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[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.

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.

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.

[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???

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

Happy Birthday Matt

I wrote about the best (birthday) gift I could receive last week – conveniently right before my actual birthday at the weekend! – but my employer‘s CBBQTTO Matt has an even more abstract wish: he wants people to blog more! (Matt’s three years younger than me, almost exactly to the day.)

Conveniently, that’s a gift I’m able to provide, because my (now trackable) blogging output has been way up so far this year. I expected that to be the case because of my Bloggy Pen Pals project, but I’ve not even managed to get around to writing about my experience of exchanging emails with my first penpal partner Colin yet! Instead, I’ve been swept up with writing posts as part of Bloganuary 2024!

Making a conscious daily effort to write more has been… challenging. I feel like my thoughts come out half-finished, like I’m writing too trivially, without sufficient structure, or even too-personally. But I’m loving the challenge!

Anyway – happy birthday Matt! Forty is a great age, highly recommended. Hope you love it.

[Bloganuary] Attachment

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

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

I really struggled with this question: I couldn’t think of anything that I was especially attached to as a kid.

Maybe it was just that I couldn’t think of anything; that the memory was lost to time and age.

So I did the obvious thing… and reached out to my mum.

It turns out that apparently my recollection is correct: I really didn’t have any significant attachments to toys or anything like them. I didn’t ever have any kind of “special thing” I slept with. I recall in my later childhood being surprised to learn that some people did have such things: like all children, I’d internalised my experience of the world as being representative of the general state of things!

Why, I wonder, are some children different than others and get this kind of youthful attachment to something? Is it genetic?¹ Is it memetic, perhaps a behaviour we subconsciously reinforce in our children because we think it’s “normal”?

A young girl asleep on a stone floor, her head on a doormat, napping alongside a French Bulldog. — Being attached to napping with a dog doesn’t count, right? (‘cos I’ve definitely done that at least once, although for obvious reasons I’ve only managed to take photos of *others* doing the same.)

I’ll bet that some clever psychologist has done some research into this already², but that sounds like a different day’s exploration.

¹ I’m not genetically-related to our kids: they’re biologically the children of my partner and her husband, but consider all three of us to be their parents.

² And that a dozen other psychologists have reinterpreted this research in completely different and incompatible ways.

[Bloganuary] Mission

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

What is your mission?

But more seriously, my mission – if I have such a thing, is:

Today’s my first day back at work after an decent length break (if you exclude the Friday after Christmas, when I did a little, I’ve been away from my day job for over a fortnight), and I’ve got a lot to catch up on even before I kick off running a training course I’ve never delivered before, so that’s all you get for today. But so long as my Bloganuary streak (which now almost makes it onto my leaderboard!) continues, I’m counting this as a win.

[Bloganuary] Live Long and Prosper

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

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

Today’s my 43rd birthday. Based on the current best statistics available for my age and country, I might expect to live about the same amount of time again: I’m literally about half-way through my anticipated life, today.¹

Naturally, that’s the kind of shocking revelation that can make a person wish for an extended lifespan. Especially if, y’know, you read Andrew’s book on the subject and figured that, excitingly, we’re on the cusp of some meaningful life extension technologies!

My very first thought when I read Andrew’s thoughts on lifespan extension was exactly the kind of knee-jerk panic response he tries to assuage with his free bonus chapter. He spends a while explaining how he’s not just talking about expending lifespan but healthspan, and so the need healthcare resources that are used to treat those in old-age wouldn’t increase dramatically as a result of lifespan increase, but that’s not the bit that worries me. My concern is that lifespan extension technologies will be unevenly distributed, and the (richer) societies that get them first are those same societies whose (richer) lifestyle has the greater negative impact on the Earth’s capacity to support human life.²

Andrew anticipates this concern and does some back-of-napkin maths to suggest that the increase in population doesn’t make too big an impact:

In this ‘worst’ case, the population in 2050 would be 11.3 billion—16% larger than had we not defeated ageing.

Is that a lot? I don’t think so—I’d happily work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if it meant no more suffering from old age.

This seems to me to be overly-optimistic:

The Earth doesn’t care whether or not you’re happy to work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if that extra effort isn’t possible (there’s necessarily an upper limit to how much change we can actually effect).
16% extra population = 16% extra “work” to save them implies a linear relationship between the two that simply doesn’t exist.
And that you’re willing to give 16% more doesn’t matter a jot if most of the richest people on the planet don’t share that ideal.

