Dan Q
Our family tradition on New Year’s Day is to go to the Rollright Stones. Legend has it that you can’t count the standing stones and get the same answer twice.
This year the younger child counted 37, the elder 67… so wide a difference that you can see how one might ascribe a mystical reason!
This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).
It worked out pretty well.
Micro-recipe:
1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it’s hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.
Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?
Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out…
The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast.
On a midnight train back from a London theatre trip, somehow the 8-year-old is still awake (and reading comics to me!); the 10-year-old is understandably wiped-out.
A fun night out though!
Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I’m not sure…) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange.
verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire to bed (first the kids, then – eventually – the adults).
We love it.
Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I’m continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent.
At first I thought “Christmas post” had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild.
Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them.
Because these were the “lick and stick” kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I’ve been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.
You know you’ve stayed up too late when… the milkman arrives and hands you your milk.
Yesterday, I fulfilled the primary Three Rings objective I set for myself when I kicked off my sabbatical twelve weeks ago and migrated the entire application to a new hosting provider (making a stack of related improvements along the way).
I did some work on this project during my Three Rings-focussed International Volunteer Day last week, but it feels like I’ve been working on it for much longer than that. And it feels like it… because I have been.
Months prior, I was comparing different providers and their relative merits, making sure that our (quirky and specific) needs could be met. Weeks beforehand, I was running a “dry run” every four or five days, streamlining the process of moving the ~450GB1 of live data while minimising downtime. Days before the event felt like the countdown for a rocket launch, with final preparations underway: reducing DNS time-to-lives, ensuring users knew about our downtime window, and generally fitting in a little time to panic.
logrotate. When you’re building architecture for a system as gnarly as Three Rings, there’s
about a billion tools that need such careful tweaking2.
It’s challenging to pull off a “big”, intensive operation like this in an entirely voluntary operation. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it were I not on sabbatical, but it’d certainly have been harder and riskier.
But then, I also couldn’t have done it without the kickass team of volunteers I’ve surrounded myself with. I guess the real success story here is in the power of a well-aligned team and in volunteer effort.
1 Three Rings‘ user data is represented by a little under 70GB of MariaDB databases plus about 380GB of organisational storage: volunteer photos, files, email attachments, and the like. Certainly not massive by comparison to, say, social media sites, search engines, and larger eCommerce platforms… but large enough that moving it takes a little planning!
2 Okay, a billion tools to configure? That’s an exaggeration. Especially now: since the architectural changes I’ve put in place this week, for example, production app server builds of Three Rings no require a custom-compiled build of Nginx (yes, this really was something we used to need).
3 Which you’d think I’d have realised with my more-successful recent second attempt at secret-cabinet-making.
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Checked up on this cache during a dog walk nearby. All seems good, cache is ready to be found!
Today I learned that you can use reportValidity() on a HTML5
input of e.g. type="email" to force the browser to run it’s own validation, without waiting for the containing form to be submitted (which in some cases might not
happen, e.g. if you’re handling input using JS).
That’s cool.
Earlier this year, after our loft conversion work, I built a secret cabinet into the bookshelves I constructed for my new bedroom. My 10-year-old was particularly taken with it1, and so I promised her that when she moved bedroom I’d build one for her.
My initial order of fake book fronts was damaged in transit but the excellent eBay seller I’d been dealing with immediately sent a comparable replacement. This had left me with a spare-but-damaged set of fake book fronts, but with a little gluing, sawing and filing I was able to turn them into a second usable fake cabinet front.
My 10-year-old’s fake cabinet isn’t quite as sophisticated as mine (no Raspberry Pi Zero, solenoids, or electronic locks) – you just have to know where it is and pull on the correct corner of it to release it – but she still thinks it’s pretty magical2.
A cut-down plank of plyboard stained the right colour, some offcuts of skirting board, a couple of butt hinges, some L-brackets, some bathroom mirror mounting tape, the fake book fronts, and an hour and a half’s work seems totally worth it to give a child the magical experience of a secret compartment in their bedroom. My carpentry’s improved since my one, too: this time I measured twice before cutting3 and it paid-off with a cleaner, straighter finish.
1 She was pretty impressed already at the secret cabinet, but perhaps more-so when she discovered that the fake book fronts I’d used were part of the set of The School for Good and Evil, the apparently-disappointing film version of one of her favourite series’ of books.
2 Which, frankly, it is. I wish I’d had a secret compartment in my bedroom bookshelves when I was her age!
3 Somebody should make a saying about that.
Today, while I cooked dinner, I introduced my two children (aged 10 and 8) to Goat Simulator.
Within half an hour, they’d added an imaginative twist and a role-playing element. My eldest had decreed themselves Angel of Goats and the younger Goat Devil and the two were locked in an endless battle to control the holy land at the top of a rollercoaster.
The shrieks of joy and surprise from the living room could be heard throughout the entire house. Perhaps our whole village.