Category: misc

Mothering

This Mothering Sunday (aka Mothers Day) we went to church – it was the Brownies' and Ladybirds' Flag parades too.

I thought about my dear departed mum and the sacrifices she and dad made to keep us comfortable and to support me until I started to work…

During the service the choir sang Psalm 127, and the temporary vicar asked us, with a smile, to follow along too – if we could.

Yeah, it's impossible without choral training and a safety net, so I simply traced the words with my index finger. I was lucky that I could read the words; I'd taken my reading glasses along this time!

So, here it is, Psalm 127, from the King James Version:

1 Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

2 It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

3 Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.

4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.

5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

I occasionally have dark thoughts about the results of my quivering arrows, but overall, in a non-spiritual sense, I've been blessed by my 2 girls.

The thing is, I don't really care if I've misinterpreted the Psalm; I took something good away from it.

Snow

It snowed in Rochdale today, and Rochdale ground to a near-halt. My drive to work, a journey that normally takes around 20 minutes, took 2 hours!

It happens every winter, every time it snows.

The utterly clueless idiots-behind-their-wheels appear to make my desire for a 4-wheel-drive car a near-irrelevance.

'Near' isn't total; that'll do for me.

Twentynine

February 29 (Wikipedia) is a date that appears only during years divisible by 4 (with an integer remainder!) – apart from those divisible by 100 (but not 400) no, don't stop reading…

There are a lot of interesting notable dates, people and legal facts mentioned on the Wikipedia page, so it's quite a scroll to get to…

In this modern age Bachelor's Day doesn't retain the same importance it once had. But if you're on the edge of popping the question to the subject of your undying love, it's a heck of a day to do it.

Gloves on standby!

Shi(f)t

During November 2015 I decided to start a daily journal – an activity which soon changed into an almost-daily series of blog posts. During the time since I've noticed a shift in the way I approach social media. I'm not sure I like it.

The blogging exercise quickly morphed into a need to create a test site, added to GitHub.com in parallel to my main 10Centuries blog account. I've also been experimenting with rudimentary self-hosting.

As this has happened I've been neglecting both my blog and those people who comment on the posts. I've not even been keeping up with the shiny new 10Centuries.org after my initial flurry of (hopefully constructive) fault reporting during the early private beta stage.

So it's time for a rethink.

Sure it may be the time of year at fault; I'm not alone in noticing a realignment of priorities away from social media. But this time around I'm analysing in a bit more depth.

So…

Rather than concentrate on 'self' I think it's time I looked at others' blogs. It's only fair.

I've quite a backlog of posts in my RSS feed reader. Time to read, folks.

If you have a blog of your own please let me know, if I have or if I haven't already got it queued up I'll take a look!

Thanks!

Insomnia

I've been asleep, honest! Knowing there would be a solution to my Raspberry Pi automation woes I started to search around 2am.

Google and Stackoverflow.com are pretty handy at this time of night; 'rvm installation not working: "RVM is not a function".

It turns out that all I needed to obviate my need to run the scripts in a login shell was to copy the second line of code from ~/.bash_profile to ~/.bashrc.

Thankyou Haris Krajina!

No, I'm not going to wait up.

Engineer

A small number of us wear similar sweaters for work – similar in that they're self-coloured and pleasantly form-fitting. Ok, in my case it's because they've shrunk in the wash… (but that's the subject of a previous, uncomfortable-for-me, blog entry here.)

Yesterday a slightly awkward exchange occurred at the coffee machine, one which I felt an urge to follow up by email. I'd had a brilliant idea – a Eureka moment (but without the nudity and attendant spillages.) Here's the brief exchange:

"As an engineer I’m bound by a code of professional conduct to suggest a solution to the jumper hue issue; a daily palette based on the colours of the rainbow. In ascending frequency order, and by day.

Unfortunately though, my purple one today falls outside the rigid boundaries of the, it must be said, unfortunately limited scheme. Your flagrant Thursday jumper today merits a red card I’m afraid, though I’m sure you could carry the visible spectrum off better than I were you to try harder.

I’d better start work on version 2.0.

Baz."

The reply came a little later. I'd honestly not expected one.

"Hi Barrie,

Thank you so much for your email. Well, what can I say? I’m disappointed with myself that I have got off to a bad start on the first day of the week, but I do feel that I need to correct you on something. Your jumper hue is not purple. I do believe it’s a wine/beetroot shade, but definitely not purple.

