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

  • Full Circle

    Full Circle

    If you happen to find yourself wandering in the general direction of recursivewords.com while scrolling (you know – instead of getting on with whatever you should be doing), you might notice a few changes.

    I caved and moved the “mother blog” to WordPress – mostly in response to a Blogger robot banning my blog earlier this week. They re-instated it within hours, but it brought home to me how much of a house-of-cards Blogger is – even if I was viewing it through rose-tinted glasses.

    I won’t bore you with how I managed to lift the last few years worth of posts in the air and land them again – suffice to say the Substack import at WordPress tends to fail spectacularly when faced with any more than a hundred posts.

    Thankfully humans are still better than AI at some things – even if that includes telling AI how to do something. The response typically starts with “That’s a brilliant insight…”

    While on the subject of technology, does anybody else struggle with Apple auto-correct replacing what you’ve written with utter gibberish? I’ve been fighting a continual battle with it replacing words on me for months now – words that make no sense in the context of the sentence I’m writing.

    Enough about technology (which Apple auto-correct just changed to “techology”)… seriously.

    Anyway.

    Today is the last day “at home”. At mid-day tomorrow a taxi will arrive to transport us to the docks at Southampton to board the P&O cruise ship “Aurora”. The bags are mostly packed.

    Shit just got real for the kids – with their main concern being “what happens if the internet stops working?”. Bugger the washing machine, the central heating, or anything else – the internet is apparently far more important.

    I fitted a stair gate at the top of the stairs this morning – in preparation to stop a certain little person who is on the cusp of walking at 7 months old. We suspect we may miss her first steps while absent. WhatsApp will be our friend.

    We’ll be gone for a MONTH – not that you’ll notice, because I’ll have more time than ever before to write – and I fully intend to.

    I’m taking the laptop, tablet and phone with me. I’m even taking a small portable camera – the kind we all used before smart-phones came along – to save my mobile phone battery while wandering around far-flung cities (although saying that – paranoia made me buy a portable phone charger thingy – I only just remembered it).

    The clothes are almost all packed now. Just my other halves dresses to go into travel bags in the morning. I’ve packed my running shoes – while at sea I’m determined to use the time wisely. I’m sure we’ll forget something tremendously important – it would be odd if we didn’t.

    I imagine the next post from me will be written and posted from somewhere off the coast of Portugal on Tuesday – as we make our way towards the Mediterranean.

    Wish us luck!

  • Blocks, Bans, Beer and Departures

    Blocks, Bans, Beer and Departures

    It’s been a bit of a week. Quite apart from visiting the pub three times in three days (with friends, co-workers, and family), my brother blocked me on Facebook, the old-school incarnation of my blog got banned (temporarily) by Blogger, and we are of course in the thick of packing to go away for a month.

    I won’t get too far into why my brother blocked me on Facebook – suffice to say that if you post made up right wing drivel that can easily be proven entirely false, and I’ve had a bad enough day, I’ll ask Gemini if what you’ve posted is true or not, and paste the answer into the comments box. Some people don’t like their soap-box tirades being fact-checked, it turns out.

    On Wednesday night my other half had planned to go out for something to eat with a wonderful friend that lives across the way. While in the middle of thinking “yippee – that frees me up to record some content for the internet”, she popped her head back around the door. The friend’s boyfriend was also going, so would I like to go too? I dropped everything, pulled shoes on, and ran from the house.

    I had something of a headache the next morning. I guess the nice thing was everybody taking an interest in where the accidental content creator escapade might take me next – and in the middle of everybody telling me what I should be doing, the wonderful mentioned friend realised and stopped everybody in their tracks. It’s not the first time she’s done it – she’s one of the most insightful, empathetic people I’ve ever met. It’s probably why we get on so well.

    The very next day I had agreed to meet up with co-workers – both present and past – for a catch up. I woke up with a headache the next morning again. Everybody joked that it was preparation of the holiday – training my liver to deal with alcohol after months of rarely drinking.

