Recursive Words

The life and times of a work-from-home software and web developer as he fights a house, four women, two cats, idiocy, apathy and procrastination on an almost daily basis.

Recent Posts

  • Dance like nobody is watching

    Dance like nobody is watching

    While everybody else was doing other things this evening I found myself spending a rare evening with my youngest daughter – just the two of us. I was pretty determined we should spend some time together, rather than fall into the all-too-common rut of her sloping off to her bedroom to chat with friends on her own.

    I ordered a pizza from Dominos, put beer in the fridge, and turned the record player on.

    While sharing a can of already cold beer we found in the fridge and waiting for the pizza to arrive we went on something of a musical journey together – and turned the volume up to 11.

    We’re never usually allowed to turn music up. There’s a saying about mice playing while the cat’s away, isn’t there? Well these mice figured out how to put Spotify through the record player speakers.

    Oh the fun we had.

    Can I just say – if you didn’t already know – the first track on Elton’s new album “The Rose of Laura Nyro” sounds much better turned up to 11 on a decent sound system. I think it hit home with my accomplice too.

    The pizza arrived, and I handed over control of the music system to my young(er) charge – showing her how to connect to it via Bluetooth. With hindsight, this was probably a mistake.

    Within minutes we transitioned from Lady Gaga, Lewis Capaldi, and Jess Glynne to the Witch Doctor, the Macarena, and Cha Cha Slide.

    In a fit of idiocy – more to make my daughter laugh than anything – I allowed her to try to teach me the Cha Cha Slide. Oh how we laughed. Proper laughter. Mostly at me, not with me, but I didn’t mind. Let’s just say I’m never going to be a dancer (and it’s a bit late to consider a career change anyway). I wonder if it’s possible to have three left feet?

    Of course I already knew the dances – but she didn’t have to know that.

    We clowned around for a couple of hours, and had so much fun. It’s funny, isn’t it – we could have gone to the pub for dinner and pretended we were socialites. Instead we stayed home, ate pizza, played music, danced, and laughed at each other until our sides hurt.

    A few minutes after going our separate ways I overheard her talking to her sister on the phone.

    “We just had the best time – listening to music, eating pizza, and drinking beer. You should have seen Dad trying to do Cha Cha Slide”.

    A huge smile spread across my face.

    In years gone by, she would have scoffed at any of the music I subjected her to. This evening she listened and enjoyed. I think she’s turned the corner from hating things just because they’re “something my parents like”. This evening she re-discovered Madonna, Wilson Phillips, Shania Twain, Kylie, and more.

    She watched the “Cherish” video in absolute silence with half a slice of pizza in her hand – utterly captivated.

  • Brave New World

    Brave New World

    After conducting all manner of covert experiments in recent days and weeks – driven by a creeping disdain for the continued and increasingly brazen commoditisation of readers by the major online publishing platforms – I’ve pulled the trigger on a somewhat seismic change.

    My personal journal – recently called “Recursive Words” – is leaving Substack. I’ve paid for a year’s worth of hosting at Ghost, and have migrated this years posts over. I’ve also migrated my wonderful subscribers – if you were receiving emails before, you’ll still receive them. You don’t have to do anything.

    In recent months I’ve received quite a bit of feedback from readers that Substack was increasingly doing the hard sell on them – pushing to install an app, then filling that app with unwanted content, and subsequently lighting their phone up with notifications. It doesn’t help that Substack has become popular among the celebrity crowd – who have legions of agents monetising everything they say and do. Their orbits are incredibly destructive.

    In many ways I find myself tilting at the blogging platforms as Don Quixote might have. I could self-host Ghost if I wanted to. That they have a hosted service, for a fee, means you are not subject to any spam. All you’ll get on the internet is my words, and all you’ll get in your email is my words. It’s that simple. That’s why I’ve done it.

    You’ll notice in the new blog that you can become a member – all this means is your email address is stored so you’ll receive an update when I publish anything. It also means you can comment. When you login to the blog, it will ask for your email address – then email you a link that logs you in. No passwords. Once you’re logged in, you can comment. It’s as simple as that. Your email address is never given out, shared, or exposed.

    I like simple things.

    It will surprise nobody that I tried out WordPress (again), Squarespace, and Wix en-route to deciding on a platform. I have opinions on all of them, should anybody ask. In truth, I had wished both Squarespace and Wix had been better than they turned out – but here we are. I even tried Jekyll out a few weeks ago (a lunchtime I won’t get back in a hurry).

    Anyway.

    I’ll stop waffling on – blog posts about blogging and online publishing platforms are insufferable at the best of times. Let’s just say “I’ve moved house”, and leave it at that.

    Did I tell you I bought a Nintendo Switch? I have a little guy living in Animal Crossing now. My other half reliably informs me that I need to put more effort in. He’s still living in a tent, and sleeping on a camp bed. He’s also going to be in debt to Tom Nook for the term of his natural life.

  • Gone but not forgotten

    Gone but not forgotten

    While tinkering with something on the internet this evening – and shaking my head at my own idiocy when it comes to not only finding rabbit holes, but actively digging them – I started reading old blog posts. Snapshots of my life from years gone by.

    While reading, I happened upon a post from the distant past about a new friend I had made on the internet, and how rarely that seemed to happen any more. I smiled, and wished I could step back and time and reassure myself that no – it still doesn’t happen – all these years later.

    It got me thinking – wondering really – about the old friend – so I pulled on my pretend backpack and set off across the World Wide Web to perhaps find them. A few minutes later I met a “domain expired” page, and my heart sank. The internet equivalent of turning up at your best friend’s house to discover their house boarded up.

    A voice on my shoulder whispered words to the effect of “shouldn’t their blog still live on a subdomain?” – so I tried out a few different versions of their name. On the third try, the once mighty WordPress must have felt sorry for me, and in the manner of a postman that used to deliver post to the address I was trying, suggested I try the address written on a scrap of paper handed to me.

    And that’s how their goodbye message appeared on my screen. A wonderfully written post about their blogging journey – sharing thoughts, stories and adventures – that had come to it’s natural conclusion.

    My heart didn’t so much sink, as audibly thump into the floor.

    I continued reading, and got a bit emotional. I was mentioned – in the final post that nobody could see any more. Even though neither of us had reached out for quite some time, I had not been forgotten.

    Of course then I set about finding a way – any way – to let them know I had read their words. To let them know they will be missed. To let them know that I had not forgotten either. I received word back a few minutes later, and began pulling myself back together.

    I’m a silly sod sometimes.

    It has got me thinking though – about how rare it is to find a friend on the internet these days – and how much we should protect, cherish, and nurture it when it happens. As the speed of everything increases, and as so many draws for our attention surround us, it seems to have become increasingly rare for anybody to notice anyone any more.

    We’re all one click away from being forgotten. One click away from being swallowed in the torrent that passes on each side of the islands we stand upon.

    You know the funny thing? The “last post” was posted today – on the very day that I happened to go looking. When I realised, I smiled.

    Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

  • Friday night

    Friday night

    How is it that if you look away for a few minutes, several days hurtle past? I guess it was a short week anyway – following the Easter long weekend – but still… it feels like I’ve been out of the loop forever.

    Last weekend we were invited to visit some wonderful friends, and spent the evening catching up with each other’s adventures. Following that we used the end of the long week to visit a National Trust property to wander around it’s gardens in the rain – making the best of it in stereotypically English fashion. Tonight we went out for a meal with co-workers to celebrate the retirement of somebody I’ve worked with for 25 years.

    It only just occurred to me that I’ve worked with him for 25 years. How mad is that? Who works at the same place for a quarter of a century any more? I can still remember my first meeting with him – he interviewed me. Actually – that’s a lie – I went in for an “informal chat”, that turned into a more formal chat, that turned into a job offer.

    I’ve no idea if I’ll ever see him again – the offer is there – to call in and visit if we’re ever nearby – but you kind of know in your heart that it’s “goodbye”. Not in a sad way – just a pragmatic “the world carries on” kind of way.

    Anyway.

    It’s getting late. I’ll try to unpack some more from my head over the weekend. There’s quite a bit to unpack. Trying to find words to neatly package thoughts isn’t always easy. It used to be. I need to find my way back to that.

    As ever, perhaps running is the answer.

  • Hello limbo, old friend

    Hello limbo, old friend

    Every day seems to crash into the next at the moment. A never ending trudge towards nowhere in particular. Somehow almost a week has passed since I last wrote. Life keeps happening. Or rather, work keeps happening.

    I’ve been parachuted into a sizeable project that I have no real part in, and have been on a vertical learning curve to at least understand what it’s all about. Hours and hours have been spent watching recorded meetings, reading scraps of documentation, and faking confidence.

