On a midnight train back from a London theatre trip, somehow the 8-year-old is still awake (and reading comics to me!); the 10-year-old is understandably wiped-out.
A fun night out though!
Kind: Notes
Book Exchange
Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I’m not sure…) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange.
verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire to bed (first the kids, then – eventually – the adults).
We love it.
Note #25413
Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I’m continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent.
Xmas Post
At first I thought “Christmas post” had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild.
Note #25406
Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them.
Because these were the “lick and stick” kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I’ve been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.
Too Late
You know you’ve stayed up too late when… the milkman arrives and hands you your milk.
Note #25383
Today I learned that you can use reportValidity() on a HTML5
input of e.g. type="email" to force the browser to run it’s own validation, without waiting for the containing form to be submitted (which in some cases might not
happen, e.g. if you’re handling input using JS).
That’s cool.
Note #25375
Today, while I cooked dinner, I introduced my two children (aged 10 and 8) to Goat Simulator.
Within half an hour, they’d added an imaginative twist and a role-playing element. My eldest had decreed themselves Angel of Goats and the younger Goat Devil and the two were locked in an endless battle to control the holy land at the top of a rollercoaster.
The shrieks of joy and surprise from the living room could be heard throughout the entire house. Perhaps our whole village.
Bacon Solves Little, Improves Much
Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.
Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I supposed to be tidying again?
Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.
Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he’s still breathing (he’s fine, by the way!).
Even then, there’s still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋
Note #25369
Here in Oxfordshire we’re nowhere near the epicentre of Storm Darragh, but we’re still feeling the effects. A huge tree came down and blocked the Thorney Leys road in Witney near Burwell Meadow and the kids and I needed to take an ad-hoc diversion.
🤞 Fingers crossed for all my friends and family in worse-hit places!
Note #25356
For my final bit of Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day, I’m working on improving the UI of a new upcoming feature: a spreadsheet-like page that makes it easy for administrators to edit the details of many volunteers simultaneously (all backed by the usual level of customisation and view/edit permissions that Three Rings is known for).
It’s a moderately-popular request, and I can see it being helpful to volunteer coordinators at many different types of voluntary organisation.
Don’t have time to write up the test instructions today, though, because I’ve got to wrap up my volunteering and go do some childwrangling, so that’ll do for now!
Note #25347
Even when it’s technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).
Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that… but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.
Note #25345
My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn’t all technical work. It’s also time to process the incoming postal mail.
Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren’t, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our hosting costs. Most send money digitally, but some use dual-signatory accounts that require they send cheques.
Note #25343
As well as the programming tasks I’m working on for Three Rings this International Volunteer Day, I’m also doing a little devops. We’ve got a new server architecture rolling out next week, and I’m tasked with ensuring that the logging on them meets our security standards.
Each server’s on-device logs are retained in date-stamped files for 14 days, but they’re also backed-up offsite daily.
Those bits all seem to be working, so next I need to work out a way to add a notification to our monitoring platform if any server doesn’t successfully push a log to the offsite backup in a timely manner.
Note #25341
Not every code review is fireworks, but most Three Rings changes come from the actual needs of the voluntary organisations that Three Rings supports. Some of our users were confused by the way the Admin > Roles page was laid out, so one of our volunteers wrote an improved version.
And because we’re all about collaboration, discussion, learning from one another, and volunteer-empowerment… I’ve added a minor suggestion… but approved their change “with or without” it. I trust my fellow volunteer to either accept my suggestion (if it’s right), reject it (if it’s wrong), or solicit more reviews or bring it to Slack or our fortnightly dev meeting (if it requires discussion).
