Longrow 18

I won our 3-person office NFL ‘Pickem’ this year. We each had to try to correctly predict more winners than the others from every game, every week throughout the 18-week regular season. It’s not a trivial pursuit, it’s not just guessing a result by looking at what other people are thinking.

Before we started none of us really spent time choosing a reward from the others for gaining the ultimate victory.

Anyway one of the guys pushed me a bit for an answer, and so did the other. And today, one brought in his treasured shiny hipflask with something special sloshing gently inside. For me to try.

It’s a ‘Longrow’ 18 year old single malt.

And I’m just about to take my first sip.

And I’m going to make the most of it.

I don’t know much about whiskies or whiskeys, but I do know, when I’ve tried one, what I like.

It smells perfect. It’s peaty, which I like. Love.

Ideally, and it seems extraordinarily churlish of me to say this given the circumstances, my choice would be a Laphroaig 15 year old – probably the most rounded (most polarising) whisky I’ve ever tried. But the price went silly after the company withdrew it then brought it back. It would have been silly to even ask for a miniature bottle.

Ok, I’m going to sample this ‘water of life’ neat from my 20 year old ‘Glencairn’ glass – a most-treasured present from my wife 3 days after we got together.

Please don’t be disappointed that I’m not briniging you an evocation of a Scottish loch in the autumn, crushed walnuts or burning tyre smoke. Naah, it’s unlikely I’d be able to separate stuff out like someone trained in this sniffing, sipping, swirling thing.

I cup the glass across my fingers and palm, take a long sniff, swirl, sniff, anticipation, sip. Think.

Same again, swill it round the old gums. Think.

Feel it going down. Think.

It’s a really good-sized measure this.

Because I’m bloody-well worth it!

Anyway, as an experience after almost-exclusively drinking Bud Light for the last couple of years it’s beyond my ability to describe.

Honestly, I’m not keen on the aftertaste. The initial taste though is awesome, and as it grabs the gums adds to the ‘experience’ a drink costing almost the absolute top end of my limit back when I had…

It slides down really really well too. Really well. Did I mention that already?

I can’t wait to sniff the empty glass in the morning. Trust me if you’ve never tried it, just have a go. I first did it with a Maker’s Mark – a whiskey I hated from the very first sip.

I feel nice and warm now. Nice. Warm.

Onto the second half then.

Cheers!

I’d better remember to give the hipflask a bit of a polish before handing it back, but I’m not washing it out.

Some context:

A post from 2016: ‘Hic‘.

One from 2017: ‘Drunkard‘.

A bit later in 2017: ‘Makers Mark review part 6‘.

Flash

A group of maybe 8 teenagers walked past the house a few minutes ago, one saying, “Oh my God, there’s a bloke Âą sat in the dark on his phone!” That was me, that was, Mollie cat sat on one leg, Pumpkin puppy resting her head on the other. But the young people outside wouldn’t have seen how warm and comfortable we were.

The irony wasn’t lost on me as I looked up to see half of their faces illuminated by their screens, and one taking a photo of the front of the house – with flash. I’m not worried about my privacy, after all I was sat there with the curtains open, and from what I know about light, reflections and angles, there’s a better-than-good chance the photo would be one of a flash bounced back from the window.

But hey, maybe I got my 15 minutes of fame early this year?

So, teenagers walking past in the dark (we do have streetlights) and cold (hovering around freezing) and damp (the fine rain that wets you through), at this time of year‽ There must have been something pretty catastrophic happened this weekend to make that happen!

And unless the content creators to whom they owe their very lives are down today it’s not TikTok, this isn’t the USA after all (where the company’s self-enacted, political-points-scoring ban started this weekend).

So, I wonder what calamity sent them out today?‽!

Âą A British English word for man, guy, me in this case. (At least they didn’t say “old guy”).

Surf.social

(After spending time ‘testing’ I’ve added a few more notes in the addenda at the bottom. I’m likely to update this post as things progress… or ignore it entirely).

Well, the itch to try Surf.social (a new social and all-internet aggregator from the people who make Flipboard) became too great and I reached out to them. @marci@flipboard.social (internet royalty!) saw my plaintive cry and set me up with an invite code. Thanks Marci!

I’ve installed the beta app within the iOS TestFlight environment and signed in using my Mastodon credentials. Easy.

It took a while before the splash screen gave way to the intro (I succumbed to the urge to force-close it), and now I’m in!

