Back at work after a three-month break, and it turns out the first thing that I’d missed is my team’s quirky morning ritual.
Blog
Dan Q found GCA1K70 Oak Protection
This checkin to GCA1K70 Oak Protection reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After claiming the FTF on the new cache to the North East, the geohound and I continued our walk with a wander through thy woods, eventually finding ourselves near this gate. I’d nearly attempted this cache during a previous visit to these woods but IIRC was dragged right past it by impatient dogs, children, or both. 😂
Today, though, it was a QEF for the doggo and I. Fun container and a good size too, FP awarded. TFTC!
Dan Q found GCB2FZ4 Family Fun #2
This checkin to GCB2FZ4 Family Fun #2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
FTF! It’s been a while since I’ve typed that!
Woke this morning slightly hungover and figured a nice walk with the geopup might help me feel better. And what an opportunity: a brand new cache only a short way from home!
Jumped in the car and zipped up to Church Hanborough, parking near the cemetery/allotments because the church bells were ringing and all the parking spots nearer to the centre of thy village were occupied by churchgoers. Walked up the paths to the GZ and had sight of the cache’s shiny container before we were even there. Retrieval was quick and easy, but we had to wait a while before we could return it to it’s hiding place because a large group of dog walkers (one of whom was holding court on how he was confident that Donald Trump would soon “dismantle the Deep State” 🙄) were passing.
Soon signed vs returned and on our way. TFTC!
Note #25585
After a night that alternated between raining and freezing winds here, at the edge of Storm Éowyn, this morning my skylight has ice patterns on it that look beautiful and almost organic.
‘All Americans legally female’: Trump invites mockery with sloppy executive order
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Obviously all of the 118 executive orders President Trump signed into effect on 20 January fall somewhere on the spectrum between fucking ridiculous and tragically fascist. But there’s a moment of joy to be taken in the fact that now, by Presidential executive order, one could argue that all Americans are legally female:
…
One of Trump’s order is titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” In the definition, the order claims, “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” It then says, “’Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
What critics point out is the crucial phrase “at conception.” According to the Associated Press, the second “order declares that the federal government would recognize only two immutable sexes: male and female. And they’re to be defined based on whether people are born with eggs or sperm, rather than on their chromosomes, according to details of the upcoming order.”
…
So yeah, here’s the skinny: Trump and team wanted to pass an executive order that declared that (a) there are only two genders, and (b) it’s determined biologically and can be ascertained at birth. Obviously both of those things are categorically false, but that’s not something that’s always stopped lawmakers in the past (I’m looking at you, Indiana’s 1897 bill to declare Pi to be 3.2 exactly…).
But the executive order is not well thought-out (well duh). Firstly, it makes the unusual and somewhat-complicated choice of declaring that a person’s gender is determined by whether or not it carries sperm or egg cells. And secondly – and this is the kicker – it insists that the point at which the final and absolute point at which gender becomes fixed is… conception (which again, isn’t quite true, but in this particular legal definition it’s especially problematic…).
At conception, you consisted of exactly one cell. An egg cell. Therefore, under US law, all Americans ever conceived were – at the point at which their gender became concrete – comprised only of egg cells, and thus are legally female. Every American is female. Well done, Trump.
Obviously I’m aware that this is not what Mrs. Trump intended when she signed this new law into effect. But as much as I hate her policies I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t respect her expressed gender identity, which is both legally-enforceable and, more-importantly, self-declared. As a result, you’ll note that I’ve been using appropriate feminine pronouns for her in this post. She’s welcome to get in touch with me if she uses different pronouns and I’ll respect those, too.
(I’m laughing on the outside, but of course I’m crying on the inside. I’m sorry for what your President is doing to you, America. It really sucks.)
Dan Q wrote note for GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Checked in on this cache while on a dog walk to ensure the Storm Éowyn hadn’t trashed it. Good news: it’s fine! I need to update the cache description to reflect that the speed limit here is now 20mph, though!
Invertobang
My 8-year-old asked me “In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽” (I assume the answer is yes!)
A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ = U+203D, ⸘ = U+2E18. Nice.
(And yet we don’t have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar and double-bar “cifrão” dollar signs…)
Note #25565
Last year, a colleague introduced me to lazygit, a TUI git client with a wealth of value-added features.
Somehow, though, my favourite feature is the animation you see if you nuke the working tree. 😘 Excellent.
Sabbatical Lesson #1: Boundaries
Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave1. I’d meant to write about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained from it before I returned, but I’m glad I didn’t because one of the lessons only crystallised this morning.
My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the kids get up. Then I can focus on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and to school, and when I come back to my desk I’ve already got my day planned-out. It’s always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and it leans into my “early bird” propensities2.
Over the last few years, I’ve made a habit of pulling out my phone and checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after dropping the kids at school. By this point it’s about 08:45 which is approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates – who span five timezones – have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I’d come to legitimise this bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that, for example, walking the dog home from the school run was “downtime” anyway. What harm could it do to start doing “work” things ten minutes early?
