• Walked a different way to work today. The detour was only a couple of blocks but it was actually quite stimulating seeing an area of the the city I hardly know. Refreshing.

  • Day 10: train #mbapr

    Velocity trains at the platforms of South Cross station, with a Metro train departing in the background
  • Go to prod early because you never know what surprises you’ll encounter when you deploy (cough Cloud Formation cough).

  • Had a crummy afternoon at work today. Had to make some fixes that were quite urgent, and forgot to verify something. Good new is that when I verified it this evening, it worked as expected: no nasty surprises or bugs. So relieved! ๐Ÿ˜Œ

    Everything’s coming up Leon. ๐Ÿ™Œ

  • Getting in line for the cafรฉ to open.

    A pigeon in front of closed shutters over a shop

    Actually, this pigeon is more patient than I am. I decided to go somewhere else.

  • Day 9: crispy

    I guess you could describe these autumn leaves as crispy. Well, maybe a couple of weeks ago you could. With all the recent rain we’ve had, I guess they’ve gone soggy now. #mbapr

    Close-up of brown autumn leaves in a garden amongst green plants
  • Dealing with money is annoying. Dealing with money using Go’s big.Rat type? Really annoying.๐Ÿ˜ฎโ€๐Ÿ’จ

  • Six Appeal #9

    โฌœโฌœโฌœ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจโฌœ โœ”๏ธ
    ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ โœ”๏ธ
    ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ ๐Ÿšซ
    ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ ๐Ÿšซ
    ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ๐ŸŸจ ๐Ÿšซ
    ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸฉ๐ŸŸฉ โญ

    3 minutes, 16 seconds - total score: 704

    Apparently the correct answers are real words.

  • Day 8: prevention

    An ounce of this? Well, not quite. I can’t prevent myself getting sick abroad, but I try to take a few things to save myself needing to go to the chemist. This idea came from my previous job, which took quite a lot of effort preventing people getting sick while travelling. #mbapr

    An small blue bag, opened to reveal a bunch of over the counter medication like cold and flu tablets, pain killers, etc.
  • Small Calculator Commands

    This page documents the extra commands from Small Calculator. These were taken from source code, pretty much as is, but styled to suite the web, and any spelling mistakes fixed. These were retrievable from the application itself by typing “help” follow by the command. Available Commands The list of available commands are as follows BLOCK <statements> Executes a block of statements HELP [topic] Display help on topic DEFFNC <function> Defines a new function ECHO <text> Displays text on the line ECHOEXPR <cmd> Executes a command and displays the result EXEC <file> Executes a file of commands FUNCTIONS Displays all predefined functions IF <pred> Does a command on condition RETURN <val> Sets the return value RETURNEXPR <cmd> Sets the return value to the result of <cmd> Type "HELP <command>" to see infomation on a command BLOCK BLOCK {<cmd1>} {<cmd2>} . Continue reading โ†’

  • Small Calculator

    Date: Unknown, but probably around 2005 Status: Retired Give me Delphi 7, a terminal control, and an expression parser, and of course I’m going to build a silly little REPL program. I can’t really remember why I though this was worth spending time on, but I was always interested in little languages (still am), and I guess I though having a desk calculator that used one was worth having. I was using a parser library I found on Torry’s Delphi Pages (the best site at the time to get free controls for Delphi) for something else, and after getting a control which simulated a terminal, I wrote a very simple REPL loop which used the two. Continue reading โ†’

  • Day 7: well-being

    “An apple a day,” and all that. Kinda wish I liked apples more than I do (I don’t really like them that much). #mbapr

    Supermarket display of apples for sale.
  • ๐Ÿ”— Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

    A really great read.

    Iโ€™ve never been on a cruise. This, plus the many jokes Iโ€™ve heard from comedians that have worked cruises, is probably the closest experience Iโ€™ll ever get to cruising. After reading it, itโ€™s definitely not for me.

  • Oof, glad I bought an unbrella. Even if itโ€™s a $10 piece of junk with half the stretchers broken. At least half of me will be dry after the walk home. โ˜”๏ธ

  • ๐ŸŽฅ I’ve released a video tutorial on how to use and configure the Sidebar For Tiny Theme. This walks through the process of creating and using a custom Micro.blog theme to configure the sidebar with custom HTML. Hope others find it useful.

  • It strikes me as odd seeing articles from those that continue to mourn the loss of Twitter and complain about itโ€™s owner, only to go on and continue to use Twitter.

    Of course, Iโ€™m the one that continues to read these articles. So whoโ€™s really the odd person here? ๐Ÿ˜

  • Day 6: windy

    Sails of modernity. #mbapr

    Modern power generating windmills in a field.
  • Day 5: serene

    The Remarkables, Queenstown, NZ. Taken March 2013. #mbapr

    The Remarkables, Queenstown, NZ with a bit of vegetation in the foreground and Lake Wakatipu in the middle.
  • Vivaldi can learn a thing or two from Safari about being able to copy and paste a HTML table into a spreadsheet. Safari does quite well here:

    Screenshot of Numbers for MacOS of a well-formatted paste of the AWS RDS DB instance details table copied from Safari

    Vivaldi, not so much:

    Screenshot of Numbers for MacOS of a badly-formatted paste of the AWS RDS DB instance details table copied from Vivaldi. Instead of the cells of a row from the original table being formatted as a row, each cell appears on a new row
  • Self-Driving Bicycle for The Mind

    While listening to the Stratchery interview with Hugo Berra, a thought occurred to me. Berra mentioned that Xaomi was building an EV. Not a self-driving one, mind you: this one has a steering wheel and peddles. He made the comment that were Apple to actually go through with releasing a car, it would look a lot like what Xaomi has built. I haven’t seen either car project myself so I’ll take his word for it. Continue reading โ†’

  • Day 4: foliage

    Spot the visitors. #mbapr

    A photo of green leaves against a blue sky with corellas eating in the branches
  • From @jarrod:

    Youโ€™re likely familiar with the Navy SEAL mantra of โ€œSlow is smooth, and smooth is fast.โ€ I propose one more line: โ€œAnd fast is fun.โ€

    We’re going through a crunch at the moment, taking out a fair bit of tech debt in what we’re building. And it occurred to me that going slow might be slow now, but it’ll allow you to go fast later. On the other hand, you can go fast now, but it’ll slow you down in the long run. That tech debt will come due eventually.

    So I guess the choice is, when do you want to go slow? Now or later?

  • I should stop trying to multitask. What happens is that I kick off something that takes some time, and instead of just wait for it, I start work on something else only to forget the original task I started first. I should just wait the few minutes it takes for that task to finish.

  • ๐Ÿ“บ Andor: Series 1 (2022)

    Quick review of Andor: Series 1 (2022), created by Tony Gilroy. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm generally a fan of Star Wars but the level of story telling that went into this made it so much better. It's not perfect โ€” Andor's arc felt a little fragmented (he was sent to prison forโ€ฆ reasons? That had nothing to do with the garrison?) โ€” but it didn't detract from the whole. Other than the plot, the acting, casting, scoring, etc. were all excellent. Definitely recommend. Rated: great
  • Release version 1.1.1 of Sidebar for Tiny Theme. You’ll need to upgrade Tiny Theme to version 2.7.4 or later to use it, but the good news is that it’s no longer replacing any templates of Tiny Theme itself. It’s all now working with hooks, which is a much nicer way of doing things (thanks, @mtt).