I was sceptical when the forecast said there’d be sleet and snow this morning, but sure enough, it’s just barely beginning to settle on the skylight of my attic bathroom. 🫢
Kind: Notes
Harswell Steel
My past self, receiving a copy of Transport Tycoon for his 14th birthday, would have his mind blown if he could see the kind of insanely-complex super-stations that are possible in (the open-source successor to) the game 30 years on.
Of course, this kind of thing – multiple simultaneously shared in-and-out routes on a bidirectional station – wasn’t (sensibly) possible before the introduction of path-based signalling in OpenTTD 0.7.0. And modern path-based signals in the game are even smarter.
But still, 14-year-old me had a dream. And nowadays that dream is real.
Geohash Luck
Maybe it’s just that my sabbatical is making me pay more attention then usual, but it feels like I’m getting very lucky with nearby geohashpoints lately. Tomorrow’s hashpoint in my graticule might be achievable!
This is a good omen, perhaps, for next week. Next week my mother and I are going to hop over to the West coast of Ireland where there are several contiguous mostly-land graticules that have never seen a successful expedition. We could be the first! 🤞
Dominated
Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.
Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊
This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary teacher they had.
His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”
Autumnal
Waiting patiently at the school gates on a distinctly Autumnal morning, our pupper’s squat stature means she’s about knee-deep in the season’s golden leaves.
Enumerating Domains
I’ve just enumerated my personal domain names. There’s a lot fewer of them than there used to be!1
Anyway: here’s the list –
- danq.me and a variety of aliases (danq.uk, danq.dev, danq.link, danq.blog, scatmania.org); there’s also like a billion subdomains in use of course, like things.danq.me and find.danq.me
- freedeedpoll.org.uk, which I really ought to update at some point but which still clearly helps many people
- dndle.app, a D&D-inspired Wordle-clone which I still get bug reports and pull requests for so clearly somebody’s using it
- geohashing.site, the central hub of Geohashing activity worldwide
- egxchange.org, which hosts the most environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency wallet you’ll ever see
- abnib.co.uk, a community of friends (also with about a billion subdomains)
- q-t-a.uk, my family website, which exists mostly to facilitate addressing for a stack of internal/selfhosted services
- rockmonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t do much nowadays
- fleeblewidget.co.uk, my partner’s blog, but I look after the domain registration
- textplain.blog, my plain-text blog
- levellers.blog, the blog of my D&D group
- theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner’s brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures
I think that’s all of them, but it’s hard to be sure…
Footnotes
1 Maybe I’ve finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.
Note #24972
Future Arimaa grand masters at practice, this Sunday morning boardgaming session.
Any Cup
In spite of their signage, Costa weren’t happy to take my old jockstrap for recycling.
Quesapizza Lunch
After a morning of optimising a nonprofit’s reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I’ve earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm…
My Car is Sad
All! The! Warning! Lights! By the time a car needs to pahinate the error messages it wants to display, something has definitely gone wrong. 😬
Go back to bed!
Things my children have gotten out of bed to say to me tonight:
- I don’t want to go to school tomorrow
- I can’t find [name of toy]
- I want [name of toy I lent to my sibling] back
- if I’m ill, I don’t have to go to school tomorrow, right?
- I can’t sleep
- I might be ill: I don’t think I should go to school tomorrow
- I want a hot water bottle
- I’m too hot
- I’ve lost my hot water bottle
- I spilt my water1
- I went to the toilet because I thought I was going to throw up but I didn’t but I think I’m too ill to go to school tomorrow
- my book is wet
- I forgot to brush my teeth
- I don’t like these pyjamas
- I still can’t sleep
Footnotes
1 it later turned out to have been spilled on an electrical extension socket! 😱
Note #24906
As the kids grow older… someday our final soft play session – something we used to do all the time, and now do only rarely – will be in the past.
But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!
Note #24882
Okay, is every company using AI to fuck up their mailing lists, now?
For the second time this week I’ve received an email from a company whom I’d explicitly demanded cease processing my PII. This time, in February they outright told me that they’d deleted my data and sent screenshots to “prove” it (which was already after they’d failed to unsubscribe me from their mailing lists in the first place).
Note #24871
Just received an unsolicited marketing email from a company that I asked to remove me from their systems eleven and a half years ago (!).
I haven’t heard from them since then.
The marketing email is sent using a platform that “uses AI to help you seamlessly connect with your customers”. By which I assume the platform means “we’ll crawl your email history to find anybody we can possibly spam”.
Just gonna go grab my GDPR/DPA2018 beating-stick. This is gonna be a fun one.
PortAventura
Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.
