Dan Q

[Bloganuary] Fun Five

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

List five things you do for fun.

This feels disappointingly like the prompt from day 2, but I’m gonna pivot it by letting my answer from three weeks ago only cover one of the five points:

Code
Magic
Piano
Play
Learn

Let’s take a look at each of those, briefly.

Code

Code is poetry. Code is fun. Code is a many-splendoured thing.

This is not what real coding looks like. This is what real coding looks like.

When I’m not coding for work or coding as a volunteer, I’m often caught coding for fun. Sometimes I write WordPress-ey things. Sometimes I write other random things. I tend to open-source almost everything I write, most of it via my GitHub account.

Magic

Now I don’t work in the city centre nor have easy access to other magicians, I don’t perform as much magic as I used to. But I still try to keep my hand in and occasionally try new things; I enjoy practicing sleights when I’m doing work-related things that don’t require my hands (meetings, code reviews, waiting for the damn unit tests to run…), a tip I learned from fellow magician Andy.

My favourite go-to trick with an untampered deck of cards is my variant of the Ambitious Classic; here’s a bit from the middle of the trick from the last time I performed it in a video meeting.

You’ll usually find a few decks of cards on my desk at any given time, mostly Bikes.¹

Piano

I started teaching myself piano during the Covid lockdowns as a distraction from not being able to go anywhere (apparently I’m not the only one), and as an effort to do more of what I’m bad at.² Since then, I’ve folded about ten minutes of piano-playing³, give or take, into my routine virtually every day.

This is what piano playing looks like. But perhaps only barely.

I fully expect that I’ll never be as accomplished at it as, say, the average 8-year-old on YouTube, but that’s not what it’s about. If I take a break from programming, or meetings, or childcare, or anything, I can feel that playing music exercises a totally different part of my mind. I’d heard musicians talk about such an experience before, but I’d assumed that it was hyperbole… but from my perspective, they’re right: practicing an instrument genuinely does feel like using a part of your brain than you use for anything else, which I love!

Play

I wrote a whole other Bloganuary post on the ways in which I integrate “play” into my life, so I’ll point you at that rather than rehash anything.

A lot of my RPG-gaming takes place online, via virtual tabletops, and is perhaps the most obvious “playtime” play activities I routinely engage in.

At the weekend I dusted off Vox Populi, my favourite mod for Civilization V, my favourite⁴ entry in the Civilization series, which in turn is one of my favourite video game series⁵. I don’t get as much time for videogaming as I might like, but that’s probably for the best because a couple of hours disappeared on Sunday evening before I even blinked! It’s addictive stuff.

Learn

As I mentioned back on day 3 of bloganuary, I’m a lifelong learner. But even when I’m not learning in an academic setting, I’m doubtless learning something. I tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction books on my bedside table. I often get lost on deep-dives through the depths of the Web after a Wikipedia article makes me ask “wait, really?” And just sometimes, I set out to learn some kind of new skill.

It’s not always wacky and off-the-wall things like basic blacksmithing that I learn. Sometimes it’s normal, practical activities like baking bread or… umm… Argentine tango?

In short: with such a variety of fun things lined-up, I rarely get the opportunity to be bored⁶!

Footnotes

¹ I like the feel of Bicycle cards and the way they fan. Plus: the white border – which is actually a security measure on playing cards designed to make bottom-dealing more-obvious and thus make it harder for people to cheat at e.g. poker – can actually be turned to work for the magician when doing certain sleights, including one seen in the mini-video above…

² I’m not strictly bad at it, it’s just that I had essential no music tuition or instrument experience whatsoever – I didn’t even have a recorder at primary school! – and so I was starting at square zero.

³ Occasionally I’ll learn a bit of a piece of music, but mostly I’m trying to improve my ability to improvise because that scratches an itch in a part of my brain in a way that I find most-interesting!

⁴ Games in the series I’ve extensively played include: Civilization, CivNet, Civilization II (also Test of Time), Alpha Centauri (a game so good I paid for it three times, despite having previously pirated it), Civilization III, Civilization IV, Civilization V, Beyond Earth (such a disappointment compared to SMAC) and Civilization VI, plus all their expansions except for the very latest one for VI. Also spinoffs/clones FreeCiv, C-Evo, and both Call to Power games. Oh, and at least two of the board games. And that’s just the ones I’ve played enough to talk in detail about: I’m not including things like Revolution which I played an hour of and hated so much I shan’t touch it again, nor either version of Colonization which I’m treating separately…

⁵ Way back in 2007 I identified Civilization as the top of the top 10 videogames that stole my life, and frankly that’s still true.

⁶ At least, not since the kids grew out of Paw Patrol so I don’t have to sit with them and watch it any more!

[Bloganuary] New Tricks

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024.¹ Today’s prompt is:

If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?

The strangers who we keep inviting into our house do not want to steal your toys and do not need to be “seen off”.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog looks up from behind a fence, in a hallway. — “Somebody’s at the door! I’d better bark to see them off!”

Lately, we’ve had a lot of strangers in the house: builders, plumbers, and electricians, all working on some significant building works.

