Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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Taking A Dive
I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well.
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Trouble brewing at the village carnival's decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance.
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A cardboard longship collides with an X wing in a grassy field.
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A postcard from a distant friend
I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererลซ on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele!
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You don't have to blog like me
You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here.
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Garbage for humans
unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this...
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Dad Joke of the Day came to me early when some fellow dog walkers coming the other way said "Hello, gorgeous!"
"Ooh, thank you!" I replied, nonchalantly tussling my hair and striking a coquetteish pose.
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Dan poses with a coquetteish grin while walking a French Bulldog along a gravelled rural path.
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Maybe "is AI a bubble?" is the wrong question
Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've been watching those clocks and they smell like tulips to me... ๐ท
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Always reassuring when you fill in a company's contact form and the next page is placeholder text...
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Thanks For Your Enquiry title, followed by 'Aliquam vehicula laoreet lacus, ac vulputate purus vulputate...' etc.
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How the European heatwave fucked me up
I've been somewhat-offline for the last few days, after a heatwave lead to a heat illness lead to an opportunistic infection lead to me lying in bed and groaning. But I'm getting back to normal, slowly.
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Some mornings... you just gotta make a whole damn litre of coffee.
(for iced coffee purposes, of course; and definitely not just for me!)
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Demmy would like to know why I haven't turned off the UK's heatwave yet. ๐ฅต
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Close up of the face of a fawny French Bulldog with her tongue blepping out to the side.
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Iced coffee and air con. Possibly the only things that'll keep me sane, working in the UK's current heatwave (especially with the schools closed and kids sent home!).
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Dan, a white man with a small beard and a blue ponytail, holds a pint if iced coffee on front of a residential portable air conditioner unit.
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What Was Matt Thinking?
Ernie Smith from Tedium wrote about Matt's Script Archive, which back in the 1990s was a big part of how and why I learned to code in Perl. Let's take a trip down memory lane...
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F-Day plus 130
A hundred and thirty days since we got flooded out of our home, and remedial works are starting to ramp up. Today an electrician, tracing a fault that's developed in the wiring, cut a hole through a wall to repair it and threw up so much dust that it's hard to see anything!
I was nearby, helping a restoration company assess the damage to the ride-on lawnmower that was in the garage and whose motor hasn't started since (the garage saw some of the deepest water that hit us), when I heard the fire alarm and went to check on them. All is well: we don't need to add 'fire' to the list of disasters befalling our house this year! -
Setting the width of selects to the width of the selected option
Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately "get it". Like: that's a cool new feature, I can already see how it'll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve accessibility, or allow me to do something new. Other times...