Bean chilli breakfast pizza

Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This’ll work, right?

Pizza built with bean chilli and mixed grated cheese, ready to go into an oven.

Update: yeah. This works.😋

Finished pizza, looking delicious.

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Coffee dogs

What’s the equivalent phrase to “hair of the dog”, but for caffeine?

I’ve always been pretty sensitive to it, and while I’m less-so now, it was still definitely a mistake to eat several portions of tiramisu right before bedtime.

So now I’m going to need more caffeine, this morning, to compensate for the lack of sleep.

What do we call that?

Getting better!

After most of four days spent primarily in bed with what’s probably a norovirus infection (or something like it), this afternoon I got up and went outside. 🎉

It felt like a huge achievement, even if I ran back in to the warmth the very second that the dog I was supervising had finished her business.

A white man stands outside a white house, looking cold. His hands are buried in the pockets of his checked pyjama bottoms, and his upper half is wrapped tightly in a Tumblr-branded grey jumper. Various childrens toys litter the garden around him.

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3-day streak

Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great… until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your “streak” as an “achievement”! 😅

Two 'Jetpack' notifications on an Android phone, both at 08:07. The first reads: 'Dan Q posted on Marketplace Engineering: AFK for itsdang -26Feb25'. The second reads: 'New achievement: You're on a 3-day streak on Marketplace Engineering!'

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For anybody who could use a break

Third day of being ill with what’s probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school… and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip… I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Willd-Built.

The opening page reads: “For anybody who could use a break.”

Printed serifed text reading: 'For anybody who could use a break.'

Yes. Yes, please.

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Fever dreams

Don’t remember the last time I felt so run-down. I’ve been unwell since Sunday with an illness I can only assume I caught from the 11-year-old, who’s been unable to keep food down for several days.

In my case, though, I’ve mostly been full of muscular aches and cramps, ocassionally fits of shivers, and strange dizziness.

I’ve spent the last day and a bit mostly drifting in and out of sleep, where I’ve had the weirdest dreams. I just woke from one where I was lost in a sprawling hotel, looking for my room which was number 317 or possibly 305, I couldn’t remember. The signage didn’t make sense to me and I couldn’t read it, and found myself wandering around a sprawling resort, with hot air balloon services connecting different parts. At one point I found myself lost in a library whose winding shelves formed a Escherian maze, and a small child watched me with suspicion as I fumbled around for an exit.

In a disturbing dream from yesterday afternoon, I was lying in a desert of cold sand as the wind gradually piled up more and more sand against me. At first I felt fascinated, thinking I’d learned something about how dunes form, until I discovered that I wasn’t able to move. I gradually sunk deeper and deeper underground, in pain except when I lay very still and let it take me, until eventually I started to become the very sand that I was disappearing into. I felt flakes of myself break away and become part of the desert, unable to resist the change nor reconstruct myself, resigned to my fate.

I’m in less pain so far this morning than yesterday, so I think I’m recovering, but man this has been an unpleasant ride. Whatever I’m infected with: do not recommend, would not contract again, one out of five.

Goodbye, Slippers

Yesterday, owing to some plot, the dog didn’t get as much outside/walk/play time as she’d like.

Today, she let me know how she felt about that by shredding my slippers. 🙄

A partially-shredded slipper is held in a hand, in front of a French Bulldog, on the wooden floors of the hallway of a house.

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Wavey Dan

I was experimenting with VP8/VP9 WebM video transparency and I made a stupid thing: a URL that, if you go to it, means you’ll he followed around my blog by a video of me just hanging out in the corner of the page – https://danq.me/?fool_id=06

I’ve added it to my list of “stupid/random things that can happen if you visit my blog on April Fools’ Day”: https://danq.me/fools/

Screenshot of DanQ.me, with a transparent video overlay of Dan in the bottom right corner, waving.

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Spring is coming

A lunchtime dog walk was made especially delightful by the growing warmth of the approaching British springtime. It’s really bright and pretty out, this afternoon!

A French Bulldog in a harness but no lead stands in front of a empty field, under bright blue skies with sparse clouds. Bare wintery trees can be seen in the background, bathed in warm yellow light.

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Piano Repair

The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano.

Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend.

But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, and bodged a fix. It sounds great.

I feel accomplished.

Behind the lower front board of an open upright piano, a hand reaches in between the pedal rods and the soundboard to point at the hinge screw of the sustain pedal.

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Step #1

I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.

So obviously step #1 involves a big ol’ coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go…

A wooden kitchen surface containing a red mug full of freshly-brewed coffee alongside a plate painted with fruits on which sits a heart-shaped doughnut, topped with chocolate and decorated with an iced motif of a sunflower. Beneath the plate, out-of-focus, are the pages of a news periodical.

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Note #25737

“I’m only asking for basic respect.” – Dr. Beth Upton, in the face of a hostile courtroom, media, and world.

Her fucking bravery is amazing. 💖

Note #25736

After “fixing” BBC News’ RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I’d subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I’d been on the Full edition. I’ve corrected it now in my RSS reader, but it was an interesting couple of days.

tl;dr: I accidentally stopped reading international news and I was less stressed

Anyway: if you’re not already using my improved BBC News RSS feeds, they’re at: https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev