Dan Q

Tag: theme park

Boring Polyamory: Equality and Bedrooms

Among the correspondence I engaged in following my blog post about my (boring) polyamory were a few examples of people being concerned about the equality of our arrangement: how we keep things “fair”1. By way of example, let’s take a look at a specific example that’s come up. Here’s something that I was asked recently:

Why does [my partner] Ruth not have her own bedroom? Both of her partners [JTA and I] get one!

Where does my partner sleep?

Simplified calendar showing May 2026 with different-coloured dots on the days: 14 of one, 17 of the other.
It’s been joked that polyamory is just a fetish for calendar management. Our family calendars are moderately simple, I imagine, compared to those of people in larger polycules or with less routine.

Except when she’s travelling or otherwise elsewhere2, Ruth spends her nights in an approximately even split3 between JTA‘s bedroom and mine.

This leads some people to observe that:

  • JTA has a bedroom of his own,
  • I have a bedroom of my own, and
  • Ruth “shares” both of those,
  • and this is unfair because her partners both get something that she is denied.

Superficially, this sounds true. But it conflates “fairness” with “parity”.

Fairness versus parity

Parity is making sure that everybody gets the same thing. It’s a simple, but crude, measure of equality. That’s probably why it’s so-popular with children.

“My sister got a doughnut so I should get one too.”

“You had an iced finger instead. You said you prefer iced fingers to doughnuts. And your sister doesn’t like iced fingers. Both of you got what you wanted.”

“Yeah, but now I want a doughnut because she had one!”

– the kind of conversation that’s probably familiar to you if you have children

When you aim for parity, you’re trying to make sure that every person gets the same thing. But this isn’t ideal, because not every person wants or needs the same thing!

A child with a ring doughnut decorated to look like a monster imitates the face of that monster, towards another child who is pointedly not paying attention.
“I don’t even want this. I just don’t want to feel like you’re getting something I’m not!”

Fairness, is aiming to for everybody to be content.

Ideally, everybody would get everything they wanted, all the time! But where that’s impossible, we can aim to at-least ensure that everybody is content. That everything is “good enough” for everybody. Unlike a quest for parity, this respects the fact that people have different needs.

Me personally? I absolutely prefer to have a bedroom of “my own”! In fact, to go even further than that: if I were in Ruth’s position I probably would want a room of my own, if it were feasible. Also, in some kind of hypothetical universe in which neither of us had other partners… I’d still ideally want to sleep alone some of the time (maybe once every couple of weeks?), because I’m of an inclination to occasionally luxuriate in being able to totally starfish-out.

If it were me instead of Ruth at the fulcrum of our V-shaped polycule… I suspect I’d have different needs to Ruth. And that’s fine!4

I’m a big fan of people being able to have their own space if they want it.

When the three of us first started cohabiting I suggested that Ruth should have her own bedroom. In our first shared house, we ensured that she did! But in practice, it never got used. Over time we’ve dropped it in favour of having a spare bedroom: a versatile space that can be place for gaming, or television, or guests5.

It was valuable to start from a position of assuming that we would all get “our own” room: parity is a good starting point! But fairness – meeting everybody’s needs in the most-equitable manner – is a better finishing point.6

Communicating a way to fairness

The world sometimes sucks. Many of the social interactions humans engage in, on a day-to-day basis, are not rooted in fairness. Some human social interactions go to the opposite extreme: they even exploitative.

Have you ever been in a salary negotiation? You might have heard the idiom that the first person to say a number loses. Salary negotiations are an adversarial game. Both sides want to come out with the most money, and so neither side is incentivised to show their hand.

Everything I learned about salary negotiations… I learned from playing Theme Park. Just make sure you’ve got a deal before you run out of biscuits.

Relationships between people who care about each another don’t have to work by adversarial rules (and, in fact, probably shouldn’t!7). If you love and trust and want the best for one another, then – hopefully – you can be honest about what you want, and can be okay with being hearing whether or not it’s something that your partner(s) can provide. Or else work together to find compromise position that best facilitates everybody’s needs!

So: if Ruth decides that she wants to have a bedroom of her own again, we can try to make that happen. If I start an additional serious/committed relationship and decide that I’m not getting enough “alone time”, we can work out how to achieve that. If JTA’s work starts requiring a long and tiring commute and he needs fewer childcare responsibilities, we’d solve for that. We tackle these problems as a family who love and care for one another, with the goal of getting an outcome that’s fair to everybody!

Those outcomes don’t have to mean that we each get “the same”. Just that we each, as far as possible, get what we most want.

Footnotes

1 Sometimes somebody – almost always a man – will claim that our arrangement is unfair to both JTA and I who have to “share” one woman, as if her role were to be “owned” by one of us. Sometimes somebody – almost always a woman – will claim that our arrangement is unfair to Ruth because she has to split her time and attention between two men. I find it hilarious that these two arguments, diametrically opposed, are most-often made on gender lines.

2 The other month, for example, Ruth stayed over at her aunt and uncle’s house after celebrating her uncle’s birthday. JTA and I hung out and watched some RobWords until I, tired after an afternoon of beginners’ tango, took an early night!

3 In actuality, Ruth spends slightly more nights sleeping in JTA’s room than in mine. This, too, is one of those things where people will sometimes instinctively assume represents some kind of injustice to me and that I’m somehow being hard done by or deprived of some kind of relationship “rights”. This is, clearly, nonsense.

