One of my dog's favourite games is 'My Ball', in which my role is to want the toy that she is guarding. It's all about the motivation, you see! Which is like some of the games I used to play with our eldest, when she was a toddler, I realise. | Continue reading

Our family tradition on New Year’s Day is to go to the Rollright Stones. Legend has it that you can’t count the standing stones and get the same answer twice. This year the younger child counted 37, the elder 67… so wide a difference that you can see how one might ascribe a mysti … | Continue reading

This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip). It worked out pretty well. Micro-recipe: 1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done. 2. Meanwhile, make a batt … | Continue reading

Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me? Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out… | Continue reading

The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast. | Continue reading

On a midnight train back from a London theatre trip, somehow the 8-year-old is still awake (and reading comics to me!); the 10-year-old is understandably wiped-out. A fun night out though! | Continue reading

Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I’m not sure…) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange. verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire … | Continue reading

Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I'm continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent. | Continue reading

At first I thought “Christmas post” had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild. | Continue reading

Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them. Because these were the "lick and stick" kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I've been unable to taste anything except glue ever since. | Continue reading

You know you’ve stayed up too late when… the milkman arrives and hands you your milk. | Continue reading

This week, I allowed myself to come perilously close to my burnout point (you would never guess I was on sabbatical, would you?), but I'm proud to say I noticed before I hit a point of catastrophe. Now I just need to course-correct and stop picking up 'new' things for a few days. … | Continue reading

Yesterday I achieved one of my primary sabbatical goals and moved Three Rings' primary servers to a new datacentre and a new architecture. But while the visible part happened yesterday, the whole thing's been months in the making and builds upon the effort of an entire team of de … | Continue reading

When I was ten, I'd have killed to have a secret compartment hidden in my bedroom bookshelves. And once she'd seen the one I built for my own room, earlier this year, my ten-year-old predictably wanted one of her own, too. Luckily I had the spare parts and, now, the experience to … | Continue reading

Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second. Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, w … | Continue reading

It's International Volunteer Day, and thanks to being on sabbatical I got to spend most of the day volunteering with Three Rings. I liveblogged everything I got up to in a series of notes to try to shine a light on what volunteering (in a developer/devops role) with Three Rings c … | Continue reading

For my final bit of Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day, I’m working on improving the UI of a new upcoming feature: a spreadsheet-like page that makes it easy for administrators to edit the details of many volunteers simultaneously (all backed by the usual l … | Continue reading

Even when it’s technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks). Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team voluntee … | Continue reading

My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn’t all technical work. It’s also time to process the incoming postal mail. Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren’t, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our h … | Continue reading

As well as the programming tasks I’m working on for Three Rings this International Volunteer Day, I’m also doing a little devops. We’ve got a new server architecture rolling out next week, and I’m tasked with ensuring that the logging on them meets our security standards. Each se … | Continue reading

Not every code review is fireworks, but most Three Rings changes come from the actual needs of the voluntary organisations that Three Rings supports. Some of our users were confused by the way the Admin > Roles page was laid out, so one of our volunteers wrote an improved version … | Continue reading

Good news! It turns out that the new code to fix the mail merge fields in Three Rings doesn’t introduce an inconsistency with established behaviour. It was important to check, but it turns out all is well. I touched bases with a fellow volunteer on Slack. Three Rings volunteers p … | Continue reading

My first task this International Volunteer Day is to test a pull request that aims to fix a bug with Three Rings’ mail merge fields functionality. As it’s planned to be a hotfix (direct into production) we require extra rigor and more reviewers than code that just goes into the m … | Continue reading

Happy International Volunteer Day! Volunteering rocks. As I'm on sabbatical, I'm in the lucky position of being able to spend most of the day on a volunteer project very close to my heart: Three Rings. I'll be posting throughout the day about some of the different tasks I take on … | Continue reading

Each year, we encourage our two children to each select exactly one new bauble to add to our tree. The result is a decoration that's a celebration of the changing tastes and interests of our two kinds: a mismatched, discordant, crazy mixture of colours and shapes, but in which ea … | Continue reading

mgx shows off a cute use of Javascript to make a fun blog post post more-fun, all the while helping to keep the Internet fun and weird. | Continue reading

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can’t get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it. Ah well, what’s a chef to do? 🤷🍷 | Continue reading

Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village’s hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning. | Continue reading

I've blogged a total of 219 posts spanning 99 consecutive days of blogging, a personal best by a long stretch. | Continue reading

In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks. In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion. | Continue reading

About twenty years ago, I spent three hours playing I-Spy in a broken-down elevator. And in doing so, I learned two things about my friend Fiona. | Continue reading

I’m leaving Ireland a day late, from the wrong airport, and with one fewer functioning arm than I anticipated. It’s been quite the ride. I’ll be glad to get home. (for those that are concerned: I’ve damaged my shoulder, possibly while slipping down a hill in search of a geocache … | Continue reading

Sooo… I’m in Dublin. I missed me flight at Knock airport, which turns out to have been the only plane leaving that tiny airport today. So I arranged a flight from Dublin tomorrow, extended my car rental and arranged to drop it off in the capital’s airport instead, and zipped over … | Continue reading

This checkin to GC8XWKX Shamrock #20 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. My mum and I have been visiting Ireland on a geohashing & geocaching expedition. We’d spotted this shamrock shape but it wasn’t in our operating zone so we didn’t get a chance … | Continue reading

This checkin to GC8E8A0 Challenge 💖 Virtual x 15 💖 Country x 5 💖 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I’ve never much gone for ‘challenge caches’. Mostly they just bug me when I fail to filter them off my map and only end up r … | Continue reading

A sixth Irish geohashing trip in Ireland spelled disaster. The hashpoint itself was easy, but we missed our flight back to the UK and ended up having to road-trip our way coast-to-coast to get back to somewhere we could catch a plane in the morning... | Continue reading

I’ve only been driving in Ireland for several days, so less than 100% of the iconography of the signage makes sense to me instantly, for now. But this one’s a complete mystery to me. Is this warning joggers than tiny cars might bounce off their heads? Or is it exhorting distant s … | Continue reading

This checkin to GC9QNY4 NFCache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Despite having been hidden as recently as 2022, this “feels” like an old-school cache. A non-trivial offset, a real scramble through the terrain to find it, and a generous-sized con … | Continue reading

This checkin to GC6TZ1G CachePoint reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. After a boat tour of the bay and a delightful late lunch, my mum and I came out here to find this cache as the last of three muggles present were packing up. TFTC! | Continue reading

A fifth geohashing trip in Ireland for me and my mum was foiled when I couldn't find anybody who'd take my money in exchange for driving us to a random spot out in the sea. We took a boat tour but it didn't come close enough to score. | Continue reading