    I wouldn’t say I don’t drink any more – I just see it as wasting time if I can’t think clearly enough to get on with whatever I want to be getting on with – and learning to fly aeroplane after aeroplane for the YouTube channel requires a ridiculous level of concentration. It’s painfully obvious to me that I should slow down. Yesterday I worked all day – wrapping up projects in preparation for the impending holiday – and then immediately switched to learning how to operate a business jet from the late 1980s.

    By midnight I had live-streamed flying it, and published the first draft of the procedure to prepare the aircraft for flight. It never ends.

    Before that all happened last night we *all* went to the pub – the entire household – myself, my other half, three daughters, and one granddaughter. Leaving the house took an HOUR. I sat in the pub as something of a passenger, drank a pint of orange, made conversation, and then came home again. I carried my granddaughter to the car – through the middle of town – her eyes were agog at the night lights, the cars, and the people passing us on nights-out. By the time we got home she was fast asleep.

    So… winding back to earlier in the week – you may remember I have resurrected the Blogger incarnation of this blog (you may be reading it now – given that I cross-post between Blogger and Substack). You might understand my shock and confusion then when a robot at Google emailed me, telling me that my blog had been banned for breaking several of their community rules.

    After a bit of reading, I figured out that being able to import old posts runs contrary to a rule about automating content creation. I guess they never saw somebody with six thousand posts before though…

    I appealed. Within 12 hours the blog was alive once more. I will admit to taking another look at WordPress, Ghost, and Squarespace while being furious with Blogger – and even considering self-hosting via Jekyll. The blog re-appeared though, and I’m not sure I can be bothered with moving everything *again*. We’ll see how it goes.

    Maybe Substack isn’t that bad after all.

    So. Today (Saturday) you find me enjoying the first day of a MONTH off work. While my other half went grocery shopping with the kids this morning, I went shopping for wash-bag contents, and started folding clothes into shiny new suitcases. My packing is largely done already.

    It’s funny – I’m one of those people that rarely buys clothes – I’ll happily keep on wearing the same things until they have holes in them – then throw everything away, and start again. This holiday has triggered one of those refreshes. New suit. New jeans. New shirts. New shoes. New trainers.

    I spent an hour this morning with a hand-held steamer, getting the creases out of dress shirts – fresh from their packets. OH MY WORD I should have bought a hand-held steamer YEARS ago. Granted, I rarely wear dress shirts, but it’s SO much quicker and easier than ironing. Don’t get me wrong – I’m good at ironing – I’ve always done my own – since I was a teenager.

    Oh. One more thing. A mysterious package arrived yesterday from the US – containing a huge metal model of an Airbus A320 with illuminated windows (and I mean huge – the sort of thing you see in a travel agent). It was from a company I have worked with on the internet, along with a wonderful letter thanking me for using their products. Now I just need to find somewhere to put it! My other half is joking about building a studio to record YouTube content – or at least re-vamping the junk room at some point.

    I wonder what you need to make a “studio”? Egg boxes on the walls? An illuminated “ON AIR” sign? Every good studio needs a huge metal aeroplane with illuminated windows, right?

  • Table for one

    Table for one

    The clock just ticked past 10:30 on Sunday morning. You find me perched at a small table in Wetherspoons, having just made a cooked breakfast disappear. I’m surrounded by families and groups of friends – coming and going – eating breakfasts, catching up with one another, and filling the pub with conversation and laughter.

    It’s a strange thing – escaping from a house filled with mayhem and noise to a pub filled with further mayhem and noise.

    There’s an odd problem with sitting in a pub on your own – especially if you have a laptop with you. You can’t leave the table, unless you take everything with you – so you can’t re-fill your coffee, or go to the bathroom. If you take everything with you, it’s sods law that somebody else will take “your” table while you’re not at it. I’ve had that happen while travelling with work in the past. And of course if you leave your bag or coat at the table, then people might think it’s lost property.

    Looking around the pub – at least in the direction I’m facing- I’m the only person here on my own.