4 Also: I couldn’t think of a better way to graphically represent us swapping around into some differently-pivoted V-shaped relationship than by using the deck of playing cards that was on my desk anyway. I was feeling unimaginative, apparently. Can you tell?

5 Or – indeed – a spare room can be a space for for one of us to use, if we’re ill or leaving early in the morning or something and don’t want to disturb a bedpartner.

6 If you’re looking for another example of the difference between parity and fairness, consider taxation! A flat tax like a poll tax exhibits strong parity, because everybody pays the same, but it doesn’t exhibit much fairness because the value of that tax burden is less for somebody who is wealthy than for somebody who is poor. We call taxes that favour parity over fairness regressive taxes. I guess that we could call sharing of family resources in a way that favours parity over fairness regressive sharing?

7 If you’re in a relationship that’s routinely adversarial, then… and I don’t mean to be judgemental… that doesn’t sound like a very healthy relationship to me. Perhaps step back and re-assess whether it serves you both?

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Three(ish) Weeks In Spain

Ruth, JTA, the kids and I are all back in the UK1 after a three week period during which some or all of us were consistently in Spain. The whole adventure was the kind of masterpiece of epic planning that only Ruth could have pulled off, and it worked spectacularly2.

A fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies comfortably on a blanket on a sofa, with her tongue sticking out in a large sideways blep.
I wasn’t around for the first week of the trip, but continued working from home (with the dog, pictured) as per the usual.

San Sebastián

Through clever permutations of remote-working from overseas (mostly by Ruth) and overlapping/intersecting stretches of annual leave (mostly by JTA and I), we were able to avoid having to send the dog to the dogsitter for a block of more than a single week3, didn’t need to break the bank on our collective leave budgets, and managed to give the kids the longest possible block of continuous immersion in the language and culture of Spain.

A group of children in wetsuits surf on low waves.
The one time I tried surfing, I wasn’t good at it, but I was reassured that was normal for a first day. The kids disproved that theory, becoming pretty reasonable boarders very quickly.

In the first week (when I wasn’t there), the kids got to take a mixture of surfing classes and Spanish language lessons in San Sebastián, among other activities. The Bordeaux wildfires caused some travel chaos for the others getting there, but they made it work in the end.

Tarragona

Later, I flew out to meet up with them and we switched to the opposite coast of Spain, staying in a delightful little villa North of Tarragona. The summer heatwaves that are affecting the continent made the middle of the day especially oppressive, so we did as the locals do and sensibly sheltered indoors during the hottest part of the day… but the kids in particular were glad to be able to take a dip in the pool to cool off.

Under nearly-cloudless skies and surrounded by trees and olive and grape-laden slopes, a stone villa and its outbuildings sit prominently under the bright sun.
The villa was a lovely building in a fabulous spot, nestled among hillside olive groves and vineyards, but the lack of wired Internet access/WiFi plus the signal-blocking stone walls made it more “disconnected” than we’d anticipated4!

As has become my tradition when travelling and on family holidays – because I’m an earlier riser than most, but also because I wanted to make the most of the coolest part of the day – I got out early most days for a whole bunch of geocaching expeditions5. But once others were awake we found plenty of other opportunities to explore the area.

Wide/panoramic view from a pagoda-like tower, where a woman and two children lean over a railing to look at a network of bridge-linked islands in a lake below, dotted with palm and other trees.
Parc Samà‘s breezy towers and water features took some of the heat out of the day, when we visited its attractive botanic gardens.

Having come from, remarkably, a similar level of temperature and humidity in the UK, I was interested to see how much greener everything was here on the Mediterranean coast. The plants here, better-adapted to hot and dry summers than those that we plant on our little island, were clearly more-suited to these kinds of conditions. Is it perhaps time that Britain started ditching her lawns and other year-round thirsty vegetation… instead planting more tropical-adjacent plants to provide shade (and carbon capture!) as the climate continues to shift?

A freshwater turtle pokes its head out of blue-green water near a rocky shore, with small black fish visible swimming in the depths.
This little fella had the right idea about keeping cool.

I enjoyed that we were able to split out time between a diversity of activities. A week-long jaunt can be dominated by a single activity – a skiing holiday, for example – but by the time you’re spending most of a month exploring a country, you want to be able to mix things up a bit, right?

A Roman aquaduct spans a forested valley.
Per local legend (and in common with many similar spans around the world6, which usually share a myth about the devil aiding in its otherwise-impossible construction in exchange for the first soul to cross it and then being tricked when an animal is sent across first), the Ferreres Aquaduct  is also known as Devil’s Bridge, which lead me to observe that of all the architecture I’ve seen with which Hell’s ruler is credited, this might be the best (nice work, Satan!).

Sometimes we kept it slow-paced and relaxing, like reading by the pool while the children invent splashing-based games or playing board games in the shade. Other times we explored history and culture, like our visit to the Ferreres Aqueduct, the Catedral de Tarragona, or the old Roman amphitheatre.

Two children wearing VR headsets and holding parasols, in the ruins of a restored Roman amphitheatre.
An augmented reality tour of the amphitheatre was both engaging and educational for the kids, bringing to life its long and complex history: did you know it started as an amphitheatre, but later was the ground of a church (commemorating Saint Fructuosus, who was executed there), then became a prison, and now… it’s an amphitheatre again: in addition to being a historical monument it’s used to stage concerts and things!

And other times still we even did the typical “British tourist in Spain” things, like a trip to the beach or an expedition out on a catamaran to swim in the sea while the sun set.

