The geokids and I are staying nearby and came out for a walk this morning to discover this under-appreciated cache. What an amazing location and such a great view! We searched many
“obvious” locations without luck, then translated some logs to get a clue. We should have checked the attributes! A little danger later and the cache was in hand. SL, TFTC/GPC! FP awarded – thanks so much for bringing us here. Greetings from
Oxfordshire, UK!
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.
Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I
keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:
Lots of circles, all connected to one another, passing zeroes and ones around. Around this time she’d observed that I wrote my number zeroes “programmer-style” (crossed) and clearly
tried to emulate this, too.
I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.
As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d
been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for
each server:
I don’t think she intended it, but she’s made the primary application servers look the grumpiest. This might well fit with my experience of those servers, too.
I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.
You might have come across our dog before, if you followed me through Bleptember.
It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and
misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”
I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.
Footnotes
1 She spelled it “the Itnet”, but still: max props to her for thinking “what would
he like a picture of… oh; he likes the Internet! I’ll draw him that!”
2 She also drew ears and a snout on the Demmy-server, in case the identity wasn’t clear to
me!
Playing simultaneous games against both children might have been less challenging if they hadn’t both kept trying to start fights with one another at the same time! 😂
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one
half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent look as awkward as the one whose kid, in a combined toilets/changing room, just pointed at me, saying: “Daddy, look! Look! That man’s using his
willy to pee-pee in the standing-up toilet!” 🤣
If you wanna bend a stream of electrons travelling at nearly the speed of light, you’re gonna need a lot of big magnets.
This started on Saturday with a trip to the Harwell Campus, whose first open day in eight years provided a rare opportunity for us to get up
close with cutting edge science (plus some very kid-friendly and accessible displays) as well as visit the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source.
It’s hard to convey the scale of the thing; turns out you need a big ol’ ring if you want to spin electrons fast enough to generate a meaningful amount of magnetobremsstrahlung
radiation.
The whole thing’s highly-recommended if you’re able to get to one of their open days in the future, give it a look. I was particularly pleased to see how enthused about science it made
the kids, and what clever questions they asked.
For example: the 7-year-old spent a long time cracking a variety of ciphers in the computing tent (and even spotted a flaw in one of the challenge questions that the exhibitors then had
to hand-correct on all their handouts!); the 10-year-old enjoyed quizzing a researcher who’d been using x-ray crystallography ofproteins.
Medicine
And then on Sunday I finally got a long-overdue visit to my nearest spirometry specialist for a suite of experiments to try to work out what exactly is wrong with my lungs, which
continue to be a minor medical mystery.
“Once you’ve got your breath back, let’s fill you with drugs and do those experiments again…”
It was… surprisingly knackering. Though perhaps that’s mostly because once I was full of drugs I felt briefly superpowered and went running around the grounds of the wonderfully-named
Brill Hill Windmill with the dog until was panting in pretty much the way that I might normally have been,
absent an unusually-high dose of medication.
It’s got a graph; that makes it science, right? (I’m ignoring those party political histograms that outright lie about how narrow the margins are…)
For amusement purposes alone, I’d be more-likely to recommend the first day’s science activities than the second, but I can’t deny that it’s cool to collect a load of data about your
own body and how it works in a monitorable, replicable way. And maybe, just maybe, start to get to the bottom of why my breathing’s getting so much worse these last few years!
The other weekend, I joined in with the parade at Witney Pride, accompanied by our 10-year-old who’d expressed an interest in coming too.
It was her first Pride but she clearly got the idea, turning up with a wonderful hand-coloured poster she’d made which, in rainbow colours, encouraged the reader to “be kind”.
You’ve seen pictures of Pride parades before, possibly even ones with me in them.
You know what: our eldest is so woke it makes me embarrassed on behalf of my past self at her age. Or even at twice her age, when I still didn’t have the level of
social and societal awareness and care about queer issues that she does already.
I’d equipped her with a whistle (on a rainbow lanyard) and instructions that in the event of protests from religious nuts she shouldn’t engage with them (because that’s what they
want) but instead just to help ensure that our parade was louder than them! I needn’t have worried though: Witney ain’t Oxford or London and our march seemed to see nothing
but joy and support from the folks we passed.
When we got to the parade’s destination, the kid found a stall selling a variety of badges, and selected for herself a “she/her/hers” pronoun pin.
“It’s not like anybody’s likely to look at me and assume that my pronouns are anything other than that,” she explained, “But I want it to be normal to talk about, and I want to show
solidarity for genderqueer people.”
That’s a level of allyship that it took me until I was much, much older to attain. So proud!
