May 2023 Archives

Have Fun with Missions, Visions, and Values

I just spent a lightweight week in Rome with fellow members of Automattic‘s Team Fire.

Among our goals for the week was an attempt to strengthen the definition of who are team are, what we work on, and how and why we do so. That’s basically a team-level identity, mission, vision, and values, right?

In front of the Colosseum in Rome, Dan - wearing a rainbow-striped bandana atop which his sunglasses are perched - takes a selfie. Behind him stand a man with dark hair and a closely-trimmed beard wearing a purple "woo" t-shirt, a woman with long brown hair wearing beads and a multicoloured dress, a man wearing spectacles and a dark t-shirt on which the number "23" can be made out, and a man in sunglasses with a ginger beard, wearing an open blue shirt. — We were missing two members of our team, but one was able to remote-in (the other’s on parental leave!).

Fellow Automattician Ben Dwyer recently wrote about his experience of using a deck of Dixit cards to help his team refine their values in a fun and engaging way. I own a Dixit set, so we decided to give it a go too.

A deck of Dixit cards, bound by a twisted elastic band, sits on a flight itinerary for the journey "LGW to FCO" taking place on May 21, 2023 and costing $367.60. — The cards sat on my ‘plane tickets for a fortnight because it was just about the only way I’d remember to pack them.

Normally when you play Dixit, you select a card from your hand – each shows a unique piece of artwork – and try to describe it in a way that’s precise enough that some of the other players will later be able to pick it out of a line-up, but ambiguous enough that not all the other players will. It’s a delicate balancing act. Even when our old Geek Night was in full swing we didn’t used to play it often because our well-established group’s cornucopia of in-jokes and references made it trivially easy to “target” your descriptions at specific players¹, but it’s still a solid icebreaker activity.

Perhaps it was the fantasy artwork that inspired us or maybe it just says something about how my team sees themselves, but what we came up with had a certain… swords-and-sorcery… even Dungeons & Dragons… feel to it.

Ou team’s new identity isn’t finalised, but I love the fact that we’ve been able to inject a bit of fun and whimsy into it. At our last draft, my team looks to be defined as comprising:

Gareth, level 6² Pathfinder, leading the way through the wilds
Bero, Level 5 Battlesmith, currently lost in the void
Dan (me!), Level 5 Arcane Trickster, breaking locks and stealing treasure
Cem, Level 4 Dragonslayer, smashing doors and bugs alike
Lae, Level 7 Pirate, seabound rogue with eyes on the horizon
Kyle, Level 5 Apprentice Bard, master of words and magic
Simran, Level 6 Apprentice Code Witch, weaving spells from nature

I think that’s pretty awesome.

¹ Also: I don’t own any of the expansion packs and playing with the same cards over and over again gets a bit samey.

² The “levels” are simply the number of years each teammate has been an Automattician, plus one.

Dan Q found GC7FB9H From Canterbury to the cache

This checkin to GC7FB9H From Canterbury to the cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Well that was quite the adventure!

The first wayoint is right across the road from where some work colleagues and I are staying for an “away week”. I decided to dash out during a break in the weather to try and solve this multi between meetings. But I was quickly confused because… this isn’t the way I was taught to do Roman numerals. I’d always been told that you should never have four of the same letter in a row, e.g. you should say XIV, not XIIII. Once I’d worked out what I was doing wrong, though, I was okay!

The second and third waypoints had me braving some frankly scary roads. The drivers here just don’t seem to stop unless you’re super assertive when you step out!

Once I had the final numbers and ran it through geochecker I realised that the cache must be very close to where I’d had lunch earlier today! Once I got there it took me a while to get to the right floor, after which the hint made things pretty obvious.

Great trail, really loved it. And just barely made it back before the rain really started hammering down. TFTC, FP awarded, and greetings from Oxford, UK!

Dan Q found GC9QCKH When in Rome live as the Romans do (bb Tribute 05)

This checkin to GC9QCKH When in Rome live as the Romans do (bb Tribute 05) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Took until the fourth hiding place before I found the cache. Out for a walk with work colleagues on the way to dinner. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Travelling light

Now that travel for work is back on the menu, I’ve been trying to upgrade my “pack light” game.

I’ve been inspired in part by Beau, who I first met during my trip to South Africa in 2019 during my Automattic onboarding. Beau travelled from the US for a two week jaunt with nothing but hand luggage, and it blew my mind.

Gotta flight? Pack light, pack tight. That’s right! Corporate branding is just a bonus.

For my trip to Vienna earlier this year for a divisional meetup, I got by with just a backpack and a laptop bag. Right now, I’m waiting to fly to Rome for a week, and I’ve ditched the laptop bag in favour of just a single carry-on backpack. About 7kg of luggage, and well within the overhead locker size limit.