Fortunately, I’m reassured by the fact that – as Andrew points out – change is unlikely to happen fast. That means that the existing existential threat of climate change remains a bigger and more-significant issue than potential future overpopulation does!

In short: while I’m hoping I’ll live happily and healthily to say 120, I don’t think I’m ready for the rest of the world to all suddenly start doing so too! But I think there are bigger worries in the meantime. I don’t fancy my chances of living long enough to find out.

Gosh, that’s a gloomy note for a birthday, isn’t it? I’d better get up and go do something cheerier to mark the day!

¹ Assuming I don’t die of something before them, of course. Falling off a cliff isn’t a heritable condition, is it? ‘Cos there’s a family history of it, and I’ve always found myself affected by the influence of gravity, which I believe might be a precursor to falling off things.

² Fun fact: just last month I threw together a little JavaScript simulator to illustrate how even with no population growth (a “replacement rate” of one child per adult) a population grows while its life expectancy grows, which some people find unintuitive.

[Bloganuary] A Different Diet

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

What could you do differently?

Well that sounds like a question lifted right off an Oblique Strategies deck if ever I heard one!

I occasionally aspire to something-closer-to-veganism. Given that my vegetarianism (which is nowadays a compromise position¹ of “no meat on weekdays, no beef or lamb at all”) comes primarily from a place of environmental concern: a Western meat-eating diet is vastly less-efficient in terms of energy conversion, water usage, and carbon footprint than a vegetarian or vegan diet.

From an environmental perspective, the biggest impact resulting from my diet is almost certainly: dairy products. I’m not even the hugest fan of cheese, but I seem to eat plenty of it, and it’s one of those things that they just don’t seem to be able to make plant-based alternatives to perfectly, yet.

In an ideal world, with more willpower, I’d be mostly-vegan. I’d eat free range eggs produced by my own chickens, because keeping your own chickens offsets the food miles by enough to make them highly-sustainable. I’d eat honey, because honestly anything we can do to encourage more commercial beekeeping is a good thing as human civilisation depends on pollinators. But I’d drop all dairy from my diet.

I suppose I’m not that far off, yet. Maybe this year I can try switching-in a little more vegan “cheese” into the rotation.

¹ I missed many meats. But also, I don’t like to be an inconvenience.

[Bloganuary] Billboards

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

If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?

I always loved it when a book or exam paper or similar contained a page whose only content was the words “this space intentionally left blank”. It tickles a particular part of me: the part that wonders how “keep of the grass” signs get there without anybody treading on the grass, or laughs whenever somebody says something like “nobody drives in Oxford, there’s too much traffic.”

René Magritte's The Treachery of Images. — This is not the famous painting, *The Treachery of Images*.

So yeah, that.

[Bloganuary] Nostalgia vs Futurism

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

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

I probably spend similar amounts of time and energy on both. And that is: a lot!

Thinking about the past

I’m nostalgic as anything. I play retro video games (or even reverse-engineer them and vlog about it). I revisit old blog posts on their anniversary, years later. I recreate old interactive advertisements using modern technologies. When I’m not reading about how the Internet used to be, I’m bringing it back to life by reimagining old protocols in modern spaces and sharing the experience with others¹.

Hardware turtle and microcomputer. — Would a nostalgic person reimplement *this* set-up but in a modern browser? Why yes, yes I would.

Thinking about the future

But I’m also keenly-focussed on the future. I apply a hacker mindset to every new toy that comes my way, asking not “what does it do?” but “what can it be made to do?”. I’ve spent over a decade writing about the future of (tele)working, which faces new challenges today unlike any before. I’m much more-cautious than I was in my youth about jumping on every new tech bandwagon², but I still try to keep abreast and ahead of developments in my field.

But I also necessarily find myself thinking about the future of our world: the future that our children will grow up in. It’s a scary time, but I’m sure you don’t need me to spell that out for you!

Either way: a real mixture of thinking about the past and the future. It’s possible that I neglect the present?

¹ By the way: did you know that much of my blog is accessible over finger (finger @danq.me), Gopher (gopher://danq.me), and Gemini (gemini://danq.me). Grab yourself a copy of Lagrange or your favourite smolweb browser and see for yourself!

