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Seeking Out Bad News
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just going out of the way to seek bad news. Maybe it’s because I think that if I don’t, then a problem will go unaddressed as no-one else is aware of it.
There’s probably some evolutionary trait to this. Being the one that hears a predator, and reacts to it before anyone else, is an advantage. But in this day and age, many of the problems that I have anxiety about is pretty much known by everyone, and addressing it in any meaningful way is beyond my direct control.
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It seems like every time I’m working on something where time is of the essence, a device or operating system decides that now is the perfect time to update. Looking at you, Windows.
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There’s exactly one week left in my current job before I leave. An email, which seems to have marked the occasion, has notified me that the induction Trello board, opened when I joined, has just been closed.
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I can’t understand how people post to Medium. I’m sure they have nice authoring tools, and you’ll get readers for your work, but the actual reading experience is awful. It’s slow, it’s janky, and just now the page I was reading errored out without me interacting with it.
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Wow, fresh off the acquisition of Day One, it looks like Automattic is acquiring Pocket Casts. That makes two aquisitions of apps that I use on a daily basis. Not entirely sure how I feel about this.
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In today’s crazy ideas to get out of things I rather not do: as part of getting solar panels, I have to get a photo of part of my roof. I’d rather not get on a ladder and I don’t have a drone. But I do have a Raspberry Pi with a camera module. I’m wondering if doing something with that, along with a battery, duck tape, and a couple of broomsticks would work.
Update: well, this idea hit a roadblock quickly. I booted up the Raspberry Pi and tried the camera, and I got an error suggesting that the camera module is not connected. The Raspberry Pi is inside a case, meaning that if I wanted to check the camera module connection, I’d have to open it. The annoying thing is that when I first got it (it was several years ago), the camera was working fine. It must have come loose while I was moving it around or something.
So now I need to open the case without breaking it. Not sure how easy that would be to do.
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It seems to be that the general advice for those under 50 looking at the AstraZenica vaccine is to speak with your doctor. I don’t know how it is with others, but I don’t actually have a doctor to speak with. Most of my experience with GPs are with bulk billing clinics, with doctors coming and going, that deal with routine matters like prescription renewals and doctor certificates for colds. I’m not sure if there is anyone there that I could turn to for advice like this.
I wonder if I’m an outlier here. Maybe it’s time I got one.
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There’s no worst combination that anxiety and boredom. Having something on your mind, while also having very little to do, there isn’t many avenues for distraction, and all you have left is refreshing various news site for updates.
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Washing sheets in winter is the worst. You are so reliant on the forecast being perfect and you have to make the call early in the morning. And of course forecasts can be wrong, and you find yourself having a better day to do them on the day you decided to do it tomorrow.
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A Year On Micro.blog
It’s been a year since I’ve signed up to Micro.blog and written my first post, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it sooner.
The reason for joining was to write more; to focus less on the blogging engine and more on the blog itself. At the time I have only posted seven times over a period of 9 months. In the last year, that post count has risen to 222. I guess I can call that objective achieved.
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I’ve got to get into the habit of writing more about what I’m doing. I never think about it at the time because it always seems like a distraction. But I always regret it later when I want to revisit something, and nothing about it is written down, and all I have to go on is my memory. Conversely, on those rare occasions when I actually had something about it written down, I’m always happy that I did.
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Trying my hand at logo design for something I’m working on. I’m aiming for something that looks like a mix between a bookmark, the letter D, and something to suggest synchronising stuff. This is probably the best I’ve got so far.
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Start of new project: organising solar panels for my house.
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Genius me set myself a reminder on Friday to “update the doco”. The reminder has just shown up, and I have no idea what “doco” I was referring to.
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Why I like developing in Go vs. something like NodeJS: my development setup doesn’t randomly break for some weird reason. When it does break, it’s because of something I did explicitly.
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Credit to Vic. DHHS for including more information about the origin of new Covid-19 cases alongside the daily tally. I appreciate that this feedback from the public has been taken onboard. I can imagine it means more work, but it really helps with peace of mind.
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I’m seeing more and more apps these days being designed as the software equivalent of catalogues, and I’m finding it quite distasteful. This is not so much ads: I understand that developers need to make money some way. It’s more things like “featured articles” in Maps on iOS, or news articles in search results (if these were ads, they should be disclosed as such).
I’m using your software to achieve a goal here, not simply to browse around.
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When it comes to organising things, whether it’s a large transition or simply the events of my day, I tend to be quite rigid in my scheduling. I make sure to plan ahead, and ensure that the things that need to happen do so in the intended order. There is a time for everything, and everything is to happen on time. Any deviations from this and I get anxious.