    I went clothes shopping yesterday – clothes for the impending holiday. Smart shirts, and a “casual” blazer. It feels odd – calling a blazer “casual” – it almost feels like clothes are still associated with class in a strange sort of “Jeeves and Wooster” way. Casual to me is a t-shirt – not a particular cut of blazer and khaki pants.

    After half an hour being measured and talked at by the most genial, friendly shop assistant I might have ever encountered, I left having spent an eye-watering amount of money.

    My other half banned me from buying clothes from Amazon some time ago.

    If you didn’t know – we depart next Monday for a month long holiday – our first in two years. A cruise around the Mediterranean to celebrate twenty five years of putting up with one another. We’re visiting pretty much everywhere along the way – Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Tunisia, and Gibraltar.

    Along the way aboard ship there will be formal dinners – full black tie – I have a dinner jacket and waistcoat hanging in the closet, ready to go – and the most expensive suit I’ve ever owned alongside it.

    We have pre-paid for pretty much everything on-board ship – including internet access. I’m taking a laptop with me, so you’ll no doubt find almost daily posts from me along the way – with pictures and stories of life on-board, foreign cities, and the friends we make along the way.

    I’ve been debating about taking a paper journal – to record unfiltered thoughts about what might be a pivotal journey in many ways – a half-way mark in life, with thoughts about the future. Taking time out from “life” for a few weeks will do me some good – especially after several years burning the candle at both ends.

    Anyway.

    Time is marching on. There’s only so long you can spend sitting at a table on your own in a pub, not buying anything, before the staff start glancing sideways at you.

    Maybe I’ll go look at paper journals and pens.

  • Summoning Archimedes

    Summoning Archimedes

    After finishing work this evening a thought occurred to me. A little thought. A little thought that burrowed a hole straight through the firewall that’s supposed to stop damn fool escapades before they start.

    “I wonder what it would take to bring the images across from the Substack blog, into the Blogger version, and make them look nice?”

    The reason I’m telling you anything about this is because of course it’s already done. Sometimes – when you start something stupid – the only way around is through. I’m not sure you’ll be *that* interested in the colossal effort that was eventually required to port the images across, but the title of the post gives a clue.

    Archimedes is famously reported as once saying “give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the earth”.

    It turns out if you export an entire blog from Substack, then write a program to parse the export file and turn it into a CSV file of post titles, dates, and image URLs, you can then write a program to download all of the images, write another program to upload them to a Google storage container in the cloud, and then finally write a program to re-attach them to your posts via the Blogger API.

    Of course when I say “you can”, I really mean “you can ask Claude Code” – the trick is knowing what to ask it, and building guard-rails around it a mile high.

    I guess this is the point where I shut down Visual Studio Code, and back away from the computer – fearful of what I might dream up next.

    It turns out giving somebody with over thirty years of development experience access to AI is a bit like giving Lex Luthor access to the Fortress of Solitude’s archives.

    “Tell me everything…”

    (Cue the purple tentacle laugh from the “Day of the Tentacle” video game – not many people will get that one – if you do, you just found your people)

    Back on planet earth, I just finished making spaghetti bolognese for everybody. I wasn’t going to help, but then saw my middle daughter chopping strips of pepper up bit by bit, grabbed the entire bunch and a knife, and shortened her workload by about a thousand percent. The penny-drop-moment on her face was priceless.

    I carried on and made the rest of dinner – while cleaning as I went – which resulted in no washing up – which is why I am here right now writing this – because I got half an hour of my life back. It’s funny how that works.

    It’s a continual source of wonderment to me – how the rest of the household can cause such devastation at almost every turn, and how it so rarely occurs to them to make anybody else’s life easier.

    Just for the record – I’ve washed up four times so far today. If I wander into the kitchen to make a coffee, I can almost guarantee there will be a fifth load of washing in the sink (you know, next to the half-empty dishwasher).

    Don’t even let me start about the downstairs bathroom that I scrubbed from top to bottom this morning after getting out of the shower.

    Anyway.