And even though she’s got to be starting to recognise the same old folks coming and going, day-in and day-out, our little pup still goes completely mental every time the builders turn up, each morning.

Composite photo showing (a) a white house clad in scaffolding and (b) a workman looking up at a large square hole that's been cut in the ceiling of a bedroom. — It’s been… a little stressful and chaotic for us all, here. Every few days a new hole appears in the house, and a new set of curious buried problems emerges (*why does this pipe go here? who thought it was good idea to wire these sockets like that?*).

I get it. They come and go but don’t smell like they live here. They make a lot of noise and dust. But seriously, dog: these people aren’t going to bring us any harm². Just chill out already!

Today we’re having one of the biggest bits of work done: the removal of the ceiling in the main hallway and the installation of a new staircase. So the dog’s spending the day… elsewhere! We’ve sent her off to play with her little doggy friends at our dogsitter’s house. It’s probably for the best.

Footnotes

¹ Also, this is now my second-longest daily-streak of blogging ever. C-c-c-combo continues!

² Some days they don’t come through the front door at all, but up the scaffolding and in through the roof: she knows they’re here from the banging sounds but not from which direction they’ll approach, and she’ll sometimes gather all of her toys into a pile and guard them… y’know, in case they’ve come here to steal all her most-valuable well-chewed playthings.

[Bloganuary] What’s in a name?

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.

First eighteen years

When I was born, my parents named me Daniel, possibly as a result of Elton John’s influence.¹ I wasn’t given a middle name, and – ignoring nicknames, some of which are too crude to republish – I went exclusively by Daniel for my entire childhood.

Daniel in the Lions' Den, c. 1615 by Pieter Paul Rubens — “Oh Lord! Please deliver me from this fate| For I am truly Not A Cat Person!”

The name comes from a Aramaic and Hebrew roots – din (judge) and el (god) – meaning “judged by god”, but I can’t imagine my parents knew or cared. They’ll probably have been aware of its Biblical significance, where Daniel² interprets dreams for the king, gets promoted a whole lot, but then because he prefers worshipping his god to worshipping his king they throw him to the lions³ before getting rescued by an angel and going on to have a successful career predicting the end times (long before John of Patmos made it cool).

Next eight years

When I went to university in 1999 I started volunteering with Aberystwyth Nightline.⁴ They already had a Daniel, so for convenience I introduced myself as Dan. By the time I was going by Dan there I figured I might as well be Dan in my halls of residence and my course, too, so Dan I became.

People occasionally called me Dan prior to my going to university, but it was there that it became cemented as being my “actual name”. “Other” Daniel graduated and moved away from Aberystwyth, but I’d settled pretty well on Dan. I updated my name in my email From: line to reflect the change in circa 2003, which felt plenty official enough, and I didn’t do well at maintaining many of my pre-university friendships sufficiently that I’d hear “Daniel” from anybody at all.

Dan, aged 22, his hair untied and hanging down, wearing an orange shirt, puts his finger to his lips in a "shh" gesture while looking directly into the camera. — “Shh, don’t tell anybody my legal name is ‘Dan’,” Dan of May 2003 might have said.

Last seventeen years

Eventually, my then-partner Claire and I got to that point where we were talking about what we wanted out of it in the long term. We agreed that while marriage wasn’t a good representation of our relationship, but we quite liked the idea of having the same family name someday. And so we started, on-and-off, talking about what that surname could be. Neither of us wanted to take the other’s and double-barrelling was definitely out: we decided we’d far rather come up with a completely original name that was just ours.

It took us years, because we were pretty indecisive, but we eventually cut out choices down by committing to a single-character surname! When we chose ‘Q’ as our new surname and wrote out some deeds poll I took the opportunity to change my legally-recognised first name to just Dan, at the same time. That was what everybody⁵ called me by now, anyway.

It didn’t take long before I’d updated it on my ID and everywhere else (although some government organisations made a fuss about it). Now nobody could deny that I was, for all legal purposes, Dan.

Footnotes

¹ My mother tells me that they also considered Luke, which I suppose might have been George Lucas’ doing.

² I mean the one from the Book of Daniel, of course, not one of the other three Daniels mentioned in the Bible. It turns out that in ancient times, as now, Daniel was a common-as-muck kinda name.

³ It turns out than in ancient times, as now, being thrown to the lions was considered fatal.

⁴ There’s a whole other story about why I did this, and the path it set me on, but that’s for another day I think.

⁵ Not everybody consistently calls me Dan. My mother routinely still calls me Daniel, but given that she gave birth to me she can get away with calling me anything the hell she wants.

[Bloganuary] Dream Job

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What’s your dream job?

It feels like a bit of a cop-out to say I’m already doing it, but that’s true. Well, mostly (read on and I’ll make a counterpoint!).

Automattic

Dan (wearing a rainbow bandana) waves at the camera; behind him are four work colleagues, and behind that the Colosseum in Rome. — Getting to hang out with my awesome teammates in various locations around the globe is a plus.

