
There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
What breaks?
What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn’t shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
Personal Location Tracking FTW
I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. At one point, we found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: I couldn’t place exactly why I’d been there before. Geocaching, possibly: I couldn’t see any on the map but perhaps they’d been since archived?
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I’ve been in the last decade or two, so I was able to run a quick query and discover that I’d walked out here on a geohashing expedition in 2024.
Personal location tracking continues to be awesome. Being able to both forwards-search (“where was I on this date?”) and reverse-search (“when was I last within this area?”) unlocks a wealth of aides mémoire that are otherwise hard to come by.
It’s hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it’s a slow-burner – you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! – but I still recommend it.
Flossed
Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.
Chicory House, Real Coffee, Flooded Keyboard
As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱
Chicory, Coffee, and Code
Now that we’ve finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment… with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!
Good morning, Goldfinch
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!
