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!
The elder child and I are staying nearby and couldn’t resist coming to a nearby cache with so many FPs. The name gave us a bit of a clue what we would be looking for but nothing could
have prepared us for for this imaginative and unusual container! FP awarded. Attached is very non-spoiler photo of us with our very own Incy
Wincies. Greetings from Oxfordshire!
Progressive enhancement is a great philosophy for Web application development. Deliver all the essential basic functionality using the simplest standards available; use advanced
technologies to add bonus value and convenience features for users whose platform supports them. Win.
JavaScript disabled/enabled is one of the most-fundamental ways to differentiate a basic from an enhanced experience, but it’s absolutely not the only way (especially now that feature
detection in JavaScript and in CSS has become so powerful!).
In Three Rings, for example, volunteers can see a “starchart” of the volunteering shifts they’ve done recently, at-a-glance, on
their profile page1.
In the most basic case, this is usable in its HTML-only form: even with no JavaScript, no CSS, no images even, it still functions. But if JavaScript is enabled, the volunteer can dynamically “filter” the year(s) of volunteering
they’re viewing. Basic progressive enhancement.
If a feature requires JavaScript, my usual approach is to use JavaScript to add the relevant user interface to the page in the first place. Those starchart filters in Three
Rings don’t appear at all if JavaScript is disabled. A downside to this approach is that the JavaScript necessarily modifies the DOM on page load, which introduces a delay to the page being interactive as well as potentially resulting in layout shift.
That’s not always the best approach. I was reminded of this today by the website of 7-year-old Shiro (produced with, one assumes, at least
a little help from Saneef H. Ansari). Take a look at this progressively-enhanced theme switcher:
No layout shift, no
DOM manipulation. And yet it’s still pretty clear what features are available.
The HTML that’s delivered over-the-wire provides a disabled<select> element, which gains the CSS directive cursor: not-allowed;, to make it clear to the used that this dropdown doesn’t do anything. The whole thing’s wrapped
in a custom element.
When that custom element is defined by the JavaScript, it enhances the dropdown with an event listener that implements the theme changes, then enables the disabled
<select>.
I’m not convinced by the necessity of the <form> if there’s no HTML-only fallback… and the <label>
probably should use a for="..." rather than wrapping the <select>, but otherwise this code is absolutely gorgeous.
It’s probably no inconvenience to the minority of JS-less users to see a theme switcher than, when they go to use it, turns out to be
disabled. But it saves time for virtually everybody not to have to wait for JavaScript to manipulate the DOM, or else to risk
shifting the layout by revealing a previously-hidden element.
Altogether, this is a really clever approach, and I was pleased today to be reminded – by a 7-year-old! – of the elegance of this approach. Nice one Shiro (and Saneef!).
Footnotes
1 Assuming that administrators at the organisation where they volunteer enable this
feature for them, of course: Three Rings‘ permission model is robust and highly-customisable. Okay, that’s enough sales pitch.
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Boo to this prompt! This Bloganuary already asked me how I like to play and about five things I do for fun; now
it wants me to choose the thing I “enjoy most” from, presumably, that same set.
What is a song or poem that speaks to you and why?
Much better.
Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac.
I’ll save you looking it up: here’s a good live recording to put on while you keep reading.
At 5½ years older than me, the song’s been in my life effectively forever. But its themes of love and loss, overcoming naivety, growing up and moving on… have grown in significance to
and with me as I’ve grown older. And to hear Stevie Nicks speak about it, it feels like it has for her as well, which just doubles the feeling it creates of timeless relevance.
In concert, Nicks would often dedicate the song to her father, which lead to all manner of speculation about the lyrics being
about the importance of family. And there’s definitely an undertone of that in there: when in
2015 she confirmed that it was about a challenging moment of decision in her youth in which she was torn between continuing to try to “make it” as a musical act with her
then-partner Lindsey Buckingham or return to education. Her father was apparently supportive of either option but favoured the
latter.
Ultimately she chose the former and it worked out well for her career… although of course the pair’s romantic relationship eventually collapsed. And so the song’s lyrics, originally
about indecision, grow into a new interpretation: one of sliding doors moments, of “what ifs”. In some parallel universe
Stevie Nicks dropped out of Buckingham Nicks before Keith Olsen introduced Lindsey Buckingham to Mick Fleetwood, and we’d probably never have heard Landslide.3
Stevie still sings Landslide in concert, and now it feels like it’s entered its third life and lends itself a whole new interpretation. Those lyrics about turning around and looking
back, which were originally about reconsidering the choices you made in your youth and the path you’d set yourself on, take on a whole new dimension when sung by somebody as they grow
through their 60s and into their 70s!