I’m incredibly fortunate that my job gets to tick so many of the boxes I’d put on a “dream job wishlist”:

I work on things that really matter. Automattic’s products make Web publishing and eCommerce available to the world without “lock-in” or proprietary bullshit. I genuinely believe that Automattic’s work helps to democratise the Internet and acts, in a small way, as a counterbalance to the dominance of the big social media silos.
I get to make the world a better place by giving away as much intellectual property as possible. Automattic’s internal policy is basically “you don’t have to ask to open source something; give away anything you like so long as it’s not the passwords”.¹ Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, and all that.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. I work from where I want, when I want. I’m given the autonomy to understand what my ideal working environment is and make the most of it. Some mornings I’m just not feeling that coding flow, so I cycle somewhere different and try working the afternoon in a different location. Some weekends I’m struck by inspiration and fire up my work laptop to make the most of it, because, y’know, I’m working on things that really matter and I care about them.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. Automattic’s home to some incredibly talented people and I love that I’ve managed to find a place that actively pushes me to study new things every day.
Automattic’s commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good-to-excellent. As well as getting work work alongside people from a hundred different countries and with amazingly different backgrounds, I love that I get to work in one of the queerest and most queer-affirming environments I’ve ever been paid to be in.

Did I mention that we’re hiring?²

Three Rings

Dan sits at a boardroom table in an airy, bright room. He's wearing an Automattic t-shirt that reads "Let's make the Web a better place." In the background, several other people discuss a pile of post-it notes that have begun to pile up on the table. — I don’t know how I managed to select a photo of my fun-loving kickass volunteers that’s somehow more dry and corporate than the photo of my work colleagues above.

But you know where else ticks all of those boxes? My voluntary work with Three Rings. Let me talk you through that wishlist again:

I work on things that really matter. We produce the longest-running volunteer management system in the world³ We produce it as volunteers ourselves, because we believe that volunteering matters and we want to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to do as much good as possible, and this allows us to give it away as cheaply as possible: for free, to the smallest and poorest charities.
I get to make the world a better place by facilitating the work of suicide helplines, citizens advice bureaus, child support services, environmental charities, community libraries and similar enterprises, museums, theatres, charity fundraisers, and so many more good works. Back when I used to to helpline volunteering I might do a three hour shift and help one or two people, and I was… okay at it. Now I get to spend those three hours making tools that facilitate many tens of thousands of volunteers to provide services that benefit an even greater number of people across six countries.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. Mostly I work from home; sometimes we get together and do things as a team (like in the photo above). Either way, I’m trusted with the autonomy to produce awesome things in the way that works best for me, backed with the help and support of a team that care with all their hearts about what we do.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. I mentioned one of them yesterday. But seriously, I could sing the praises of any one of our two-dozen strong team, whether for their commitment to our goals, their dedication to making the world better, their passion for quality and improvement, their focus when producing things that meet our goals, or their commitment to sticking with us for years or decades, without pay, simply because they know that what we do is important and necessary for so many worthy causes. And my fellow development/devops volunteers continue to introduce me to new things, which scratches my “drive-to-learn” itch.
Three Rings’ commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good, and improving. We skew slightly queer and have moderately-diverse gender mix, but I’m especially impressed with our age range these days: there’s at least 50 years between our oldest and youngest volunteers with a reasonably-even spread throughout, which is super cool (and the kind of thing many voluntary organisations dream of!).

The difference

The biggest difference between these two amazing things I get to work on is… only one of them pays me. It’s hard to disregard that.

Sometimes at Automattic, I have to work on something that’s not my favourite project in the world. Or the company’s priorities clash with my own, and I end up implementing something that my gut tells me isn’t the best use of my time from a “make the world a better place” perspective. Occasionally they take a punt on something that really pisses me off.

That’s all okay, of course, because they pay me, and I have a mortgage to settle. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal.

My voluntary work at Three Rings is more… mine. I’m the founder of the project; I 100% believe in what it’s trying to achieve. Even though I’ve worked to undermine the power of my “founder privilege” by entrusting the organisation to a board and exec that I know will push back and challenge me, I feel safe fully trusting that everything I give to Three Rings will be used in the spirit of the original mission. And even though I might sometimes disagree with others on the best way forward, I accept that whatever decision is made comes from a stronger backing than if I’d acted alone.

Three Rings, of course, doesn’t pay me⁴. That’s why I can only give them a few hours a week of my time. If I could give more, I would, but I have bills to pay so my “day job” is important too: I’m just so incredibly fortunate that that “day job” touches upon many of the same drives that are similarly satisfied by my voluntary work.

If I didn’t have bills to pay, I could happily just volunteer for Three Rings. I’d miss Automattic, of course: there are some amazing folks there whom I love very much, and I love the work. But if they paid me as little as Three Rings did – that is, nothing! – I’d choose Three Rings in a heartbeat.

But man, what a privileged position I’m in that I can be asked what my dream job is and I can answer “well, it’s either this thing that I already do, or this other thing that I already do, depending on whether this hypothetical scenario considers money to be a relevant factor.” I’m a lucky, lucky man.

Footnotes

¹ I’m badly-paraphrasing Matt, but you get the gist.

