But anyway, I’m currently blogging from a Holiday Inn at London Luton Airport. At 3am I gotta get up, pack back up, get the car over to long-term parking, and get the shuttle to the airport. Hopefully by 3:30am-ish. Gonna get checked in, stop by duty free, and get a bottle of single malt whisky for the folks in Skopje.

Hope this week goes well. I’m nervous - not just about going to North Macedonia for the first time and meeting people face-to-face for the first time, but because I’ll be stuck in an office for a full-on 8 hours a day for 4 days! Heh heh. Who does that? I’m not used to it anymore!

Anyways, I’m off to bed early, so as always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice. And, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!

Chris

Stuff I Did

• Emailed an artist about a potential badger tattoo.
• Picked up a separate Apple charger and wire to keep in the bedroom. During the day working from home, I’ll move from the sofa, to my desk, to the bed, round and round depending on how my legs feel. I need a charger everywhere.
• At work, put my impossible Jira ticket to the side to pick up more useful and urgent work integrating our AWS accounts with something called Secureframe. They provide a one-click CloudFormation integration, but the consensus was that we’d rather do it with Terraform - so that’s what I’m doing. Made great progress on it on Friday and should finish it on Monday.
• I also figured out how to best game the daily timesheets work forces me to do. The trick, is to log all the daily agile rituals, meetings, Git PR reviews, and time logging itself - for the entire month - at the beginning of the month. When you’ve eaten 2.5 to 3.5 hours a day with that, you just give all the rest of the time to which ever 1 ticket you’re working on daily.
• Suffered. I’m in quite a lot of daily pain in my feet, legs, and hips. Could be nerve neuropathy caused by type 2 diabetes, but that’s under pretty good control now so I don’t understand why it’s getting worse? Could be plain arthritis? Could be something more sinister. I can’t figure out what makes the pain come or go so I don’t even know what to tell my GP.
• Started taking iron tablets (with B12 and C) as an experiment. Seeing if this improves my energy and cold fingers. Might be helping?
• The missus bought me 2 new pairs of Levis jeans. Since early summer I’ve lost like 20lbs and none of my old ones fit anymore. Might sell them?

What I Read or Watched

• Earlier in the week I was trying to find a good example of a resumé / cv marked up with the h-resume microformat. Probably for no particuarly good reason as support for it seems almost non-existent but I already keep a html copy so a few extra html classes won’t hurt anthing. I ended up coming across Ben Werdmuller’s Narrative Resumé. The microformatting was spot on but the narrative bit was the fascinating part. Building a resumé as a compelling story… There could be some value in that for the right clients!
• Watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”. It’s arguably the worst one of the bunch with so much CGI and bad acting, but Javier Bardem is my favourite actor in the world, Kaya Scodelario is stunning, and Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa redeemed the whole movie.

Changes To My Website

• Bumped the version of Hugo that I use, and I bumped the container OS it uses as Alpine’s had a minor update.
• Added a recipe for Chai that was marked up via h-recipe microformat.
• Wrote a tiny piece of javascript that pulls a line of advice from my personal collection of quotes and displays it on the front page. I’m a bit proud of that bit.

What I Learned

• I’m still REALLY bad at Javascript programming. I’ll never Grok it.

Pretty things I Saw

• Many fluffy / chunky cats, good sunsets, lighting.

What I Ate

• I’m down this week on Kimchi. From a ton the week before to just two forks this week. Still obsessed though!
• The only thing of note, is that we retried eating at the Chinese place within visible distance of our house. Since it opened like 20ish years ago, we only ate there like 3 times. And each time, the food tasted like burnt grease and made us ill the next day. Thing is, we noticed that it had been redecorated and different people were working there. I’m happy to report, it’s under new ownership, the food is fresh and delicious, and we weren’t ill. Win!

New Music I Listened To

• You don’t get to hear modern rock in the United Kingdom. It’s just generally not played on normal radio here. So, I thought I might dig through Spotify and I’ll definitely be making that a part of my weekly routine. It’s a few years old but I really enjoyed this:
  Shinedown - A Symptom Of Being Human

Nature Notes

• The season seems to be starting to turn towards Autumn. Temperatures are falling, it’s getting far wetter, the wild blackberry brambles are starting to not look their best, and the missus and I are starting our yearly debate about when we can turn the heating on.
• I need to start closing down the allotment for the season. That means pulling weeks, rotovating the soil, and thinking about next year. I’m - hoping - it will be my final season. I love having an allotment and expected to do it right up to and beyond retirement, but my body isn’t coping and climate change is making growing food a lot harder. Something’s got to give. But, I’ll give next year everything I’ve got. All for one and one for all.

Win of the Week

• After work one evening I was just randomly doom scrolling across the Indieweb and came across a post by Tankek advising people to run their posts / site through a link checker before federating. I thought: “why not?”, and did it. Good gods! My webmentions link had a typo in it - so I’ve clearly not been able to get any webmentions for a while at least. I made sure to say thanks!

Looking Forward To

• We’re spending a weekend in the highlands in Scotland soon.
• Seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice perhaps on Friday with the family.
• My new Pixel Watch 3 should come this week.
• There’s an Apple event and I hope they announce the Ipad Mini 7.
• An electrician should pitch up on Tuesday to refit our wired smoke alarm. The old one expired and a battery powered one is in its place. Check your smoke alarms folks! They all have an expiry date.