Day 2: Some down time

I'm not normally good at pacing my use of holiday entitlement. I get a generous 27 days allowance, running from January to December. Most years I'll get into December and end up with more than 5 days to “burn”, even after booking off all the days between Christmas and New Year.

This year is different. At the start of the year I booked in for our annual holiday in July and for the December interregnum. And then Covid struck.

Employers treat Annual Leave entitlement as a liability that sits on their books. If I use my annual leave in the latter part of the year then that liability accumulates through the year. If they allow me to carry it forward to next year, that liability has to be transferred from one year to the next. This has balance sheet implications at the best of times, but it becomes more serious when staff are being furloughed – delaying using my holiday contributes to the need to furlough someone else.

And so, like many organisations, we've been required to use a proportion of our annual leave in the first part of the year. This seems eminently sensible, it applies to everybody and will strengthen the organisation against what may unfold in the second half of the year (and beyond). There is another way of looking at it too. When lockdown lifts then our customers may start spending again: the company doesn't then want everybody using the whole year's allocation when there's business to be done.

And so today I find myself using a day's annual leave during lockdown – I have no plans to go anywhere (of course), instead it's a genuine down day. There are domestic activities of course (my bed linen is in the washing machine now), but it's also a tinkering day. Things I might tinker with:

• My new Pi Zero W – it arrived earlier this week, I'd like to get it up and running and transfer my temperature sensor from my “big” Pi to the Pi Zero
• PostgreSQL – a work thing has come up that needs a pg back end. A little drill would be useful and interesting
• Olympus XA – I acquired a beaten up rangefinder on eBay, and I think the rangefinder is massively out of whack. Some test shots (then developed and measured) will help calibration

There are other things I want to tinker with at some point. I'd love to mount a solarcam in the back garden while we have building work going on, haven't got round to that.

So enough of writing yesterday's post! Let's start with some domestic duties and then get to the tinkering.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 1: Why am I doing this? Just a very simple challenge to write every day for 100 days – the very simple outline of the challenge is at https://100daystooffload.com/.

In my heart of hearts I suspect this will be another endeavour I start and run with for a few days. I've plenty of wreckage in my home and all over the Internet of started projects. But the fact it will probably peter out doesn't mean I shouldn't have a go.

The challenge also illustrates the reversal the Internet brought: for centuries the ability to have your writing published was scarce, and attention to published matter was plentiful. Getting into print was the challenge.

In the Internet age the converse is true: there are many, many channels to publish your work online, and the barrier to being published is negligible. The challenge instead is to have anyone pay attention to your writing at all.

My approach to 100DaysToOffload (or more likely TwoOrThreeDaysToCreateAnAbandonedCornerOfTheInternet) is just to put some random wibblings here. As I learn about POSSE I'm sure I'll syndicate the content on social media. But that's not the primary purpose.

Update 1st May 2020 For now I'm going to give notifications of posts on Mastodon. You'll find my account at @dvavasour@fosstodon.org or https://fosstodon.org/@dvavasour

#100DaysToOffload