Whilst I appreciate and do accept the card, I can’t accept a red one. Red is just not my colour. I don’t do red and that’s that. Red is not good for us gingers, I’m afraid and as I am too bound by a professional code of conduct as a ginger, you will simply have to come up with another colour.

I eagerly await your palette…

Have a nice day,"

Me, speechless, though not apoplectically-so:

"*Baz stills sense of outrage, stands sits corrected, starts work on v2.0.1*"

The conciliatory response came an agonising-for-me 50 minutes later:

"I must say that the beetroot/wine colour does suit you though. A warm colour for these Wintery times. I would even go as far to say that it’s perhaps a burgundy. There’s not many who can carry such a shade off."

Awesome. And, with that, order in my universe was restored.

Which was nice.

Nerdity

Another short one today; it's been a 'nothing' weekend outside my ongoing Raspberry Pi playtime.

Here's a repeat link to what I wanted to do with it, what I've done, and what I've actually accomplished so far – which is actually now 2/3 of the total.

My Raspberry Pi Setup – at GitHub.com.

So, what else have I accomplished?

  • Walked Ruby dog,
  • Helped with the girls' homework,
  • Bought a pair of walking shoes to replace those that Ruby chomped,
  • Washed, dried, put away clothes,
  • Changed the cat litter,
  • Been shown a paint colour chart; my wife's chosen a new colour for the hallway…

In-short, underperformed.

Tosser

Daughter 2:

"Mummy, daddy's good at tossing!"

My wife, deadpan:

"Yes, he's a born tosser."

It is of course Shrove – AKA Pancake – Tuesday.

I haven't lost my touch.

Apart from the last, the one poured too thickly, the one I burned.

Meh

Summary: Meh.

Detail: Feeling crap, like death warmed up.

I was going to write a long piece about how my recent blog posts weren't necessarily a true reflection of self. The only stuff I've mentioned recently is negative, judgmental or at least ambivalent towards 'things.'

I lead a charmed life though, I'm lucky I'm in a position to be able to moan about first-world problems.

Anyone reading will tire of me mentioning the Raspberry Pi computer. Yesterday's enforced break from playing with it brought with it a welcome pause; the first day since I bought the thing that I haven't felt the need to reset it due to my misplaced enthusiasm for moving forward.

We'll see.

Sideways seems a fair direction to head in, for now.

I had a bit of a play this afteroon, between sitting on [redacted] and made progress; as can build and serve to my computer, can FTP to my web server and have it served from there.

I found a bug in the Jekyll static site generator though; or at least the one on my system. The most recent post 'No' fails to display its title when rendered locally. Renaming it to 'Nope' works but I'd like to Zzzz…

Nope

Another summary post, this of a wasted day:

Personal

The lady who was supposed to visit my oldest daughter today didn't show up on time. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I rang 1-1/4 hours after the scheduled start time.

"Oh, she's been off sick for a week-and-a-half, can you give me your daughter's name please?"

I did so.

"I'm just looking at her diary, it seems we missed you."

I then launched into a rant: 'I took the day off, my wife's stayed awake after her night shift, you've got a disappointed little girl here; tell the manager we're yet again dissatisfied by your lack of organisation…'

Home

A local tradesman tasked with a simple home visit 'around teatime', to fit his schedule, to quote us for 2 new radiators failed to show or call or text.

Ruby

(The dog this time!)

She's chewed her second pair of my Gore-Tex walking shoes. The girls leave the shoe cupboard door open, have no concept of…

My wife seems to think the total destruction of one side of the heel padding is fixable. I'll hover a finger over the Amazon 'buy again' button.

Ruby

(Yeah, computer stuff.)

Another day, another Raspberry Pi reset; the fourth in 4 days. Rather than do what I wanted to with the computer, it's perhaps a good time to re-evaluate my single purpose; blogging support.

It would gave been sustainable, there's enough scope in setting up a web site to fiddle with, fine-tune, break and fix. But problems with Ruby (computer program dependencies) are getting tiresome. Next step though: check out @mlv's 'strings (1)' comment.

Luckily the Raspberry Pi community has a huge amount of imagination and skill, for example Jonathan Duerig's (@duerig's) book scanner.

Stuff

I went shopping on my own while my wife slept and the girls watched streaming films. I didn't miss much either. The best thing to happen all day.