Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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Wikipedia @ 25: Presto Card
The Presto Card is Toronto and the surrounding area's equivalent of London's Oyster Card. I enjoyed learning about it, but I don't think it justifies a whole blog post of what-I-learned.
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This plant has sonehow managed to grow through the atrtoturf lawn of our temporary home!
Life... uh... finds a way?
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A leafy plant growing in the middle of an artificial lawn.
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Observation:
Media franchises attract fandoms, and many get their fair share of character 'shipping (especially of the attractive characters).
Soccer also attracts huge fandoms... but I don't think I've ever seen or heard of "soccer slash" (even of the attractive players).
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Four-cell table showing the intersections of Fandoms and Slash with Media and Soccer, respectively. Media + Fandoms is a photo from Comic-Con; Media + Slash is a comic art picture of Captain Kirk and Spock kissing; Soccer + Fandom is a full World Cup stadium; Soccer + Slash just shows a question mark.
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Why, when I change the temperature on the thermostat of my Renault Zoe does it change the fan direction, too? Is this a UI affordance for people who want their faces colder but their feet warmer? I don't understand!
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A white hand turns the thermostat knob in a car from 19℃ to 20℃ in 0.5℃ increments; the untouched nearby fan direction control seems to change of its own accord. Initially blowing towards the user's face it switches on 'towards feet' at 19.5℃ and switches off 'towards face' at 20℃, and reverses the process when the temperature is turned down again.
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Even this self-checkout thinks I'm eating too much chocolate.
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Self-checkout screen abbreviating a product name to 'Cadbury Giant Butt'.
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Four OpenBenches
Despite Google making it harder for me to do so 🤬, I managed to add not one, not two, not three but four new memorial benches to the OpenBenches database during a dog walk this morning.
A particular excitement was adding my first bench with two plaques.
It's the little things. -
How kind of the humans who constructed this sofa to leave a perfect dog-shaped nest in-between the cushions. Our pupper is appreciative.
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A satisfied but sleepy-looking fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies on a blanket that's slipping into the crack between two sofa seat cushions, forming a nest around her torso. Her legs hang, crossed, off the front of the sofa.
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Something's gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household's film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition...
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TV screen interface showing posters for many films. Groundhog Day is listed twice in succession. This is funny because the film is about a celebration date, 'groundhog day', repeating itself.
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Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️
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Dan, a white man with a blue ponytail and a goatee, smiles next to a broad rural river.
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It's been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is - going many others, mostly older and larger than him! - finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞
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A mixed age group of people dressed in taekwondo robes with a mixture of red and black belts.
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Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.
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Two laptops sit nestled between two large monitors, with a desktop computer on the floor below and a teleprompter/webcam on an arm above, in a brightly-sunlit garden office.
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The "regular" house's Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.
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Dan, a white man with a ponytail and a goatee beard, carries a large black cube-shaped computer down a staircase.
This was a challenging selfie to take. Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven't yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!
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There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
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Two lines of holes cover a portion of a light green wall, with a rectangular gap between them, under a protruding screw, where perhaps a tray shelf was once mounted.
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What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
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DataDog graph marked to show a co-worker's departure on Friday evening being immediately followed by a flurry of errors which then stopped for the weekend before coming back in force on Monday morning.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
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I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. At one point, we found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: I couldn't place exactly why I'd been there before. Geocaching, possibly: I couldn't see any on the map but perhaps they'd been since archived?
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to run a quick query and discover that I'd walked out here on a geohashing expedition in 2024.
Personal location tracking continues to be awesome. Being able to both forwards-search ("where was I on this date?") and reverse-search ("when was I last within this area?") unlocks a wealth of aides mémoire that are otherwise hard to come by.
It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it.