² Automattic’s not hiring as actively nor voraciously as it has been for the last few years – a recent downtown in the tech sector which you may have seen have heavily affected many tech companies has flooded the market with talent, and we’ve managed to take our fill of them – we’re still always interested to hear from people who believe in what we do and have skills that we can make use of. And because we’re a community with a lot of bloggers, you can find plenty of first-hand experiences of our culture online if you’d like to solicit some opinions before you apply…

³ Disclaimer: Three Rings is the oldest still-running volunteer management system we’re aware of: our nearest surviving “competitor”, which provides similar-but-different features for a price that’s an order of magnitude greater, launched later in the same year we started. But maybe somebody else has been running these last 22 years that we haven’t noticed, yet: you never know!

⁴ Assuming you don’t count a Christmas dinner each January – yes, really! (it turns out to be cheaper to celebrate Christmas in January) – as payment.

[Bloganuary] Leadership

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What makes a good leader?

I pretty-much answered this in an RSS Only post about a year ago, while talking about the things I’m worst at when I’m a leader, and that I therefore admired in others (along with specific examples of real people I’d worked under). The features I picked out that I admired were:

An ability to keep track of all the moving parts in and around a team,
The courage to demonstrate and encourage emotional honesty in professional environments, and
A keenness to proactively support the people you lead.

A flotilla of paper boats on a table: a red boat leads the way ahead of two blue and two green boats. — An ability to fold origami watercraft is also a bonus in a good leader.

(Incidentally, did you know that I publish some of my posts “RSS Only”: that is, they don’t show up on my homepage, generally don’t appear in my social feeds, etc. The only way to know when one is published is to subscribe to my blog using RSS, or one of the other mechanisms by which my “RSS Only” content gets shared, e.g. email…)

Anyway: I haven’t changed my mind in the last year – for me personally, the qualities I look for in a leader are those that compensate for the things at which I’m weakest. I want a leader that can pull me, push me ahead, point the way, or just hang back and let me explore, depending on what the situation demands. And I still stick by the list I wrote a year ago.

BEEF

Just when I thought I’d already seen the best imaginable television series to star Ali Wong and Steven Yeun in the form of Tuca & Bertie… suddenly BEEF comes out of nowhere and it’s flipping amazing.

[Bloganuary] Uninvention

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Fucking cryptocurrency.

I remember when Bitcoin first appeared. A currency based on a ledger recorded in a shared blockchain sounded pretty cool from a technological standpoint, and so – as a technology enthusiast – I experimented with it.

I recall that I bought a couple of Bitcoin; I think they were about 50 pence each? It seemed like a “toy” currency; nothing that would ever attract any mainstream attention. After all: why would it? It’s less-anonymous than cash. It’s less-convenient than cards. It’s (even) less-widely-accepted than cheques. It somehow manages to be somehow slower than everything. And crucially, without any government backing it can’t be used to settle a debt or pay your taxes¹. The technology was interesting to me, but it had no real-world application.

Imagine my surprise when people started investing in the cryptocurrency. Began accepting it in payment for things. I know a tulip economy when I see one, I figured, so I got rid of my “toy” Bitcoins when the price hit around £750 each². Sure, it’d have been “smarter” to wait until it hit £45,000 each, but I genuinely thought the bubble was going to burst and, besides, I’d never wanted to get into that game to begin with: I was just playing about with an interesting bit of technology when suddenly half the world began talking about it.

The world taking cryptocurrencies seriously was the worst thing that ever happened to them. When they were just a toy, nobody “invested” in them. Nobody built planet-destroying mining rigs to compete to produce more of them. Nobody used them as a vehicle to make ransomware feasible or set up elaborate Ponzi schemes or get-rich-quick scams off the back of them.

(Fake) cryptolocker screenshot that implies that DanQ.me has encrypted your files and will only decrypt them if you send 1 EGX (Emma GoldCoin). — DanQ.me has encrypted all your files. As Emma GoldCoin is the only cryptocurrency I can get behind, I demand you send me 1 EGX to unlock them. (No, don’t go and check; I promise they’re encrypted! Just take my word on it!)

And yeah, with few exceptions (of which Emma GoldCoin is the best), cryptocurrencies not only provide a vehicle for scammers, do nothing to combat inequality (and potentially make it worse by tying it to the digital divide), and destroy the planet… but they generally don’t even achieve the promises they make of anonymous, decentralised, stable, utilitarian currencies.

I’m not going to deep-dive into everything that’s wrong with cryptocurrencies³ (and I’m not going near NFTs, but rest assured they’re even stupider). There’s plenty of more-eloquent people online who can explain it to you if you need to; start at Web3IsGoingGreat.com if you like.

So yeah, if we could just uninvent cryptocurrencies, or at least uninvent whatever it is the masses think they see in them, then that’d be just great, thanks.

Footnotes

¹ Being legal tender and being useful to pay your taxes are the magic beans that make fiat currencies worth something.

² Sometimes, people mistake me for somebody with any level of interest in cryptocurrency “investment”. After I’m done correcting their misapprehension, I enjoy pointing out that I made a 150,000% return-on-investment on cryptocurrencies and I still recommend against anybody getting involved in them.

