Notes – Page 3

Double Sausages

This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.

Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?

Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I’ve mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics… until I got distracted by dndle.app, which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things!

Note #24767

Kicking off day #1 of my three-month sabbatical from work at a hotel in Reading, at a meeting with fellow Three Rings volunteers to discuss our organisational culture and values.

Fixing BBC News… Yet Again

The Beeb continue to keep adding more and more non-news content to the BBC News RSS feed (like this ad for the iPlayer app!), so I’ve once again had to update my script to “fix” the feed so that it only contains, y’know, news.

Zero

✅ Inbox Zero
✅ Slack Notification Zero
✅ Assigned PR Reviews Zero
✅ Owned PRs… one, but it’s approved and just waiting for the right moment to merge

That’s got the be the first time in… literally years… that I’ve ended a workday so “clean”. Feels amazing.

There’ll be a mess again tomorrow, but hopefully only of a manageable size because I’m particularly clean to finish this week at “Work Zero”.

Note #24744

Happy International Pronouns Day! 🥳

I use he/him pronouns.

Facebook AI Training Opt-Out

And while we’re talking about AI.

It took a disproportionate about of time to find the right (tiny) link, but eventually I managed to opt-out of my content being used to train Facebook’s AI. They don’t make it easy, do they?

Note #24735

You know that you REALLY needed that coffee when you:

1. get out a mug,
2. turn on the coffee machine,
3. load the dishwasher while you wait for the coffee machine to warm up,
4. can’t find your mug any more, oh shit it’s in the dishwasher 🤦

eBay Balance

eBay UK have changed their terms to (a) remove seller fees for most private sellers, but (b) instead of paying-out immediately, payouts are four times a year (or on-demand).

That sounds like they’re trying to keep money in their ecosystem. The hope is, I guess, that by paying sellers in virtual “eBay Pounds” rather than actual money in the first instance they’ll encourage those sellers to become buyers again (either of other listings, or of eBay’s postage and other services). You can cash out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

You see the same technique used e.g. by the National Lottery, who pay out “small” winnings into your online account, knowing that the vast majority of winnings are on the order of only a few times more than the value of a ticket, and so players will be more-likely to “re-invest” if they’re not paid-out directly.

Or maybe I’m just being cynical.

Sick words

This evening I pushed against my illness-addled brain to try to sit in on the fortnightly Zoom call with the Three Rings dev team. Unfortunately it seems like the primary symptom of my cold is an inability to string words together.

At one point, I apologised to by colleague “Beff” (I meant “Bev”, but I had just been talking about “Geoff”) that I couldn’t work out how to stop “scaring my screen” (well, I suppose Halloween is coming up…). Then, realising my mistake, explained that it was a bit of a “ting-twister”.

I should just go to bed, right?