White’s move. Mate in three. A giant chessboard is the perfect environment to teach a child some basic chess strategy, right?
Kind: Notes
Note #26287
While adding an entry to OpenBenches (openbenches.org/bench/36677), I was struck by how much of an impact this woman – Jane Gregg – must have made on her local community.
In this community garden in Bampton, in the Lake District, a bench dedicated to her includes not only a plaque summarising her achievements but it’s also been hand-carved with the words “Jane an amazing human.”
Lake District art lesson
Brought the kids up Knipe Scar with limited and challenging art materials (huge sheets of paper and thick marker pens) for a lesson in drawing what a landscape makes you feel, rather than focusing on what you can actually see.
Note #26282
“I know that losing your job was hard,” my 8-year-old said to me this evening, “So you can borrow this.” He handed me his newest soft toy.
“It’ll help you feel better when you’re sad. Keep him for the week.”
😭
Rosgill Crossroads
I’m in an extremely rural area and I needed a phone call with my lawyer about my recent redundancy. Phone signal was very bad, so I resolved to climb a nearby hill and call him back.
“I’m at a crossroads,” I said, when I finally found enough bars to have a conversation with him.
“In your life?” he asked.
“I guess,” I replied, “But also, y’know, literally.”
A Surprisingly Shit Bathroom
This bathroom at the holiday home where some fellow volunteers and I are doing some Three Rings work, this week, has a few unusual quirks, including this surprisingly-shit bathroom:
- The door has a lock… but there’s a second door which doesn’t.
- Oh, and the first door’s lock doesn’t actually do anything. The door can still be opened from the outside.
Note #26262
The phone signal is so shit at this year’s 3Camp venue that I’ve had to climb a hill to take a call from a lawyer (whom I’m speaking to about my recent redundancy). Nice to be outdoors, though!
3Camp 2025
I’m off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.
And if there’s one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it’s that I’ve got a shiny new laptop to do my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).
Redundant
Apparently Automattic are laying off around one in six of their workforce. And I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Anybody remote hiring for a UK-based full-stack web developer (in a world that doesn’t seem to believe that full-stack developers exist anymore) with 25+ years professional experience, specialising in PHP, Ruby, JS, HTML, CSS, devops, and about 50% of CMSes you’ve ever heard of (and probably some you haven’t)… with a flair for security, accessibility, standards-compliance, performance, and DexEx?
CV at: https://danq.me/cv
Unacceptable language
8-year-old, angry: Give me that fucking thing right now!
Me: [Child’s name]! That’s not an acceptable way to ask for something!
8-year-old, calmer: Sorry. PLEASE can you give me that fucking thing?
To-go pint
Sometimes the kids need to leave your pub dinner before you finish your drink, and you need to take a “to-go” pint.
Note #26217
For a little while I got to lie in the sunshine and read my book in quiet solitude. But before long I found I was sharing it with a small child and his noisy games console.
Still delightful, though, and it feels wonderfully Spring-like out there today.
Istanbul decompression
It wasn’t until I made time for myself to get out into the countryside near my home and take the dog for a walk that I realised how much stress I’d been putting myself under during my team meetup, this week.
Istanbul was enjoyable and fascinating, and I love my team, but I always forget until after the fact how much a few days worth of city crowds can make me feel anxious and trapped.
It’s good to get a mile or two from the nearest other human and decompress!
Geocaching Convex Hull now includes Turkey
Thanks to finding a couple of geocaches here in Istanbul, my geocaching “2D convex hull” (the smallest possible convex polygon that covers an area), which I wrote some code to draw last year, just expanded a little further to the East. 🎉
I’ve got a lot of the world left still to encircle, but I’m slowly extending my reach…
(previous map, for comparison: https://danq.me/_q23u/2024/04/dans-geoing-hull-2024-04-03.webp)
Team Desire in Istanbul
With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.
You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.
