write.as/jonbeckett

“What light through yonder window breaks? It is the Javascript Client Object Model, and I am the Sun, burning everything to ashes around me while celebrating getting this damn thing working”. Now you can see why I’m not a famous playwright. It would have been pretty funny if Shakespeare had written “BURN THIS MOTHER DOWN!” at some point in one of his plays.

When I arrived at work this morning I knew what I had to do, and I had no idea how I was going to do it. After spending the first three quarters of an hour correcting my own spelling mistakes in three lines of programming (it turns out computers are unreasonably picky about spelling mistakes), I turned to a co-worker and said “do you ever get to the point in the day when you think it might be better to just go home, and try again tomorrow?”

By late morning my brain and fingers seemed to be working in concert with one another, and I lucked into Googling the answer to a part of the thing I had no clue how to do. Ten minutes after that the thing I’ve been working on for the last however long burst into life.

This is all tremendously vague, isn’t it. The thing is – if I start telling anybody exactly what I’m working on, I’ll no doubt get that call from HR to pop down for a “quick chat”. It’s happened before. I’ve worked hard to cloak this blog with a certain level of anonymity, and I’m not going to blow a huge hole in it myself – other people are far more capable of doing that by writing my name in comments, tweets, and posts elsewhere.

On another note, it’s good to be back at Squarespace. As much as I tried to convince myself that Wordpress and Blogger had all sorts of benefits, they really didn’t. In many ways I was being the destructive little kid sitting in the corner, taking each pencil out of his pencil case, snapping it into pieces, and throwing it in the bin while muttering quiet threats in the direction of whoever might be listening.

I’ll shut up now.

For the entire time I was playing with Blogger, hoping for it to be better than it actually was, I was secretly cross-posting into a hidden Wordpress blog. I actually entertained plans to migrate over to the Ghost blogging platform, and got as far as buying a domain name and some trial webspace. After 48 hours filing repeated support calls to the hosting company for things they did wrong, I realised just how stupid I was being, and returned to Wordpress with my tail between my legs.

I’ve already done all the tinkering, and reduced the blog down to perhaps the most minimal combination of not-much that can be achieved.

If you’ve tripped over this post by chance, you might like to know that this post is just the latest on top of a pile of over four thousand other posts – stretching back to 2003. I’m trying to imagine a scene with a pile of old newspapers stretching into the sky, and you peering up at it, murmuring “holy crap?!”, in a disbelieving manner.

Anyway. Feel free to follow my forgettable nonsense. It’s quite entertaining sometimes, honest.

I left work an hour early this evening, in order to get home in time to feed the children before heading out to another school awards function. The children had been left instructions to make pasta, and might possibly have succeeded, but given Miss 13’s culinary display at the weekend, I thought it better if I was present. She made a wonderful meal for everybody, but by the time she finished counting out everything on the plates to make sure her sisters had no more than her, everything was cold. Who would have guessed that pasta could be messed up? Apparently it can if you’re 13, and telling your 16 year old sister what to do. Once again I found myself wading in to rescue dinner. I told the kids to go sit down while I started running back and forth in a manner Barry Allen would have been proud of. He’s “The Flash”, if you were wondering. If you’re still none the wiser, don’t worry about it. Let’s just note that red spandex with wings stuck to my ears wouldn’t be a good look anyway.

I’m getting sidetracked.

We got through dinner, my other half arrived, and half an hour later we found ourselves joining several hundred other parents and children in a vast hall to watch trophies, plaques, and salvers being given out for everything from “Cleverer than Stephen Hawking” to “Turned Up Most of the Time”.

The awards were handed out by a movie editor from Hollywood. I forget his name – he won the academy award for “Gravity” a few years back. He told a long and winding story about his life as a movie editor, which fell largely on deaf ears until he mentioned that his first job in the movies had been to fire the snow cannon on the set of 101 Dalmatians.

“Next time you watch it, when you see the snow – that was me.”