In particular, coming to the song as a parent4
is a whole other thing. Its thoughts on innocence and growing-up, and watching your children do so, reminds me of my perpetual struggle with comparing myself to the best parent I know. An intergenerational effort to be my best me; to look forwards with courage and backwards with compassion for myself.
All of which is pretty awesome for a song that under other circumstances might be just a catchy twist on a classic country rock chord progression with some good singing. Sliding doors,
eh?
2 This is my first year doing Bloganuary, so I didn’t get to answer this prompt last time
around.
3 Nor, for that matter, any of the other excellent songs that came out of Nicks’ and
Buckingham’s strained relationship, such as Silver Springs, Second Hand News and, perhaps most-famously, Go Your Own Way. I guess sometimes you need the sad
times to make the best art.
4 Nicks, of course, famously isn’t a parent, but I refer you to a 2001 interview in which she said “No children, no husband. My particular mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a
wife. Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better.”.
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
I really struggled with this question: I couldn’t think of anything that I was especially attached to as a kid.
Our kids have very strong attachments to a knitted blanket from her babyhood and to a stuffed toy elephant he’s slept with since he was very young, respectively.
Maybe it was just that I couldn’t think of anything; that the memory was lost to time and age.
So I did the obvious thing… and reached out to my mum.
“Muuuuum… where’s my… whatever I used to be attached to? Also… what was it?”
It turns out that apparently my recollection is correct: I really didn’t have any significant attachments to toys or anything like them. I didn’t ever have any kind of “special thing” I
slept with. I recall in my later childhood being surprised to learn that some people did have such things: like all children, I’d internalised my experience of
the world as being representative of the general state of things!
Why, I wonder, are some children different than others and get this kind of youthful attachment to something? Is it genetic?1 Is it memetic,
perhaps a behaviour we subconsciously reinforce in our children because we think it’s “normal”?
Being attached to napping with a dog doesn’t count, right? (‘cos I’ve definitely done that at least once, although for obvious reasons I’ve only managed to take photos of
others doing the same.)
I’ll bet that some clever psychologist has done some research into this already2, but that sounds like a
different day’s exploration.
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
How do I play? Let me count the ways!
RPGs
I’m involved in no fewer than three different RPG campaigns (DMing the one for
The Levellers) right now, plus periodic one-shots. I love a good roleplaying game, especially one that puts character-building and storytelling
above rules-lawyering and munchkinery, specifically because that kind of collaborative, imaginative experience feels more like the kind of thing we call “play” when
done it’s done by children!
Family D&D and Abnib D&D might have a distinctly different tone, but they’re still both playtime activities.
Videogames
I don’t feel like I get remotely as much videogaming time as I used to, and in theory I’ve become more-selective about exactly what I spend my time on1.
Similarly, I don’t feel like I get as much time to grind through my oversized board games collection as I used to2,
but that’s improving as the kids get older and can be roped-into a wider diversity of games3.
Our youngest wakes early on weekend mornings and asks to kick off his day with board games. Our eldest, pictured, has grown to the point where she’s working her way through all of the
animal-themed games at our local board games cafe.
Escape Rooms
I love a good escape room, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough for (more of) them too so I’ve an excuse to do more of them. When we’re not playing conventional escape rooms,
Ruth and I can sometimes be found playing board game-style boxed “kit” ones (which have very variable quality, in my experience) and we’ve
recently tried a little Escape Academy.
Ruth and I make a great duo when we remember to communicate early-and-often and to tag-team puzzles by swapping what we’re focussing on when we get stuck.
They’re not the only satnav-based activities I do at least partially “for fun” though! I contribute to OpenStreetMap, often through the
“gamified” experience of the StreetComplete app, and I’m very slowly creeping up the leader board at OpenBenches. Are these “play”? Sure, maybe.
And all of the above is merely the structured kinds of play I engage in. Playing “let’s pretend”-style games with the kids (even when they make it really, really
weird) adds a whole extra aspect. Also there’s the increasingly-rare murder mystery parties we sometimes hold: does that count as roleplaying, or some other kind of play?
