Sometimes the kids need to leave your pub dinner before you finish your drink, and you need to take a “to-go” pint.
Kind: Notes
Note #26217
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!
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. 🎉
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)
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.
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
Note #26131
Note #26129
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
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).
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!
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.
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:

In the game, I mean.
Yet another blow to US soft power in order to appease the ego of convicted felon Donald Trump. Sigh.