Our youngest daughter won several awards – and though immensely proud, I felt bad that so few of her friends picked up any awards.

Perhaps the highlight of the entire evening was our daughter’s form tutor announcing her retirement at the end of the year after spending thirty years at the same school, and the entire auditorium raising to it’s feet and giving her a standing ovation that went on and on. She had a huge wobble as she looked out at everybody – I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. I kept expecting the orchestral score from Mr Holland’s Opus to erupt from a hidden orchestra pit.

Anyway. It’s late. “Half past my bedtime”, as our middle daughter used to say.

This morning I attended the school “Awards Assembly” – where groups of kids get marched up in front of the school to have a nervous breakdown in front of a microphone while mumbling pre-written words from a scrap of paper to several hundred parents, and the rest of their peers in the school hall. I wandered into the school wearing cut off jeans and a shirt – perhaps deliberately not looking very smart. After subscribing to the age old tactic of “following people that seem to know where they are going”, I arrived at the school hall – wandering along behind somebody that reminded me of a friend from the internet. I did a double-take, and so did she. Had this friend from the middle of the US actually been living three doors down the road from me all this time?

We all got seated in the hall, and were entertained by the resident school rock band, who played the same four bars of music two hundred and eighty five thousand six hundred and forty two times in a row. I think some people might have called it ambient music. I was ready to rip the strings off one of the electric guitars with my teeth and smash it through the amplifier after the two thousandth repetition.

The assembly was something of a non-event in the end. It’s been sitting in my Google Calendar for weeks – with all sorts of veiled threats attached to it. I entertained myself watching other parents file into the room – some of which I vaguely knew, and then laughed when a phone started ringing, and the head of year bellowed:

“PARENTS PHONES WILL BE CONFISCATED”

While hiding in the junk room earlier this evening, in-between sessions of washing dishes, clearing the kitchen up, and brokering peace in the latest argument to occur between Miss 12 and 13, I found myself looking at Twitter. I had a notification. It’s worth noting that I rarely receive notifications about anything. The chief reason may be because I grew tired of the daily Facebook “who can piss the heighest” competition quite some time ago, so do no more than occasionally look in and amuse myself with the latest attention-seeking antics of usual suspects.

I clicked on the little notification icon, and sat in my chair grinning at the computer screen.

This is where I cast my own mind back to a blog post I wrote quite some time ago, about being the last of the group I started out with that is still writing a regular blog. I can cross another name off the list of people that stopped blogging, because one of them has re-appeared. Probably the best writer of the lot. She had the rather famous book of her blog published back in the day – there’s a copy of it on the bookshelf next to me.

I’m still smiling now. In a strange way, having some of the bloggers reappear that served as inspiration so many years ago is forcing my hand once again. Rather than post whatever inane drivel comes to mind, I might actually put some effort into stringing a few words together once again.

Anyway. That’s all. Not much to report, but in a way, something pretty significant to report. She’s back!

The mighty everything store in the sky is offering wondrous deals at huge discounts today, because it’s “Prime Day”. It’s kind of like saying “Here’s some money off some stuff that will help you spend more money with us, but only if you’re already spending lots of money with us”. I’m sure there’s some clever mathematics analogy to do with something squared, but I’ll be buggered if I can figure it out. I’m not sure I can be bothered. Two of the developers at work were talking about the Amazon Echo – the biggest thing you never knew you needed until somebody invented the damn thing to arrive since the “smart” phone (and why are “smart” phones called “smart” – mine is as brainless as a bucket of mud). Apparently the Echo has been slashed to about half price for the next few hours.

I’m sorry – and I know this is flying in the face of everything everybody might expect of me – but I can’t see the point in the Amazon Echo at all. How do you qualify spending a ridiculous amount of money on a device that sits there and tries to understand what you’re asking it to do, after you’ve trained it to do it ? Do you really need to have voice controlled lightbulbs? Or voice controlled heating? Is it really THAT much work to stand in front of your music player for a few seconds to choose something to play? And why would I want Amazon (of all people) to keep a damn shopping list for me?