Dan, a white man, drips from a swim in the sea as he stands, holding a plastic cup of white wine, on the deck of a catamaran.
I expected the catamaran trip to be a bit tacky, but it was actually lush. (I may have availed myself of the open bar, a bit!)

Obviously the biggest reason for our trip was to catch sight of the total solar eclipse as it passed over the region, and our villa’s garden/vineyard was without a doubt a superlative spot for this. We’d initially been concerned that visibility of the low-in-the-sky/close to sunset eclipse might be obstructed by the hills and that, therefore, we’d need to find another spot from which to spectate, but an early-in-the-week experiment of watching the sunset (with an eye on the clock) reassured us that this wasn’t the case. So – as long as we were lucky with the cloud cover – we should be set.

Dan sits on a sun lounger on a driveway, alongside a covered brick barbeque building. He's alongside two children doing the same, and all are wearing disposable eclipse glasses.
A particular highlight of the entire trip was hanging out as a family in our private vineyard, watching the solar eclipse.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great visibility of a total solar eclipse once before, in 1999, but honestly: this one beat it. The perfect location, the reds of the setting sun, the “moon illusion” exaggerating the perceived size of the moon as it approached the sun, the joy of vicariously sharing in the childrens’ wonder… all of these made the whole experience pretty mind-blowing.

The sun completely occluded by the moon.
You’ve seen pictures of eclipses before, but this one is mine. I maintain that even the good/professional photographs are poor substitutes for the real experience, though!

We watched, we awed, and then we saw the still half-obscured sun gradually disappear over the horizon. And then, a round of hugs and cheers and conversation later, we sat up late to enjoy the Perseids begin their nocturnal display.

Over the silhouette of hills, a total solar eclipse is just coming to an end, with a 'diamond ring' effect resulting from the sun's reappearance visible.
Mostly I was looking at the sky (through the safety of my eclipse glasses, of course). But I managed to snap a handful of photographs that, despite the limitations of my phone’s camera, came out pretty well.

PortAventura

After our week in the villa we delivered JTA to the airport to return home. Then Ruth, the kids and I drove on to PortAventura, perhaps our favourite theme park anywhere in the world. Since our last visit, the younger kid has reached a milestone of height that permits him to ride all of the largest rides, and he was excited to take advantage of this newfound privilege.

A man (Dan), a woman (Ruth), and two children sit in a circular boat on a 'river rapids' style ride.
A particularly useful thing about PortAventura compared to some other theme parks is that it’s designed with heatwaves in mind: it’s got lots of natural shade, cooling-off areas, and the right ratio of water rides for when you positively, absolutely need a good soaking.

Both the elder child and I were particularly excited to share with him my favourite non-looping rollercoaster, Shambhala. Shambhala is simply excellent: it’s a highly-vertical smooth ride with a free and open-feeling restraint that, collectively, give amazing “air” and a sensation of “flying” that’s hard to compare to almost any other coaster ride I’ve been on. I could sing its praises aplenty.

A man with a screwdriver repairs the restraint system on a rollercoaster car.
The second we reached the front of the line for our first ride on Dragon Khan… it broke down. But we got to watch it being repaired right in front of us, so that’s cute!

Going to Disneyland Paris and PortAventura in the same summer gives me the confidence to say: PortAventura is the better theme park. The rides, the theming, the food, the queue management, the accommodation, the value-for-money… it’s all better. So if  you’re considering a European theme park trip and you don’t care about getting your photo taken with Goofy or whatever… PortAventura would be my suggestion.

PortAventura’s water park is good too, although it was pretty busy on the day we went. Their 30-metre tall near-vertical waterslide King Khajuna is a little intimidating7, but nothing our thrillseeking little man wasn’t up for.

Barcelona

Finally, we made our way to Barcelona for a “wind-down” couple of days at a hotel we’ve always enjoyed there. Aside for being mistaken for staff while I was using my laptop by the rooftop pool, there’s little of note to say about it: we took it easy, did as little as we could get away with, and generally “unplugged” before our journey back to the UK and a return to normal life (boo!).

Altogether a fabulous trip… and a really interesting experiment in a model that we could replicate if we ever opted for a three week (but drop-in/drop-out/telework) holiday in future. Though… I’d again want (our scheduling queen) Ruth to wrangle the logistics, because it gets complicated when there are so many moving parts!

Footnotes

1 Although not in our house, of course, which is still being repaired following the flood in February; it’s now F-Day plus 191 days… more on that in a future blog post, I’ve no doubt.

2 For a while, she was talking about trying to engineer it into a five-week expedition spanning both this and our trip to France earlier in the summer (to which JTA, the kids and I drove/LeShuttle’d, and to which Ruth flew following a work-related event in Austria: my, what a cosmopolitan life we’re leading this year!). But that’d have been an enormously more-complicated affair and I’m glad we settled on this “simpler” trip in the end!

3 Not that she cares: the dog loves hanging out with her little doggy friends, and is always excited to be taken to our dogsitter‘s, where she also “commutes” for a workday or two most weeks.

4 During out post-holiday ‘retro’ (because of course that’s what we do), the lack of connectivity appeared as both a negative and a positive on some of our lists! Obviously we’re all aware that a little digital disconnection is healthy and valuable, but sometimes it takes being in the middle of nowhere to impose the requisite self-discipline to keep off your devices!

5 Geocaching logs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (my 1000th successful find) – not that Geocaching.com can count that correctly! – 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

6 Obviously, the Devil’s Bridge nearest where I used to live and at which Ruth and I spent our first anniversary – back when we had no idea that we’d be able to make our relationship last… what…? 19 years this month!) – will always have a special place in my heart.