    Anyway.

    I cut the lawn after work this evening. I’m not sure why I’m writing about it. The overriding thought was “if I get this done, I won’t have to do it at the weekend”. That sentiment drives much of my life at the moment.

    While writing this, Suzanne Vega is singing “Marlene on the Wall”.

    How is it 1am already? Where did the evening go? I’m half-watching Google Maps – to see my middle daughter finish her shift at the pub and begin making her way home. One of us typically stays up when she’s working late. The 3am finishes are no joke.

    Maybe I should start a late night movie group with friends – for the nights when I’m staying up late. Of course – any vaguely sensible person will have been asleep hours ago.

    Perhaps the idea I had a while ago about the midnight writing club wasn’t such a bad idea after all – where we wander into a group video chat with no requirement to actually chat – we’re just “there”. I wonder if it would work?

    Easter is this weekend. I haven’t bought any Easter eggs yet. Perhaps I’ll escape at lunchtime tomorrow and see what I can find in town.

    I’m going to stop writing now.

  • The Memory Library

    The Memory Library

    When I write for the blog, the words have recently started out in a note taking application called “Obsidian”. I like it primarily because it writes in plain text. When starting a new post, I invariable name the file with the date, and then the name of the day until I think of something better.

    Tonight’s post’s initial title is “Saturday Night” – so guess who’s now humming Whigfield’s one-hit wonder, and knows he will now be humming it for the next few days. So will you. You’re welcome.

    It says something about the way I typically write that I don’t have a clue what a post is going to be about until I’m writing it.

    I just launched Spotify, and asked it to play “Saturday Night”. Maybe if I listen to it, it will drive it out somehow?

    I need a playlist of 1990s dance anthems. Ear worms. For some reason the memory of a box-set of dance music I once owned just climbed from the catacombs of my memory. The box was branded with the logo of a club called “Miss Moneypenny’s”, with a picture of Melinda Messenger in a silver lycra suit on the cover.

    Isn’t memory odd. The things we have seen, heard, watched, read, or experienced get stored away for years – decades – with the happenings of every subsequent day, month and year piled on top. All it seems to take to recover any of it is a sound, a word, or a smell.

    I can almost imagine my brain as an old curiosity shop or library – filled with a ramshackle collection of curios, junk, and brick-a-brack – overseen by a Professor Quirrel type character – who hears a sound or tastes the air, before holding a finger up and racing off into the labyrinthine catacombs before returning with a tome of memories – a bound volume of a place and time with an embossed binding and ribbons tied across it’s pages.

    I can smell the library, even though it doesn’t exist.

    I love the smell of libraries and second hand bookshops.

  • Resisting temptation

    Resisting temptation

    I fell down an internet rabbit hole this week. After posting my frustrations with Substack’s increasingly steep slide towards becoming a walled garden, a number of people got in touch – relating their annoyance too.

    Substack used to be simple. Online newsletters with email subscriptions. Then they added comments, likes, notes, chat, and all manner of other things that nobody really wanted or needed – and all of which required membership in one way or another.

    Fish in a barrel.

    So I started looking at options.

    WordPress.com is still out there, and Automattic’s founder – Matt Mullenweg – is still waging an idiotic war against WP Engine. Regardless of my issues with Matt’s behaviour, WordPress.com (the hosted solution) is a walled garden, and always will be. I get it – there are advantages to forcing your audience to have an account – likes and comments can’t be traced to somebody otherwise.

    The default behaviour of WordPress – behind the JetPack plugin – is the same as it always was; with commenters email addresses being recorded for blog authors to discover. Not a lot of people know that. More than once I have reached out to a commenter, and they were shocked to discover that any blog they had commented on within the WordPress ecosystem has their email address.

    Blogger is still out there too – acquired by Google in 2003, and then left to rot for the last twenty years. I looked into importing some of my posts into it – to see how viable it still is – and the importer repeatedly fell over without reporting any issues.

    I wandered over to Wix – who seem to be spending more than the GDP of a small African country on TV and internet ads at the moment. Quite apart from their AI designer not creating responsive designs, I was also shocked to discover that much of their blogging user interface is set in stone. Given the cost of the platform (it’s not free), I was genuinely shocked.

    I took a look at Squarespace too – another darling of the commercial advertising world. I built a company website based on Squarespace a couple of years ago, so know exactly what it’s capable of. It’s probably the best option – but also not free.

