Day 4

Tuesday 28 April

Over the years, I have maintained a variety of blogs and migrated my content between most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Ghost, Joomla, Habari, Typepad, Tumblr, Posterous, Jekyll, Django, Octopress, Nikola, Hugo, Pelican).

For this #100DaysToOffload exercise, I am using write.as. I currently have a neglected but perfectly functional blog which uses a static site generator (Hugo) and publishes the content on Amazon S3.

However, it's five months since I posted on that blog and I can guarantee that if I were to use that platform, the workflow would be:

1. What is the precise filename syntax of a new Hugo blog post ?
2. What is the precise syntax of the YAML front-matter ?
3. How do I publish pages to S3 ?
4. Oh wait, hang on. I remember now. I wrote a handy shell script for that. Where is it ?

Now, if I was more intelligent, I would not live my life endlessly re-circulating in Groundhog Day, forever condemned to relive my past mistakes. But I'm not so I am.

Yes, I know that I could have a shell alias and an Emacs template that did the necessary and deposited me directly in the editor ready to write. Patches welcome.

Using write.as has no much barriers. You just write. I remarked on Mastodon about the minimalist interface but this was not a criticism, far from it. I truly believe the stripped down minimalist UI is ruddy marvellous.

Furthermore, write.as fits perfectly with Kev Quirk's urging to 'Just. Write' when he conjured up the idea of 100 Days To Offload.

You don't even need to register on write.as. You can simply post anonymously.

To get such a minimalist, clutter free, calming environment, you would typically need a 'Distraction Free' plugin on most other platforms. That's after you'd wasted an hour evaluating all the 'Distraction Free' plugins.

And another thing, the people behind write.as are great. For example, I had a minor issue with my post yesterday. As it contained two YouTube links, it was flagged as potentially spam and/or mindless click-bait (fair enough) but I sent a quick email to support and the issue was promptly resolved.

Day 3

Monday 27 April

I don't normally write much about my job. I guess that's because I am wary of revealing company confidential information but I work for Oracle Corporation and have done so since 2006. I am a Technical Consultant ('Jack of all Trades, Master of None').

I find 'Dear Diary' blog posts quite tedious but anyway, during these strange times, it's something to write about.

I have been a remote worker since I returned to work following a 'minor health issue' in 2011 so this remote working thing isn't novel, strange, challenging or depressing for me. I don't need endless quizzes, fancy dress meetings or 'Best Zoom background' competitions to motivate me or raise my spirits.

09:00 – login and process email.

It's a cliche but you do need to be quite disciplined when you're a remote worker. I always endeavour to get to my height adjustable desk by 09:00, err, let's say 09:30, well at least by 10:00 (in case anyone notices).

The temptation to lounge around in my pyjamas watching mindless daytime TV or the tennis from Wimbledon has never been an issue for me. I feel very lucky to be able to work from home. I have done my share of sitting in airport lounges, staying in expensive hotels, eating in lovely restaurants (on my own) during years of foreign travel to help customers in glamorous locations like Prague, Bergen, Madrid and West Bromwich.

It's down to trust. Your employer is trusting you to get the job done. Guess what – if you don't, someone, somewhere will notice.

09:30 – demo to colleagues of a embryonic APEX application that, essentially, provides real-time access to an Excel spreadsheet on an internal Web site. Sounds trivial but this enables multi-user access and a single source of truth without managers circulating the file via email which is beneficial.

11:30 – complete a design document for an external client describing how we intend to purge data from FY14 due to legal requirements. Again, straightforward but slightly complicated by the fact, the client needs to review and approve the data to be removed. The data volumes to be purged involves millions of records to there is no way they can possibly meaningfully 'review' the data but the purged data is preserved in separate tables for audit purposes (and recovery in case we got the threshold date wrong)

13:00 – lunch. A cheese sandwich using home-made bread. We didn't have any yeast so, while it smelled nice coming out of the oven, it was slightly dense and heavy going. A single slice felt like you'd eaten an entire loaf.

14:00 – research an longer-term internal project providing an APEX front-end to a Document repository. Sounds interesting and is a real project with eight people involved using REST API's. Most of my APEX work to date has been just me on my own so it will be useful to work with a more experienced colleague and learn something.

15:00 – cherry picking presentations from the recent APEX@Home marathon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FThnrGLHkgI

The Covic-19 Therapeutic Learning System (TLS) was particularly interesting to me as it was a real-life application developed very quickly. Imagine demo'ing an initial prototype to Larry Ellison over Zoom !

16:00 – researching pastel coloured histograms, doughnut rings and pie charts in APEX.

17:00 – wife's return from work imminent (she is a nurse in a GP surgery) so put some salmon fillets in the oven to accompany the roasted vegetable couscous with feta cheese she made on Sunday.

18:00 – moment of weakness and I find myself watching 'About A Girl' from Nirvana's first ever live gig at the Pyramid Club in New York from 1989.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7yY8rJ6l0s&t=587s

#100DaysToOffload

Day 2

Sunday 26 April

Wife cut my hair. Probably not as good as the lady who visits us at home but my sideburns no longer resemble those of a 1970's George Best. Fringe is sub-optimal but who cares. Not me.

Another walk in Richmond Park. Entered at Kingston Gate, walked up to Isabella Plantation car park and back again.

Don't know how many steps or distance but it takes us about an hour.

Wife painted (most of) the lounge. The fact that the circle behind the wall clock was a darker blue than the rest of the room inexplicably bothered her.

It didn't bother me one jot so I made myself scarce by washing her car and vacuuming the interior. Somehow she had contrived to park somewhere under a tree and the vehicle looked like it had been on safari through the Serengeti national park (i.e. coated in bird muck). Some of it needed scraping off with my fingers. Which was nice.

4pm saw 'Street Bingo'. A neighbour rigged up a small amplifier and we all crossed numbers off a grid. Someone got the first line, someone else got the entire grid ('House'). This was followed by a quiz of 'Five things'.

Five Harry Potter books, five Beatles songs, five characters from 'Friends' etc. The teenage kids enjoyed it. We didn't win at bingo and didn't win a single round of the quiz but we enjoyed a glass of wine in the sun and chatting with our immediate neighbours.

We are now best friends forever after they had kindly bought us six Magnum ice-creams as a trade for the use of our Karcher high-pressure water jetwash to clean their patio.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 1

Saturday 25 April

Went for a walk in Richmond Park. Still swerving people, mainly on the roads approaching the park and at the entrance gates.

Great to see families out on bikes, dog walkers, people jogging and folk enjoying the open spaces with no cars and no cyclists on the roads.

Thankfully, didn't see any cyclists flouting the massive 'NO CYCLING' signs on every gate as that was getting irritating and rather stressful.

Bought a baguette for lunch from a bakery/coffee shop fresh from the oven. Strictly speaking, a breach of the advice but he's a small, local business struggling, there was no queue and the bread was warm and fresh from the oven.

Hoovered the lawn and mowed the house.

The wife made some minestrone soup and a lamb tagine. This enforced lockdown is turning her into a domestic goddess.

#100DaysToOffload