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!
Kind: Notes
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?
Note #24701
Playing simultaneous games against both children might have been less challenging if they hadn’t both kept trying to start fights with one another at the same time! 😂
Note #24696
I’m back home from Mexico (and feeling a little worse for wear), where this young lady wanted to let me know that I was sorely missed.
Goodbye Tulum
Goodbye, Tulum! You were delightful, if very hot. It’s time for me to head back to the UK.
Hurricane Milton
From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take it away, not towards, me.
My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find themselves along the route of this awakened beast.
Five Cards
It’s a bit hard to perform close-up magic to an audience 40 metres deep, so I pre-recorded my favourite card trick! Then I talked over it, explaining to colleagues from my division why it’s my favourite bit of slight-of-hand, and what great magic tricks have in common with great code.
I feel like I’m likely to have to perform a lot more illusions at the bar later today!
Tropical rain
It’s 05:30 local time on the third day of my work meetup in Tulum, on Tyne Caribbean Coast of Mexico, and I was just woken by incredibly heavy rain. I got up and stepped out until it, and was surprised to discover that it’s almost as warm as the shower in my bathroom. In the distance, beyond the palm trees and over the hill, the booms of thunder are getting closer. Beautiful weather for a beautiful place.
