Dan Q

Sabbatical Magic

A couple of weeks ago, I kicked off my first sabbatical since starting at Automattic a little over five years ago¹.

Dan sits in front of two laptops (one of which shows a photo of an echidna for some reason), in a meeting room full of casually-dressed volunteers. — The first weekend of my sabbatical might have set the tone for a lot of the charity hacking that will follow, being dominated by a Three Rings volunteering weekend.

The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:

Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
building a first draft of Three Rings’ new server architecture, which turns out to mostly work but still needs some energy thrown at it,
a geohashing expedition with the dog, and
a family holiday to Catalonia, Spain.

Dan, Ruth, and JTA with their children and a tour guide called Julie, enjoying churros in a Barcelona cafe. — You’d be amazed how many churros these children can put away.

The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year², but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:

Barcelona, where we stayed in a wonderful skyscraper hotel with fantastic breakfasts and, after I was able to get enough sleep, explored the obvious touristy bits of the city (e.g. la Sagrada Família³ and other Gaudían architecture, the chocolate museum, the fort at Montjuic, and because it’s me, of course, a widely varied handful of geocaches).
The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from⁴ but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!

I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…

Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.

Dan sits at a laptop in a hotel bar, a view of Barcelona out of the window behind him, a beer bottle alongside him. — I’m not saying that I didn’t write code while on holiday. I totally did, and I open-sourced it too. But programming feels different when your paycheque doesn’t depend on it.

If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on⁵.

But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!

Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday? Who knows.

That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away again.

Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.

Footnotes

¹ A sabbatical is a perk offered to Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open Web!

² I didn’t get around to writing about Paris, but I did write about how the hotel we stayed at introduced our eldest, and by proxy re-introduced me, to Wonder Boy, ultimately leading to me building an arcade cabinet on which I finally, beat the game, 35 years after first playing it.

³ Whose construction has come on a lot since the last time I toured inside it.

⁴ Although alcohol helped with that.

⁵ I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!

3D Workers Island

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Tony Domenico

If you’ve come across Tony Domenico’s work before it’s probably as a result of web horror video series Petscop.

3D Workers Island… isn’t quite like that (though quick content warning: it does vaugely allude to child domestic abuse). It’s got that kind of alternative history/”found ~~footage~~ webpage” feel to it that I enjoyed so much about the Basilisk collection. It’s beautifully and carefully made in a way that brings its world to life, and while I found the overall story slightly… incomplete?… I enjoyed the application of its medium enough to make up for it.

Best on desktop, but tolerable on a large mobile in landscape mode. Click each “screenshot” to advance.

Bluesky and enshittification

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…

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

…

There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.

Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.

…

Cory Doctorow

Wise words from Cory about why he isn’t on Bluesky, which somewhat echo my own experience. If you’ve had the experience in recent memory of abandoning an enshittified Twitter (and if you didn’t yet… why the fuck not?), TikTok, or let’s face it Reddit… and you’ve looked instead to services like Bluesky or arguably Threads… then you haven’t learned your lesson at all.

Freedom to exit is fundamental, and I’m a big fan of systems with a built-in Ulysses Pact. In non-social or unidirectionally-social software it’s sufficient for the tools to be open source: this allows me to host a copy myself if a hosted version falls to enshittification. But for bidirectional social networks, it’s also necessary for them to be federated, so that I’m not disadvantaged by choosing to drop any particular provider in favour of another or my own.

Bluesky keeps promising a proper federation model, but it’s not there yet. And I’m steering clear until it is.

I suppose I also enjoyed this post of Cory’s because it helped remind me of where I myself am failing to apply the Ulysses Pact. Right now, Three Rings is highly-centralised, and while I and everybody else involved with it know our exit strategy should the project have to fold (open source it, help charities migrate to their own instances, etc.) right now that plan is less “tie ourselves to the mast” than it is “trust one another to grab us if we go chasing sirens”. We probably ought to fix that.

Dan Q found GCAAD6C El pont sobre el riu #14 Set a La Pobla Cérvoles

This checkin to GCAAD6C El pont sobre el riu #14 Set a La Pobla Cérvoles reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My family and I are staying in El Vilosell, so this morning I borrowed a bike to take the trail over the hill from there to here. The ride was beautiful, and the easy downhill rides between cliffs and terraces more than made up for the tiring and bumpy sections of uphill pedalling. At the highest point, I met a fox, on his way to bed I guess as the sun crested the hilltops.

Despite the recent heavy rain the Set riverbed was almost dry: just a trickle of a stream. From the description, I was initially worried that the cache might be underneath, which looked challenging, but a peep at the hint reassured me that there were more-likely hiding spots.

A little finger-work and the cache was in hand. Nice spot! That’s when I discovered that there was a hole in my pocket and my pen had escaped! Oh no! I hope a photolog will be sufficient to show that I found this cache.