    I’m listening to Kacey Musgraves “Deeper Well” album. She’s become an unlikely soundtrack to the junk room in recent weeks and months. A calm voice amid the mayhem.

  • Backwards

    Backwards

    I spent an hour this afternoon tinkering with a blogroll – adding a page to my blog filled with names from the present and past – most of them still here, some of them not. I’m sure more names will come to mind over the days ahead.

    While digging through email, and through the wayback machine in a largely fruitless search for blogrolls from the distant past, I happened upon several friends I had lost touch with over the years. One conversation in particular – four years ago – was about just that – losing touch. We promised to each other that we would try. We obviously failed.

    I couldn’t help thinking about the “river” analogy once again – that each of us is kind of like a leaf flowing down-stream – sometimes floating alongside others – sometimes drifting away. Sometimes you see the same leaves again – sometimes you don’t. There’s a part of me that immediately wonders if we have any agency in it – if the whole coming together and drifting apart is predetermined or not.

    I wonder if the pile of ZIP disks sitting on the shelf opposite me hold any secrets? I’m pretty sure the first incarnation of “Thought Cafe” sits on them – the first website I built, back in the late 1990s.

    Every idea was new back then. I remember “Web 2.0” being talked about endlessly – and numerous websites sprouting as the world wrestled with how this “internet thing” might be used – or how we might twist it, bend it, and manipulate it into forms nobody had thought of yet.

    I suppose in many ways the arrival of the “social” internet was inevitable really. It still makes me smile that there’s nothing inherently “social” about the “social” internet. If you throw a thousand strangers into a walled garden in the middle of nowhere, that doesn’t make it or them “social” at all really. Quite the opposite probably.

    Anyway. It’s getting late, and I’m rambling.

    And yes, I’m avoiding the arrival of tomorrow. I’ve played this game before. I think I’m quite good at it. The clock has a different opinion.

  • The one where I created a Horcrux

    The one where I created a Horcrux

    My blog has existed at Substack for quite some time now – often as a side project of sorts – a foothold – while the “real” blog existed elsewhere.

    At some point – perhaps a couple of years ago now – while other platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr eroded away, Substack became a last stand of sorts – a last place my words could be found.

    And I’ve become increasingly unhappy about that.

    Don’t get me wrong. Substack is wonderful. Of all of the hosted publishing platforms that have existed in recent years, it’s clearly the most popular – with a daily influx of famous faces appearing in the roll-call of newcomers.

    I guess my problem is really the platform’s problem – and what happens when you get enough people in one place, and you involve money (Substack supports paywalls, if you were wondering where this is going).

    In the space of a year, Substack seems to have become Medium. And that’s never a good thing to happen. Back during the pandemic, Ev and the gang at Medium built a wonderful machine that allowed people to write, and readers to award you a proportion of their subscription fee in the shape of feedback. A like at Medium was worth actual money.

    It didn’t take long – once Medium gained serious traction – for the same marketing morons to appear that ruin everywhere else on the internet for everybody. Suddenly every article was about how to gain followers, subscribers, likes, money, fame, fortune, and everything in-between. In short order the remaining pool of paying readers found themselves in an enormous game of “shooting fish in a barrel”.

    The same thing is happening to Substack. The “notes” wall is filled with strategies, offers, and insights into how to make money on the platform. Snake oil sales-people purport to understand “the algorithm”, and lead people like pied pipers to their promised lands – guides to get rich quick – behind a paywall.

    Money ruins everything.

    Back when I started writing a blog – back before any of the hosted solutions existed – self hosting was the only option. You had to acquire webspace, install software on it, configure the software, perhaps hook up a domain name, and then – only then – could you begin posting anything to pollute the web.

    Over time a plethora of platforms appeared – among them LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, Yahoo 360, Posterous, Drupal, Joomla, and Squarespace.

    My blog existed on most of them at one time or another.

    The key thing about all of the early platforms is they didn’t try to connect people. You had to build your own connections – by adding guestbooks, blogrolls, and RSS feeds.

