Notes – Dan Q

Firstup Day 1

Off to my first day at Firstup. Gotta have an induction: get my ID badge, learn where the toilets are, how to refill the coffee machine, and all that jazz.

Except, of course, none of those steps will be part of my induction. Because, yet again, I’ve taken a remote-first position. I’m 100% sold that, for me, remote/distributed work helps me bring my most-productive self. It might not be for everybody, but it’s great for me.

And now: I’m going to find out where the water cooler is. No, wait… some other thing!

Hotdog Among the Trees

As the UK’s heatwave continues, the dog and I were delighted that this morning was sufficiently overcast that we could manage a proper walk without completely melting.

Her breed copes badly with the heat and we’ve lately had to keep her indoors or in the shade more than she’d like, so a chance to run around among the trees was very welcome!

Waves Hand Car Wash

I know how I’m SUPPOSED to read it, but when I see this I can’t help but imagine a conversation like…

“What shall we call our car wash?”

/waves hand/ “I dunno.”

Person Rowing Boat

On our family Slack, Ruth and I have a tradition of reacting to one another’s messages, where no other emoji seems appropriate, with a “person rowing boat” emoji.

🚣

I can’t remember exactly how it started. Possibly one of us was using the text search to find the “robot” emoji (probably in reference to our robot vacuum cleaner, which used to be more-frequently found hiding under the sofa than anywhere else in the world).

🤖

But whatever the reason, the game stuck. And because you can leave multiple emoji responses to a Slack message – and because Unicode permits a diversity of gender and skin tone options for this particular emoji – sometimes this results in a whole flotilla of rowboats parading beneath our messages.

🚣‍♂️🚣🏻‍♀️🚣🏻🚣🏼🚣🏻‍♂️🚣🏾🚣🏿🚣🏼‍♂️🚣🏽‍♂️🚣🏾‍♂️🚣🏽🚣🏽‍♀️🚣🏾‍♀️🚣🏼‍♀️🚣‍♀️🚣🏿‍♂️🚣🚣🏿‍♀️

And if an emoji armada isn’t an excuse to demonstrate the fact that the <marquee> tag still works in most browsers, for some reason, I don’t know what is.

Doxxing an Imaginary Person?

This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.

Apparently the video – which is a demo of some Three Rings features – apparently fell foul of Google’s anti-doxxing rules. I’m glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course.

Let’s see who I doxxed:

Yup… apparently doxxed an imaginary person with two structurally-invalid phone numbers and who’s recently moved house from Some Street to Other Street in the town of Somewhereville. 😂

(Maybe I’m wrong. Do you live on Some Street, Somewhereville?)

Let’s see what YouTube’s appeals process is like, shall we? 🤦

Unrepentant Blep

The unrepentant bleppy face of a dog who, without fail, steals the warm spot I’ve left behind on the sofa within like three seconds of me standing up.

All The Pondweed, So Many Pondweed

Have I posted this joke before? It’s all a Blur.

Accessible description: Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and a faded blue ponytail, stands in a darkened kitchen. Turning to the camera, he says “I get up when I want, except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the tadpoles.” Then he holds up a book entitled “Pond Life”.