It really is “open data”. Look: I found the record that was created as a result of the kids’ and my participation back in 2019!
We’ve moved house since then, but we’re still within the Thames basin and can provide
value by taking part in this weekend’s sampling activity. The data that gets collected on nitrate and phosphate levels in local water sources – among other observations – gets fed
into an open dataset for the benefit of scientists and laypeople.
The kids were smaller last time we did this.
It’d have been tempting to be exceptionally lazy and measure the intermittent water course that runs through our garden! It’s an old, partially-culverted drainage ditch1,
but it’s already reached the “dry” part of its year and taking a sample wouldn’t be possible right now.
The ditch in our garden is empty 75% and full of water 25% of the time. Oh, and full of ice for a few days each winter, to the delight of children who love smashing things. (It’s also
full of fallen wood and leaf detritus most of the year and JTA spends a surprising amount of time dredging it so that it drains
properly into its next section.)
But more-importantly: the focus of this season’s study is the River Evenlode, and we’re not in its drainage basin! So we packed up a picnic and took an outing to the
North Leigh Roman Villa, which I first visited last year when I was supposed to be on the Isle of Man with Ruth.
“Kids, we’re going outside…” / “Awww! Noooo!” / “…for a picnic and some science!” / “Yayyy!”
Our lunch consumed, we set off for the riverbank, and discovered that the field between us and the river was more than a little waterlogged. One of the two children had been savvy
enough to put her wellies on when we suggested, but the other (who claims his wellies have holes in, or don’t fit, or some other moderately-implausible excuse for not wearing them) was
in trainers and Ruth and I needed to do a careful balancing act, holding his hands, to get him across some of the tougher and boggier bits.
Trainers might not have been the optimal choice of footwear for this particular adventure.
Eventually we reached the river, near where the Cotswold
Line crosses it for the fifth time on its way out of Oxford. There, almost-underneath the viaduct, we sent the wellie-wearing eldest child into the river to draw us out a sample of
water for testing.
As far as Moreton-in-Marsh, the Cotswold Line out of Oxford essentially follows the River Evenlode. In some places, such as this one near Kingham, the river was redirected to
facilitate the construction of the railway. Given that the historic Gloucestershire/Oxfordshire boundary was at this point defined by the river, it’s not clear whether this
represents the annexation of two territories of Gloucestershire by Oxfordshire. I doubt that anybody cares except map nerds.
Looking into our bucket, we were pleased to discover that it was, relatively-speaking, teeming with life: small insects and a little fish-like thing wriggled around in our water
sample2.
This, along with the moorhen we disturbed3 as we tramped into the reeds, suggested that the river is at least in some level of good-health
at this point in its course.
I’m sure our eldest would have volunteered to be the one to traipse through the mud and into the river even if she hadn’t been the only one of that was wearing wellies.
We were interested to observe that while the phosphate levels in the river were very high, the nitrate levels are much lower than they were recorded near this spot in a previous year.
Previous years’ studies of the Evenlode have mostly taken place later in the year – around July – so we wondered if phosphate-containing agricultural runoff is a bigger problem later in
the Spring. Hopefully our data will help researchers answer exactly that kind of question.
The chemical experiments take up to 5 minutes each to develop before you can read their colours, so the kids had plenty of time to write-up their visual observations while they
waited.
Regardless of the value of the data we collected, it was a delightful excuse for a walk, a picnic, and to learn a little about the health of a local river. On the way back to the car, I
showed the kids how to identify wild garlic, which is fully in bloom in the woods nearby, and they spent the rest of the journey back chomping down on wild garlic leaves.
Seriously, that’s a lot of wild garlic.
The car now smells of wild garlic. So I guess we get a smelly souvenir from this trip, too4!
Footnotes
1 Our garden ditch, long with a network of similar channels around our village, feeds into
Limb Brook. After a meandering journey around the farms to the East this eventually merges with Chill Brook to become Wharf Stream. Wharf Stream passes through a delightful nature
reserve before feeding into the Thames near Swinford Toll Bridge.
2 Needless to say, we were careful not to include these little animals in our chemical
experiments but let them wait in the bucket for a few minutes and then be returned to their homes.
3 We didn’t catch the moorhen in a bucket, though, just to be clear.
4 Not counting the smelly souvenir that was our muddy boots after splodging our way
through a waterlogged field, twice
The younger child and I had an initially fruitless search in, under and around the nearby bridge before we had the sense to insert our babel fishes, after which the hint item became
clear to us. A short search later the cache was in hand. SL, TNLN, TFTC!