    RSS was explicitly invented such that readers could read regardless of platform or technology. RSS Reader services became enormously popular – with the likes of Google Reader, Bloglines, Feed Demon, and Radio Userland becoming the homepage for many people’s browsing experiences.

    Circles of friends grew up across wildly different platforms – running entirely different software, but ultimately compatible with one another.

    And then it all changed, with the arrival of the walled gardens.

    MySpace probably started it. Or LiveJournal.

    Suddenly you had to have an account on the same platform in order to like, or comment on a post. The walled gardens had arrived, and they ruined everything.

    So… why am I going on about all of this in the dead of night?

    Because I’m going to try something out. Granted, it’s a bit of a Don Quixote move – tilting at all sorts of windmills – but when has that ever stopped me in the past?

    This afternoon I created an account at Blogger – one of the last of the “old school” blog hosts, then opened Visual Studio Code, and instructed Claude to figure out what the Blogger import format looks like. Once it figured that out, I gave it access to the motherlode of my past blog posts – stretching all the way back to 2003 – and asked it to create yearly import files for Blogger.

    The first few imports worked.

    Minutes later it occurred to me that Claude could be of further assistance. I instructed it to look at the stock theme that ships with the Ghost blogging platform – a wonderful theme called “Caspar”. I asked it to figure out how to re-write Caspar as a Blogger theme file.

    An hour later I had a presentable replica of my Substack blog in existence on the internet.

    This evening it occurred to me that it might be nice to attach the new blog to a domain name – so set about releasing “recursivewords dot com” from the clawed hands of WordPress, and delivered it to CloudFlare – who were then instructed how to wire the domain up to Blogger.

    And that’s how a wonderfully minimalist incarnation of my blog came into existence this afternoon and evening. You can visit it right now – at https://www.recursivewords.com.

    I’m considering making the theme available as open source – because I can see more people retreating to Blogger if platforms such as Substack continue to be deluged with get rich quick idiocy.

    Anyway. It’s getting late. Half past my bedtime, as my middle daughter would once have said.

    We’ll see how this digital horcrux idea goes. If it has legs or not. If nothing else, it’s been fun to tinker with Blogger, and remember how the internet once was.

    Postscript – as you will see, visiting this post today – the Horcrux has eventually landed at WordPress. Blogger deleted my blog in the dead of night – claiming I had broken their own rules – by using their own import tools. Figure that one out.

  • The social internet is like the custard guns in Bugsy Malone

    The social internet is like the custard guns in Bugsy Malone

    I’m wondering about pulling my personal blog from Substack and landing it somewhere else.

    I don’t like – for a personal journal – that readers are bombarded with invitations to join, to subscribe, to follow, and to become yet another cog in the machine.

    I don’t like the continuous temptation to “play the game” – and don’t like that most interactions are fleeting. I can’t help feeling it would be far better to have a few readers that come back, than an army of readers that happened to have the posts thrust at them while blindly scrolling.

    I guess the heart of the problem – for me at least – is that I don’t see the “social internet” as social at all any more – it’s more like being on a conveyer belt, passing countless other people on their own conveyor belts.

    I have a few close friends I’ve made over the years – none of them through any of the tent-pole blogging platforms, I might add – that read my blog from time to time – and kind of feel that’s how it should be.

    If you want to read, and you know where to find me, you can drop by. You shouldn’t have to put up with the machinery of the internet watching your every move in order to fire words at you like a custard gun from Bugsy Malone.

  • Growth Days

    Growth Days

    Yesterday and today were blocked out as “growth days” on my calendar at work – we get a number of them per year, and if you don’t use them, you lose them. Having not used any of mine all year, I now have two per month pencilled in all the way through until Christmas.

    Of course the rest of the world outside of the company has no idea about these “growth days”, and the rest of the world doesn’t conveniently stop for a couple of days every month – so guess what happens. Just guess. “Can you quickly jump on this call?”. “Have you got five minutes?”.

    We all know five minutes is never five minutes, don’t we?

