I like beer. I like the Internet. What if I could get beer using the Internet?!?! A few years ago I purchased a mixed crate of beer online. I unticked all the checkboxes for marketing messages - but incautiously allowed them to send me special offers. Every couple of months, they'd send me an email offering discount beer. And I'd ignore it. Mostly because I was still slowly working my way…
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After spending 2020 watching every episode of Frasier, we thought we'd binge watch its predecessor sitcom "Cheers". It's a tough watch. It obeys all the familiar tropes of a sitcom - a static location, characters drawn in broad strokes, and whacky banter. On paper, it's great. But on screen... Look, let's get this out of the way - Cheers is pretty funny! We're only on the first 3 seasons, but…
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One Friday last year, I posted some farewell messages in Slack. Removed myself from a bunch of Trello cards. Had a quick video call with the team. And then logged out of my laptop. I walked out of my home office and sat in my garden with a beer. The following Monday I opened the door to the same office. I logged in to the same laptop. I logged into a new Slack - which wasn't remarkably…
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Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this: Launch a product to great fanfare Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨ Stop answering emails and pull requests If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it. Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The val…
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Andy Weir has hit on a winning formula. To wit: Somehow I, an otherwise unremarkable man, has to SAVE ALL OF HUMANITY! OH NO! Something is BROKEN! I'll use SCIENCE to fix it! Pop culture reference. OH NO! Something else is broken. I'll use SCIENCE to fix it! The science didn't work!!! ... and repeat until (spoilers) the day is saved. Look, this is basically the same as The Martian. And, you…
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Like all good geeks, I have far too many domain names that I acquired for interesting projects which never took off. My latest is a bit different though. https://⏻.ga/🔗 That's "Unicode Power Symbol Dot Gabon". Because why not. Regular readers will know that I helped get ⏻ and several power symbols into Unicode. When I do talks about this, I usually refer to them as Emoji because, to most peo…
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This guy's probably right - but there's no need for him to be such a dick about it. The book is about the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis which, simply put, says that the language people use changes the way they experience the world. McWhorter thinks this is bullshit - and goes through his reasoning in painstaking detail. It occasionally veers into personal attacks, which I found a little odd. K. D…
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About 2.5 years ago I proposed a small accessibility improvement to WordPress. It has taken a bit longer than I'd hoped but, as of WordPress 6.1 it has been merged! Now, if you're using the Classic editor, you'll get a larger and resizeable box for entering alt text. Because the text entry uses <textarea> most browsers will also show any spelling errors. Good spelling is essential for people …
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(Welcome to #NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month. I'm publishing a new blog post every day in November.) My employer encourages employees to have "career conversations" with their line manager. And I hate it. I don't resent them for making me participate, and it's probably good for me to engage in a little introspection. But that doesn't mean I can't whine like a petulant toddler. Since my …
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So, farewell Jodie! What a brilliant Doctor she has been. I started this series of blog posts four years ago to celebrate her becoming ther new Doctor. As ever, I've identified all of the mobile phones used in Doctor Who. This blog post goes through the 2022 specials - three cracking stories to round out Jodie's tenure. Eve of The Daleks Classic time-loop episode where - for once - a mobile…
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Back in June, I noticed a pretty insidious piece of Twitter spam. The "twoo.fun" website was claiming that it could tell you who visited your Twitter profile. That's pretty enticing! It's what LinkedIn uses to drive its premium product. Perhaps it would tell me if a potential employer was looking at my profile? Or if my crush kept visiting it!??!?!? So people visited the website and signed in…
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The end-game of my MSc is almost in sight! I've written up 6 assignments. Now all I need to do is write a 10,000 word dissertation in the form of a Major Project Report. Oh, and go through an End-Point-Assessment with my portfolio to make sure I actually know what I'm talking about. But, back to the report. I need to write a 1,000 word literature review. The only problem is… I've never done o…
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