travel – Page 2

Without Bloganuary

In January 2024 I participated in Bloganuary, a “write a blog post every day for a month” challenge organised by Automattic. I wasn’t 100% impressed by the prompts made available and was – as an employee of Automattic – shuffling towards trying to help make them better in a future year. To be part of the solution!

I didn’t participate in January 2025, because I was on sabbatical and – as well as it feeling a little “close” to work! – Bloganuary intersected with a winter-sun trip to Trinidad & Tobago, where – despite a state of emergency being declared – Ruth and I unlocked a geohashing graticule, experienced small-world serendipity, and generally explored beautiful and remote places.¹

View of waves crashing into a bay on a rugged island coastline. — There’s definitely something in this ‘winter sun’ thing that seems to help me stay sane in the cold dark months. This morning, I’m blogging from a hotel balcony in Peurtro de la Cruz, Tenerife.

Of course, two significant things changed since then:

As part of a sweeping range of redundancies, I was let go from my position at Automattic², and
Automattic ceased running Bloganuary: I’m guessing that the folks responsible for making it happen were among the many that Automattic decided to axe, or else their shifting priorities – reflected by their waves of layoffs – are no longer compatible with providing that service to bloggers.

Ah well, I figured. I’d just do my own thing. I can write something for every day in January 2026, can’t I?

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Turns out that yes, I can. 53 posts over 31 consecutive days, so far this year. This year might be my fastest run at 100 Days To Offload yet.

In general, I suppose I’ve been blogging more-frequently lately. Why is that? I guess it’s been a realisation that a blog post doesn’t always have to be polished to perfection. I still write long-form posts which require research and planning, like setting up a network of Windows 3.x VMs just to get screenshots of what programming then looked like or making that podcast episode with the music in it… but I’m also feeling more-free to just express myself in the moment. To share things I see that look interesting or funny or pretty, or just whatever I’m thinking. I’ve been using “kinds” to categorise my posts so it’s easy for people to avoid my more-inane stuff if they like, but that’s a secondary consideration because ultimately… I blog for me.

I’ve also been trying to make blogging more social. Over the last year I’ve made an effort to (visibly) “follow” more personal bloggers and correspond with them (including in new – by which I mean old – ways like exchanging postcards!).

Anyway… all of which is to say that I’ve been writing more and I’ve been loving it. The best way to read more of what I’m writing, if you’d like to, remains: by subscribing via RSS.

But regardless of how and why you’ve come to find this post – thanks for dropping be: drop me a message and say hi and let’s be friends.

Footnotes

¹ I’d anticipated having a lack of Internet access, but in fact 4G was widespread throughout both islands and overall I managed to post something on every day except three in January 2025.

² Based on friends I’ve spoken to, there seem to have been a lot more folks let go since; the company seems to be shrinking quite a lot, which might go some way to explaining my second observation too.

Dan Q found GC9PVXZ EL CRÁTER DE LA RAMBLETA

This checkin to GC9PVXZ EL CRÁTER DE LA RAMBLETA reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My partner Ruth and I were disappointed not to be able to hike any of the trails up here today – they’re all closed – but enjoyed finding both the nearby Virtual and this Earthcache geocaches. The evidence of lava flows (that remain to this day!) are really quite impressive.

Dan Q found GC9P71A El tEidE

This checkin to GC9P71A El tEidE reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

My partner Ruth and I are spending a long weekend in Puerto de la Cruz. We loved coming up to see this beautiful, bleak, stark volcanic landscape.

TFTC!

Hollandaise Sauce

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.

I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat as a holiday treat.

But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.

Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.

Airborne RSS

RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap.

(I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.)

Time to catch up on some news, blogs, etc.!

Invisible Dog

Our dog has decided that the perfect place to lie down at our holiday accommodation is… on a staircase whose carpet is the same colour as her!

I’m grateful for her very-visible blep… or I’d have tripped over this camouflaged pupper several times already!

Note #27758

Obviously I wasn’t planning on going to the US anytime soon, but if I did… they might struggle with my visa application when I put every “email address I’ve used for the last 10 years” on, because I actively use a variety of catch-all domains/subdomains.

