birthday – Dan Q

Dan Q found GCA2025 Where’s 25? – Locationless Cache

This checkin to GCA2025 Where's 25? - Locationless Cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Happy 25th birthday, geocaching.

I’m spending the weekend volunteering for a nonprofit I founded (it’s almost as old as geocaching, at 23). We’re staying in a hotel at N 52° 36.184′ W 001° 53.869′. I’ve also gotten out to find a couple of local geocaches.

But guess which room number the hotel have given me…

Note #25446

I’m staying in a lodge in the Yorkshire Dales National Park to celebrate the eldest kid’s birthday and we’ve just received a huge dump of snow, overnight. What was grass is now a thick white carpet of fresh powder. Sounds like a great birthday present for an excited kid I can just hear beginning to wake up…

Note #25084

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. 🫢

Dan Q found GC34G3G Coventry – Hertford Street

This checkin to GC34G3G Coventry - Hertford Street reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The rest of the family and I are visiting for my youngest’s birthday to do a handful of fun activities. Geocaching didn’t make the list, but that wasn’t gonna stop me finding this QEF while putting our swimming stuff back in the car before we eat our lunch. Thanks to the hint, this was in almost the first place I looked. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire!

Happy Birthday Matt

I wrote about the best (birthday) gift I could receive last week – conveniently right before my actual birthday at the weekend! – but my employer‘s CBBQTTO Matt has an even more abstract wish: he wants people to blog more! (Matt’s three years younger than me, almost exactly to the day.)

Conveniently, that’s a gift I’m able to provide, because my (now trackable) blogging output has been way up so far this year. I expected that to be the case because of my Bloggy Pen Pals project, but I’ve not even managed to get around to writing about my experience of exchanging emails with my first penpal partner Colin yet! Instead, I’ve been swept up with writing posts as part of Bloganuary 2024!

Making a conscious daily effort to write more has been… challenging. I feel like my thoughts come out half-finished, like I’m writing too trivially, without sufficient structure, or even too-personally. But I’m loving the challenge!

Anyway – happy birthday Matt! Forty is a great age, highly recommended. Hope you love it.

Dan Q found GC2WTGE 8~ NUDDSY MEGA RAMBLE

This checkin to GC2WTGE 8~ NUDDSY MEGA RAMBLE reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A challenging and courageous scramble by the eldest (who turned 10 yesterday!) and I (who turned 43 today!) up the slippery wet leaves to reach the GZ. I stopped to double check the proximity and meanwhile the little one found it! Thanks for the enjoyable birthday scramble, and TFTC!

Dan Q found GC5TF25 Mystic Abbey

This checkin to GC5TF25 Mystic Abbey reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Out for a walk on my 43rd birthday, left the kids playing with their other parents in the (beautiful) ruins of the abbey or I hacked my way around to the GZ. Started searching at my evaluation of the target point and spiralled outwards, eventually finding the cache about 10m away (downhill and further from the abbey) after interpreting the hint. Good sized container in a great location, TFTC and greetings from Oxfordshire!

[Bloganuary] Live Long and Prosper

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

Today’s my 43rd birthday. Based on the current best statistics available for my age and country, I might expect to live about the same amount of time again: I’m literally about half-way through my anticipated life, today.¹

Naturally, that’s the kind of shocking revelation that can make a person wish for an extended lifespan. Especially if, y’know, you read Andrew’s book on the subject and figured that, excitingly, we’re on the cusp of some meaningful life extension technologies!

My very first thought when I read Andrew’s thoughts on lifespan extension was exactly the kind of knee-jerk panic response he tries to assuage with his free bonus chapter. He spends a while explaining how he’s not just talking about expending lifespan but healthspan, and so the need healthcare resources that are used to treat those in old-age wouldn’t increase dramatically as a result of lifespan increase, but that’s not the bit that worries me. My concern is that lifespan extension technologies will be unevenly distributed, and the (richer) societies that get them first are those same societies whose (richer) lifestyle has the greater negative impact on the Earth’s capacity to support human life.²

Andrew anticipates this concern and does some back-of-napkin maths to suggest that the increase in population doesn’t make too big an impact:

In this ‘worst’ case, the population in 2050 would be 11.3 billion—16% larger than had we not defeated ageing.

Is that a lot? I don’t think so—I’d happily work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if it meant no more suffering from old age.