But walking the dog isn’t “downtime”. It’s personal time. When I’m looking at your phone and thinking about work I’m actively choosing not to be looking at the beautiful countryside that I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each morning, and not to be thinking about… whatever I might like to be thinking about! By blurring my work/life-balance I’m curtailing my own freedom, and that’s bad for both my work and personal lives!
My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and shared some wisdom with me, which I’ll attempt to paraphrase here:
It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That particular notetaking strategy. By the time you’ve come up with the best answers for you, there’s too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully enact personal change.
Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to “reboot” the way you work. You’re still informed by all of your previous experience, but you’re newly blessed with a clean slate within which to implement new frameworks.
He’s right. I’ve experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an organisation, but there’s an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to “reboot” your way of working when returning from a sabbatical. I’ve got several things I’d like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the first one is that I’m not connecting my personal phone to my work Slack account.
Footnotes
1 My employers’ sabbatical benefit is truly an epic perk.
2 Mysteriously, and without warning, at about the age of 30 I switched from being a “night owl” to being an “early bird”, becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person’s preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after birth. As I’ve put it since: “I’ve become one of those chirpy, energetic ‘morning people’ that I used to hate so much when I was younger.”.
Note #25556
The final weekend of my sabbatical was spent, like the first one, at a Three Rings event. As a side activity to the volunteer work, everybody was asked to put their name on a paper plate and leave it on a particular table, allowing others to semi-anonymously add compliments, thanks, or kind words about its owner.
Comments on my plate:
* Your my faveriot [sic] brother (gee, I wonder who THAT one was from 😂)
* Always seems to be doing interesting things. A maverick! Thinks outside the box
* Awesome
* Thank you for inventing this (a) system & (b) corporate model!
* Always smiley and excited
* Thanks for always pushing lots of new features!
* Puts up with idiots willingly and patiently
* You literally dreampt this whole thing into existence!
* Quirky
* Innovative solutions!
* Helpful in all ways!
Fabulous. I might wall-mount it.
Note #25554
Goodbye, Trinidad and Tobago. 🇹🇹
You were wonderful. I hope to visit you again. ❤️
Note #25552
When you love Jesus but you’re sick of Him blocking your driveway.
We’ll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida
Another book I received at Christmas Eve’s book exchange was We’ll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida,
translated from the original Japanese by Emmie Madison Shimoda. It’s apparently won all kinds of acclaim and awards and what-have-you, so I was hoping for something pretty spectacular.
It’s… pretty good, I guess? Less a novel, it’s more like a collection of short stories with an overarching theme, within which a deeper plot which spans them all begins to emerge… but is never entirely resolved.
That repeating theme might be summed up as this: a person goes to visit a clinic – often under the illusion that it’s a psychiatric specialist – where, after briefly discussing their problems with the doctor, they’re prescribed a dose of “cat” for some number of days. There’s a surprising and fun humour in the prescription, each time: the matter-of-fact way that the doctor dispenses felines as if they were medications and resulting reactions of his nonplussed patients. Fundamentally, a prescription of cat works, and by the time the cat is returned to the clinic, its caretaker is cured, albeit not necessarily in the way in which they would have originally expected.
Standing alone, each chapter short story is excellent. The writing is compelling and rich and the characters well-developed, particularly in the short timeframes in which we
get to know each of them. There’s a lot of interesting bits of Japanese culture represented, too, which – as an outsider – piqued my curiosity: whether by the careful work of the author
or her translator it never left me feeling lost, although I suspect there might be a few subtler points I missed as a result of my geographic bias1.
The characters (whether human, feline, or… otherwise…?) and their situations are quirky and amusing, and there are a handful of heart-warming… and heart-wrenching… moments that I thoroughly enjoyed. But by the time I was half-way through the book, I was becoming invested in a payoff that would never come to be delivered. The nature of the doctor, his receptionist, and their somewhat-magical clinic is never really resolved, and the interconnections between the patients is close to non-existent, leaving the book feeling like a collection of tales that are related to… but not connected to… one another. As much as I’d enjoyed every story – and I did! – I nonetheless felt robbed of the opportunity to wrap up the theme that they belong to.
Instead, we’re given just more unanswered questions: hints at the nature of the clinic and its occupants, ideas that skirt around ideas of magic and ghosts, and no real explanation. Maybe the author’s planning to address it in the upcoming sequel, but unless I’m confident that’s the case, I’ll probably skip it.
In summary: some beautifully-written short stories with a common theme and a fun lens on Japanese culture, particularly likely to appeal to a cat lover, but with no payoff for getting invested in the overarching plot.
Footnotes
1 Ishida spends a significant amount of intention describing the regional accents of various secondary characters, and comparing those to the Kyoto dialect, for example. I’m pretty sure there’s more I could take from this if I had the cultural foothold to better understand the relevance! But most of the cultural differences are less-mysterious.
Note #25538
This is funny, but I’m confident Wrexham’s potholes have nothing on the Trinbagonian ones I’ve been experiencing all week, which have sometimes spanned most of the width of a road or been deep enough that dipping a wheel into them would strike the road with your underchassis!
Note #25533
Yesterday, Ruth and I made the first ever attempt at a geohashing expedition in Trinidad & Tobago, successfully finding a hashpoint in Chase Village in the West of Trinidad!