I’ve probably missed some addresses (e.g. to which I’ve only ever received spam that’s since been deleted), but a conservative estimate of the number of personal email addresses which I’ve sent mail from or to would be… 7,669 email addresses. 🤣

Note #27483

Good morning Lapland!

Note #27296

Attempt #2 to get to Belfast starts… at 3:30am in a Premier Inn in Gatwick. 🥱 Today, perhaps, I’ll catch a plane! 🤞

Riding With Strangers: California Hitchhikers in the 1970s

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

…

“For years, starting in the late ‘70s, I was taking pictures of hitchhikers. A hitchhiker is someone you may know for an hour, or a day, or, every so often, a little longer, yet, when you leave them, they’re gone. If I took a picture, I reasoned, I’d have a memory. I kept a small portfolio of photos in the car to help explain why I wanted to take their picture. This helped a lot. It also led me to look for hitchhikers, so that I could get more pictures.

“I almost always had a camera… I finally settled on the Olympus XA – a wonderful little pocket camera. (I’ve taken a picture of the moon rising with this camera.) One time I asked a chap if I could take a photo, and he said, “You took my picture a few years ago.” I showed him the album and he picked himself out. “That’s me,” he said, pointing…”

…

Sheldon D. (Flashbak)

Not that hitch-hiking is remotely as much a thing today as it was 50 years ago, but even if it were then it wouldn’t be so revolutionary to, say, take a photo of everybody you give a ride to. We’re all carrying cameras all the time, and the price of taking a snap is basically nothing.

But for Doug Biggert, who died in 2023, began doing this with an analogue camera as he drove around California from 1973 onwards? That’s quite something. Little wonder he had to explain his project to his passengers (helped, later on, by carrying a copy of the photo album he’d collected so-far that he could show them).

A really interesting gallery with a similarly-compelling story. Also: man – look at the wear-and-tear on his VW Bug!

Note #26625

Off to Pembrokeshire on holiday I’ve had to stop near Cardiff to put some more charge into the car… which provides the perfect opportunity for the doggo and I to explore a nearby sports field and take in All. The. Smells. 🐶

Note #26591

Off to London. BRB!

Delivery Songs

Duration 7:01

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling¹. So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.

On a verdant manicured lawn under a summer sky, two parents walk barefoot after their young child, who is running towards a traditionally-coloured yellow-and-white British ice cream van with visible branding reading 'fresh dairy ice cream' and '99 flake'. — Bet you want a double-99 with monkey’s blood now, right? If not, maybe hearing the chime will make the difference.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!

And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!

A grey-haired man wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans leans casually against the open doors of a white van that's visibly filled floor-to-ceiling with 19-litre 'water cooler style' water bottles, plus a pallet lifter. The van is parked between red-and-white striped cones on an Istanbul street. — In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man².

My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!

And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.

It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?

Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome⁴! (My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody, right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a recognisable tune.

Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”? Just a thought.

Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead of the UK. Let’s fix that!

Footnotes

¹ It’s not unheard of for ~~cruel~~ clever parents to try to teach their young children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s sold out of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for myself.

² The official line from the government is that the piped water is safe to drink, but every single Turkish person I spoke to on the subject disagreed and said that I shouldn’t listen to… well, most of what the government says. Having now witnessed first-hand the disparity between the government’s line on the unrest following the arrest of the opposition’s presidential candidate and what’s actually happening on the ground, I’m even more inclined to listen to the people.

³ My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental cover of Burn Baby Burn?

⁴ Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…

Dan Q found GC6VTEG Galata Bridge #3

This checkin to GC6VTEG Galata Bridge #3 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After lunch with my work team in a delightful restaurant overlooking the bridge (which I’m just-about pointing at in the attached photo) I decided to take a diversion on the route back to our coworking space to come and find this geocache, my most-Easterly yet.

The coordinates put me exactly at a likely spot, but it actually took until I’d searched three different candidate hosts before the cache container was in my hand. Signed log and (stealthily) returned to hiding place. TFTC!

Team Desire in Istanbul

With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.

You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.