    I’m probably being a little bit dramatic. The entire concept of a “growth day” is still kind of novel to me – I’ve spent most of my career learning how to put fires out while the flames climb up my trousers.

    The one thing the growth days have given me is the opportunity to take a step back – to really think about what I’m doing, and where things are headed.

    The core skill-set that has differentiated me from so many for the last several decades has almost entirely been replaced by AI in the last year. That said, there’s still a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt pedalled about artificial intelligence. Here’s the thing – the name is wrong.

    Artificial intelligence is NOT intelligent. It’s a very, very fast idiot with photographic memory. Actually – more than that – it not only knows what it has seen, but it knows the general way a million similar situations went. When you strip AI down to it’s nuts and bolts, all it’s really doing is probability calculations on an unimaginable scale.

    AI has no big ideas. It has no hunches about anything. The interesting thing to me at least in the huge backlash around the arts is how short sighted people are when denouncing how AI learns. It learns it’s colossal matrix of probabilities by looking. You know… like when we go to a museum, or an art gallery, or flick through a magazine, or walk down a street, or watch television, or a hundred other things.

    We do the same damn thing.

    It’s a bit like saying “how dare you use AI to write that passage of text – after letting it read the entire contents of the library – only humans should be allowed to write – after reading the entire contents of the library, and writing with peer review throughout their entire lives”.

    Have the detractors SEEN the general level of grammar, spelling, and punctuation on Facebook or Threads?

    Being fair, I suspect a LOT of the spelling problems that afflict the social internet are down to Apple auto-correct. I’ve used just about every major modern operating system over the last several years, and Apple auto-correct is by far the worst – which kind of proves the point about AI not being intelligent.

    Anyway.

    One unintended side-effect of having a “growth day” is the opportunity to take a step back, and read a little of the dreaded “social internet”.

    I stepped into Threads at lunchtime, and marvelled at the tent-pole battles about anything and everything. It seems rather than commentators gathering around posts to be the smartest guy in the room, on Threads anything and everything posted is an invitation to attack. It’s pretty harrowing stuff.

    I left Threads behind rather quickly, and retreated to the safety of Substack – where the most recent note on their wall caused me to pause for quite some time. Somebody had posted exactly what I had been thinking for some time – that since Substack became popular, and flooded with tens of thousands of writers, it’s value as a community has all but vanished. It’s not really their fault either – it’s the problem of all communities when they cross a given tipping point.

    I guess you can liken it to a small village. When only a few people live there, you get to know one another. You meet each other in passing from week to week. Friendships are forged – not by design, but by happenstance. Once the village grows to the size a thriving metropolis, the community drowns. You rarely see the same person twice, no matter how clever the algorithm – which causes everybody to retreat within bubbles of a few friends – rarely stepping outside for fear of the rampant mansplaining, hate, division, and rhetoric being spread far and wide by the usual soap-box-lunatics that ruin all public platforms eventually.

    Don’t even get me started about “the algorithms” – that watch your every move – expertly narrowing that which you see to all of your prejudices or predilections. If you stop scrolling, then you must like what you’re seeing. If you keep scrolling, you’ll never find the last thing you read ever again.

    I’ve written in the past about concordant feedback. I think the thing that worries me most is that the people most likely to be manipulated and radicalised by algorithmic timelines are the most vulnerable – the least aware of the poison they are teaching the machinery to feed them.

    It’s probably time to get off my own soap box.

    Perhaps the resistance against the social platforms is another siren song from the distant past – the beginnings of the world wide web – when we actively searched for and found one another, rather than trusting an unseen algorithm to do it for us.

    I wonder if people that are accepting in the belief in creator figures that govern our every-day lives are also accepting of the algorithms that drive the social networks? No doubt they’ll claim we invented the social networks, whereas creators are divine – except if you wind the clock back far enough, you discover we invented the creators too.

    On reflection, perhaps this whole “stepping back and thinking” business isn’t such a good idea after all. Once you start questioning one thing, you end up questioning everything.