I guess at least I can take some comfort in Amazon never being able to draw any comparisons between my web searches, and things I might buy. The last time I looked, there were no white goods or household consumeables even vaguely related to any of the Microsoft Office 365 Client Side Object Model Javascript libraries.

Maybe I’m becoming a luddite. Maybe I’ll be the last man standing though – while everybody else is sitting in their robot deck chairs like the morbidly obese passengers on the spaceship in Wall-E, I’ll be the guy that can still walk, because he went shopping for groceries, rather than getting them air-dropped by drone on his front doorstep.

Getting back to the whole “smart” phone thing – I’ve been seriously considering going back to a basic candy-bar phone – or at least trying it for a while. I’m not going to buy the Nokia 3310 because it’s just a marketing gimmick – but I might get a similarly dumb handset. It strikes me that I could actually get back to reading books if I don’t have the magical “dicking around” device sitting in my pocket. I often take a book in my bag for long train journeys, but the temptation to endlessly stalk idiots across Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Wordpress, Blogger, and so on is often irresistable.

I think the only thing I might miss on a phone would be the railway times app – but again, it’s not so long ago that I would actually plan ahead, rather than figure out a journey while I’m making it. The same goes for instant messaging apps (yes, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, I’m looking at you). The only reason I ever receive messages is because somebody wants something from me and they don’t want to ask face to face.

Anyway. I got a bit off-track, didn’t I. Alexa can get lost. I don’t need a robot to be reminding me of all the things I haven’t done – I have a family for that, and they’re very good at it. I also don’t need the kids ordering a bouncy castle, or playing the latest manufactured rubbish from the singles chart throughout the house all day.

I wonder if you can say “Alexa, only listen to me”, or even better, “Alexa, if the kids ask you for anything, pretend to do it, and just let me know instead”…

I’ve been head down writing programming since the moment I walked into the office this morning – well, since I filed my time-sheet for last week to keep the project manager off my back, and paid a huge chunk of money off my credit card to keep the bank off my back.

I’m starting programming on a new project today. It feels like standing at the bottom of a cliff, with no obvious way up. I have to get to the top by Thursday ideally. I have a secret plan to bust my backside today and tomorrow, and then goof around for a couple of days. Of course you might consider taking the time out to write this “goofing around”, but I have an unplanned conference call in twenty minutes where I’ll need to pretend to be clever for half an hour. I tried to duck out of it and tell them I was busy, but apparently that doesn’t work.

The conversation went something like this:

“Do you have time to talk to this very important client this morning about this thing?”

“Not really – I’m head down working on this very important project for somebody else.”

“That’s not the right answer. We have to do this call.”

Well why the hell did you ask then? Why didn’t you say that straight away? Why do people do that ?

Just to lighten the mood (for me), I saw the most entertaining exchange between somebody and their family ever recorded on Tumblr this morning – it basically boiled down to a bisexual girl having to deal with an bigoted elderly Aunt “speaking her mind”. The girl responded by speaking her mind too, which inevitably caused family fallout of nuclear proportions. I will admit to a secret glee whenever I hear about somebody being called out for their ignorance, or prejudiced views.

Anyway. Better get ready for this conference call. Snore.

What on earth happened to the weekend? It feels like I only walked out of work an hour ago. Of course that ignores the hours spent washing clothes, washing dishes, grocery shopping, tidying up endlessly, and all the other things that go on every weekend. It also ignores a visit to the local cricket ground this morning to see our youngest daughter receive a trophy from her coach to celebrate the end of another season – and my in-laws arriving this afternoon for roast dinner. Quite why we were eating roast dinner in perhaps the hottest, most humid day of the year is another question.