I’m absolutely sold on this approach. I get to:

walk past the queues for luggage drop (having checked-in online),
keep the entirety of my luggage with me at all times (which ensures it goes where I do),
breeze through security¹, thanks to smart packing²
walk right out of the airport at the other end without having to wait for the flingers to finish smashing everybody’s luggage into the carousels.

Minimalist carbon fibre wallet, balanced on two fingertips, with parts of a Halifax Mastercard credit card showing from behind an elasticated band. — I’ve been working on simplifying my everyday carry, too. My wallet is the Carbon Fibre Liquid Wallet, which is about the size of a deck of playing cards (something I also often carry!) and holds a handful of cards, a bundle of cash, a bottle opener, *and* all my regular keys. The hook on the end is for attaching the pendrive with my password safe for travel.

As somebody who’s travelled “heavy” for most of my life – and especially since the children came along – it’s liberating to migrate to a “pick up a bag and go” mindset. To begin with, the nagging thought that I must’ve forgotten something essential was challenging, but I think I’ve gotten past that stage now.

Travelling light feels like carefree: like being a kid again, when all you needed was the back on your back and you were ready for an adventure. Once again, I’ve got a bag on my back³ and I know that everything I need for an adventure is right here with me⁴.

¹ If you’ve travelled with me before, you might have noticed that I sometimes have trouble at borders on account of my damn stupid name, as predicted by the Passport Office. I’ve since learned all the requisite tricks to sidestep these problems, but that’s probably worthy of a post in its own right.

² A little smart packing goes a long way. In the photo above, you might see my pre-prepared liquids bag in a side pocket, my laptop slides right out for separate scanning, my wallet and phone just dump out of my pockets, and I’m done.

³ I don’t really have a bag on my back right now. I’m sat in a depature lounge at Gatwick Airport. But you get the idea.

⁴ Do I really have everything I need? I’ve not brought a waterproof coat and, looking at the weather forecast at my destination, this might have been a mistake. But worst case I can buy a cheap poncho at the other end. That’s the kind of freedom that being an adult gets you, replacing the childlike freedom to get soaked and not care.

Normal for Children

Lacking a basis for comparison, children accept their particular upbringing as normal and representative.

Kit was telling me about how his daughter considers it absolutely normal to live in a house full of insectivorous plants¹, and it got me thinking about our kids, and then about myself:

I remember once overhearing our eldest, then at nursery, talking to her friend. Our kid had mentioned doing something with her “mummy, daddy, and Uncle Dan” and was incredulous that her friend didn’t have an Uncle Dan that they lived with! Isn’t having three parents… just what a family looks like?

Dan, wearing a black jumper, sits on a green chair in a brightly-decorated bedroom. On his chest, a 2-year-old girl has fallen asleep, clutching a woolen yellow blanket and with her thumb in her mouth. — You don’t have an Uncle Dan? Then where do you nap‽

By the time she was at primary school, she’d learned that her family wasn’t the same shape as most other families, and she could code-switch with incredible ease. While picking her up from school, I overheard her talking to a friend about a fair that was coming to town. She told the friend that she’d “ask her dad if she could go”, then turned to me and said “Uncle Dan: can we go to the fair?”; when I replied in the affirmitive, she turned back and said “my dad says it’s okay”. By the age of 5 she was perfectly capable of translating on-the-fly² in order to simultaneously carry out intelligble conversations with her family and with her friends. Magical.

When I started driving, and in particular my first few times on multi-lane carriageways, something felt “off” and it took me a little while to work out what it was. It turns out that I’d internalised a particular part of the motorway journey experience from years of riding in cars driven by my father, who was an unrepentant³ and perpetual breaker of speed limits.⁴ I’d come to associate motorway driving with overtaking others, but almost never being overtaken, but that wasn’t what I saw when I drove for myself.⁵ It took a little thinking before I realised the cause of this false picture of “what driving looks like”.

A boxy 1979 white Ford car, number plate DSS 657T with a badly dented and somewhat corroded front wheel arch on the drivers' side, sits empty and parked at the side of an otherwise empty asphalt strreet. In the background, under grey skies, a city skyline can be made out with houses, tower blocks, and a church steeple, on the other side of an arched river bridge. The leaves are early-autumn coloured: mostly greem, but with some brown appearing and a handful of bare branches exposed. — How my dad ever *managed* to speed in this old rustbucket I’ll never know.

The thing is: you only ever notice the “this is normal” definitions that you’ve internalised… when they’re challenged!

It follows that there are things you learned from the quirks of your upbringing that you still think of as normal. There might even be things you’ll never un-learn. And you’ll never know how many false-normals you still carry around with you, or whether you’ve ever found them all, exept to say that you probably haven’t yet.

