Istanbul decompression

It wasn’t until I made time for myself to get out into the countryside near my home and take the dog for a walk that I realised how much stress I’d been putting myself under during my team meetup, this week.

Istanbul was enjoyable and fascinating, and I love my team, but I always forget until after the fact how much a few days worth of city crowds can make me feel anxious and trapped.

It’s good to get a mile or two from the nearest other human and decompress!

Dan, a red leash hung across his shoulders, gives a half-shrug as he smiles for a selfie on a grassy trail between a hedgerow and a field. Behind him, near a weathered old-fashioned footpath sign, his French Bulldog looks at him expectantly.

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Geocaching Convex Hull now includes Turkey

Thanks to finding a couple of geocaches here in Istanbul, my geocaching “2D convex hull” (the smallest possible convex polygon that covers an area), which I wrote some code to draw last year, just expanded a little further to the East. 🎉

World map, with an irregular near-quadrilatral drawn such that it approximately connects Inverness (Scotland), Istanbul (Turkey), Cape Town (South Africa), and San Francisco (California, USA), encompassing the area within.

I’ve got a lot of the world left still to encircle, but I’m slowly extending my reach…

(previous map, for comparison: https://danq.me/_q23u/2024/04/dans-geoing-hull-2024-04-03.webp)

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Team Desire in Istanbul

With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.

You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.

A group of men sit on chairs, a sofa, and the edge of a desk in a comfortable large office space.

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Kebab Menu Accessibility

Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…

(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical ellipsis)

Istanbul

Istanbul is… sprawling. I stood on this footbridge, over the water, to try to comprehend the scale of the place, but it’s just massive. The hills, which help the tall buildings to tower over you no matter where you stand, only serve to exaggerate the effect. Quite the spectacle of human settlement.

View from above a river, flanked by dense city on both sides, under an overcast sky.

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Note #26129

Good morning, Oxfordshire! A freezing-fog farewell for me, this morning, as I get up early to catch a series of buses to the airport.

A wet rural road, lit by the sun's first light as it rises ahead, it's flanked by fields full of freezing fog.

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Perfect bath

There are few moments of self-satisfaction so great as accidentally running a bath to both the perfect depth and the ideal temperature, after forgetting you’d started drawing the water at all.

Dog Tired

Woke up. Had a walk. Now it must be time for a well-earned nap. 💤

A sleepy-looking French Bulldog, wearing a harness, lying on her side in a dog basket with her eyes mostly-closed and her tongue mostly-in-her-mouth.

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More castles and mazes

Made a little progress on the game idea I’d been experimenting with. The idea is to do find a series of orthogonal (like a rook in chess!) moves that land on every square exactly once each before returning to the start, dodging walls and jumping pits.

But the squares have arrows (limiting the direction you can move out of them) or numbers (specifying the distance you must travel from them).

Four sample puzzles, one of them solved.

Every board is solvable, starting from any square. There’ll be a playable version to use on your device (with helpful features like “undo”) sometime soon, but for now you can give them a go by hand, if you like this kind of puzzle!

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Cherry blossom

When I was a child, we had a cherry blossom tree in our garden. In late Spring, as the flowers began to wilt, I’d enjoy shaking it to make flutters of pink confetti rain down around me.

This tree, though, spotted on the school run this morning, is very early in its bloom. It feels like a happy reminder that Spring is beginning.

Barely-opened cherry blossom buds against a vibrant blue sky.

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Steam Email alt-text improvements

I noticed that automated emails from Steam weren’t doing alt-text very well. Some image links had no or inadequate alt-text. (Note that Steam don’t support opting for plain text rather than HTML emails.)

I’m fortunate enough to depend upon alt-text never-to-rarely. But I prefer not to load remote images, so I still benefit from alt-text.

I filled out a support request to Steam layout out the specific examples I’d found of where they weren’t doing very well, and stressing why it’s (morally, legally, etc.) important to do better.

And you know what: they quietly fixed it. When I received an email today telling me that something on my wishlist is on sale, it had reasonably-good alt-text throughout. Neat.

Voice of America

In light of Trump’s attempts to axe Voice of America, because it is, he claims, “anti-Trump” (and because he’s so insecure that he can’t stand the thought that taxpayer dollars might go to anybody who disagrees with him in any way, for any reason), I’ve produced a suggested update to the rules of Twilight Struggle for the inevitable 9th printing:

Twilight Struggle card "The Voice of America", which normally allows the US player to reduce USSR influence in non-European countries. The card has been modified with the additional rule "Remove from play in 2025."
I guess the Russian player gets to stretch their influence unchecked, anywhere they want, from 2025 onwards.
In the game, I mean.

Yet another blow to US soft power in order to appease the ego of convicted felon Donald Trump. Sigh.

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Castles and mazes

Possibly I’m a little late for the “casual daily puzzle game” party. (Did Wordle already get invented in this timeline; I forget?)

I think there’s something in an idea I’ve been toying with. Bring on the weekend, when I can throw some brainpower at the frontend code!

A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.

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Coaching in the Library

I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house’s new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room’s not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.

Dan, a white man with a ponytail, wearing a black shirt and jeans, sits in a rocking chair in front of an open laptop at a long desk; he has a notebook in his hand and holds a pen near his lips. He's in a domestic library with deep red walls, balanced-arm lamps, a woven rug on a wooden floor, and the wall behind him entirely covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A grassy lawn and sapling trees can be seen through a window, bordered by floral curtains and two clumsily-placed WiFi routers that sit on the window ledge. On the corner of the desk lie various hand tools, suggesting that light construction work has recently taken place.

(Incidentally: I might be treating “lives in a house with a library” as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)

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