Board games seem to have taken over the evenings throughout the weekend. Last night we dug out a rarely played box containing “Lord of the Rings Risk”, and all played late into the night. I don’t think anybody was clearly winning, and in the end hostilities were ended because it was past everybody’s bedtimes. This evening the kids discovered a box containing the original “Risk” board game – I gather from the shouting and giggling in the lounge that my other half momentarily took control of Europe, but didn’t factor in Miss 13 cashing in everything to amass an army the size of which had not been seen since the Crusades. I think bedtime intervened before the massacre happened.

Just for the record, I’ve tried to write this post three times over the last four hours. Each time, I’ve been called away to do something for somebody. Twenty minutes ago it was to make supper for one of our children – when I walked into the kitchen (that I had cleared up an hour ago), I discovered a sink full of washing that had apparently materialised out of nowhere. That happens to me a lot.

I often imagine other people have exciting, fun lives, judging by the photos you see splashed across Facebook, but then I remember that all you get to see on Facebook is the highlight reel. You don’t see any mention of the less favourable antics you know about that very few others do. I seem to have become the keeper of endless secrets – I’ve lost count of the number of people that have confided in me over the years. In some ways I’m quite glad my life so boring – so ordinary. The endless photos of railway platforms, board games, and days out to museums with the kids are perhaps a testament to the things we find value in – which are often at odds with a lot of the people we know, who wouldn’t dream of sharing anything unless it might be something other’s can’t easily do. “Who can piss the highest”.

I have a few hours of the weekend left. With a little luck I’ll be left alone, and afforded the chance to catch up with distant friends – to read about their adventures, with the hope they are a little more exciting than my own.

I guess with this whole re-boot thing going on, I get the chance to re-write my about page – or even not bother with one. Do I write a self-aggrandizing pile of codswallop, or should accidental readers be forced to figure me out through the published posts? I’m tempted not to bother. I’m not bothering with a lot of things these days.

I read an interesting tweet from a long time favourite blogger earlier – commenting that blogging had changed almost out of recognition from when we all started. I have a fairly good record of everything I’ve written since about 2003, and know that I started at least a couple of years before that. It’s tempting to look back at those early years with rose-tinted spectacles – it’s also rather sobering when you consider how many of us are still writing. I can probably count those that started around the same time, and are still going on the fingers of one hand – and I’m one of them.

Anyway. I’m supposed to be working. I’ll write more soon – probably about something exciting like the weather, or the damn fish tank pump packing up last night.

I started watching “The OA” again tonight. I originally watched it on my own while holed up in a hotel with work – the entire series in one night on Netflix – eight hours. This time I’m watching it with our eldest daughter.

I think perhaps the most interesting thing, watching it again, is noticing how many clues were in the first episode. Clues you of course had no reason to notice at the time. It made me realise how little we really take in, and how much hard work the writers put into the show. I’m guessing the more emotionally draining scenes later in the series are going to be magnified on a second viewing – the anticipation of what’s to come is almost irresistable.

I love sharing new things with our eldest daughter. In the same way that reading Peter Pan was a privilege when she was little, watching TV shows and movies she is now old enough for is so much fun. The challenge is still out there to prove that old movies can be good – I think she might need to be a bit older to really understand that. How things look is still more important than anything else, but she’s still young. She has time.

I’m always surprised if I discover friends don’t like the same TV shows or movies that I do. A few weeks ago we were at a gathering, and late in the evening conversation turned to favourite movies. I mentioned the likes of K-PAX, Good Will Hunting, and What Dreams May Come. I was laughed at.

It’s interesting, isn’t it – when you are young you tend to like what the majority likes. I’m not sure what happens to change that, but as you grow older, you become more confident in forming your own opinions, and not so much defending them, as being happy with them regardless of the opinion of others.

Anyway. Miss 16 loved The OA. I’ve pleaded with her not to read anything about it online, because it will ruin it for her. She has a hundred questions, and can’t tie any of the loose ends up in her head yet. I sat grinning as the credits rolled, and her brow furrowed.