Unstructured observations:

Adding sources to one’s Home feed or a custom feed using the built-in search page is fairly intuitive and quick. Just type something and a range of source types appear. Magic?

Me first, though I’m no narcissist. I hope. My Mastodon bio page is a bit truncated but it’s probably too big anyway.

The Feeds, Posts and Discuss tabs behave differently to each other.

  • Feeds shows one’s feeds (Home and custom).
  • Posts is a Flipboard-like flip interface with a limited number of one-at-a-time posts shown.
  • Discuss has a free-scrolling list of the same posts, again a limited quantity.

Right now my Watch, Read and Look tabs don’t have any content, and because it’s a beta I can only see the top of the words “Nothing is here right now”, with no ability to scroll down. I’m using a beta of iOS 18.3 until the next public update, and on an iPhone XS.

Ah, it’s variable, I looked at another feed and can see the whole message now. A good thing I’m used to pretending I properly beta test stuff isn’t it!

Picking an individual account to follow in a feed either shows nothing for a Micro.blog user’s account (I guess it’ll take a while to populate) or, in the case of the RSS feed for xkcd.com, another Flipboard flip layout. Incidentally, I initially used Surf.social’s browser setting to open in an external app, not sure I like it so will change.

And the xkcd feed truncates the images, based as it is on their height not width; I’d prefer to see the whole thing previewed but maybe that’s just me?

I do like Surf.social’s search. It’s a world apart from Mastodon’s because it finds stuff. (I know Mastodon’s philosophy is to limit visibility and thus the likelihood of abuse; so this is not a complaint).

Whoever’s working the Surf.social account right now sent me this very useful reply:

“Here are two ideas to dive in:

  1. Start by surfing some of the great custom feeds we’re featuring in Home. Try tapping the Sources tab to get a sense of how these feeds are built.
  2. Tap “Create a New Feed” to get started making your own custom feed. Once you’ve done this, tapping the star icon will let you choose between adding a feed to home or other feeds you are making.

The email you got from us should have more suggestions!

Contact us at support@surf.social if you have any issues

Otherwise feedback@surf.social is welcome

Ride on… 🤙

And with that I’ll stop writing and just have a play for a bit.

Addenda

(Listed in the order found, feedback for some sent to the developer via the TestFlight app):

I’ve explored a bit more and thanks to Marci added a ‘Puppy training‘ feed container containing their ‘Dog Training. Help!‘ feed container. It’s a really cool concept and it just works. Feeds of feeds in feeds, oh yes.

I’d really like to be able to add RSS feeds by URL but it doesn’t look to be possible, at least not yet. For instance I have feeds for a couple of subreddits I moderate; I’m sent either new posts or new comments in those subreddits, and I get my post submissions, saved links and incoming messages from across the network. I’ve a couple of custom Google News searches running too. When RSS feeds arrive I’ll be happier.

I recently signed up to the Bluesky.social network to follow accounts that primarily exist (or until recently) existed on Twitter – and do not exist on Mastodon, not yet. Now I’ve not looked in Twitter for a while. Whilst my timelines there aren’t as ‘polluted’ as some I’ve heard about I’m just opposed to using it since elmo bought the place. I’ve been careful who I follow to maintain a degree of sanity. However, Mastodon is where I want to be, and that’s why – for me – Bluesky isn’t comfortable. Using Surf.social removes the need to check Bluesky – and so I can focus on what I’m interested in without necessarily seeing any discussion.

Mastodon polls don’t show the available options, only the supporting text.

Update: I thought at first there was no ‘proper’ method to remove a source from a custom feed – that one must select it, add and then select the feed from which it must be removed. The dialogue then shows the operation’s success. And so I said “Early days yet.” However I found what’s likely to be the intended method of removing a feed – select the ‘…’ menu at the top of the feed and choose the option to remove from there.

Viewing a Mastodon thread a post is linked to still sends me out of the app despite me deselecting the ‘Use External Browser’ option in Settings.

A feed’s Watch (videos), Read (articles) Listen (new to me, no content yet) and Look (somehow different to Read) tabs now have content. Too granular?

The Listen tab is probably a placeholder for me because I haven’t added any podcasts yet.