This seems to me to be overly-optimistic:

The Earth doesn’t care whether or not you’re happy to work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if that extra effort isn’t possible (there’s necessarily an upper limit to how much change we can actually effect).
16% extra population = 16% extra “work” to save them implies a linear relationship between the two that simply doesn’t exist.
And that you’re willing to give 16% more doesn’t matter a jot if most of the richest people on the planet don’t share that ideal.

Fortunately, I’m reassured by the fact that – as Andrew points out – change is unlikely to happen fast. That means that the existing existential threat of climate change remains a bigger and more-significant issue than potential future overpopulation does!

In short: while I’m hoping I’ll live happily and healthily to say 120, I don’t think I’m ready for the rest of the world to all suddenly start doing so too! But I think there are bigger worries in the meantime. I don’t fancy my chances of living long enough to find out.

Gosh, that’s a gloomy note for a birthday, isn’t it? I’d better get up and go do something cheerier to mark the day!

Footnotes

¹ Assuming I don’t die of something before them, of course. Falling off a cliff isn’t a heritable condition, is it? ‘Cos there’s a family history of it, and I’ve always found myself affected by the influence of gravity, which I believe might be a precursor to falling off things.

² Fun fact: just last month I threw together a little JavaScript simulator to illustrate how even with no population growth (a “replacement rate” of one child per adult) a population grows while its life expectancy grows, which some people find unintuitive.

[Bloganuary] The Gift of Time

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

What topical timing, given that it’ll be my birthday in four days!

Dan, wearing wizard's robes alongside two similarly-dressed children, makes cocktails using a selection of bizarre-looking laboratory equipment. — My birthday is slightly overshadowed by the proximity to it of our eldest child’s birthday, but we can still find enough overlap of interest to do some fun things. Here we are last year, for example, at a magic-themed cocktail-making workshop (with non-alcoholic recipes for the kids, of course).

Of the things I have least but treasure most, perhaps the biggest is time. Between work, volunteering, and childcare, I often find myself rushing to cram-in any of the diversity of “play” activities I engage in.¹

I always feel particularly guilty if I step away to do “me things” that put me out of reach, because I know that while I’m off having fun, my absence necessarily means that somebody else has to be the one to break up whatever child squabble is happening right now². It feels particularly extravagant to, for example, spend a weekend in pursuit of a distant geohash point or two³.

Dan drinking beer from a Wye Valley Brewery pint glass. — A fancy dinner in a hotel bar in the middle of a two-day geohashing expedition across the Midlands, as far from work and home responsibilities as I can manage? Yes please!

So one of the best gifts I ever received was for my birthday the year before last, when Ruth gave me “a weekend off”⁴, affording me the opportunity to do exactly that. I picked some dates and she, JTA, and the kids vanished, leaving me free to spend a few days hacking my way from Herefordshire to somewhere near Birmingham in what turned out to be the worst floods of the year. It was delightful.⁵

Most people can’t give me “time”: it doesn’t grow on trees, and I haven’t found a place to order it online. It’s not even always practical to help me reclaim my own time by taking fixed timesinks off my to-do list⁶. But for those that can, it’s a great gift that I really appreciate.

It’s my birthday on Monday, if anybody wants to volunteer for childminding duties at any point. Just sayin’. 😅

Footnotes

¹ It’s even harder when I occasionally try to fit a course around that.

² Ours can be a particularly squabbly pair, and really know how to push one another’s buttons to escalate a fight!

³ Unless I were to take the kids with me: then if feels fine, but then I’ve got a different problem to deal with! The dog’s enough of a handful when you’re out traipsing through a bog in the rain!

⁴ Last year, she gave me tango lessons, which also broke me out of my routine and felt like a weekend off, but in a very different way.

⁵ I think that Ruth feels that her gift to me on my 41st birthday was tacky, perhaps because for her it was a “fallback”: what she came up with after failing to buy a more-conventional gift. But seriously: a scheduled weekend to disconnect from everything else in my life was an especially well-received gift.

⁶ Not least because I’m such a control freak that some of the biggest timesinks in my life are things I would struggle to delegate or even accept help with!

It Takes Two

Lately, Ruth and I have been learning to dance Argentine Tango.

In a church hall, its walls decorated with colourful cloths, Dan and Ruth stand in a large circle of people, watching a man and a woman preparing to demonstrate some tango steps. — Stand with both feet together on the floor? Sure, I can do that one.