7 Reaching the top of King Khajuna’s tower, you can feel it swap in the breeze, and when you get to the slide itself its ‘horizon’ disappears precipitously until you shuffle completely up to it, at which point there’s little choice about your destination! While we queued for our first goes, we witnessed several people reach the top, change their minds, and turn back!

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Chuck Wagon

Apparently, zero of the imagineers building this Disneyland Paris cafe conceived that “Chuck Wagon” sounds like what a cowboy would call a wheeled vomit trough. 😂

Faux Old-West building painted with lettering identifying it as the Chuck Wagon Cafe.

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Firstup Recruitment

In a little over a week I’ll be starting my new role at Firstup, who use some of my favourite Web technologies to deliver tools that streamline employee communication and engagement.

I’m sure there’ll be more to say about that down the line, but for now: let’s look at my recruitment experience, because it’s probably the fastest and most-streamlined technical recruitment process I’ve ever experienced! Here’s the timeline:

Firstup Recruitment Timeline

  • Day 0 (Thursday), 21:18 – One evening, I submitted an application via jobs listing site Welcome To The Jungle. For comparison, I submitted an application for a similar role at a similar company at almost the exact same time. Let’s call them, umm… “Secondup”.
  • 21:42 – I received an automated response to say “Firstup have received your application”. So far, so normal.
  • 21:44 – I received an email from a human – only 26 minutes after my initial application – to invite me to an initial screener interview the following week, and offering a selection of times (including a reminder of the relative timezone difference between the interviewer and I).
  • 21:55 – I replied to suggest meeting on Wednesday the following week1.
  • Day 6 (Wednesday), 15:30 – Half-hour screener interview, mostly an introduction, “keyword check” (can I say the right keywords about my qualifications and experience to demonstrate that, yes, I’m able to do the things they’ll need), and – because it’s 2025 and we live in the darkest timeline – a confirmation that I was a real human being and not an AI2. The TalOps person, Talia, says she’d like to progress me to an interview with the person who’d become my team lead, and arranges the interview then-and-there for Friday. She talked me through all the stages (max points to any recruiter who does this), and gave me an NDA to sign so we could “talk shop” in interviews if applicable.
Dan peeps out from behind a door, making a 'shush' sign with his finger near his lips. On the door is a printed sign that reads 'Interview happening in library. Please be quiet. Thanks!'
I only took the initial stages of my Firstup interviews in our library, moving to my regular coding desk for the tech tests, but I’ve got to say it’s a great space for a quiet conversation, away from the chaos and noise of our kids on an evening!
  • Day 8 (Friday), 18:30 – My new line manager, Kirk, is on the Pacific Coast of the US, so rather than wait until next week to meet I agreed to this early-evening interview slot. I’m out of practice at interviews and I babbled a bit, but apparently I had the right credentials because, at a continuing breakneck pace…
  • 21:32 – Talia emailed again to let me know I was through that stage, and asked to set up two live coding “tech test” interviews early the following week. I’ve been enjoying all the conversations and the vibes so far, so I try to grab the earliest available slots that I can make. This put the two tech test interviews back-to-back, to which Ruth raised her eyebrows – but to me it felt right to keep riding the energy of this high-speed recruitment process and dive right in to both!
  • Day 11 (Monday), 18:30 – Not even a West Coast interviewer this time, but because I’d snatched the earliest possible opportunity I spoke to Joshua early in the evening. Using a shared development environment, he had me doing a classic data-structures-and-algorithms style assessment: converting a JSON-based logical inference description sort-of reminiscent of a Reverse Polish Notation tree into something that looked more pseudocode of the underlying boolean logic. I spotted early on that I’d want a recursive solution, considered a procedural approach, and eventually went with a functional one. It was all going well… until it wasn’t! Working at speed, I made frustrating early mistake left me with the wrong data “down” my tree and needed to do some log-based debugging (the shared environment didn’t support a proper debugger, grr!) to get back on track… but I managed to deliver something that worked within the window, and talked at length through my approach every step of the way.
  • 19:30 – The second technical interview was with Kevin, and was more about systems design from a technical perspective. I was challenged to make an object-oriented implementation of a car park with three different sizes of spaces (for motorbikes, cars, and vans); vehicles can only fit into their own size of space or larger, except vans which – in the absence of a van space – can straddle three car spaces. The specification called for a particular API that could answer questions about the numbers and types of spaces available. Now warmed-up to the quirks of the shared coding environment, I started from a test-driven development approach: it didn’t actually support TDD, but I figured I could work around that by implementing what was effectively my API’s client, hitting my non-existent classes and their non-existent methods and asserting particular responses before going and filling in those classes until they worked. I felt like I really “clicked” with Kevin as well as with the tech test, and was really pleased with what I eventually delivered.
  • Day 12 (Tuesday), 12:14 – I heard from Talia again, inviting me to a final interview with Kirk’s manager Xiaojun, the Director of Engineering. Again, I opted for the earliest mutually-convenient time – the very next day! – even though it would be unusually-late in the day.
  • Day 13 (Wednesday), 20:00 –  The final interview with Xiaojun was a less-energetic affair, but still included some fun technical grilling and, as it happens, my most-smug interview moment ever when he asked me how I’d go about implementing something… that I’d coincidentally implemented for fun a few weeks earlier! So instead of spending time thinking about an answer to the question, I was able to dive right in to my most-recent solution, for which I’d conveniently drawn diagrams that I was able to use to explain my architectural choices. I found it harder to read Xiaojun and get a feel for how the interview had gone than I had each previous stage, but I was excited to hear that they were working through a shortlist and should be ready to appoint somebody at the “end of the week, or early next week” at the latest.
Illustration of a sophisticated Least Recently Used Cache class with a doubly-linked list data structure containing three items, referenced from the class by its head and tail item. It has 'get' and 'put' methods. It also has a separate hash map indexing each cached item by its key.
This. This is how you implement an LRU cache.
  • Day 14 (Thursday), 00:09 – At what is presumably the very end of the workday in her timezone, Talia emailed me to ask if we could chat at what must be the start of her next workday. Or as I call it, lunchtime. That’s a promising sign.
  • 13:00 – The sun had come out, so I took Talia’s call in the “meeting hammock” in the garden, with a can of cold non-alcoholic beer next to me (and the dog rolling around on the grass). After exchanging pleasantries, she made the offer, which I verbally accepted then and there and (after clearing up a couple of quick queries) signed a contract to a few hours later. Sorted.
  • Day 23 – You remember that I mentioned applying to another (very similar) role at the same time? This was the day that “Secondup” emailed to ask about my availability for an interview. And while 23 days is certainly a more-normal turnaround for the start of a recruitment process, I’d already found myself excited by everything I’d learned about Firstup: there are some great things they’re doing right; there are some exciting problems that I can be part of the solution to… I didn’t need another interview, so I turned down “Secondup”. Something something early bird.