    I looked at Ghost a little while ago – the content management platform started by a group of ex-Wordpress engineers. It’s very good, but also quite expensive, and it’s treatment of email subscribers leans heavily towards monetising them.

    I even looked at Jekyll – the static site generator built into Github – that allows anybody to create a blog from a pile of markdown files (and guess who has 6,000 markdown files). It works well, but would mean strapping on a third party subscription engine – something like follow.it – which is messy, and a bit clunky. It also doesn’t handle images easily.

    We all know where this is going, don’t we.

    I’m not leaving Substack.

    I don’t want to run my own platform – and I don’t want to surrender to the entry requirements of WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or wherever else. Of course as soon as I post this, Substack will probably change their commercial model and force my hand – but for now, Substack does seem to just work.

    I might switch liking and commenting off though. It doesn’t really need it – and people can email me if they want to pass judgement about a post. It’s only when liking or commenting that the heavy handed membership workflow kicks in. If the blog had no likes or comments, it wouldn’t have the opportunity to hassle people.

    Anyway.

    It’s late, and I’ve just written several hundred words about nothing at all.

    I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

  • Last man standing

    Last man standing

    Everybody else went to bed some time ago. I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of the desk lamps while Billy Joel plays the piano and sings.

    I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this evening – cleaning and tidying the thousands of blog posts hidden away in the backup I curate and maintain. Away from the public gaze I have everything I’ve ever written stored in “markdown” format – plain text files. It’s an insurance policy of sorts – to make sure I don’t lose my writing in the event of disaster.

    Over time I’ve become lazy – copying and pasting into the archive from various platforms and text editors – some of which are far too clever for their own good – decorating text with curly quotes, em-dashes, non breaking spaces, and so on. In the grand scheme of things, spotting the odd ligature in your text isn’t the end of the world, but once you know they are there, they eat away at you – or rather, they eat away at me.

    It’s a slippery slope. What started out as few minutes tidying up some obvious issues turned into an entire evening. An entire evening I might have spent far more productively.

    It didn’t help that I then spent an hour creating a second incarnation of the blog using a static site generator called “Jekyll” – mainly because I could. I do that sort of thing a lot.

    We won’t mention that it occurred to me that I might move the motherlode of text files into Obsidian – a rather wonderful cross-platform note-taking tool that also uses markdown.

    I really am my own worst enemy sometimes.

    While writing largely about nothing at all, the clock has ticked past midnight once again. Billy Joel went home some time ago. Tori Amos has dragged her piano out to centre stage, is sitting sideways on the seat, and has begun singing “Winter”.

    I’ll always have a soft-spot for Tori.

    It’s late. I should go brush my teeth, then fall into bed.

  • On Green Dolphin Street

    As the weekend ebbs away and a new week approaches, you find me sitting in the junk room, listening to music, and attempting to shut the rest of the world out for at least a little while.

    Emptying a few thoughts into the keyboard is proving deceptively difficult.

    Not quite knowing where to start, I’ll start with today.

    I spent the majority of today wandering around a nearby town with my middle daughter. She asked last night if I might accompany her. I had no other plans, so shrugged, smiled, and said “why not?”.

    I needed some new clothes anyway.

    In response to the warmer temperatures this weekend, yesterday morning saw me digging through the clothes drawers in the bedroom yesterday in search of any kind of shorts. I came back empty handed. I wondered for some time about their whereabouts, and then yesterday evening recalled perhaps throwing them away, on account of them falling to pieces.

    I’m regularly reprimanded for wearing clothes in various states of disrepair – be that socks with holes, torn trousers, ripped shirts, or whatever else it might be.

    Along the way the gravitational pull of both the record store, and the bookshop grew too strong. I came home having bought three vinyl albums, and three books. I would be listening to the albums now, but my other half tends to dictate what goes on in the living room (where the record player is) – hence me sitting in the study, listening to Spotify.

    I’m still on the female recording-artist bent – today’s haul brought Carly Rae Jepsen, Kate Bush, and Carole King albums to the collection. And yes – it’s “the” Carole King album – “Tapestry”. I’ll listen to it later; for the moment Carly is singing about beach houses and lonely times. The Kate Bush album is the one with the oriental cover – “Wuthering Heights” and “The Man with the Child in his Eyes” are among the tracks.

