Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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How kind of the humans who constructed this sofa to leave a perfect dog-shaped nest in-between the cushions. Our pupper is appreciative.
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A satisfied but sleepy-looking fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies on a blanket that's slipping into the crack between two sofa seat cushions, forming a nest around her torso. Her legs hang, crossed, off the front of the sofa.
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Something's gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household's film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition...
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TV screen interface showing posters for many films. Groundhog Day is listed twice in succession. This is funny because the film is about a celebration date, 'groundhog day', repeating itself.
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Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️
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Dan, a white man with a blue ponytail and a goatee, smiles next to a broad rural river.
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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. 🥋 🤞
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A mixed age group of people dressed in taekwondo robes with a mixture of red and black belts.
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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'.
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Two laptops sit nestled between two large monitors, with a desktop computer on the floor below and a teleprompter/webcam on an arm above, in a brightly-sunlit garden office.
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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.
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Dan, a white man with a ponytail and a goatee beard, carries a large black cube-shaped computer down a staircase.
This was a challenging selfie to take. 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!
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There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
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Two lines of holes cover a portion of a light green wall, with a rectangular gap between them, under a protruding screw, where perhaps a tray shelf was once mounted.
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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.
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DataDog graph marked to show a co-worker's departure on Friday evening being immediately followed by a flurry of errors which then stopped for the weekend before coming back in force on Monday morning.
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!
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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.
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Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.
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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. 😱
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A desktop computer keyboard inverted over a kitchen sink, with many of its keycaps scattered around.
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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!
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Good morning, Goldfinch
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!
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Unpacked Kitchen
Today's mission in what we're calling the Chicory House - our home while our actual house gets repaired - was to unpack the kitchen. I think it's looking pretty good!
(The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!)
Next weekend's mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn't the conservatory dining table. 😬 -
100 Days to Offload × 7
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk's "100 Days To Offload" blogging challenge. And today... I just completed it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me - he counts "posts over a twelve month period", while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: "posts in a calendar year", because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day... but it's 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions... the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