Wow, that was fast!

With only eight days between the screener interview and the offer – and barely a fortnight after my initial application – this has got to be the absolute fastest I’ve ever seen a tech role recruitment process go. It felt like a rollercoaster, and I loved it.

Photograph of a looping steel rollercoaster against a setting sun. A logo of a flaming 'F' in the corner declares it Firstup: World's First Recruitment-Themed Rollercoaster. The track is annotated with the steps of the process in order, from application to screener to interview and so on.
Is it weird that I’d actually ride a recruitment-themed rollercoaster?

Footnotes

1 The earliest available slot for a screener interview, on Tuesday, clashed with my 8-year-old’s taekwondo class which I’d promised I’ll go along and join in with it as part of their “dads train free in June” promotion. This turned out to be a painful and exhausting experience which I thoroughly enjoyed, but more on that some other time, perhaps.

2 After realising that “are you a robot” was part of the initial checks, I briefly regretted taking the interview in our newly-constructed library because it provides exactly the kind of environment that looks like a fake background.

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Article posted at UTC on .

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Sabbatical Magic

A couple of weeks ago, I kicked off my first sabbatical since starting at Automattic a little over five years ago1.

Dan sits in front of two laptops (one of which shows a photo of an echidna for some reason), in a meeting room full of casually-dressed volunteers.
The first weekend of my sabbatical might have set the tone for a lot of the charity hacking that will follow, being dominated by a Three Rings volunteering weekend.

The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:

  1. Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
  2. building a first draft of Three Rings’ new server architecture, which turns out to mostly work but still needs some energy thrown at it,
  3. a geohashing expedition with the dog, and
  4. a family holiday to Catalonia, Spain.
Dan, Ruth, and JTA with their children and a tour guide called Julie, enjoying churros in a Barcelona cafe.
You’d be amazed how many churros these children can put away.

The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year2, but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:

  1. Barcelona, where we stayed in a wonderful skyscraper hotel with fantastic breakfasts and, after I was able to get enough sleep, explored the obvious touristy bits of the city (e.g. la Sagrada Família3 and other Gaudían architecture, the chocolate museum, the fort at Montjuic, and because it’s me, of course, a widely varied handful of geocaches).
  2. The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from4 but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
  3. A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!
Dan and the kids atop the remains of a castle tower.
All that remains of the Castell del Vilosell is part of a single tower, but it affords excellent views over the rest of the village as well as being home to a wonderfully-placed geocache.

I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…

Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.

Dan sits at a laptop in a hotel bar, a view of Barcelona out of the window behind him, a beer bottle alongside him.
I’m not saying that I didn’t write code while on holiday. I totally did, and I open-sourced it too. But programming feels different when your paycheque doesn’t depend on it.

If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on5.

But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!

Dan, standing in an airport departure lounge, mimes "mind blown" to the camera.
🤯🤯🤯

Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday? Who knows.

That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away again.

Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.

Footnotes

1 A sabbatical is a perk offered to Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open Web!

2 I didn’t get around to writing about Paris, but I did write about how the hotel we stayed at introduced our eldest, and by proxy re-introduced me, to Wonder Boy, ultimately leading to me building an arcade cabinet on which I finally, beat the game, 35 years after first playing it.

3 Whose construction has come on a lot since the last time I toured inside it.

4 Although alcohol helped with that.

5 I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!

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PortAventura

Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.

Three glasses of beer held by adult hands clink together against a glass of water and a bottle of Fanta held 6 by cold hands.

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Holidays in the Age of COVID

We’ve missed out on or delayed a number of trips and holidays over the last year and a half for, you know, pandemic-related reasons. So this summer, in addition to our trip to Lichfield, we arranged a series of back-to-back expeditions.