Let me tell you everything I know about tango¹:

It takes two to tango.
I am not very good at tango.

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and holding a glass of wine, looks sceptically at the camera as he stands in front of a television screen showing a couple dancing, with the title frame "La Caminata: Introduction to Walking in Tango (Core Steps)". — Our lessons started online, in our own living room, with videos from Tango Stream‘s “Tango Basics” series. It was a really good introduction and I’d recommend it, but it’s no substitute for practice!

This adventure began, in theory at least, on my birthday in January. I’ve long expressed an interest in taking a dance class together, and so when Ruth pitched me a few options for a birthday gift, I jumped on the opportunity to learn tango. My knowledge of the dance was basically limited to what I’d seen in films and television, but it had always looked like such an amazing dance: careful, controlled… synchronised, sexy.

After shopping around for a bit, Ruth decided that the best approach was for us to do a “beginners” video course in the comfort of our living room, and then take a weekend getaway to do an “improvers” class.

After all, we’d definitely have time to complete the beginners’ course and get a lot of practice in before we had to take to the dance floor with a group of other “improvers”, right?²

Dan and Ruth sat on opposite sides of a table on a train, with darkness outside the window behind, raising tumbler glasses full of prosecco and smiling. — By the time we were riding the train up to Edinburgh, we’d watched all the videos in our beginners’ course, and tried all of the steps in isolation… but we’d had barely any opportunity to combine them into an actual *dance*.

Okay, let me try again to enumerate you everything I actually know about tango³:

Essentials. A leader and follower⁴ hold one another’s upper torso closely enough that, with practice, each can intuit from body position where the other’s feet are without looking. While learning, you will not manage to do this, and you will tread on one another’s toes.
The embrace. In the embrace, one side – usually the leader’s left – is “open”, with the dancers’ hands held; the other side is “closed”, with the dancers holding one another’s bodies. Generally, you should be looking at one another or towards the open side. But stop looking at your feet: you should know where your own feet are by proprioception, and you know where your partners’ feet are by guesswork and prayer.
The walk. You walk together, (usually) with opposite feet moving in-sync so that you can be close and not tread on one another’s toes, typically forward (from the leader’s perspective) but sometimes sideways or even backwards (though not usually for long, because it increases the already-inevitable chance that you’ll collide embarrassingly with other couples).
Movement. Through ~~magic and telepathy~~ a good connection with one another, the pair will, under the leader’s direction, open opportunities to perform more advanced (but still apparently beginner-level) steps and therefore entirely new ways to mess things up. These steps include:
- Forward ochos. The follower stepping through a figure-eight (ocho) on the closed side, or possibly the open side, but they probably forget which way they were supposed to turn when they get there, come out on the wrong foot, and treat on the leader’s toes.
- Backwards ochos. The follower moves from side to side or in reverse through a series of ochos, until the leader gets confused which way they’re supposed to pivot to end the maneuver and both people become completely confused and unstuck.
- The cross. The leader walks alongside the follower, and when the leader steps back the follower chooses to assume that the leader intended for them to cross their legs, which opens the gateway to many other steps. If the follower guesses incorrectly, they probably fall over during that step. If the follower guesses correctly but forgets which way around their feet ought to be, they probably fall over on the very next step. Either way, the leader gets confused and does the wrong thing next.
- Giros. One or both partners perform a forwards step, then a sideways step, then a backwards step, then another sideways step, starting on the inside leg and pivoting up to 270° with each step such that the entire move rotates them some portion of a complete circle. In-sync with one another, of course.
- Sacadas. Because none of the above are hard enough to get right together, you should start putting your leg out between your partner’s leg and try and trip them up as they go. They ought to know you’re going to do this, because they’ve got perfect predictive capabilities about where your feet are going to end, remember? Also remember to use the correct leg, which might not be the one you expect, or you’ll make a mess of the step you’ll be doing in three beats’ time. Good luck!
- Barridas and mordidas. What, you finished the beginners’ course? Too smart to get tripped up by your partner’s sacada any more? Well now it’s time to start kicking your partner’s feet out from directly underneath them. That’ll show ’em.
Style. All of the above should be done gracefully, elegantly, with perfect synchronicity and in time with the music… oh, and did I mention you should be able to improve the whole thing on the fly, without pre-communication with your partner. 😅