TFTC/GPC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.

Note #24882

Okay, is every company using AI to fuck up their mailing lists, now?

For the second time this week I’ve received an email from a company whom I’d explicitly demanded cease processing my PII. This time, in February they outright told me that they’d deleted my data and sent screenshots to “prove” it (which was already after they’d failed to unsubscribe me from their mailing lists in the first place).

Dan Q found GCAA274 Garrigues #23 – El Vilosell

This checkin to GCAA274 Garrigues #23 - El Vilosell reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geokids and I are staying nearby and came out for a walk this morning to discover this under-appreciated cache. What an amazing location and such a great view! We searched many “obvious” locations without luck, then translated some logs to get a clue. We should have checked the attributes! A little danger later and the cache was in hand. SL, TFTC/GPC! FP awarded – thanks so much for bringing us here. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

The Time Travel Movie That Doesn’t Move

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Nerdwriter1 (YouTube)

When I saw the title of this piece by The Nerdwriter pop up in my RSS reader, the first words that grabbed my attention were “time travel movie”. I’ve a bit of a thing for time travel stories in any medium, and I love a good time travel movie¹. Could I be about to be introduced to one I’m not familiar with, I wondered?

Before the thumbnail loaded², I processed the rest of the title: the movie doesn’t move. At first my brain had assumed that this was a reference to the story spanning time but not space, but now suddenly it clicked:

We’re talking about La Jetée, aren’t we?

Like many people (outside of film students), I imagine, I first came across La Jetée after seeing it mentioned in the credits of Twelve Monkeys, which adapts its storyline in several ways. And like most people who then went on to see it, I imagine, I was moved by that unforgettable experience – there’s nothing quite like it in the history of film (if we’re to call it a film, that is: its creator famously doesn’t).

Anyway: Nerdwriter1’s take on it doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said, but it’s a beautiful introduction to interpreting this fantastic short film and it’s highly-accessible whether or not you’ve seen La Jetée³. Give his video essay a watch.

Footnotes

¹ Okay, let’s be honest, my feelings go deeper than that. Time travel movies are, for me, like pizza: I love a good time travel movie, but I’ll also happily enjoy a pretty trashy time travel movie too.

² Right now I’m in a rural farm building surrounded by olive groves in an out-of-the-way bit of Spain, and my Internet access isn’t always the fastest. D’ya remember how sometimes Web pages used to load the text and then you’d wait while the images loaded? They still do that, here.

³ There’s spoilers, but by the time a film is 60 years old, I think that’s fair game, right?

Note #24871

Just received an unsolicited marketing email from a company that I asked to remove me from their systems eleven and a half years ago (!).

I haven’t heard from them since then.

The marketing email is sent using a platform that “uses AI to help you seamlessly connect with your customers”. By which I assume the platform means “we’ll crawl your email history to find anybody we can possibly spam”.

Just gonna go grab my GDPR/DPA2018 beating-stick. This is gonna be a fun one.

Hero of Alexandria

A little under two millennia ago¹ there lived in the Egyptian city of Alexandria a Greek mathematician and inventor named Hero², and he was a total badass who invented things that you probably thought came way later, and come up with mathematical tricks that we still use to this day³.

Inventions

Illustration of an aeolipile, showing a heated sphere or cylinder of water spraying steam in two different directions, causing it to rotate. — If you know of Hero’s inventions because of his aeolipile⁴,known as “Hero’s engine”, I’ve got bad news: it was probably actually invented by his predecessor Vitruvius. But Hero *did* come up with a way to use the technique to make a pneumatic temple door that automatically opened when you lit the fires alongside it.

Hero is variably credited with inventing, in some cases way earlier than you’re expecting:

automatic doors (powered either by pressure plates or by lit fires),
vending machines, which used the weight of a dispensed coin to open a valve and dispense holy water,
windmills (by which I mean wind-powered stationary machines capable of performing useful work),
the force pump – this is the kind of mechanism found in traditional freestanding village water pumps – for use in a fire engine,
float-valve and water-pressure based equilibrium pumps, like those found in many toilet cisterns, and
a programmable robot: this one’s a personal favourite of mine because it’s particularly unexpected – Hero’s cart was a three-wheeled contraption whose wheels were turned by a falling weight pulling on a rope, but the rope could be knotted and looped back over itself (here’s a modern reimplementation using Lego) to form a programmed path for the cart

Illustration showing mechanism of action of a fire-powered automatic door: heated air expands to displace water into a vessel whose now-increased weight pulls ropes wrapped around two wheels which pull open a pair of temple doors. — It’s just headcanon, but I choose to believe that the reason Hero *needed* to invent the fire extinguisher might have involved the number of “attempting to make fire do work” inventions that he came up with.

