Category: Uncategorized

Back from holiday! Yay! So what was the story with the hire car?

Well. We had some credit with a hire car company from a booking we cancelled years ago. We needed something bigger than our EV for this trip as we were taking an extra passenger. So we used our credit to hire a Peugeot 3008 “crossover”-style car. Petrol. Automatic.

What did I hate about it, apart from being really noisy at low speed and the jolts of gear changes that we weren’t used to?

This hire car has been… fine. But it has SO many ridiculous design flaws. Tempted to write it up for posterity.

Gosh I have my filters set up well. Hardly a mention here. 🙈🙉👍

Working in marketing and eCommerce has taught me that I’m a bit of a weirdo.

1. Tiny UX tweaks will not affect my purchase. If I want to purchase something and the cart is just a little bit shit, I’m not gonna then go and buy something else.

2. I find cart reminder emails extremely annoying.

3. I will hunt down your pricing page if I it kills me. Moving the link to it will make it easier/harder, but I WILL find it.

And so on…

OK. This week I become a proper full-time EV zealot.

I have hired a petrol automatic for a week.

It’s crap. I hate it. It’s loud. It’s unresponsive. The brakes are harsh. Petrol is expensive and smells.

Its only redeeming feature is the range.

Everything else is worse.

(Hybrids probably represent a good half-way. But gosh I love my EV)

I am This Close to ordering a garden office/studio. Exciting!!!

Still freaks me out that “0” is falsey in PHP. In some ways that’s super clever. But in other ways it’s super annoying.

Proper type hints save the day regardless!

I've been talking a LOT at work about abstractions lately. They're probably all bored of me. And yet, abstractions are SO important.

In code, the right abstraction at the right time is such an enabler!

Darnit. Both Seagulls AND other vehicles using my car as target practice today.

I'm fine. The car is fine. A minor incident. Just annoying.

And it's covered in bird poop!!

Did some fun stuff on my personal laptop today and YAY it's SO frickin nice to have MY tools and preferences. 🙌

I used to get excited by big tech announcements. But now it's all just so uninteresting. Is this because I'm old? Is it because there's just SO MANY keynotes and product launches now that it's too hard to keep up? Or… has it actually become boring and mundane for others too?

I’m loving all the retro gaming and emulation stuff that’s happening in a big way now (yeah I know it’s not new).

Questions:

– is there any official way to buy ROMs? Will the game owners ever catch on to this? In happy to pay!
– are downloaded ROMs safe? Can they do anything bad?

So here’s a thing.

I like structured communication. Document templates. Emails with headings and executive summaries. Bulleted lists. Meeting agendas.

But… it occurred to me today…

Is this a generational thing?

I really want to get others in my life to see the benefits of it.

But are younger generations (I’m mid forties) just not into this stuff? Is it not actually beneficial for them because they are so adept at unstructured comms?