Bug, or just my ineptitude: Attempting to add Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent food series ‘Eat This Podcast’ by searching first for his name brings it up in the Podcasts section (complete with familiar icon and description) but then attempts to add a ‘November Learning’ feed. Searching by its title instead simply fails to find the podcast feed in the Podcasts section or anywhere else.

Update: I really really do like the way the feed ‘containers’ work. I’ve setup 4 so far:

  • ‘Puppy training’ (containing Marci’s feed),
  • ‘Quotes’ (quotations),
  • ‘bazbt3’s feeds’ (unoriginal I know),
  • And one called ‘All’, containing the preceding 3.

So I’ve gone 3 levels deep.

Ok, quite a lot of the feed items don’t render particularly pleasingly, and I should probably turn off auto-starting videos (if there’s an option to), and I still don’t really understand why there are so many tabs and what they’re used for. But the app has promise, and I can see why the Flipboard team decided to make it, it’s kind-of… liberating.

Fleas

The area of Mollie cat’s back immediately ahead of her tail has always been sensitive. I recently noticed it had become ‘crusty’ under her fur – as-if she had a bad case of lumpy dandruff, and what I’d term hyper-sensitive (I am not a nurse/doctor).

We got home from the vet earlier. It’s fleas. The vet ran a fine-toothed comb through the fur, rolled the flakes/flecks, whatever they were, in a paper towel and found leftover blood. Flea poo.

So Mollie got a flea and worming treatment, a steroid injection for the sensitivity to touch (she licks and bites when it happens), and I signed her up to the vet’s health plan to reduce ongoing bills.

She’s 15 and I’m, er… a few multiples of that. It’s my very first experience of fleas, aside from the amateur nit nurse in primary school mistaking my dandruff for tiny organisms. My mum resented the implication and marched down to school to confront the errant lady, despite what we now know about the link between nits and good cleanliness. (Anyone, at any time, with clean or dirty hair it matters not, can get head lice and nits, and it’s not difficult to get rid of them).

Anyway, Pumpkin puppy already had her treatment on plan so I just need to get Stella cat’s done, and get her signed up to the plan.

And some flea spray for the house. And wash yet more bedding and…

…maybe get the girls to mention it to their friends, some of whom might be mature enough to not judge…

And only now, as I write this, has my skin started to…

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Themes

Update below, maybe WordPress isn’t so bad after all?

I broke my WordPress self-hosted/managed site earlier simply by installing a theme, the one named ‘Default’.

The hosts’s AI troubleshooter failed miserably to make any form of difference when I started it.

To fix it ‘manually’ I first attempted to follow the help page linked to in the error message – go into myPHP and deactivate all the plugins.

Nope.

So then I searched for help directly related to WordPress themes and found the way to fix it is to delete the offending theme folder and rename an existing folder to the offending one.

Success, and I felt lucky I knew which theme was active.

And even more luckily everything is back up again.

My hosting plan includes only weekly automatic backups so yes, I just started one now.

Painful isn’t it, how something so complex can be broken by something so apparently simple as a site theme change.

Anyway, I just looked for similar issues with it and eventually arrived at the WordPress.org forum. The only response i found to its incompatibility with a previous version of PHP was the original poster replying to their own post to make a technical change within the theme file definition.

Pointless reporting it if there’s nowhere to report it, so I’ve given up and I’m sticking with ‘Simple Grey’.

Update: While attempting to fix my site I was sent an email from WordPress, “@bazbt3 🏡 Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue”. I was busy so didn’t notice it. The email described the fault and contained a special link to bypass the dashboard I couldn’t access – to enter a “special recovery mode”. Maybe now I know this is a thing, the next time the site breaks I’ll be more patient?

5 second rule

Originally posted to Reddit on January 26 2024, and prompted in 2025 by this toot by Col: https://mstdn.social/@kibcol1049/113799104744391111.

Last night was Burns Night, when Scots worldwide traditionally celebrate the life of poet Robert Burns by reciting poetry, eating haggis, tatties & neeps. Or something like that.

We couldn’t find a veggie haggis this year so my wife bought a steak for my youngest daughter and me, to go with the veggies. I cooked it medium rare and cut a small slice as it was resting. I’m nurturing a cough started the day before and unfortunately coughed, accidentally swallowing the meat, which stuck in my throat.

Uncomfortable? Hell yes! I started to retch so went to the smallest room, hoping the meat went either down or out. It eventually went down.