Photograph of a small laminated instruction sheet on a golden tablecloth. Titled "Norteña Tango", it reads: Let's make this an amazing weekend. We are all here to dance, so let's look around us and try to make sure that everyone is dancing. We'd love it if you would follow the lines of dance by moving around the floor steadily, try using the cabeceo, leave space between you and the couple in front, make use of the corners of the dance floor, stay in the same lane where possible, take care when entering the dance floor, clear the floor and change partners during the cortinas. It would be great if you could avoid overtaking other couples on the floor, walking (other than when dancing) on the floor. — Just when you think you’ve worked out the basic rules of tango, you find a leaflet on your table with some rules of the dancefloor to learn, too!

Ultimately, it was entirely our own fault we felt out-of-our-depth up in Edinburgh at the weekend. We tried to run before we could walk, or – to put it another way – to milonga before we could caminar.

A somewhat-rushed video course and a little practice on carpet in your living room is not a substitute for a more-thorough práctica on a proper-sized dance floor, no matter how often you and your partner use any excuse of coming together (in the kitchen, in an elevator, etc.) to embrace and walk a couple of steps! Getting a hang of the fluid connections and movement of tango requires time, and practice, and discipline.

Photograph of paving slabs: a glyph of a walking person, signifying "walk here", has been painted onto the flagstones, but the stones have since been lifted and replaced in slightly different locations, making the person appear "scrambled". — Got the feeling that your body and your feet aren’t moving in the same direction? That’s tango!

But, not least because of our inexperience, we did learn a lot during our weekend’s deep-dive. We got to watch (and, briefly, partner with) some much better dancers and learned some advanced lessons that we’ll doubtless reflect back upon when we’re at the point of being ready for them. Because yes: we are continuing! Our next step is a Zoom-based lesson, and then we’re going to try to find a more-local group.

Also, we enjoyed the benefits of some one-on-one time with Jenny and Ricardo, the amazingly friendly and supportive teachers whose video course got us started and whose in-person event made us feel out of our depth (again: entirely our own fault).

If you’ve any interest whatsoever in learning to dance tango, I can wholeheartedly recommend Ricardo and Jenny Oria as teachers. They run courses in Edinburgh and occasionally elsewhere in the UK as well as providing online resources, and they’re the most amazingly supportive, friendly, and approachable pair imaginable!

Just… learn from my mistake and start with a beginner course if you’re a beginner, okay? 😬

Footnotes

¹ I’m exaggerating how little I know for effect. But it might not be as much of an exaggeration as you’d hope.

² We did not.

³ Still with a hint of sarcasm, though.

⁴ Tango’s progressive enough that it’s come to reject describing the roles in binary gendered terms, using “leader” and “follower” in place of what was once described as “man” and “woman”, respectively. This is great for improving access to pairs of dancers who don’t consist of a man and a woman, as well as those who simply don’t want to take dance roles imposed by their gender.

Ideal #2 (SMBC)

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The SMBC comic that came out this weekend was perhaps the best birthday present the Internet could provide.

The Diamonds, The Dagger and One Classy Dame

On account of the pandemic, I’d expected my fortieth birthday to be a somewhat more-muted affair than I’d hoped. I had a banner, I got trolled by bagels, and I received as a gift a pizza oven with which I immediately set fire to several pieces of cookware, but I hadn’t expected to be able to do anything like the “surprise” party of my thirtieth, and that saddened me a little. So imagine my surprise when I come back from an evening walk the day after my birthday to discover than an actual (remote) surprise party really had been arranged without my knowing!

Matt, Suz, Alec, Jen, Dermot and Doreen on a Google Meet screen. — “Hello, remote guests! What are you doing here?”

Not content with merely getting a few folks together for drinks, though, Ruth and team had gone to great trouble (involving lots of use of the postal service) arranging a “kit” murder mystery party in the Inspector McClue series – The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame – for us all to play. The story is sort-of a spiritual successor to The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, which we’d played fifteen years earlier. Minor spoilers follow.

Naturally, I immediately felt underdressed, having not been instructed that I might need a costume, and underprepared, having only just heard for the first time that I would be playing the part of German security sidekick Lieutenant Kurt Von Strohm minutes before I had to attempt my most outrageous German accent.

