Category: Personal
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My Car is Sad
All! The! Warning! Lights! By the time a car needs to pahinate the error messages it wants to display, something has definitely gone wrong. 😬
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Hey Google, pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Wait, it isn't supposed to be pronounced "clan via Pokemon Go garage city of cocoa"? I've been saying it wrong my whole life! 😅
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Things my children have gotten out of bed to say to me tonight:
- I don't want to go to school tomorrow
- I can't find [name of toy]
- I want [name of toy I lent to my sibling] back
- if I'm ill, I don't have to go to school tomorrow, right?
- I can't sleep
- I might be ill: I don't think I should go to school tomorrow
- I want a hot water bottle
- I'm too hot
- I've lost my hot water bottle
- I spilt my water1
- I went to the toilet because I thought I was going to throw up but I didn't but I think I'm too ill to go to school tomorrow
- my book is wet
- I forgot to brush my teeth
- I don't like these pyjamas
- I still can't sleep
Footnotes
1 it later turned out to have been spilled on an electrical extension socket! 😱
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As the kids grow older... someday our final soft play session - something we used to do all the time, and now do only rarely - will be in the past.
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A mug of coffee held in front of a view of a multicoloured soft playground.
But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!
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Sabbatical Magic
Two weeks into my extended break from work and on my way home from Spain, I've discovered something magical about a sabbatical: it frees me from my compulsion to think about next week's work, at the weekend.
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3D Workers Island
Tony Domenico's 3D Workers Island is a clever application of the retro-Web as a storytelling medium, in sort of a "found footage" way but with webpages instead of, y'know, videotape. The story's not perfect, but the execution is great.
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Bluesky and enshittification
Cory Doctorow's post this week about how Bluesky's model isn't (yet) immune to enshittification matches my reasoning for not using it, too. But also points out a hypocrisy in my own behaviour for so-far failing to apply a "Ulysses Pact" model to Three Rings.
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Found GCAAD6C El pont sobre el riu #14 Set a La Pobla Cérvoles
I borrowed a bike from our hosts in el Vilosell so I could ride the rough hilltop trail to the bridge over the river Set, 3km away, and find a geocache.
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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).
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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 …
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The Time Travel Movie That Doesn't Move
The Nerdwriter's done a video essay about La Jetée, and it truly does justice to that remarkable movie.
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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.
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Hero of Alexandria
Hero of Alexandria is my hero. And it's not for the steam engine he didn't invent (that was Vetruvius), nor for his formula for the area of a triangle, nor even for his programmable robot (yes, really). It's for his square root algorithm.
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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.
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Three glasses of beer held by adult hands clink together against a glass of water and a bottle of Fanta held 6 by cold hands.
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Sex With Monsters
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.