Returning to the kitchen hoping to just relax and feel less miserable, Stella, the cat we’ve had since October and adopted in December, jumped off the counter with my steak. It fell on the floor as I shouted and as I reached for it she re-acquired it and ran between my legs, dragging the steak under her.

I finally caught her in the living room, shouted again and grabbed the steak off her. Straight back on the plate, a dollop of tomato ketchup squeezed beside the veg, and I sat down to eat. Finally.

Sure it was cold by that point but I’d won right?

Right?

Biodegradable

We have a local authority-issued kitchen waste ‘caddy’, a bin just large enough for food scraps and peelings. The local authority supplies biodegradable liners on demand – actioned by us tying a yellow ‘flag’ to the main food and garden waste bin and waiting for the collection crew to drop a new roll of bags at the front door.

It doesn’t happen like that. The flag is tied and ignored for a few weeks. There’s a web form to complete which should spur the crew into action, but doesn’t on the next collection day.

So there’s an email address to, er… email. So I did that yesterday with this subject line:

“[my address] – food caddy bags not left”

I got a reply today:

“Good morning, | Thank you for your email | Please provide your address and postal code so I can look into this for you. | Apologies for the inconvenience.”

(I’ve thrown the response all onto one line for speed of posting).

As far as I know there are only 2 locations with my street’s name in the country and only one has a street number as high as mine, and there’s definitely only one in the very town to which I addressed my…

(big sighs)

My reply back was polite.

“[Preamble | my address] (as the subject line), [postcode] | name]”

Flush

Our toilet cistern developed a fault just before Christmas, luckily only leaking into the bowl. Not a major thing, but we have metered water so it was costing money. The cistern is a low-profile type with limited flush volume to save water, and aside from the one repair a few years ago has handled everything we threw at it, if you know what I mean.

Visit 1

Anyway, a plumber came, looked at it and wanted to break through the tiles around it instead of extracting it after lifting the button bezel. No.

Anyway, I asked if he could confer with his office to query what happened during the previous repair. He agreed, closed the isolating valve to save us money and water Âą, and left.

Incidentally, it has a special seal not carried routinely by the national network of plumbers we used.

So I had to rebook.

Visit 2

Instead of ordering the part or the seal based on prior information, during the second visit the cistern was looked at and a part ordered for delivery to our home. So I had to rebook.

Visit 3

The part arrived on Monday, I rebooked immediately, and the plumber completed the work earlier today. Success! No leak, and we have a working flush.

And here is the one the plumber removed.

What a waste.

Âą We have another toilet, we’re posh we are.

Decorations

Public service announcement.

The evening of January 6th is known as Twelfth Night, 12 days after Christmas Day. According to tradition one should take down all decorations around the home or workplace.

The thing to note is that it’s supposedly unlucky to leave them up past this date.

There’s only one way to avoid the misfortune that will surely follow after not taking them down, and that’s to instead wait until February 2nd, Candlemas, the official end of Christmas in mediaeval England, 40 days after Christmas Day.

Your choice.

But I’ve a question. Which one of you reprobates is leaving your decorations up every year and getting possessed by goblins‽

Link:

Twelfth Night: When should you take down your Christmas decorations? (BBC Newsround).

Hypo (old)

I was chatting yesterday lunchtime about plans for the weekend, plans for 2025, and just casually mentioned the events that unfolded in my ‘Hypo‘ blog post.

But it reminded me about the first time, years ago, I had to ring for the paramedics to attend to my wife.

A novice at marriage and fatherhood I was more anxious back then, understandably so given the newness of the situation. Being confronted by a sweating, shuddering, gibbering, unresponsive loved one is hard. I don’t know how my wife puts up with me!

Anyway, I’d been slowly feeding her bits of chocolate after the glucose gel pack ran out. There was no improvement after a while so I had to get the professionals in.

When they arrived I was looking after daughter1 and the cats and didn’t think about the implications of just sending the paramedics upstairs.

And then I realised I’d sent 2 strangers up, strangers who entered the room just as my wife returned to consciousness. She’s there, stark naked, spreadeagled on the bed, wondering what the hell is going on.

Time passed, the 2 pros didn’t need to do much other than observations and to advise me to get her something decent to eat.

My first request after she was out of bed, please don’t ring your mum or sister or tell anyone at work that I let 2 complete strangers into the bedroom when you were at your most vulnerable.

I was thwarted.

I probably deserved it too.