I know some people, both friends and family, that are the polar opposite to this. No need for a set scheduled, just show up when you’re ready. Things happen when they happen, and if they’re delayed or out of sequence, so what? We’ll eventually get by in the end.
I wish I had a bit more of this attitude.
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I wonder if part of my indecisiveness in making large decisions, such as changing jobs, has a lot to do with the need to make everyone happy. I know that’s not always possible, you can’t please everyone. Maybe the best approach is to minimise the damage.
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I was feeling a bit under the weather yesterday so I got a Covid-19 test. In July 2020, when I last had a test, it took me 5 days to get the results. Yesterday, I got the results in 9 hours (it was negative). Really impressed by how well testing improved over the last year.
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Working On The Weekend
I’ve saw a Tweets last night saying that the best thing a young person can do to help their career is to work on the weekend. The implication there is that being the one that “puts in the extra hours” can seem, in the eyes of your employer, like you’re the hardest worker there, that you’re committed to the project and the job. This could lead to bonuses, promotions, perks, a reputation, you name it.
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I’m wondering if Slack should add a feature which, on demand, will roll-up the last several messages in a thread or channel, delete them all, and replace it with a single message saying “Nope, we were wrong here.”
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A walk in the rain, with no one else around other than the currawongs. Fair bit darker than what the photo suggests.
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I feel like the only person in the world that prefers to catch up on the WWDC keynote by reading the Ars Technica liveblog over watching it.
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Only took 5 failed CI builds today before I realised that there may be something wrong with the code I wrote.
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For anyone who needs it, here’s a Tampermonkey script for hiding the trending topics and recommended topics/people from Twitter’s sidebar.
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Congratulations to Ben Thompson on the announcement of Passport. Looks to be a very promising tool for creators aiming to make a living on the open web. All the best to him in this endeavour.
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It’s a bit of a shame that we couldn’t be using something like NFC for checking in to venues, rather than QR codes. The user experience would be much better: just tap your phone. This is quicker and less annoying than opening the check-in app, waiting for the splash screen to go away, tapping “Check In”, positioning the camera, etc.
Sure, establishments will need to buy NFC tags, which are not as cheap as printing a QR code. But I’m betting that the simpler check-in experience would mean more people would be doing so, making it easier for contact tracers to get on top of outbreaks and letting these businesses open up again.
I imagine people want to do the right thing. Make it convenient for them to do so.
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FastMail needs to steal more features from Hey. One thing that would be nice: the ability to annotate messages or threads — I think they’re called “stickies” in Hey. It would be great to add one to bills that said “Paid”.
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Stumbling Into the Concept of Narrating Your Work
About a week ago, we had a retro. One of the things that was brought up was the sense that management felt that the team was not delivering as much as we could be. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the higher ups work in Perth, a good 3,452 KM away from Melbourne. Another was that a lot of the work the team deals with is experimental in nature: more R&D vs. product development (a large portion of it involves dealing with a lot of barely supported, and completely undocumented APIs for MacOS).
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Sheets in the washing machine. Estimated time remaining is 17 minutes. This means that they should be done in just over an hour.
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Argh, people really need to stop using Twitter threads as a substitute for blog posts. I don’t want to have to go to the Twitter website to read them, and it’s difficult to take a link to one and open it in my Twitter client of choice.
Please, just write a blog post.
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Interesting day in that I can legitimately say that the reason I’m watching YouTube videos of puppies is because of my job.
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As difficult as it is going through another lockdown here in Melbourne, it’s actually kind of reassuring. I found all this will-they, won’t-they talk of a lockdown more anxiety inducing than knowing one is coming.
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There seems to be lacking an emoji for expressing being in an agreement in something while also being resigned to the fact. Happy or sad would be too strong here. The best that I can come up with is confused 😕, but it doesn’t feel right either.
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If anyone is interested in watching the recorded sessions of Google I/O 2021, you can find the videos here. Google is usually pretty good at publishing them as a YouTube playlist but for some reason I didn’t find anything like that this year.
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Mozilla’s MDN web docs are pretty good at indicating which browser supports which web feature. But it would also be nice to see which browsers no longer require a deprecated feature. It would be nice to stop adding
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On the Souring Relationship Between Apple and its Developers
Listening to episode #430 of ATP yesterday, it was kind of shocking to hear the loss of good will experienced by the hosts towards Apple and their developer relations. I can’t say that I blame them though. Although John’s point about lawyers making the case for Apple is a good one, I do get the same feeling that Marco does about Apples opinion about developers, which is not a positive one.
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Feature request for Fastmail: the ability to setup a private RSS feed for a folder, so that emails within it can be read in a feed reader. Similar to the “the Feed” in Hey, but available within a feed reader of choice.