² Exactly how many new JavaScript frameworks can you learn each week, anyway?

[Bloganuary] The Gift of Time

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

What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

What topical timing, given that it’ll be my birthday in four days!

Dan, wearing wizard's robes alongside two similarly-dressed children, makes cocktails using a selection of bizarre-looking laboratory equipment. — My birthday is slightly overshadowed by the proximity to it of our eldest child’s birthday, but we can still find enough overlap of interest to do some fun things. Here we are last year, for example, at a magic-themed cocktail-making workshop (with non-alcoholic recipes for the kids, of course).

Of the things I have least but treasure most, perhaps the biggest is time. Between work, volunteering, and childcare, I often find myself rushing to cram-in any of the diversity of “play” activities I engage in.¹

I always feel particularly guilty if I step away to do “me things” that put me out of reach, because I know that while I’m off having fun, my absence necessarily means that somebody else has to be the one to break up whatever child squabble is happening right now². It feels particularly extravagant to, for example, spend a weekend in pursuit of a distant geohash point or two³.

Dan drinking beer from a Wye Valley Brewery pint glass. — A fancy dinner in a hotel bar in the middle of a two-day geohashing expedition across the Midlands, as far from work and home responsibilities as I can manage? Yes please!

So one of the best gifts I ever received was for my birthday the year before last, when Ruth gave me “a weekend off”⁴, affording me the opportunity to do exactly that. I picked some dates and she, JTA, and the kids vanished, leaving me free to spend a few days hacking my way from Herefordshire to somewhere near Birmingham in what turned out to be the worst floods of the year. It was delightful.⁵

Most people can’t give me “time”: it doesn’t grow on trees, and I haven’t found a place to order it online. It’s not even always practical to help me reclaim my own time by taking fixed timesinks off my to-do list⁶. But for those that can, it’s a great gift that I really appreciate.

It’s my birthday on Monday, if anybody wants to volunteer for childminding duties at any point. Just sayin’. 😅

¹ It’s even harder when I occasionally try to fit a course around that.

² Ours can be a particularly squabbly pair, and really know how to push one another’s buttons to escalate a fight!

³ Unless I were to take the kids with me: then if feels fine, but then I’ve got a different problem to deal with! The dog’s enough of a handful when you’re out traipsing through a bog in the rain!

⁴ Last year, she gave me tango lessons, which also broke me out of my routine and felt like a weekend off, but in a very different way.

⁵ I think that Ruth feels that her gift to me on my 41st birthday was tacky, perhaps because for her it was a “fallback”: what she came up with after failing to buy a more-conventional gift. But seriously: a scheduled weekend to disconnect from everything else in my life was an especially well-received gift.

⁶ Not least because I’m such a control freak that some of the biggest timesinks in my life are things I would struggle to delegate or even accept help with!

[Bloganuary] Alumnus

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

What colleges have you attended?

I feel like this question might be a little US-centric? Or at least, not UK-friendly! The question doesn’t translate well because of transatlantic differences in our higher education systems (even after I skimmed a guide to higher education across the pond).

Let’s try instead enumerating the education establishments I’ve attended post-school. There’ve been a few!

Preston College

A young Dan, plus seven other casually-dressed young men, pose in a classroom. — I’m the leftmost of the unwashed nerdy louts in this collection of unwashed nerdy louts: Preston College’s Computing A-Level graduates of the 1997-1999 class.

Nowadays young adults are required to be enrolled in education or training until the age of 18, but that wasn’t the case when I finished secondary school at 16. Because my school didn’t yet offer a “sixth form” (education for 16-18 year olds), I registered with Preston College to study A-Levels in Computing, Maths, Psychology, and General Studies.

The first of these choices reflected my intention to go on to study Computer Science at University¹. Psychology was chosen out of personal interest, and General Studies was a filler to round-out my programme.

A group of young adults mill around in a rainy car park between campus buildings. — This photo first appeared in one of my oldest (surviving) contemporary blog posts, way back in 1999.

Aberystwyth University

Then known as the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, this became my next academic destination as I pursued an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with Software Engineering.

