Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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A lunchtime dog walk was made especially delightful by the growing warmth of the approaching British springtime. It's really bright and pretty out, this afternoon!
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A French Bulldog in a harness but no lead stands in front of a empty field, under bright blue skies with sparse clouds. Bare wintery trees can be seen in the background, bathed in warm yellow light.
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The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano.
Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend.
But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, and bodged a fix. It sounds great.
I feel accomplished.
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Behind the lower front board of an open upright piano, a hand reaches in between the pedal rods and the soundboard to point at the hinge screw of the sustain pedal.
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I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.
So obviously step #1 involves a big ol' coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go...
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A wooden kitchen surface containing a red mug full of freshly-brewed coffee alongside a plate painted with fruits on which sits a heart-shaped doughnut, topped with chocolate and decorated with an iced motif of a sunflower. Beneath the plate, out-of-focus, are the pages of a news periodical.
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"I'm only asking for basic respect." - Dr. Beth Upton, in the face of a hostile courtroom, media, and world.
Her fucking bravery is amazing. ๐
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After "fixing" BBC News' RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I'd subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I'd been on the Full edition. I've corrected it now in my RSS reader, but it was an interesting couple of days.
tl;dr: I accidentally stopped reading international news and I was less stressed
Anyway: if you're not already using my improved BBC News RSS feeds, they're at: https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev
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Don't Bishops normally get to retain their regular name? This BBC News headline makes it sound like we're gonna end up with Bishop McBishopface!
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BBC News headline: Public invited to suggest names for next archbishop.
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Reading more rolled papyri
In kind-of local news, I see that the folks at Diamond Light Source (which I got to visit last year) have been helping the Bodleian (who I used to work for) to X-ray one of their Herculaneum scrolls (which I've written about before). That's really cool.
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Possible future presentation concept: using a cafe/dining metaphor to help explain the proximity principle in user interface design (possibly with a "live waitstaffing" demo?).
Great idea? Or stupid idea?
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Photo looking down on a square wooden table in a cafe environment. Far from the photographer, a plate containing a couple of crumbs is pushed far to the other side of the table. Closer to him is a cup of coffee, two folded napkins, and an open MacBook. Arrows and captions draw attention to the relative distances between the components of the scene, labelling them as follows - "I am finished with this plate..." (refering to its relative distance), "...but I'm keeping this napkin" (which is closer to the coffee than the discarded plate), "I'm keeping the napkin while I finish my drink" (the two are close together), and "I'm working" (based on the relative position of the photographer and his laptop).
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On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they'd made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.
It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.
Nowadays, that's an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart... well, this isn't exactly why, but it's a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:'d to a few friends.
It's not an exciting story. It's not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)
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Back at work after a three-month break, and it turns out the first thing that I'd missed is my team's quirky morning ritual.
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Slack screenshot of Dan saying, at 08:57am: 'You know how many people pika-waved at me on a morning while I was on sabbatical? None. None at all. I missed you guys.' The quote is bookended by an animated GIF of Pikachu waving and another of Pikachu dancing around a heart. Five people have reacted with a mixture of Pikachu dances and waves.
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After a night that alternated between raining and freezing winds here, at the edge of Storm รowyn, this morning my skylight has ice patterns on it that look beautiful and almost organic.
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Skylight window viewed from the inside. The outside has a layer of ice punctuated by thinner patches of whirling, seaweed-like patterns that crisscross around it as if formed by a living thing.
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My 8-year-old asked me "In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentenceโฝ" (I assume the answer is yes!)
A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: โฝ =
U+203D, โธ =U+2E18. Nice.(And yet we don't have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar and double-bar "cifrรฃo" dollar signs...)
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Last year, a colleague introduced me to lazygit, a TUI git client with a wealth of value-added features.
Somehow, though, my favourite feature is the animation you see if you nuke the working tree. ๐ Excellent.
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The final weekend of my sabbatical was spent, like the first one, at a Three Rings event. As a side activity to the volunteer work, everybody was asked to put their name on a paper plate and leave it on a particular table, allowing others to semi-anonymously add compliments, thanks, or kind words about its owner.
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Dan holding a plate containing his name and a collection of compliments, listed in the full post.
Comments on my plate:
* Your my faveriot [sic] brother (gee, I wonder who THAT one was from ๐)
* Always seems to be doing interesting things. A maverick! Thinks outside the box
* Awesome
* Thank you for inventing this (a) system & (b) corporate model!
* Always smiley and excited
* Thanks for always pushing lots of new features!
* Puts up with idiots willingly and patiently
* You literally dreampt this whole thing into existence!
* Quirky
* Innovative solutions!
* Helpful in all ways!Fabulous. I might wall-mount it.
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Goodbye, Trinidad and Tobago. ๐น๐น
You were wonderful. I hope to visit you again. โค๏ธ
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Dan and Ruth clink champagne glasses between the booths of their club class seats.