Posts from 2021

30 Dec 2021

Review of 2021: highs and lows

An end-of-year blog post to try and get myself back into the habit of writing again. 2021 has been about the same length as all the previous years I’ve been alive, and has had its fair share of challenges and happy memories. Bird of the year: Golden Eagle Our family’s staycation megatour of the Outer Hebrides in our campervan Beyoncé had a lot of incredible high points. The actual high point was 528m above sea level when we all made it up Tòdun on Harris.

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07 Sep 2021

Sparking a thought

I heard today that someone I work with was struck by lightning! They are fine. A peculiar feeling has sprung up inside me: I really want to know what a lightning strike feels like. Not to the extent that I am going to go out and seek electrocution, for obvious reasons. It’s a mixture of curiosity and awe with quite a lot of envy. Mostly I’d like to be able to tell that story first hand, I think.

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05 Apr 2021

No power tools or tools kept in this van

Seen on the back of a van a while back: an inverse pedantic notice. The set of all tools includes the set of power tools, right? Save yourself some words! On a Venn diagram, there is nothing in the “power tools” set which isn’t also in the “tools” set. Then again, it might be better represented as an Euler diagram. I particularly like this example of an Euler diagram: British Isles Euler diagram - in fact it was while researching the overlaps between British Isles and United Kingdom that I first entered the set of people who realise that lots of so-called Venn diagrams are actually Euler diagrams.

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02 Mar 2021

An escape room for developer teams

I can’t help it: I have an insatiable desire to program computers to do things. My latest hobby project pretty much assumes that others do, too. In response to covid-imposed remoteness, seeing dev teams struggle with coherence and the strain that teams get subjected to in such circumstances, I built a thing. I’d had the idea for a little while, and I might well have missed the boat here (lockdown has been full on, my coding time limited), but hey.

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28 Feb 2021

Sula Sauce

Heinz have hit a sweet spot with this product in our house. That’s right: another high entropy cupboard product. Or should that be fridge product? No longer does Iris have to mash two sauces together to create her world famous “Sula Sauce”. I already have a world view that divides food into “better with mayonnaise” and “other” so I am pretty much right in the traction beam here. Iris shares my love for the white stuff and first tried mixing it with ketchup years ago, so the big corporations are playing catch up here.

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13 Jan 2021

Scribble school

As part of a covid lockdown, we have already had a remote Christmas and for lots of people schools are closed at the moment. We have two full-time worker parents in our family and that means “screen schooling” is all too prevalent. Recently we have launched an experiment with my parents: I thought it worth a write up. A lot of what I could find online was either aimed at teachers running classes, or very basic tech grandparenting (“try a video call instead of using your telephone”!

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