Originally intending to spend five years doing a masters degree, I later dialled-back my plans and left with only a bachelors degree (although I still somehow spent five years getting it). This was not-least because I was much more-interested in implementing Three Rings than in studying, although I at least eventually managed to get away with writing and handing in a dissertation based on my work on the project³ and was awarded a degree and got to wear a silly hat and everything.

Dan and Aberystwyth friends at Ruth and JTA's wedding. — Of course, the real adventure at Aberystwyth was the friends I made along the way. Including this lot!

Since then, I’ve used my Software Engineering degree for… almost nothing. I started working at SmartData before I’d even completed it; the Bodleian required that I had one but didn’t care what the subject was, and I’m not certain that Automattic even asked. But I still appreciate some of the theoretical grounding it gave me, which helps me when I learn new concepts to this day⁴.

Aylesbury College

Almost a decade later, the academic bug bit me again and I decided to study towards a foundation degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy! I figured that it I were going to have one degree that I never use, I might as well have two of them, right?

The academic parts⁵ of the work could be done remotely, but I needed to zip back and forth to Aylesbury on Monday evenings for several years for the practical parts.

The Open University

Almost another decade passed then I decided it was time to break into academia a further time. This time, I decided to build on my existing knowledge from my first degree plus the subsequent experience and qualifications I’d gained in ethical hacking and penetration testing, and decided to go for a masters degree in Information Security and Forensics! I even managed to do some original research for my dissertation, although it’s terribly uninteresting because all it possibly managed to prove was the null hypothesis.

Dan with his Masters Degree certificate (Master of Science in Computing: Information Security and Forensics) — Smug mode activated as I prepare to add another degree certificate to the wall.

Something I’d discovered having been a student in my teens, in my 20s, in my 30s, and in my 40s… is that it gets harder! Whereas in my 20s I could put in an overnight cram session and ace an exam, in my 40s I absolutely needed to spend the time studying and revising over many weeks before information would become concrete in my mind!⁶ It almost feels like it’s a physical effort to shunt things into my brain, where once it was near-effortlessly easy.

People have occasionally suggested that I might push my field(s) even further and do a doctorate someday. I don’t think that’s for me. A masters in a subdiscipline was plenty narrow-enough a field for my interests: I’d far rather study something new.

Maybe there’s another degree in my sometime, someday, but it’s probably a bachelors!

¹ I figured that an A-Level in Maths would be essential for admission to a Computer Science degree, but it very definitely wasn’t, though it helped out in other ways.

² The ubiquity of digital photography nowadays makes it easy to forget that snapping a picture to share with friends used to be really hard work.

³ Little did I know that 20 years later Three Rings would still be going strong, now supporting ~60,000 volunteers in half a dozen countries!

⁴ While I love and am defensive of self-taught programmers, and feel that bootcamp-plus-experience is absolutely sufficient for many individuals to excel in my industry, there are certain topics – like compiler theory, data structures and algorithms, growth rates of function complexity, etc. – that are just better to learn in an academic setting, and which in turn can help bootstrap you every time you need to learn a new programming language or paradigm. Not to mention the benefit of “learning how to learn”, for which university can be great. It’s a bloody expensive way to get those skills, especially nowadays, though!

⁵ I was surprised to find that the academic bits of my course in counselling and psychotherapy were more-interesting than the practical bits. See for example my blog post about enjoying a deep dive into the background of The Gloria Films. I learned a lot from the practical bits too, mind.

⁶ I probably didn’t do myself any favours by beginning Automattic’s intensive and challenging recruitment process while wrapping up my masters degree though.

[Bloganuary] Playtime

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

Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?

How do I play? Let me count the ways!

RPGs

I’m involved in no fewer than three different RPG campaigns (DMing the one for The Levellers) right now, plus periodic one-shots. I love a good roleplaying game, especially one that puts character-building and storytelling above rules-lawyering and munchkinery, specifically because that kind of collaborative, imaginative experience feels more like the kind of thing we call “play” when done it’s done by children!

Videogames

I don’t feel like I get remotely as much videogaming time as I used to, and in theory I’ve become more-selective about exactly what I spend my time on¹.

Dan with his thumbs-up in front of the high-score table (with the top-ranking spot about to be filled) of Wonder Boy, on a generic "80s Arcade Classics" arcade cabinet. — I managed to beat *Wonder Boy* last week, and it “only” took me three and a half decades!