1. Alton Towers

The first leg of our holiday saw us spend a long weekend at Alton Towers, staying over at one of their themed hotels in between days at the water park and theme park:

2. Darwin Forest

The second leg of our holiday took us to a log cabin in the Darwin Forest Country Park for a week:

3. Preston

Kicking off the second week of our holiday, we crossed the Pennines to Preston to hang out with my family (with the exception of JTA, who had work to do back in Oxfordshire that he needed to return to):

4. Forest of Bowland

Ruth and I then left the kids with my mother and sisters for a few days to take an “anniversary mini-break” of glamping in the gorgeous Forest of Bowland:

(If you’re interested in Steve Taylor’s bathtub-carrying virtual-Everest expedition, here’s his Facebook page and JustGiving profile.)

5. Meanwhile, in Preston

The children, back in Preston, were apparently having a whale of a time:

6. Suddenly, A Ping

The plan from this point was simple: Ruth and I would return to Preston for a few days, hang out with my family some more, and eventually make a leisurely return to Oxfordshire. But it wasn’t to be…

Screenshot from the NHS Covid App: "You need to self-isolate."
Well that’s not the kind of message you want to get from your phone.

I got a “ping”. What that means is that my phone was in close proximity to somebody else’s phone on 29 August and that other person subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.

My risk from this contact is exceptionally low. There’s only one place that my phone was in close proximity to the phone of anybody else outside of my immediate family, that day, and it’s when I left it in a locker at the swimming pool near our cabin in the Darwin Forest. Also, of course, I’d been double-jabbed for a month and a half and I’m more-cautious than most about contact, distance, mask usage etc. But my family are, for their own (good) reasons, more-cautious still, so self-isolating at Preston didn’t look like a possibility for us.

Ruth and Dan in a car, in a car park.
Ruth and I went directly to a drive-through PCR testing facility.

As soon as I got the notification we redirected to the nearest testing facility and both got swabs done. 8 days after possible exposure we ought to have a detectable viral load, if we’ve been infected. But, of course, the tests take a day or so to process, so we still needed to do a socially-distanced pickup of the kids and all their stuff from Preston and turn tail for Oxfordshire immediately, cutting our trip short.

The results would turn up negative, and subsequent tests would confirm that the “ping” was a false positive. And in an ironic twist, heading straight home actually put us closer to an actual COVID case as Ruth’s brother Owen turned out to have contracted the bug at almost exactly the same time and had, while we’d been travelling down the motorway, been working on isolating himself in an annex of the “North wing” of our house for the duration of his quarantine.

Barricade with signs reading "Quarantine: Zombie Outbreak"
I set up a “yellow zone” between Owen’s quarantine area and the rest of the house into which we could throw supplies. And I figured I’d have fun with the signage.

7. Ruth & JTA go to Berwick

Thanks to negative tests and quick action in quarantining Owen, Ruth and JTA were still able to undertake the next part of this three-week holiday period and take their anniversary break (which technically should be later in the year, but who knows what the situation will be by then?) to Berwick-upon-Tweed. That’s their story to tell, if they want to, but the kids and I had fun in their absence:

8. Reunited again

Finally, Ruth and JTA returned from their mini-break and we got to do a few things together as a family again before our extended holiday drew to a close:

9. Back to work?

Tomorrow I’m back at work, and after 23 days “off” I’m honestly not sure I remember what I do for a living any more. Something to do with the Internet, right? Maybe ecommerce?

I’m sure it’ll all come right back to me, at least by the time I’ve read through all the messages and notifications that doubtless await me (I’ve been especially good at the discipline, this break, of not looking at work notifications while I’ve been on holiday; I’m pretty proud of myself.)

But looking back, it’s been a hell of a three weeks. After a year and a half of being pretty-well confined to one place, doing a “grand tour” of so many destinations as a family and getting to do so many new and exciting things has made the break feel even longer than it was. It seems like it must have been months since I last had a Zoom meeting with a work colleague!

For now, though, it’s time to try to get the old brain back into work mode and get back to making the Web a better place!

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Review of LEGOLAND® Windsor Resort

This review of LEGOLAND® Windsor Resort originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

LEGOLAND® Windsor Resort, Winkfield Rd, Windsor SL4 4AY, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Expensive, overcrowded even outside of peak times, and increasingly losing its character and charm to become “just another theme park”… yup, this is a Merlin Entertainments acquisition, all right. If you look carefully you might find some Lego, but I wouldn’t count on it.

So long as you’re wiling to tolerate this above, this theme park caters better than most to families with pre-teen children.

Instead Of Blogging…

Things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, this last month, include:

  • Code Week: hacking Three Rings code in a converted hay loft of a Derbyshire farm, as mentioned on the Three Rings blog.
  • Hoghton Tower: as is traditional at this time of year (see blog posts from 2010, 2009, 2005, 2003, for example), went to Preston for the Hoghton Tower concert and fireworks display, accompanied by Ruth, and my sister’s 22nd birthday. My other sister has more to say about it.
  • Family Picnic: Joining Ruth and JTA at Ruth’s annual family picnic, among her billions of second-cousins and third-aunts.
  • New Earthwarming: Having a mini housewarming on New Earth, where I live with Ruth, JTA, and Paul. A surprising number of people came from surprisingly far away, and it was fascinating to see some really interesting networking being done by a mixture of local people (from our various different “circles” down here) and distant guests.
  • Bodleian Staff Summer Party: Yet another reason to love my new employer! The drinks and the hog roast (well, roast vegetable sandwiches and falafel wraps for me, but still delicious) would have won me over by themselves. The band was just a bonus. The ice cream van that turned up and started dispensing free 99s: that was all just icing on the already-fabulous cake.
  • TeachMeet: Giving a 2-minute nanopresentation at the first Oxford Libraries TeachMeet, entitled Your Password Sucks. A copy of my presentation (now with annotations to make up for the fact that you can’t hear me talking over it) has been uploaded to the website.
  • New Earth Games Night: Like Geek Night, but with folks local to us, here, some of whom might have been put off by being called “Geeks”, in that strange way that people sometimes do. Also, hanging out with the Oxford On Board folks, who do similar things on Monday nights in the pub nearest my office.
  • Meeting Oxford Nightline: Oxford University’s Nightline is just about the only Nightline in the British Isles to not be using Three Rings, and they’re right on my doorstep, so I’ve been meeting up with some of their folks in order to try to work out why. Maybe, some day, I’ll actually understand the answer to that question.
  • Alton Towers & Camping: Ruth and I decided to celebrate the 4th anniversary of us getting together with a trip to Alton Towers, where their new ride, Thirteen, is really quite good (but don’t read up on it: it’s best enjoyed spoiler-free!), and a camping trip in the Lake District, with an exhausting but fulfilling trek to the summit of Glaramara.
Setting up camp at Stonethwaite.