³ If I can pick out just one pet hate, though, that trumps all the others: it’s the “cryptobros” who call cryptocurrencies “crypto”, as if that wasn’t a prefix that already had a plethora of better-established uses, all of which are undermined by the co-opting of their name. It’s somehow even worse than the idiots who shorten Wikipedia to “wiki”.

[Bloganuary] Puppy Love

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

I’m going to let this young lady answer that for me:

I’m not even much of a “dog person”, but you can’t deny how much a dog can show adoration.

I could think of countless examples of feeling loved. As a child. As a parent. As a friend. As a lover.¹ But picking up your dog from the dogsitter after you’ve been away for a few days somehow distils the feeling down to its most-basic.

Dan kneels in the grassy verge of a recently-ploughed field in late-afternoon summer sunshine, a long red dog's lead hanging around his shoulders. By his side, a champagne French Bulldog looks with anticipation up at him (or possibly at his closed fist). — Sometimes the look of affection instead reflects their love of the treat they anticipate you might have in your hand, but still.

Footnotes

¹ I feel like I’m about to break into a Meredith Brooks song.

[Bloganuary] Clutter

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

Oh, everywhere.

A cluttered desk. — I’d love to claim that my desk isn’t always so chaotic and that much of this mess resulted from a recent shelf collapse¹, but it’s rarely *much* better than this.

But perhaps the most-valuable place I could reduce clutter would be… in my head!

Dan, a wry smile on his face, pointing at his own head. — Y’know… in here.

If you were to open up my head and look inside, what you’d see would probably look a little like my desk²: remnants of dozens of half-finished or in-progress projects, all piled on top of one another in a chaotic muddle that’d take some kind of wacky radical mind to reverse-engineer.

That’s not to say I’m disorganised (although I am at least some of the time!), but it does mean that I’m perhaps more-prone to distraction and context-switching than I might prefer. Compared to times in my life that I’ve been less “clutter-brained”, I find it harder to gain and maintain focus.

A person in an orange jumper holds a cardboard box labelled "BRAIN", which completely covers their head. From outside the image, an hand above the box is holding a piece of paper labelled "DAN'S INNER PEACE". — “It turns out your inner peace was inside you all along, sandwiched between a murder mystery game concept and an idea for a social network for dogs. You couldn’t find it because this half-baked idea for a content management system was on top of it.” Also, does this image seem familiar to you?

One of the goals I’m going to be proposing to my coach this year will include an examination of how I clutter my thinking (and whether my environmental clutter is a reflection of the same), and what I can do to get better at channelling my creativity into fewer things at once³.

But perhaps I could stand to do a little decluttering in my physical space, too.

Footnotes

¹ True, but that was a while back and I haven’t found time to put it up again, so I oughta take some responsibility.

² This is, of course, a metaphor. If you actually open up my head you’ll see, like, brains and gunk. Also, it will invalidate my warranty, so don’t do it.

³ Note that I said at once. I still want to keep those bajillion projects on a go. I just want to be more organised and disciplined about compartmentalising them so my energy’s less-divided when I’m trying to focus on a single thing for a while!

[Bloganuary] Magpies are the Best Bird

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What is your favourite animal?

The common magpie, pica pica.

Four juvenile magpies on a recently-dried concrete surface take turns to peck at a seed/fat ball. — One for joy, two for joy, three for joy, four for joy… basically any natural number of magpies brings me joy.

They’re smart (among the smartest corvids, who are already among the smartest birds).

They’re curious. They’re sociable. And they’re ever so pretty.

They’re common enough that you can see them pretty-much anywhere.

They steal things. They solve puzzles. They’re just awesome.

In a snowy woodland, a common magpie perches atop a black pig as it walks towards the camera. — This is photo of a magpie riding a pig through the snow, which is objectively fantastic. No further explanation is required, nor given.

Also, did you know where their name comes from? It’s really cool:

In Medieval Latin, they’re called pica. It probably comes from Greek kitta, meaning “false appetite” and possibly related to the birds’ propensity for theft, and/or from a presumed PIE¹ root meaning “pointed” and referring to its beak shape.
In Old French, this became pie. They’re still called la pie in French today. Old English took this and also used pie.
By the 17th century, there came a fashion in English slang to give birds common names.
- Sometimes the common name died out, such as with Old English wrenna which became wren and was extended to Jenny wren, which you’ll still hear nowadays but mostly people just say wren.
- Sometimes the original name disappeared, like with Old English ruddock² which became redbreast and was extended to Robin redbreast from which we get the modern name robin (although again, you’ll still sometimes hear robin reabreast).
- Magpie, though, retains both parts!³ Mag in this case is short for Margaret, a name historically associated with idle chatter⁴. So we get pica > pie > Maggie pie > Mag pie > magpie! Amazing!

A young magpie on dusty dry ground. — This magpie’s looking pretty chill. Also pretty. Also chill.

I probably have a soft spot for animals with distinct black-and-white colouration – other favourite animals might include the plains zebra, European badger, black-and-white ruffed lemur, Malayan tapir, Holstein cattle, Atlantic puffin… – but the magpie’s the best of them. It hits the sweet spot in all those characteristics listed above, and it’s just a wonderful year-around presence in my part of the world.

