Ross's Micro Blog

Speaking of gifts… My beautiful wife got me some Five Ten MTB shoes for my birthday. (Thanks to all who recommended!)

They did their work on the commute today!

Woo! Finally doing my “Learn to Climb” course. I have tied knots. I have belayed total strangers. I have climbed until my arms hurt (which isn’t much to be honest!)

Thank you to my wonderful family for this amazing gift.

I MUST be having a good day.

Not only did Google Meet work first time with no problems with two people I’ve never video called before, but I also managed to type “Wiltshire” first time without typing “Wiltshite” first!

Go me!!!

Me: I love mugs. Great, practical gifts with sentimental value that can tell a nice story or evoke good memories. I love mugs.

Also me: AAARGH I HAVE SO MANY FLIPPIN MUGS!!!!!

Top tip for parenting: a Voice Memos app is a great way to unintrusively (unlike video) record special moments with small children.

Yesterday my “Random Album” thing randomly brought me a 4-year-old “album” of chatter from my then-3-year-old. Beautiful!

Wishing I’d asked someone today:

“How you doing?”

Instead of:

“You alright?”

The latter feels loaded with expectation. Hard to say no to. The former is open.

I’d not noticed this before. I’m going to try to use the open question more in future.

I find myself being quite chilled but with a head full of ideas. And then being utterly confused about which ideas should be perused in my minimal spare time. I probably need to Marie Kondo some side projects. But they ALL bring joy!!

Many things have cycles. I predict that one day a regular light switch shall be marketed as:

– Needs no Wifi
– Needs no “hub”
– Needs no smartphone and app
– 100% secure and private
– Simple, 1-click operation

Everyone else gets “star of the week” at school for things like brilliant spelling and amazing phonics and wonderful mathematics. My child gets “star of the week” for drawing an enormous but perfectly-proportioned dinosaur in the school playground. 😃😂👏👏👏

Dilemma. I have two CANS of beer. One is 440ml of 6% IPA. One is 330ml of 7.1% “double brown ale” (the can just looks scary).

I think both will make me fall over.

Should I open one, the other, or neither?

Amazing when you re-visit a site you launched in 2013 with custom data import, complicated tables, and custom maps. And it STILL works so well – even the tables and maps are good on mobile. Amazing. And proud of my ancient work!!

Does anyone else get that feeling after being on a self catering holiday where you’ve lived with 4 bowls and 4 plates and 4 mugs and about 1/20th of your possessions and you get home and just want to Marie Kondo your whole house in an afternoon?

Wintle’s first law of recreational and fitness cycling:

Regardless of season or time of day, at the top of every moderate or steep climb, someone has lit a bonfire.

😷

Finally, FINALLY, I have a Gutenberg block that will print a list of pins imported from Pinboard into WordPress using my Sync Pinboard plugin.

Gosh that was hard work.

To be fair to JS: PHP/WordPress wasn’t entirely helpful either.

Honestly. I have been working on little side projects the last few days. JavaScript, in one form or another, has tripped me up at every step. Broken, unresolvable npm dependencies, deprecated packages, weird scoping issues.

Stuff for me to learn, for sure, but such hard work.

I don’t normally pay attention to my old statuses that Facebook drags up from the past, but this, from 8 years ago, is STILL a brilliant idea!

“I’ve decided to start an organisation like the Gideons that goes round hotels putting board games and packs of cards in the rooms :)”

Oh. The this is…

Finally feeling fit and time-free enough for this. Booked!!!

Climbing here we come!!

With huge thanks to my family for making this happen.

Seriously. Like. The queen should be having to going and picking someone to reluctantly do this job.

“Err…Boris? We’re a bit short of PM’s this month. Don’t suppose you’d mind stepping up would you? Just…you know…temporarily?”

No one should want it.

16 people?!?!

Did I hear 16 people want the Conservative leader + PM job?

Sixteen?

Why would you want it? It’s an impossible task.

Why do sixteen people want an impossible job playing a game that you can’t win with the risk being you trash the whole country?

Bonkers.