A small child, sitting on the floor, uses a mobile phone to watch a cartoon of two people struggling to pull a fishing rod. A feminine hand with brown-painted nails and rings on two fingers reaches in to offer the child a minature model of a human brain. — I wanted a stock image that expressed the concept of how children conceptualise ideas in their mind, but I ended up with this picture of a women offering her kid a tiny human brain in exchange for her mobile phone back. That’s a normal thing that all families do, right?

It’s amazing and weird to think that there might be objective truths you’re perpetually unable to see as a restult of how, or where, or by whom you were brought up, or by what your school or community was like, or by the things you’ve witnessed or experienced over your life. I guess that all we can all do is keep questioning everything, and work to help the next generation see what’s unusual and uncommon in their own lives.

¹ It’s a whole thing. If you know Kit, you’re probably completely unsurprised, but spare a thought for the poor randoms who sometimes turn up and read my blog.

² Fully billingual children who typically speak a different language at home than they do at school do this too, and it’s even-more amazing to watch.

³ I can’t recall whether his license was confiscated on two or three separate ocassions, in the end, but it was definitely more than one. Having a six month period where you and your siblings have to help collect the weekly shop from the supermarket by loading up your bikes with shopping bags is a totally normal part of everybody’s upbringing, isn’t it?

⁴ Virtually all of my experience as a car passenger other than with my dad was in Wales, where narrow windy roads mean that once you get stuck behind something, that’s how you’re going to be spending your day.

⁵ Unlike my father, I virtually never break the speed limit, to such an extent that when I got a speeding ticket the other year (I’d gone from a 70 into a 50 zone and re-set the speed limiter accordingly, but didn’t bother to apply the brakes and just coasted down to the new speed… when the police snapped their photo!), Ruth and JTA both independently reacted to the news with great skepticism.

Dan Q found GC8B4CH Is 14 Your Lucky Number Yet?

This checkin to GC8B4CH Is 14 Your Lucky Number Yet? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Easy find while out for a ride, breaking in my new bike. Great ride, aside from the mayflies, which I must’ve ingested about a million of! As others have observed, the logbook has soaked to the point of disintegration and could do with replacement. Thanks though for a cache I’ve probably driven, walked out cycled past a hundred times before actually stopping to find it.

Note #21312

Today I learned that the quiet, high-pitched neighing sound horses sometimes make is called “nickering”.

I learned this from a subtitle which read “[horse nickers]”. Which, as a Brit, I can’t help but interpret as somebody making a misspelling while talking about equine underwear. 🤣

Nightmares & Noggins

Last night I had a nightmare about Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, about the group I DM for on alternate Fridays.

In their last session the party – somewhat uncharacteristically – latched onto a new primary plot hook rightaway. Instead of rushing off onto some random side quest threw themselves directly into this new mission.

Four humanoid silhouettes fling themselves off the side of a floating city, which is chained to a desert hellscape below. — They flung themselves not only figuratively but also literally into their new quest, leaping from the side of a floating city.

This effectively kicked off a new chapter of their story, so I’ve been doing some prep-work this last week or so. Y’know: making battlemaps, stocking treasure chests with mysterious and powerful magical artefacts, and inventing a plethora of characters for the party to either befriend or kill (or, knowing this party: both).

I also put together a “cut scene” video welcoming the party into this new chapter of their adventure.

Anyway: in the dream, I sat down to complete the prep-work I want to get done before this week’s play session. I re-checked my notes about what the adventurers had gotten up to last time around, and… panicked! I was wrong, they hadn’t thrown themselves off the side of a city floating above the first layer of Hell at all! I’d mis-remembered completely and they’d actually just ventured into a haunted dungeon. I’d been preparing all the wrong things and now there wasn’t time to correct my mistakes!

Screenshot from donjon's "5e Encounter Size Calculator", configured for a party of four 7th-level characters, with an "extra" checkbox (not found in the real application) for "Can the party Turn Undead?" highlighted. — Also in my dream – conveniently for my new “haunted dungeon” environment – my favourite encounter size calculator included a tool to compensate for a player character who can cast Turn Undead, when making an undead encounter.

This is, of course, an example of the “didn’t prepare for the test” trope of dreams. Clearly I’m still feeling underprepared for this week’s game! But probably a bigger reason for the dream, and remembering it, was that I’ve had a cold and kept waking up to cough.

Right, better do a little more prep work!

Note #21293

Max props to the developer of puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth, who I just bought a coffee for.

The screen-scraper I wrote to bulk-export data from my Garmin sports tracker (because Garmin’s API is “only for corporate partners”, which is a magic spell you can say to make me write and open source a screen-scraper that targets your systems) stopped working today. Turns out Cloudflare could detect my automation.

Installed puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth. Fixed instantly. Awesome.

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