That’s quite a lot of stuff, even aside from the usual work/volunteering/etc. stuff that goes on in my life, so it’s little wonder that I’ve neglected to blog about it all. Of course, there’s a guilt-inspired downside to this approach, and that’s that one feels compelled to not blog about anything else until finishing writing about the first neglected thing, and so the problem snowballs.

So this quick summary, above? That’s sort-of a declaration of blogger-bankruptcy on these topics, so I can finally stop thinking “Hmm, can’t blog about X until I’ve written about Code Week!”

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Alton Towers

Went to Alton Towers on Friday for the first time in years, along with Ruth, Annie, JTA, and his sister Harriet. Highlights include:

Actually wandering around the towers, as opposed to just spending time on the rollercoasters. Who knew there was a ruin in the middle of the theme park (yes, I know, we all knew, but who actually bothered to look before now).

Getting straight to the front of every single queue. I’ll tell you what; if you ever go to a busy theme park, take a friend in a wheelchair. It doesn’t actually matter whether or not there’s any reason for them to be in a wheelchair (so long as they’re able to move around enough to get in and out of rides), because – at Alton Towers, at least – they didn’t even bother to look at the medical notes we’d brought; they just had bits of paper to sign and then we all got “helper” armbands.

And you know what’s great about those armbands? They mean you can wheel your friend in through the exit of pretty much any ride you like, and skip the queue. With busy rides like Nemesis (still perhaps the best-designed rollercoaster I’ve ever been on, overall) and Air, it’ll save you hours of your day to never have to queue, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying those controversial “queue jump” passes. I suppose that’s probably how we found the free time to tour the towers.

We squeezed in all of the water rides early on, because we didn’t know if it was eventually going to rain or not (it didn’t), and if it didn’t, we wanted the maximum possible amount of time to dry off afterwards. Which would have worked as a plan, if it weren’t for the fact that Harriet, Annie and I had to board the log flume at a special “maintenance” station (where they were able to park the wheelchair), and because they didn’t put our boat back into the maintenance station on our way back, we ended up going around twice (much to the confusion of Ruth and JTA, who’d just de-boated and were waiting near the bottom of the big drop at the end to see us splash down and get off ourselves).

Shweet ickwe baybey gooshes!!! Yeah. And here’s a picture of a confused-looking mummy goose. Later, we encouraged kids to throw bits of their overpriced hot dogs to the (huge) carp in the lake so we could watch them fight over it with the ducks. It’s easy to find entertainment in just about anything when all the rides are closing down for the night.

The relatively new aquarium/”Sea life centre” thingy, which actually turns out to be really, really, quite spectacularly good. They’ve got a petting zoo where you can play with hermit crabs and shrimp and things; stingrays and sharks that they have a “feeding time” for, and lots and lots of glass (including an underwater tunnel through which you can walk. Of course, being Alton Towers, they’re not going to let the fact that what you’re at is an aquarium stop them from selling you a ride photo, so they take a picture of you on the way in, as shown above. If we look confused in the picture, it’s because we didn’t know we were about to have our photo taken until literally a split second beforehand – we thought that we were being told where to stand in order to put us “out of the way” while they made provision for getting the wheelchair into the building.

And finally (simply because I didn’t get a picture – the one above is Creative Commons – thanks, alundavey!), I suppose I ought to mention the awesomeness that is the new ride, Rita – Queen Of Speed (stupid name, though). This hydraulic launch (though it looks like a LIM-launched one, and certainly uses magnetic braking: wonder why they didn’t go the whole hog…) rollercoaster really does have a fabulous feeling of acceleration: jumping from a standing start to 100km/h in barely over 2 seconds is quite spectacularly eye-watering.

Also, I think Ruth is in love with that rollercoaster. She sighs whenever I mention the name, Rita.

So, a rich, full weekend, between that and all the other bits and pieces I got up to. From tomorrow I’m up in Preston for a few days, then off up to Scotland for a week or so. I’ll blog on the move if I can.

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Oakwood

It’s been a busy weekend. Aside from all the usual stuff, Claire, Beth, Jimmy, Rory, Gareth, Penny and I travelled down to Oakwood (where we met up with Andy and Sian) for a round of play at the last remaining Crystal Maze Cyberdrome and a visit to Oakwood Theme Park. I’ve uploaded some pictures to Abnib Gallery: Oakwood, and if you’ve got any photos that you took while you were there, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me copies there too! (on which note: there are people who haven’t yet uploaded their photos to the 99 Red Balloons gallery: shame on you!)