The plot gave me in particular a certain sense of deja vu. In The Brie, The Bullet, and The Black Cat, I played a French nightclub owner who later turned out to be an English secret agent supplying the French Resistance with information. But in The Diamonds, The Dagger, and One Classy Dame I played a Gestapo officer who… also later turned out to be an English secret agent infiltrating the regime and, you guessed it, supplying the French Resistance.

It was not the smoothest nor the most-sophisticated “kit” murder mystery we’ve enjoyed. The technology made communication challenging, the reveal was less-satisfying than some others etc. But the company was excellent. (And the acting way pretty good too, especially by our murderer whose character was exquisitely played.)

JTA downing a Jeroboam of champagne. — The largest bottle, though, was with us: we opened the Jeroboam of champagne Ruth and JTA had been saving from their anniversary (they have a tradition involving increasing sizes of bottle; it’s a whole thing; I’ll leave them to write about it someday).

And of course the whole thing quickly descended into a delightful shouting match with accusations flying left, right, and centre and nobody having a clue what was going on. Like all of our murder mystery parties!

Google Meet transcript with the words "You are the Jewish", which nobody said. — I’m not sure how I feel about Google Meet’s automatic transcription feature. It was generally pretty accurate, but it repeatedly thought that it heard the word “Jewish” being spoken by those of us who were putting on German accents, even though none of us said that.

In summary, the weekend of my fortieth birthday was made immeasurably better by getting to hang out with (and play a stupid game with) some of my friends despite the lockdown, and I’m ever so grateful that those closest to me were able to make such a thing happen (and without me even noticing in advance).

How Not to use A Pizza Oven

Clearly those closest to me know me well, because for my birthday today I received a beautiful (portable: it packs into a bag!) wood-fired pizza oven, which I immediately assembled, test-fired, cleaned, and prepped with the intention of feeding everybody some homemade pizza using some of Robin‘s fabulous bread dough, this evening.

Fuelled up with wood pellets the oven was a doddle to light and bring up to temperature. It’s got a solid stone slab in the base which looked like it’d quickly become ideal for some fast-cooked, thin-based pizzas. I was feeling good about the whole thing.

But then it all began to go wrong.

Animated GIF showing the fire blazing as seen through the viewing window on the front of the oven. — The confined space quickly heats up to a massive 400-500ºC.

If you’re going to slip pizzas onto hot stone – especially using a light, rich dough like this one – you really need a wooden peel. I own a wooden peel… somewhere: I haven’t seen it since I moved house last summer. I tried my aluminium peel, but it was too sticky, even with a dusting of semolina or a light layer of oil. This wasn’t going to work.

I’ve got some stone slabs I use for cooking fresh pizza in a conventional oven, so I figured I’d just preheat them, assemble pizzas directly on them, and shunt the slabs in. Easy as (pizza) pie, right?

Pizza on fire in oven. — Within 60 seconds the pizza was cooked and, in its elevated position atop a second layer of stone, the crust began to burn. The only-mildy-charred bits were delicious, though.

This oven is hot. Seriously hot. Hot enough to cook the pizza while I turned my back to assemble the next one, sure. But also hot enough to crack apart my old pizza stone. Right down the middle. It normally never goes hotter than the 240ºC of my regular kitchen oven, but I figured that it’d cope with a hotter oven. Apparently not.

So I changed plan. I pulled out some old round metal trays and assembled the next pizza on one of those. I slid it into the oven and it began to cook: brilliant! But no sooner had I turned my back than… the non-stick coating on the tray caught fire! I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen.

Flames flickering at the back of a pizza oven. — Hello fire. I failed to respect you sufficiently when I started cooking. I’ve learned my lesson now.

Those first two pizzas may have each cost me a piece of cookware, but they tasted absolutely brilliant. Slightly coarse, thick, yeasty dough, crisped up nicely and with a hint of woodsmoke.

But I’m not sure that the experience was worth destroying a stone slab and the coating of a metal tray, so I’ll be waiting until I’ve found (or replaced) my wooden peel before I tangle with this wonderful beast again. Lesson learned.

Best Before

Thanks, supermarket bagels, for expressing exactly how I was feeing when I reached the kitchen this morning:

Look at Banner, Dan!

First thing I saw when I came downstairs this morning:

Totally a banner especially for my birthday, today, and not a repurposed decoration from Annabel’s yesterday.

Context for the oblivious: