Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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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! 😱
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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.
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A mug of coffee held in front of a view of a multicoloured soft playground.
But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Three glasses of beer held by adult hands clink together against a glass of water and a bottle of Fanta held 6 by cold hands.
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For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN'T totally planning to scoff them both myself! 😂
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Two portions of eggs benedict, in front of a window showing a 25th-storey view of Barcelona.
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Parenting is about sacrifices.
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Dan drinks a beer, a children's football match is being played in the background.
Here, I'm making the noble sacrifice of forcing myself to drink a delicious beer so my 10-year-old can use the customer-only bathroom at a beachside amateur football club. Such a sacrifice.
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Me, hacking challenging Javascript at work: "Damn, I need a holiday."
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Dan sits at a laptop in a hotel bar, a view of Barcelona out of the window behind him, a beer bottle alongside him.
Me, hacking challenging Javascript on sabbatical: "Ah, so relaxing."
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Enjoying a glass of cava while the kids peer down out of the window of a Barcelona skyscraper.
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Half-full champagne flute on a table. In the background, two children look out of a floor-to-ceiling window.
Day 8 of my sabbatical. Think I'm doing this right?
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This boy is excited and ready for Spain!
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A boy smiles widely as he sits, playing with his tablet, in an aeroplane window seat.
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This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.
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A child slouches in an airport lounge chair. Her right hand is being used to eat a plate of sausages. Her left hand is playing 'Fork N Sausage' on a tablet.
Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?
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Off to Spain! BRB.
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Dan, Ruth, and their children on an airport car park shuttle bus.
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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!
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Dan, looking concerned, in front of Github and Dndle.app.
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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.
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Dan sits in front of two laptops (one of which shows a photo of an echidna for some reason), in a meeting room full of casually-dressed volunteers.
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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.
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Screenshot from a web-based RSS reader, showing an item "Download the BBC iPlayer app"