Wow; that was a link-heavy paragraph.

We started at The Crystal Maze, registering ourselves as two teams, with Beth, Sian, Rory, Penny and I in the first team (Team Moo!) and Claire, Jimmy, Gareth and Andy in the other (Team Awesome!). Each team was issued with a plastic “swipe card” which can be swiped through any of the little card readers hidden around the themed zones of the maze, causing clues to appear on a nearby screen about where you need to go to play your next game, or checking you in to a game that you’re due to play.

The games range from the cheesy to the clever. Some are computer game-style remakes of genuine Crystal Maze games (using a trackball to drag-and-drop cogs onto pegs). Some provide clever theming and interactivity for multiple players (with one, for example, climbing up a ladder to move a computerised blowpipe, and others able to see on a separate screen which targets need to be hit). Some even involve physical activity (hopping on numbered stepping stones as your team solve riddles, swinging over a chasm to press buttons, or wriggling between a maze of hanging poles without touching any). It’s a great deal of fun, although it runs on genuinely ancient technology – an IPX network of DOS 386SX computers, each with 2MB of RAM, talking to a central server – although it’s well-built: when the machines (finally) rebooted they let us carry on exactly where we left off. Our team managed to crash two of them, causing them to completely lock up, which slowed us down in our race for crystals: we ended up with 30 seconds less in the crystal dome than our opponents, and I feel that this alone is to blame for us getting a handful less gold credits than them at the end. That and Beth had never seen The Crystal Maze before (can you believe it!) – that has to count for something.

Claire points out a lit button to Gareth, in the dome

The dome itself is about the size of a medium-to-large family tent, and is more like just the top half of the real dome in it’s shape. Around the walls illuminated buttons flicker on and off, and the aim is to press them when they are on and not when they are off. Occasionally, all the lights will turn off, and the players have to find the two small illuminated buttons near the floor and press them simultaneously to make the game continue, which provides some variety. It’s a great, furious, leap-around end to the activity, and it – like the rest of the experience – was a lot more fun than I expected.

Claire in the dome

Certificates in hand, we made a move 200 yards up the road to Oakwood Theme Park. The park is small and economical, as theme parks go, but it’s size isn’t a huge disadvantage, as it means that there’s actually time to do everything you might want to (perhaps a few things twice) without running around or putting excessive effort into planning a careful route. We rode the miniature railway into the heart of the park, and, as everybody got their bearings, Penny, Gareth and I decided to ride Vertigo, a 135-foot tall skycoaster (i.e. a giant swing).

Vertigo being winched up

A crane pulled up the harness (into which the three of us were strapped – like a giant sleeping bag with Gareth in the middle), and, after it reached the top, staff on the ground counted down… 3… 2… 1. I pulled the “ripcord”, a toggle by my right-hand side, and we dropped.

The first couple of seconds are a lot like parachuting, in my experience: a sudden shock of falling, followed by deceleration as the swing (or the parachute) begins to take effect. There’s the immediate shock of the rapidly-approaching and oh-so-near ground, but apart from that, it’s a very similar feeling. Then the swing begins, and there’s a sensation of moving very quickly and very close to the ground. We unlinked our arms and (perhaps with the exception of Penny, who gripped her harness tightly for some time) reached out in a Superman-like pose, and soared back up into the air. Elementary physics dictated that we’d swing almost as high again, but it still surprised me, and suddenly falling “backwards”, back towards my feet, was quite a remarkable change and only added to the buzz of the flight.

The rest of the park was good, too. Megafobia is a fast, aggressive wooden rollercoaster with a great deal of difference in the experience of sitting at the front or the back of the train. Speed (or, as we called it, The Phallus, owing to it’s unusual shape) is a fun little vertical-drop coaster with a loop and a barrel roll: it’s a little short, and the queue a little long (for some reason, they were only operating one of the four trains they had available) – it’s well-worth fighting for a place at the front, though, as the view is significantly better. The water slides (on which you ride a plastic boat that skims like a stone across water), the Treetops mini-coaster, “The Bounce,” and the pirate ship all add to the “thrill rides” selection of the park, which had always previously seemed to me to be a bit “too kiddy.” Even the pedal boats were fun, after a fashion – assuming you ignore the pain Jimmy and I had of repeatedly pumping your knees into your chest in a too-small, too-hard seat, right after a cheeseburger lunch.

Rory at the Crystal Maze experience

And then there’s Hydro. It only opened in the afternoon, which was a pity, because we could have been using that time to dry out… Hydro is the wettest “wet ride” I’ve ever been on. They really are not kidding when they warn you to leave behind your water-damagable valuables at the station. A 100-foot drop in a wide boat right into a splash pool kicks up an enormous wave that does an excellent job of soaking every single person on the boat. As if the experience of the ride weren’t enough, we then took the time to stand on the bridge over the spash pool, bracing ourselves against the railing, to “catch the wave” – a blast of foam that pours across the bridge every time the ride goes around.

So: a good day out was had by all, I feel. Please do upload your pictures from the day, because I’d love to see them. I gather Rory might be making another one of his short DVDs: if so, we’ll show it at the beginning of next week’s Troma Night.

See also: video of the Crystal Dome.

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Crystal Dome at Oakwood

On 27 April 2007 some friends and I went to the (last surviving) Crystal Maze Cyberdrome Experience at Oakwood Theme Park. Here, some of my friends can be seen playing the Crystal Dome game. See more photos here.

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