write.as/jonbeckett

After waking up a little after 8am this morning I was very busy daydreaming when my other half rolled over, woken by the cat asking for his breakfast, and murmured:

“Are you not going for a run this morning?”

I sighed. For some reason I woke up with little or no enthusiasm this morning. After wondering about maybe going running tomorrow instead, some unseen force scaped me out of bed, gathered together some shorts and a t-shirt, and delivered me to the bottom of the stairs.

Miss 15 leaned around the corner of the kitchen doorway, bowls of cat food in her hands.

“Shall we go for a run then?”

She shrugged – “I suppose?”

Five minutes later we found ourselves doing warm-up exercises in the warm morning sunshine outside the house, and then set-off through town. While running, it occurred to me that I don't have to make conversation with my youngest daughter while running – she's the polar opposite of her older sister. With Miss 19 I have to keep a continual stream of nonsensical conversation to take her mind off what she's doing – with 15, I don't have to do anything – just be there with her.

We ran eight sets of three minutes this morning. She sniffed throughout the entire run – I imagine heyfever. The sun has caused everything green to burst into life over the past few weeks – suddenly the air is thick with pollen and insects, even in the morning.

After the run we took turns through the shower, and then made a late breakfast. She cooked pancakes, while I cooked bacon. Of course I say “she cooked pancakes” – it was more a case of she made the mixture, massacred the first pancake, and then I cooked the pancakes and the bacon.

It's now almost lunchtime, and I'm not entirely sure what I might fill the afternoon with. It has already been suggested to me that I might spend some time with our eldest, but she just printed out a recipe to make sushi. Ah – so I'll be cleaning up an unholy mess in the kitchen later then.

Coffee. That's what I'll do first.

I watched an old episode of “Halt and Catch Fire” this evening. If you've not seen it, the show ran for four seasons, and broadly told the story of the 1980s computer revolution, the birth of the internet, and latterly the world wide web. The story was told through the lives of a small group of people that cross through many of the defining moments of those decades – sometimes by luck, sometimes by foresight.

There is a monologue towards the end of the third season, where one of the characters is trying to describe not so much what the future might hold for the World Wide Web (which in the time-line of the show had just been invented by Tim Berners Lee), but that the Web wasn't the important thing – and neither was the Browser – it was all about the means of getting to the place you're going.

The internet, the web, and the browser were “the thing that gets us to the thing”. You might even argue that directories such as Yahoo, and latterly the search engines were a further extension of that – because we don't set off in search of pictures or words – we set off in search of the subject of those pictures, and the author of those words.

When we access the internet, the thing we are trying to get to isn't a distant computer, or a page of text, or a photograph. It is a person. Their thoughts, ideas, and opinions. It's not about how we get there – it's about being there.

It's been a day. After pulling the design together for a future project this morning, I wandered into the garden to find my other half sitting in a camping chair outside, hiding from the children, who were arguing about chores.

The chore argument was entirely predictable. A reward system had been introduced – you know – like you might have for 7 year olds – except our younger kids are 15 and 16. I was quite impressed with how quickly Miss 16 figured out how to take advantage and try to cherry pick the chores she was willing to do (mostly driven by laziness).

Rather than work through lunch once again, I decided to spend an hour in the garden, and got most of the grass at the back of the house cut. It still looked like hell, but better than it was. I spent another half an hour out there after work – it almost doesn't look like jungle now.

We finally let Miss 15 join Tiktok this evening. She has been asking for months, and most of her friends have it. I'm just hoping we have done the right thing. I guess it's time to start having some trust in her. I don't think I've ever seen her quite so happy.

I'm running again in the morning, and then helping my youngest daughter call a journalist and ask about her work as part of a school project. I imagine she will talk on one phone, and I'll record it on another – so she can go back through it afterwards.

This evening I may fall back into the clutches of 'No Mans Sky'. It's a ridiculously addictive video game where you get dumped on a distant planet, and have to MacGuyver your way off it, and then set out across the universe.

Or maybe I should go read a book, or watch a movie. Actually, something rubbish to eat, something nice to drink, and a terrible movie sounds quite persuasive.

This has been a very random post, hasn't it.

p.s. I might have re-acquired the jonbeckett.blog domain name this evening, and attached it to the Wordpress account. Does this mean I'm eventually headed back to Wordpress? Perhaps. Very slowly though.

After sliding out of bed at perhaps 7:30 this morning and fishing some running shorts from the long neglected 'fitness' drawer, I knocked on various daughter's bedroom doors, and asked if they might be running with me. Minutes later only Miss 15 made an appearance.