Footnotes

¹ It’s somewhat confusing writing about the PIE roots of the word pie…

² Ruddock shares a root with “ruddy”, which is frankly a better description of the colour of a robin’s breast than “red”.

³ Another example of a bird which gained a common name and retained both that and its previous name is the jackdaw.

⁴ Reflective, perhaps, of the long bursts of “kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-” chattering sounds magpies make to assert themselves. The RSPB have a great recording if you don’t know what I’m talking about – you’ll recognise the sound when you hear it! – but they also make a load of other vocalisations in the wild and can even learn to imitate human speech!

[Bloganuary] Communicate Early, Communicate Often

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

In what ways do you communicate online?

What a curious question! For me, it’s perhaps best divided into public and private communication, for which I use very different media:

Public

I’ve written before about how this site – my blog – is the centre of my digital “ecosystem”. And while the technical details may have changed since that post was published, the fundamentals have not: everything about my public communication revolves around this, right here.

For example:

When I post a non-trivial toot to my Mastodon account, a copy gets posted as a note here, and vice-versa.
When I undertake a geocaching or geohashing expedition, a log gets posted as a checkin here.
When I vlog, the primary/first version is published here; secondary copies might appear e.g. on my YouTube channel for visibility but the “official” version remains here
I’ve even retroactively imported content back into my blog, e.g. my old del.icio.us bookmarks from circa 2005-2008, many of my old Reddit posts, even old reviews I wrote on Google Maps and Amazon going back as 2003, etc., all pulled-together into a single central space¹
Content gets syndicated elsewhere via a variety of mechanisms, for visibility².

A golden cornfield with setting sun, superimposed with "Reap what you wow. Plant your content into the field of your own website." — This is what I’m talking about.

Private

For private communication online, I perhaps mostly use the following (in approximate order of volume):

Slack: we use Slack at Automattic; we use Slack at Three Rings; we’ve even got a “household” instance running for The Green!³
WhatsApp: the UI‘s annoying (but improving), but its the go-to communications platform of my of my friends and family, so it’s a big part of my online communications strategy.⁴
Email: Good old-fashioned email⁵. I prefer to encrypt, or at least sign, my email: sure, PGP/GPG‘s not perfect⁶, but it’s better than, y’know, not securing your email at all.
Discord: I’m in a couple of Discord servers, but the only one I pay any reasonable amount of attention to is the Geohashing one.
Various videoconferencing tools including Google Meet, Zoom, and Around. Sometimes you’ve just gotta get (slightly more) face-to-face.
Signal: I feel like everybody’s on WhatsApp now, and the Signal app got annoying when it stopped being able to not only send but even receive SMS messages (which aren’t technically Internet messages, usually), but I still send/receive a few Signal messages in a typical month.

That’s a very different set of tech stacks than I use in my “public” communication!

Footnotes

¹ My thinking is, at least in part: I’ve seen platforms come and go, and my blog’s outlived them. I’ve seen platforms change their policies or technology in ways that undermine the content I put on them, but the stuff on my blog remains under my control and I can “fix” it if I wish. Owning your data is awesome, although I perhaps do it to a more-extreme extent than many.

² I’ve used to joke that I syndicate content to e.g. Facebook to support readers who haven’t learned yet to use a feed reader. I used to, and I still do, too.

³ A great thing about having a “personal” Slack installation is that you can hook up your own integrations and bots to e.g. remind you to bring the milk in.

⁴ I’ve been experimenting with Texts to centralise several of my other platforms; I’m not convinced by it yet, but I love the thinking! Long ago, I used to love using Pidgin for simultaneous access to IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and all that jazz, so I fully approve of the concept.

⁵ Okay, not actually old-fashioned because I’m not suggesting you use UUCP to send mail to protonmail!danq!dan or DECnet to deliver to danq.me::dan or something!

⁶ Most of the metadata including sender, recipient, and in most cases even subject is not encrypted.

[Bloganuary] Road Trip!

This post¹ is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024.²Today’s prompt is:

Think back on your most memorable road trip.

Runners-up

It didn’t take me long to choose a most-memorable road trip, but first: here’s a trio of runners-up that I considered³:

A midwinter ascent
On the last day of 2018, Ruth‘s brother Robin and I made a winter ascent of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles. But amazing as the experience was, it perhaps wasn’t as memorable as the endless car journey up there, especially for Robin who was sandwiched between our two children in the back of the car and spent the entire 12-hour journey listening to Little Baby Bum songs on loop.⁴ Surely a quick route to insanity.

Dan and Robin atop Ben Nevis — Probably should have wiped the snow off the lens.

A childhood move
Shortly after starting primary school my family and I moved from Aberdeen, Scotland to the North-West of England. At my young age, long car journeys – such as those we’d had to make to view prospective new houses – always seemed interminably boring, but this one was unusually full of excitement and anticipation. The car was filled to the brim with everything we needed most-imminently to start our new lives⁵, while the removals lorry followed a full day behind us with everything less-essential⁶. I’m sure that to my parents it was incredibly stressful, but for me it was the beginning of an amazing voyage into the unknown.