    As much as I love the serendipity of flipping through vinyl records in the music store, I will admit to frustration that they don’t have everything I might go looking for. I guess the world of streaming music has shifted expectations somewhat. You can’t underestimate chance discoveries though. An algorithmic time-line would never have caught my eye with Miles Davis.

    “On Green Dolphin Street” remains one of my favorite instrumental pieces of music – if you get the chance to listen to Miles Davis’ rendition, it’s so worth it. I think it was originally included on an album called “Kind of Blue”. You can close your eyes while listening and be teleported to just about anywhere, and any time. In a strange sort of way, it’s a soundtrack to all of our lives.

    Anyway.

    Here we are, or here I am. Writing. Trying to remember how to open the faucet filled with words that used to flow so freely. I’m not quite the open book I once was. I think once you start filtering what you share with the wider world, you begin to hesitate about everything – or at last I do.

    For me, getting started is the hardest part. Letting go. Once I start writing, it’s not so bad. Those first few words though… painful.

  • Slowly by Surely

    Slowly by Surely

    After several days of seemingly endless struggling, I started to make progress today.
    I’ve spent the last two days pulling swathes of example programming to pieces – not so much asking “does it work”, as much as “how does it work?”.
    Using a car engine as an analogy, instead of asking “does the engine work”, I’ve been asking “how does a spark plug work?”, “how does fuel get to the spark plug?”, “how does it ignite the fuel”, “how does that drive the pistons?”, “what are the pistons connected to?”, “how does the gearbox work?”, and so on.
    After two days struggle, I’ve begun to understand the whole. After watching endless tutorials, writing endless notes, and using the knowledge to piece together a working prototype out of the computer equivalents of sticky tape and string, I’m beginning to understand.
    I need to be careful now.
    I’ve been here before. As soon as you start making any sort of meaningful progress there’s a huge temptation to keep going – to burn hours, days, and weeks crafting an invisible software engineering marvel that nobody will ever see.
    I need to engineer occasional escapes from the code. Meetups with friends. Quiet walks. Perhaps even pull on the running shoes. We’ll see.
    p.s. I might have ordered myself a Nintendo Switch

  • Slowly But Surely

    Slowly But Surely

    After several days of seemingly endless struggling, I started to make progress today.

    I’ve spent the last two days pulling swathes of example programming to pieces – not so much asking “does it work”, as much as “how does it work?”.

    Using a car engine as an analogy, instead of asking “does the engine work”, I’ve been asking “how does a spark plug work?”, “how does fuel get to the spark plug?”, “how does it ignite the fuel”, “how does that drive the pistons?”, “what are the pistons connected to?”, “how does the gearbox work?”, and so on.

    After two days struggle, I’ve begun to understand the whole. After watching endless tutorials, writing endless notes, and using the knowledge to piece together a working prototype out of the computer equivalents of sticky tape and string, I’m beginning to understand.

    I need to be careful now.

    I’ve been here before. As soon as you start making any sort of meaningful progress there’s a huge temptation to keep going – to burn hours, days, and weeks crafting an invisible software engineering marvel that nobody will ever see.

    I need to engineer occasional escapes from the code. Meetups with friends. Quiet walks. Perhaps even pull on the running shoes. We’ll see.

    p.s. I might have ordered myself a Nintendo Switch

  • Learning Something New

    Learning Something New

    Today marked the beginning of perhaps a long journey into the unknown – learning something entirely new – or new to me at least.

    I’ve been busy reading documentation all day – and writing pages of notes about an endless list of programming frameworks and libraries that I’ve never heard of or seen before. The climb ahead is looking pretty vertical at the moment – I’m sure it will get easier.

    Before I knew it, the day had gone – the evening has almost gone too. It’s funny how that happens.

    Quite how I’m still awake is anyone’s guess.

    I knew my middle daughter was working until midnight in the pub last night, so stayed up to make sure she got home in one piece. Midnight didn’t seem like such a big deal – until it became 1:30am. As she approached the front door in the darkness, it magically swung open in front of her and I stepped from the shadows, smiling.

    I whispered “hello”, and she silently waved her key at me.

    We crossed paths minutes later on the upstairs landing – with whispers of “goodnight” before collapsing into bed.

    There’s a temptation this evening to fall down the internet rabbit hole in search of knowledge – to make tomorrow’s continued climb up the vertical cliff a little easier.

    I’m resisting – so far.