Mathematics

If you know of Hero because of his mathematical work, it’s probably thanks to his pre-trigonometric work on calculating the area of a triangle based only on the lengths of its sides.

But I’ve always been more-impressed by the iterative⁵ mechanism he come up with by which to derive square roots. Here’s how it works:

Let n be the number for which you want to determine the square root.
Let g₁ be a guess as to the square root. You can pick any number; it can be 1.
Derive a better guess g₂ using g₂ = ( g₁ + n / g₁ ) / 2.
Repeat until g_N ≈ g_N-1, for a level of precision acceptable to you. The algorithm will be accurate to within S significant figures if the derivation of each guess is rounded to S + 1 significant figures.

That’s a bit of a dry way to tell you about it, though. Wouldn’t it be better if I showed you?

Put any number from 1 to 999 into the box below and see a series of gradually-improving guesses as to its square root⁶.

Interactive Widget

(There should be an interactive widget here. Maybe you’ve got Javascript disabled, or maybe you’re reading this post in your RSS reader?)

Maths is just one of the reasons Hero is my hero. And now perhaps he can be your hero too.

Footnotes

¹ We’re not certain when he was born or died, but he wrote about witnessing a solar eclipse that we know to have occurred in 62 CE, which narrows it down a lot.

² Or Heron. It’s not entirely certain how his name was pronounced, but I think “Hero” sounds cooler so I’m going with that.

³ Why am I blogging about this? Well: it turns out that every time I speak on some eccentric subject, like my favourite magic trick, I come off stage with like three other ideas for presentations, which leads to an exponential growth about “things I’d like to talk about”. Indeed, my OGN talk on the history of Oxford’s telephone area code was one of three options I offered to the crowd to vote on at the end of my previous OGN talk! In any case, I’ve decided that the only way I can get all of this superfluity of ideas out of my head might be to blog about them, instead; so here’s such a post!

⁴ If the diagram’s not clear, here’s the essence of the aeolipile: it’s a basic steam reaction-engine, in which steam forces its way out of a container in two different directions, causing the container to spin on its axis like a catherine wheel.

⁵ You can also conceive of it as a recursive algorithm if that’s your poison, for example if you’re one of those functional purists who always seem somehow happier about their lives than I am with mine. What’s that about, anyway? I tried to teach myself functional programming in the hope of reaching their Zen-like level of peace and contentment, but while I got reasonably good at the paradigm, I didn’t find enlightenment. Nowadays I’m of the opinion that it’s not that functional programming leads to self-actualisation so much as people capable of finding a level of joy in simplicity are drawn to functional programming. Or something. Anyway: what was I talking about? Oh, yeah: Hero of Alexandria’s derivation of square roots.

⁶ Why yes, of course I open-sourced this code.

PortAventura

Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.

Sex With Monsters

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Simon Shadows (via Oh Joy Sex Toy)

Just in time for Halloween, this comic (published via the ever-excellent Oh Joy Sex Toy) is fundamentally pretty silly… and yet still manages to touch upon important concepts of safer sex, consent, aftercare etc. And apparently, based on Simon’s portfolio, his “thing” might well be that niche but now fun-sounding genre of “queer/monster horror”.

Dan Q did not find GC448J6 EL TRESOR DEL POU DEL MON

This checkin to GC448J6 EL TRESOR DEL POU DEL MON reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geokids and I had to give up after an extended search. We solved the riddle (we think) and counted steps, but, being unsure, hunted for a nearby map and attempted to un-do he farmer’s mistake. Still no luck. 😔 Sadly it’s our last morning in the city so this one might have to remain a blue spot on our map for a while, though I’m sure I’ll think of something I missed when I get back to my computer.

Dos Huevos

For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN’T totally planning to scoff them both myself! 😂

Dan Q found GCA8R9X Xemeneies a Barcelona #2 Foneria Giralt

This checkin to GCA8R9X Xemeneies a Barcelona #2 Foneria Giralt reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

An early morning walk from my hotel while I waited for the rest of my family to wake up brought me to this, another old chimney. I’ve really been enjoying discovering these relics of the industrial history of this part of the city.

Unusual and well-disguised cache container! 😁 First name in a clean new log sheet too; thanks to the CO for maintaining their caches! ❤️ SL, TFTC/GPC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Dan Q found GC1788D Torre Agbar

This checkin to GC1788D Torre Agbar reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My 7-year-old, who’s really interested in skyscrapers, was excited to point this one out to me upon our arrival in Barcelona on Saturday, observing that it looks very similar to “The Gherkin”/30 St Mary Axe, a highly-recognisable London landmark. He’s right, it does, and it’s a shame he couldn’t join me on this geocaching expedition but he was still around asleep when I set off.

I stood pretending to wait for a bus for a little while, then quickly found, signed, and replaced the cache. TFTC/GPC!