Live on Earth
Back in 1999 I bought tickets for myself and two friends for Craig Charles’ appearance in Aberystwyth as part of his Live on Earth tour. My two friends shared a birthday at around the date of the show and had expressed an interest in visiting me, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Unfortunately I hadn’t realised that at that very moment one of them was preparing to have their birthday party… 240 miles away in London. In the end all three of us (plus a fourth friend who volunteered to be and overnight/early morning post-nightclub driver) attended both events back to back! A particular highlight came at around 4am we returned from a London nightclub to the suburb where we’d left the car to discover it was boxed in by some inconsiderate parking: we were stuck! So we gathered some strong-looking fellow partygoers… and carried the culprit’s car out of the way⁷. By that point we decided to go one step further and get back at its owner by moving their car around the corner from where they’d parked it. I reflected on parts of this anecdote back in 2010.

The winner

At somewhere between 500 and 600 road miles each way, perhaps the single longest road journey I’ve ever made without an overnight break was to attend a wedding.

A white couple, bride and groom; she's wearing a white dress and flowers in her hair; he's in a suit with a grey waistcoat and a thistle buttonhole. — The wedding of this lovely couple, whose courtship I expressed joy over the previous year.

The wedding was of my friends Kit and Fi, and took place a long, long way up into Scotland. At the time I (and a few other wedding guests) lived on the West coast of Wales. The journey options between the two might be characterised as follows:

the fastest option: a train, followed by a ludicrously expensive plane, followed by a taxi
the public transport option: about 16 hours of travel via a variety of circuitous train routes, but at least you get to sleep some of the way
drive along a hundred miles of picturesque narrow roads, then three hundred of boring motorways, then another hundred and fifty of picturesque narrow roads

Guess which approach this idiot went for?

Despite having just graduated, I was still living very-much on a student-grade budget. I wasn’t confident that we could afford both the travel to and from the wedding and more than a single night’s accommodation at the other end.

But there were four of us who wanted to attend: me, my partner Claire, and our friends Bryn and Paul. Two of the four were qualified to drive and could be insured on Claire’s car⁸. This provided an opportunity: we’d make the entire 11-or-so-hour journey by car, with a pair of people sleeping in the back while the other pair drove or navigated!

It was long, and it was arduous, but we chatted and we sang and we saw a frankly ludicrous amount of the A9 trunk road and we made it to and from what was a wonderful wedding on our shoestring budget. It’s almost a shame that the party was so good that the memories of the road trip itself pale, or else this might be a better anecdote! But altogether, entirely a worthwhile, if crazy, exercise.

Footnotes

¹ Participating in Bloganuary has now put me into my fifth-longest “daily streak” of blog posts! C-c-c-combo continues!

² Also, wow: thanks to staying up late with my friend John drinking and mucking about with the baby grand piano in the lobby of the hotel we’re staying at, I might be first to publish a post for today’s Bloganuary!

³ Strangely, all three of the four journeys I’ve considered seem to involve Scotland. Which I suppose shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given its distance from many of the other places I’ve lived and of course its size (and sometimes-sparse road network).

⁴ Okay, probably not for the entire journey, but I’m certain it must’ve felt like it.

⁵ Our cargo included several cats who almost-immediately escaped from their cardboard enclosures and vomited throughout the vehicle.

⁶ This included, for example, our beds: we spent our first night in our new house camped together in sleeping bags on the floor of what would later become my bedroom, which only added to the sense of adventure in the whole enterprise.

⁷ It was, fortunately, only a light vehicle, plus our designated driver was at this point so pumped-up on energy drinks he might have been able to lift it by himself!

⁸ It wasn’t a big car, and in hindsight cramming four people into it for such a long journey might not have been the most-comfortable choice!

[Bloganuary] Pizza

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What snack would you eat right now?

Pizza.

Always pizza.

Forever pizza.

A pizza slides off a peel into a wood-fired oven. One half seems to have salami and olives, the other half perhaps just cheese and tomato. — Every pizza is beautiful. Except for the half of this one that has huge chongin’ black olives on (eww!).

Do you know what I love about pizza? Everything. Every little thing¹.

First up, it’s a bread product. Bread is magical. You take flour, water, a pinch of salt, and a certain other magical ingredient, knead it, let it rest, knock it back, and bake it, and you end up with food. The magical ingredient is yeast, and it’s a tiny living organism that eats carbohydrates and excretes a lot of carbon dioxide and a little bit of alcohol. Humans use both, but whether you’re brewing beer or baking bread the process feels somewhat mystical and otherworldly.

A circle of pizza dough on a worktop, a rolling pin atop it. — Making pizza, like making any bread, is a wonderful experience. But pizza can be brilliant even if somebody else makes it.

But it’s not like rising a loaf nor is it like finishing a flatbread. Pizza dough is risen, but kept thin to act as a base for everything else. And already there’s such variety: do you spin it out in a classic thin Neapolitan style to get those deliciously crispy leopard-print cornicione bites? Do you roll it out thick to hold a maximum depth of tomato sauce and other toppings when you pile it high, per the Chicago tradition? Do you go somewhere in-between? Or perhaps do something different entirely like a calzone or panzarotto? There’s no wrong answer, but already so many options.