  • Two coffees into the weekend

    Two coffees into the weekend

    It’s Saturday morning. The clock just ticked past 9am. You find me sitting in Wetherspoons, having just made a “traditional English” disappear. A cup of coffee is keeping me company – perched on the edge of the “table for one”.

    I arrived half an hour ago – after wandering past the local barber where a young family and a middle-aged-man were waiting patiently for the doors to open. Apparently beating the queue at the barbers is a thing.

    The pub is remarkably quiet – not quiet enough to bag a booth table though, it turns out. They seem to be prized real-estate for breakfast – particularly among those toting newspapers, laptops, or scrolling phones.

    Families are slowly trickling in – from experience they will arrive en-masse in about half an hour – and will trigger my exit from the ensuing mayhem. I imagine they’re all trying to leave their respective houses right now – arguing over “where your shoes are”, “have you brushed your teeth?”, and “you’re not wearing that – go and put something clean and tidy on”.

    I just made the mistake of checking my email – after the “you’re got mail” notification popped up in the corner of the screen (Oh how I miss the AOL notification made famous by the movie).

    I’ll reply later. This is my hour away from everything. My time. I need to get better at carving time for myself. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve burned the candle at both ends recently. It’s not sustainable.

    I’ve always found it interesting that people can be so different in terms of their motivations – their needs. I regard myself as largely self-sufficient – I find pretty much everything and everybody interesting, and will find my own fun if at a loose end. Others seem to either need others, or need to be needed by others. I guess there’s the whole thing about everybody being somewhere on a spectrum in terms in terms of most things – and the mania in recent years to classify exactly “what’s wrong” with each of us.

    When I was young you were allowed to be a bit different. These days it appears any differences have to be explained and categorised. I guess that’s a two way street – if you’re struggling with something others seem to find easy, it’s probably good to find out why – but by the same token it means we’re being put in boxes by others, and potentially treated differently. I don’t like that.

    Anyway.

    The shops open in half an hour. The supermarket is probably open already. I need to get some coffee, and a few other bits and bobs.

  • Unexpected departures

    Unexpected departures

    I received an email this morning from the sister of a long-time friend. Her brother had passed away, and left instructions of the people to reach out to, and the messages to send.

    I was on the list.

    The simple message read “So long, and thanks for all the fish”. I smiled.

    I wonder if it was a coincidence that I found myself watching the movie adaptation of “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” a few days ago?

    It’s an odd thing – losing somebody – knowing they will not be there any more. Once we’re gone, we’re gone – all that really remains is the memories of those who knew us, and the stories we became a part of along the way.

    I know lots of people like to believe in higher powers, or creators. I’m not one of them – not for many years now. I’ve always thought it tremendously conceited to think of ourselves as in any way special – to have been invented, or created. Trying to attach meaning to our short stay on the ball of mud we ride around the nearest star has always seemed a bit contrived to me.

    I find it far more difficult to deal with “not really gone” than “final” departures. For some people friendships seem to have a lifespan – that can be cut short, ended, or discarded along the way. I’m not built that way at all. Life might carry me away from time to time, but I’ll invariably find my way back.

    Anyway.

    I’ll miss you Peter.

  • An old friend returns

    An old friend returns

    While delving around it the loft over the weekend, on the pretence of throwing things away, I made sure to rescue at least one thing from certain doom – a twenty five year old iMac that I completed NaNoWriMo with.

    Wiring the Mac back up and switching it on was rather more nerve-racking than I was really prepared for. Thankfully after an electrical whine, and the crackle of static through the CRT display, the “Apple” chord sounded from its built-in speakers, and it slowly woke from its years long slumber – taking it’s place alongside the Commodore 64.

    After some rummaging through storage drawers I managed to find the ZIP drive, and a stack of long-forgotten ZIP disks – one of which contained the Scrivener drafts of the NaNoWriMo attempt.

