Some mornings… you just gotta make a whole damn litre of coffee. (for iced coffee purposes, of course; and definitely not just for me!)

Demmy would like to know why I haven’t turned off the UK’s heatwave yet. 🥵

Iced coffee and air con. Possibly the only things that’ll keep me sane, working in the UK’s current heatwave (especially with the schools closed and kids sent home!).

Ernie Smith from Tedium wrote about Matt's Script Archive, which back in the 1990s was a big part of how and why I learned to code in Perl. Let's take a trip down memory lane...

A hundred and thirty days since we got flooded out of our home, and remedial works are starting to ramp up. Today an electrician, tracing a fault that's developed in the wiring, cut a hole through a wall to repair it and threw up so much dust that it's hard to see anything! I was nearby, helping a restoration company assess the damage to the ride-on lawnmower that was in the garage and whose motor hasn't started since (the garage saw some of the deepest water that hit us), when I heard the fire alarm and went to check on them. All is well: we don't need to add 'fire' to the list of disasters befalling our house this year!

Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately "get it". Like: that's a cool new feature, I can already see how it'll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve accessibility, or allow me to do something new. Other times...

A morning meander around the local (mostly virtual) caches under the guise of checking the condition of the West End Live queue, while the rest of my group enjoyed a lie-in, eventually brought me to take a seat alongside this iconic bear. TFTC!

A morning meander around the local (mostly virtual) caches under the guise of checking the condition of the West End Live queue, while the rest of my group enjoyed a lie-in, eventually brought me to take a seat alongside this iconic bear. TFTC!

Approaching from the West I was foiled by the glare of the rising sun in my efforts to claim this fascinating monument from afar and eventually had to walk all the way past it to line up my photo!

Initially thought I'd be able to find this one without the hint, but when I couldn't get fix to closer than 8m I took a peep at it and was instantly aware of where to search. Soon the cache was in hand and I was back on my way. TFTC!

Stood around for a bit reading about David Bowie while I waited for the waitstaff -on their pre-work fag break down the alleyway - stopped their muggling and went inside. Glad I came early while it was quiet here! TFTC.

Can't do the physical today, but scooping a pic with the virtual during a morning walk around the neighbourhood.

After nine hours on my feet yesterday queuing for and then attending the first day of West End Live in Trafalgar Square, I somehow decided that the best thing for my poor legs would be to get up early while everybody else slept in, to come walk around and find a virtual or two. Right around the corner from my hotel, this was the first!

Star network topologies are more common, but you can still occasionally find these…

Hanging out in London’s theatreland, attracting double-takes (and a handful of thumbs-ups!) for my t-shirt…

The hours of queuing pays off! Let’s go!

Back of the queue for West End Live. It’s gonna be a long wait, but hopefully worth it!

Off to London for a couple of days of musical theatre fun! Don’t wait up!

A few weeks ago I called out a scammer after they asked me to advertise their free deed poll service (which is like mine... except it harvests personal information and provides an inferior output). It's pretty bad... but after talking to its creator I'm no longer certain that it's a scam. What do I do next?

This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! Day 1: Senior management ask me about a proposed change. I tell them it’s not worth doing. They tell […]

125 days since our house flooded, and the damaged furniture fittings, floors, underfloors, and now inner walls have been torn out. Over a third of a year since we had to move out, I’m optimistic that perhaps, at last, reconstruction work is almost ready to begin. It’s a long, slow process. And there’s clearly a […]

🎶 It starts with sausage, A hot dog in a bun. One simple sausage, Put some mustard on one… Is it just me, or are (sinner) Sir Pentious‘s colours reminiscent of a hot dog?

I guess it’s sweet that the dog has decided that I’m not to leave my home office without her noticing. But when the naps right behind my wheelie chair I worry she’s going to get her paws run over!

With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk's career. Wouldn't it be nice if the world's first trillionaire also happened to be the world's last trillionaire?

An excellent article by Matthias Ott describes Google's promised AI-first search experience, which dispenses with search results entirely and just uses an LLM (plus sponsored content seamlessly woven in), keeping you entirely within the search giant's ecosystem and minimising how much they cite their sources. As you might imagine, I have some Opinions too.

Despite being parody, diamond geezer's new age-gating - which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn't actually block access to the site - somehow perfectly straddles the line between "invasive" and "ineffective"... in exactly the same way that I expect the UK's legal implementation will manage in a year or two.

This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! This weekend, I (a) carried a 1970s Yamaha organ around the place, (b) took a beginner lesson in Argentine […]

Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It’s still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much!

A conversation with another openly-polyamorous blogger led us to ask one another why we don't write about our relationship structure more-often. In my case, the answer is simple: my relationships are boring, and that's a good thing! But here's your chance to tell me I'm wrong...

This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who's researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand. I'm seeing more and more interest in this period - even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it - as the countercultural "web renaissance" tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript. Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.