Pizza is cooked fast: the relatively thin surface absorbs heat quickly, and you keep your oven hot, baking the bread and heating the toppings at the same time. If you’re feeling fancy and fun then you can add some extras as it cooks. Crack an egg into the centre, perhaps, or drizzle some chilli oil across the entire thing. Or keep it plain and simple and let the flavours combine as the dish cooks. Whatever you do, you’ll be enjoying delicious hot food within minutes of putting it into the oven: the cooking-speed to deliciousness ratio is perhaps the highest of any savoury food.

Close-up of a pizza whose four quarters contain four different toppings. — Many pizzas² include tomato sauce and cheese as basic toppings, which is already genius: both are rich in naturally-occurring monosodium glutamate, which coupled with the rich fats and saltiness in the cheese and the sweetness and mild acidity of the tomato makes them frightfully moreish even before you’d added your favourite meats or vegetables.

Pizza is incredibly versatile, not just in the diversity of ways in which you might prepare and serve it, but also in the ways in which you can eat it. Sit at a plate with a knife and fork. Divide it into slices and pick up one at a time (with optional “New York fold” if it’s otherwise too limp). Carry a large slice on-the-go, al taglio. Fold it into a portafoglio so you don’t risk losing a single jalapeño off your hot-and-spicy meal, if you fancy. There’s no wrong answer.

If my favourite meal is pizza³, my second-favourite has to be leftover pizza. Because it reheats easily and makes a great next-morning snack. Or can be enjoyed cold, hours or days after the fact. It’s even suitable for parbaking and chilling or freezing, making it an excellent convenience food⁴. It’s widely produced in a variety of styles (and qualities) in restaurants and takeaways wherever you go, and its convenient shape means that it can be boxed and stacked with little more help than, perhaps, one of those little plastic “tables” that stop the centre of the cardboard box sagging onto it.

So yeah, I’ll take a slice to go with mozzarella, peppers and red onion for my snack, please.

Footnotes

¹ If you know me well, you’re probably well-aware of my love of pizza, although you might previously have seen it articulated so thoroughly.

² #NotAllPizzas! You don’t have to feel constrained by the bread-plus-tomato-plus-cheese-plus-other stuff paradigm. Swap out the tomato sauce for barbecue sauce on the base of a meaty pizza with a spicy tang or omit it entirely for a pizza bianca. Replace the cheese or remove it entirely for a vegan or lactose-free alternative. Or dispense with both entirely and spread pesto on your base, topped with roasted vegetables! The sky’s the limit!

³ It is. What gave it away?

⁴ Obviously I prefer a lovingly-crafted hand-stretched pizza, freshly-made under ideal circumstances. But pizza is so good that it’s still usually perfectly acceptable even when it’s mass-produced at economy scale and frozen for later consumption, which is more than can be said for many foods.

Brainfart

Brainfart moment this morning when my password safe prompted me to unlock it with a password, and for a moment I thought to myself “Why am I having to manually type in a password? Don’t I have a password safe to do this for me?” 🤦

[Bloganuary] Paws to Hear my Scents-ible Idea

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Come up with a crazy business idea.

Smell-based social networking for dogs.

Hear me out…

I’ve tried to explain to our occasionally-anxious dog that, for example, the dog-and-human shaped blobs at the far end of the field includes a canine with whom she’s friendly and playful. She can’t tell who they are because her long-distance vision’s not as good as mine¹, and we’re too far away for her to be able to smell her friend.

If this were a human meetup and I wasn’t sure who I’d be meeting, I’d look it up online, read the attendees’ names and see their photos, and be reassured. That’s exactly what I do if I’m feeling nervous about a speaking engagement: I look up the other speakers who’ll be there, so I know I can introduce myself to people before or after me. Or if I’m attending a work meet-up with new people: I find their intranet profiles and find out who my new-to-me colleagues are.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could “show” my dog who she was going to meet, in smell-form.

I imagine a USB-C accessory you can attach to your computer or phone which can analyse and produce dogs’ unique scents, storing and transmitting their unique fingerprint in a digital form. Your subscription to the service would cover the rental of the accessory plus refills of the requisite chemicals, and a profile for your pooch on the Web-based service.

Now, you could “show” your dog who you were going to go and meet, by smell. Just look up the profile of the playmate you’re off to see, hold the device to your pupper’s nose, and let them get a whiff of their furry buddy even before you get there. Dogs do pretty well at pattern-matching, and it won’t take them long to learn that your magical device is a predictor of where they’re headed to, and it’ll be an effective anxiety-reducer.

A laptop keyboard with a black man's hand and a cream-coloured dog's paw resting on it, seen from above. (Almost-matching) sleeves can be seen on the limbs of both. — Seeking investors for a genuinely terrible crazy business idea. Photo courtesy SHVETS production.

The only question is what to call my social-network-for-dogs. Facebutt? Pupper? HoundsReunited???

Footnotes

¹ Plus: I get contextual clues like seeing which car the creature and its owner got out of.