    I’m not sure what I’m going to use the Mac for – other than as a curious but beautiful oddity. It can’t connect to much of the modern internet, and pre-dates WiFi by some years too. I did manage to fill it up with some books from Project Gutenberg via an old USB stick. I also found an online project curating text files from the darker corners of the pre-internet – swathes of conspiracy theories and counter culture claptrap that I vaguely remembered reading while at college.

    It’s a fun diversion, I guess.

    Aside from the computer, I was handed a pile of old moleskine notebooks yesterday – going back at least twenty years. They didn’t get thrown away either – and while flipping through them, I realised how much more care I used to put into keeping notes. Page after page of carefully recorded system designs, doodles, and drawings.

    I also found a few attempts at Manga – back before it became ridiculously popular among the Gen Z crowd;

    It’s funny – looking back. Pages upon pages of projects I couldn’t remember – but then a name, or a place is mentioned, and huge swathes of memory return. Almost like turning a key in a locked door.

    It goes without saying – this afternoon I hooked the most recent bullet journal down from the shelf, and began back-populating it. Bringing it up-to-date. It’s not as neat as the pages from the distant past, but there’s still something about physically writing things down. Something more permanent. Typing doesn’t achieve the same thing – I’m not sure why. There’s probably all sorts of attachment theory written about it.

    Oh – one more thing – I might have ordered the box sets of the 1980s cartoons “He-Man”, and “She-Ra”. I’ll leave them running in the background of the study when I’m on work calls, to see how many incredulous stares I can cause.

  • Twenty five years of memories

    Twenty five years of memories

    We hired a skip this weekend, and have been busy emptying the attic and the darker corners of the house into it. Twenty five years worth of boxes for cameras, televisions, video game machines, computers – along with the actual chassis of long dead computers, monitors, and endless boxes of wires, guide books, plugs, adapters, and everything else that “might be useful one day”.

    We found a broken acoustic guitar along the way, and an onyx chess set.

    Imagine Monica’s cupboard from Friends, but the size of an entire floor of a house.

    We found countless children’s costumes, bags of clothes, and toys the children had grown out of along the way.

    It was difficult not to stop and look – to reminisce, and to tell stories. It was time for it to go.

    In some ways the clear-out reminded me of my grandparents giving me an old record player from their spare room when I was young – one that held multiple singles on a spindle, and dropped each onto a turntable, one after another. It was accompanied by the remains of a record collection that had no doubt been the prized collection of my aunts and uncles when they were small – or had been bought by my grandparents along the way – everything from The Sound of Music, to West Side Story, Alvin and his Magic Harmonica, Sparky the Magic Piano, Terry Scott, Cliff Richard, and Mario Lanza. I played them all to death. I think my favourite – at about nine years old – was “You need feet” by Bernard Breslaw.

    I also inherited a reel-to-reel tape recorder. We played with it until it didn’t work any more, but never really understood properly how it worked.

    In later years I inherited a radio-gram – a prized piece of 1970s furniture that doubled as a side-board and record player. It had one record hidden inside it – “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell. When you started the record player from cold, the record would speed up and slow down hilariously.

    Somehow we avoided giving any of the treasures discovered in the dark corners of the attic to the kids – it all ended up in the skip. Granted, we didn’t have record players or radio-grams.
    We did find a rather ominous diary, written by one of our daughters while young – filled with the most disjoined stream of thought anybody has seen outside of a psychological horror movie. We climbed down the loft ladder and showed it to her – she almost peed her pants laughing.

    So yes. That’s what we spent our entire weekend doing. Filling a skip with memories and detritus from 25 years of life as a young couple, life with young children, and life with teenagers.
    It’s been amazing really – discovering just how much rubbish you collect if you’re not careful.

    Being entirely honest, I didn’t spend the entire weekend emptying the loft – this afternoon I learned the ins-and-outs of a simulated “CIV-A” navigation computer from a Boeing 707, and then recorded a video about it. I know how to live.

    p.s. the youngest member of our household has not only learned to crawl, but also to stand. It’s only a matter of time until the stair gates will have to go up. Guess who’s job that will be.