Board Games

Similarly, I don’t feel like I get as much time to grind through my oversized board games collection as I used to², but that’s improving as the kids get older and can be roped-into a wider diversity of games³.

A girl, sat in front of an Agricola farmyard board, holds up a "sheeple" (small wooden sheep game piece) for the camera. — Our youngest wakes early on weekend mornings and asks to kick off his day with board games. Our eldest, pictured, has grown to the point where she’s working her way through all of the animal-themed games at our local board games cafe.

Escape Rooms

I love a good escape room, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough for (more of) them too so I’ve an excuse to do more of them. When we’re not playing conventional escape rooms, Ruth and I can sometimes be found playing board game-style boxed “kit” ones (which have very variable quality, in my experience) and we’ve recently tried a little Escape Academy.

GNSS Activities

I’m sure everybody knows I do a modest amount of geocaching and geohashing.⁴

Dan, outdoors in a field on a grey day and with the wind whipping his hair across his face, wearing a high-vis jacket over a warm fleece, holds up a GPS receiver which shows he's zero metres from his destination. — I’m out standing in my field.

They’re not the only satnav-based activities I do at least partially “for fun” though! I contribute to OpenStreetMap, often through the “gamified” experience of the StreetComplete app, and I’m very slowly creeping up the leader board at OpenBenches. Are these “play”? Sure, maybe.

And all of the above is merely the structured kinds of play I engage in. Playing “let’s pretend”-style games with the kids (even when they make it really, really weird) adds a whole extra aspect. Also there’s the increasingly-rare murder mystery parties we sometimes hold: does that count as roleplaying, or some other kind of play?

Guests dressed as a chef, a priest, and a librarian sit around a dining table at a murder mystery party. — A chef, a priest, and a librarian walk into a party… stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Suffice to say, there’s plenty of play in my life, it’s quite varied and diverse, and there is, if anything, not enough of it!

¹ I say that, and yet somehow Steam tells me that one of my most-played games this year was Starfield, which was… meh? Apparently compelling enough that I’ve “ascended” twice, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered.

² Someday my group and I will finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 so we can get started on Season 0 which has sat unplayed on my shelves since I got it… oooh… two or three years ago‽

³ This Christmas, I got each of them their first “legacy” game: Zombie Kids for the younger one, My City for the elder. They both seem pretty good.

⁴ Geocaching is where you use military satellite networks to find lost tupperware. Geohashing uses the same technology but what you find is a whole lot of nothing. I don’t think I can explain why I find the latter more-compelling.

[Bloganuary] My Biggest Challenge

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

What are your biggest challenges?

The Challenge of Winter Motivation

Two years ago, I reflected in February that I’d made almost zero blog posts in the previous month. Last month, I implemented a dynamically-updating Blog Stats page and my “winter/early Spring dip” became more-visible than ever.

Chart showing number of articles on DanQ.me by month of year, with a pronounced dip starting in January and continuing through until a rebound in April. — I find winters are *generally* bad for my creativity and motivation, usually until I bounce back in the Spring.

In an attempt to keep me writing daily, I’m giving Bloganuary a go this year. It’s sort-of like the NaNoWriMo of blogging¹. And for me, Bloganuary’s very purpose is to overcome the challenge of getting disconnected from blogging when the nights are long and inspiration’s hard to find².

The Challenge of Staying On-Task

But outside of the winter, my biggest challenge is usually… staying on-task!

It’s easy to get my focus to wane and for me to drift into some other activity than whatever it is I should be spending my time on. It’s not even procrastination³ so much as it’s a fluctuating and changing field of interest. I’ll drift off of what I’m supposed to be working on and start on something that interests me more in that moment… and then potentially off that too, in turn. The net result is that both my personal and professional lives are awash with half-finished projects⁴, all waiting their turn for me to find the motivation to swing back around and pick them up on some subsequent orbit of my brain.

A person wearing a cardboard box on their head, labelled "BRAIN". Above, a hand reaches from out-of-frame to hold a sign labelled "IDEA" above them. — You know how sometimes a stock image says *exactly* what you need it to? This isn’t one of those times.