A chef, a priest, and a librarian walk into a party… stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Suffice to say, there’s plenty of play in my life, it’s quite varied and diverse, and there is, if anything, not enough of it!
Footnotes
1 I say that, and yet somehow Steam tells me that one of my most-played games this year
was Starfield, which was… meh? Apparently compelling enough
that I’ve “ascended” twice, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered.
2 Someday my group and I will finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 so we can get
started on Season 0 which has sat
unplayed on my shelves since I got it… oooh… two or three years ago‽
3 This Christmas, I got each of them their first “legacy” game: Zombie Kids for the younger one, My City for the elder. They both seem pretty good.
4Geocaching is where you use military satellite networks to find lost tupperware. Geohashing uses the same technology but what you find is a whole
lot of nothing. I don’t think I can explain why I find the latter more-compelling.
At school, our 9-year-old is currently studying the hsitory of human civilization from the late stone age through to the bronze age. The other week, the class was split into three
groups, each of which was tasked with researching a different piece of megalithic architecture:
One group researched Stonehenge, because it’s a pretty obvious iconic choice
The final group took the least-famous monument, our very own local village henge The Devil’s Quoits
Love me some ancient monuments, even those that are perhaps less authentically-ancient than others.
And so it was that one of our eldest’s classmates was searching on the Web for information about The Devil’s Quoits when they found… my vlog on the subject! One of them recognised me and said, “Hey, isn’t that your Uncle Dan?”1
On the school run later in the day, the teacher grabbed me and asked if I’d be willing to join their school trip to the henge, seeing as I was a “local expert”. Naturally, I said yes,
went along, and told a bunch of kids
what I knew!
I’ve presented to much-larger audiences before on a whole variety of subjects, but this one still might have been the most terrifying.
I was slightly intimidated because the class teacher, Miss Hutchins,
is really good! Coupled with the fact that I don’t feel like a “local expert”2, this became a
kick-off topic for my most-recent coaching session (I’ve mentioned how awesome my coach is before).
I originally thought I might talk to the kids about the Bell Beaker culture people who are believed to have constructed the monument. But when I pitched the idea to our girl she
turned out to know about as much about them as I did, so I changed tack.
I eventually talked to the class mostly about the human geography aspects of the site’s story. The area around the Devil’s Quoits has changed so much over the millenia, and it’s a
fascinating storied history in which it’s been:
A prehistoric henge and a circle of 28 to 36 stones (plus at least one wooden building, at some point).
Medieval farms, from which most of the stones were taken (or broken up) and repurposed.
A brief (and, it turns out, incomplete) archeological survey on the remains of the henge and the handful of stones still-present.
Quarrying operations leaving a series of hollowed-out gravel pits.
More-thorough archeological excavation, backed by an understanding of the cropmarks visible from aircraft that indicate that many prehistoric people lived around this area.
Landfill use, filling in the former gravel pits (except for one, which is now a large lake).
Reconstruction of the site to a henge and stone circle again.3
It doesn’t matter to me that this henge is more a modern reconstruction than a preserved piece of prehistory. It’s still a great excuse to stop and learn about how our ancestors might
have lived.
It turns out that to be a good enough to pass as a “local expert”, you merely have to know enough. Enough to be able to uplift and inspire others, and the humility to know when
to say “I don’t know”.4
That’s a lesson I should take to heart. I (too) often step back from the opportunity to help others learn something new because I don’t feel like I’m that experienced at
whatever the subject is myself. But even if you’re still learning something, you can share what you’ve learned so far and help those behind you to follow the same path.
I’m forever learning new things, and I should try to be more-open to sharing “as I
learn”. And to admit where I’ve still got a long way to go.
Footnotes
1 Of course, I only made the vlog because I was doing a videography course at the time and
needed subject matter, and I’d recently been reading a lot about the Quoits because I was planning on “hiding” a virtual geocache at the site, and then I got carried away. Self-nerdsniped again!
2 What is a local expert? I don’t know, but what I feel like is just a guy who
read a couple of books because he got distracted while hiding a geocache!
3 I’ve no idea what future archeologists will make of this place when they finda
reconstructed stone circle and then, when they dig nearby, an enormous quantity of non-biodegradable waste. What was this strange stone circle for, they’ll ask themselves? Was it a
shrine to their potato-based gods, to whom they left crisp packets as a sacrifice?
4 When we’re talking about people from the neolithic, saying “I don’t know” is pretty
easy, because what we don’t know is quite a lot, it turns out!
