Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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Predictions in a Hat
Two decades ago this month my friend Matt posted five predictions about the future of the world. I've revisited these predictions twice since: ten years later and twenty years later, and "scored" his predictions both times.
I love that the Web's memory (and the persistence of URLs) makes this kind of long-term conversation possible. -
There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year's 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.
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Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen.
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Fools Mode
I'd completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools' Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of "features" until I went to it myself and got "party mode".
So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools' myself. -
Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities.
But just ocassionally it's about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know... to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities.
Either way, a walk in the garden can lead to the insight that gets you to the solution.
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A beautiful country house with a huge garden.
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Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning... before starting work on a new Three Rings feature!
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The sunrise as seen through the gates of a vineyard's courtyard.
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Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional "receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries" activity.
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A large group of people stand around a pile of shopping in the centre of a nicely decorated kitchen.
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Most-often when a toaster has a 'cancel' button it's simply labelled 'cancel', 'stop', or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the 'eject' icon - like you'd find on a VHS tape recorder - on its button.
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Close up of the side of a toaster, showing an "eject" button (rectangle with an upward-pointing triangle above it).
At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I'm coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.
But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say 'hey, that's cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out'.
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Like many in the UK, I'm dismayed every time I see the plague of St. George's Cross (flag of England) that nationalists have been hanging on lamp posts on recent years.
So it gave me great joy to see that this lamp post had recently acquired a (larger!) pride flag. 🏳️🌈
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Two flags hang from a tall lamp post. The smaller upper one is a St. George's Cross, the flag of England.the lower, larger (and much nicer) one is the six-colour Pride rainbow.
If we're going to become a country that hangs flags everywhere... I'd much rather that they be flags that speak of inclusivity and diversity. ❤️
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F-Day plus 38
It's 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today's the first of our 'BER' assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to 'write off': to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with …
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It's F-Day plus 35, and I'm spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I'm "between" two AirBnBs.
The dog, who doesn't normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what's happening downstairs.
The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.
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A champagne-coloured French Bulldog wearing a teal harness is on the top step of a cream-carpeted staircase. Her hind legs are folded so her bottom sits on the top step, but her forelegs are extended so she's standing on the one below. Her tongue is out in a full blep.
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Somebody should make a tea cosy but to fit a cafetiere.
That sounds like a great idea.
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Wanted a quesadilla. Didn't have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.
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Two layers of chapattis in a frying pan on a stove, alongside their packaging.
It went... only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.
I tried it, so you don't have to!
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A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing... and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.
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Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and long hair, sits at a wooden picnic bench in front of a sandwich, crisp packet, and can of Lucky Saint.
It could be worse, right?
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Horse Gym
My current temporary home - and, necessarily, office - is directly next door to some kind of "horse gym": a contraption a little like a huge revolving door to encourage one or more horses to exercise by walking around it.
Every now and then my peripheral vision registers that there's a horse outside the window and, for the dozenth time, I look up from my work and glance around to barely catch it vanishing off on yet another lap. -
Non-exhaustive list of things I'm doing when I'm writing code, that don't look like "writing code":
- thinking
- researching
- contextualising
- testing
- measuring
- documenting
- communicating
- planning
- future-proofing
- educating
- learning
- expressing
- anticipating
- discovering
- inventing
- experimenting
- debugging
- analysing
- monitoring
For all its faults, an AI agent might "write code" faster than me.
But that's only a part of the process.
My typing speed is not the bottleneck.