It’s the kind of productivity antipattern I’d bring up with my coach, except that I already know exactly how she’d respond. First, she’d challenge the need to change; require that I justify it first. Second, she’d insist that before I can change, I need to accept and come to terms with who I am, intrinsically: if this flitting-about is authentically “me”, who am I to change it?

Finally, after weeks or months of exercises to fulfil these two tasks, she’d point out that I’ve now reached a place where I’m still just as liable to change lanes in the middle of a project as I was to begin with, but now I’m more comfortable with that fact. I won’t have externally changed, I’ll “just” have found some kind of happy-clappy inner peace. And she’ll have been right that that’s what I’d actually needed all along.

Maybe it’s not such a challenge, after all.

¹ Except that would be NaBloPoMo, of course. But it’s a similar thing.

² Also, perhaps, to help me focus on writing more-often, on more-topics, than I might otherwise in the course of my slow, verbose writing.

³ Except when it is.

⁴ Not to mention countless draft blog posts!

Wonder Boy

There are video games that I’ve spent many years playing (sometimes on-and-off) before finally beating them for the first time. I spent three years playing Dune II before I finally beat it as every house. It took twice that to reach the end of Ultima Underworld II. But today, I can add a new contender¹ to that list.

Today, over thirty-five years after I first played it, I finally completed Wonder Boy.

Entryway to "West View Leisure Centre", decorated in a bright, abstract, 80s style. — I first played Wonder Boy in 1988 at West View Leisure Centre, pictured here mostly as-I-remember-it in a photo by Keith Wright (used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license).

My first experience of the game, in the 1980s, was on a coin-op machine where I’d discovered I could get away with trading the 20p piece I’d been given by my parents to use as a deposit on a locker that week for two games on the machine. I wasn’t very good at it, but something about the cutesy graphics and catchy chip-tune music grabbed my attention and it became my favourite arcade game.

Of all the video games about skateboarding cavemen I’ve ever played, it’s my favourite.

I played it once or twice more when I found it in arcades, as an older child. I played various console ports of it and found them disappointing. I tried it a couple of times in MAME. But I didn’t really put any effort into it until a hotel we stayed at during a family holiday to Paris in October had a bank of free-to-play arcade machines rigged with Pandora’s Box clones so they could be used to play a few thousand different arcade classics. Including Wonder Boy.

A young girl in a pink leopard-print top plays Wonder Boy on an arcade cabinet. — Our eldest was particularly taken with *Wonder Boy*, and by the time we set off for home at the end of our holiday she’d gotten further than I *ever* had at it (all without spending a single tenpence).

Off the back of all the fun the kids had, it’s perhaps no surprise that I arranged for a similar machine to be delivered to us as a gift “to the family”² this Christmas.

And so my interest in the game was awakened and I threw easily a hundred pounds worth of free-play games of Wonder Boy³ over the last few days. Until…

…today, I finally defeated the seventh ogre⁴, saved the kingdom, etc. It was a hell of a battle. I can’t count how many times I pressed the “insert coin” button on that final section, how many little axes I’d throw into the beast’s head while dodging his fireballs, etc.

So yeah, that’s done, now. I guess I can get back to finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the 2017 remake of a 1989 game I adored!⁵ It’s aged amazingly well!

¹ This may be the final record for time spent playing a video game before beating it, unless someday I ever achieve a (non-cheating) NetHack ascension.

² The kids have had plenty of enjoyment out of it so far, but their time on the machine is somewhat eclipsed by Owen playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Streets of Rage on it and, of course, by my rediscovered obsession with Wonder Boy.

³ The arcade cabinet still hasn’t quite paid for itself in tenpences-saved, despite my grinding of Wonder Boy. Yet.

⁴ I took to calling the end-of-world bosses “ogres” when my friends and I swapped tips for the game back in the late 80s, and I refuse to learn any different name for them.[footnote], saved Tina[footnote]Apparently the love interest has a name. Who knew?

⁵ I completed the original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap on a Sega Master System borrowed from my friend Daniel back in around 1990, so it’s not a contender for the list either.

Runners-up

The winner

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Thinking about the past

Thinking about the future

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Preston College

Aberystwyth University

Aylesbury College

The Open University

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RPGs

Videogames

Board Games

Escape Rooms

GNSS Activities

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The Challenge of Winter Motivation

The Challenge of Staying On-Task

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