We ran more or less the same route we had at the weekend – the same intervals – the same rests. After perhaps half an hour we arrived back at home, stretched, and then took turns through the shower. I had just enough time to get changed, clear the kitchen, and make a coffee before work beckoned.

I don't know why I'm such a stickler for 'turning up on time' at work – even while working from home. I watched the clock while making the coffee, and fetching the work laptop – worrying that I wouldn't be sat down and logged in on the stroke of 9am. Nobody would have seen me. Nobody would have noticed.

The day flew by – filled with meetings, online conversations with co-workers, and the design of a potentially huge future solution. Before I knew it, I had worked straight through lunch, and the end of the day was approaching.

For dinner we had baked potatoes with salad. I love simple, nutritious food. I know professional chefs often talk about ingredients rather than processes, but I think simple, tasty food wins out over fussy, complicated food every time.

This evening I'm trying to switch off for a couple of hours. I need it. A meteor shower is supposed to happen a little later – the Lyrids? – I'll wrap up warm and sit outside with a cup of hot chocolate. Then perhaps a book before bed.

I suppose the first few months of this year will go down as something on an experiment in my blogging history. I started the year off by walking away from Wordpress, and setting up a self-hosted blog in splendid isolation. I had become fed up with the temptation to 'play the game' – to seek the attention of others. I installed Ghost on a virtual machine in the cloud, and switched comments off entirely for a month or so. My castle, my words, and my rules.

Long time readers at Wordpress emailed me when I left – expressing more than a little exhasperation, and wearily predicting my return in the not too distant future.

Here we are – in the not too distant future – and I sort of have returned, and I sort of haven't. It turned out running my own island required effort on my part – looking after webserver updates, SSL certificates, and so on. I ended up moving my writing to GitHub – leveraging their ability to turn a source code repository into a website for free. If you're looking at jonbeckett.com, you're looking at the result of that effort.

After happily posting to jonbeckett.com for a while, the corona virus lockdown happened, and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. This thumb-twiddling-time resulted in the realisation that I missed the online community perhaps more than I liked to admit.

Early in April, I returned to Tumblr and Wordpress, and then after reminscing with old friends on the podcast, LiveJournal too. I back-populated them with all the posts since the beginning of the year, and figured that if I wasn't happy in any one place, I might as well try to be at all of them.

I'm still not sure if it was the right thing to do. It often feels like I don't really fit in anywhere – that I'm a strange sort of rolling stone that passes through from time to time – causing familiar faces to look up, and ask 'Isn't that the guy that used to write that blog ?'.

There is a temptation to give in – to return to Wordpress, and board up the constellation of cross-posted satellite blogs. You might liken it to returning to the city (especially as Wordpress now runs perhaps a third of the web, if commonly touted statistics are to be believed). Perhaps metropolis is a better word.

On my little blogging island, my voice is the only voice. I can sit on my pretend hill and write messages to myself all day long – thoughts, ideas, dreams, adventures. In a metropolis, my voice will be but one of millions – lost in the cacophony. Is it better to be on the outside, looking in, or on the inside, looking out?

I have the day off work today. Rather than sit in the study on my own all day, I'm at the dining table with my daughters, who are pretending to do school work. I'm not entirely sure if I'm keeping an eye on them, or if I'm keeping them company.

Miss 16 is on study leave for her exams, which are now not happening. Therefore she finds herself in the curious position of being encouraged to find a project of her own choosing to occupy her mind for the next few weeks. She seems to have chosen being the boss of her younger sister as her primary project, and is furious that I have put the brakes on that.

They survived sitting next to each other at the dining table for perhaps five minutes before the interrogation started – informing her sister that she didn't think she was putting the appropriate amount of effort into her online lessons. After I suggested that perhaps she should concentrate on what she was doing, and leave her sister alone, she slammed her book shut, stood up, and stamped up the stairs to her room – no doubt muttering bad spells under her breath.

My other half hasn't appeared yet. I'm pretty sure Miss 16 has set of in search of her to tell all manner of tall stories about her mistreatment. The kids still haven't grasped the concept that parents TALK to each other, and that any attempted subterfuge is almost entirely pointless.

My eldest has now joined us at the table. She's impressing me enormously at the moment – she has arrived with her web development book and her laptop, and is setting out on a voyage of discovery with 'cascading style sheets' today. I've asked her to work through the book, and use me when she gets stuck, rather than the other way around – I imagine the book is far more structured than anything I might come up with (although I often teach professionals this stuff, my opening line is usually 'I'm not a teacher, but I know far more about this particular subject than any teacher normally would').

Anyway.

I think it's probably coffee o'clock.

wp:jetpack/markdown {“source”:“We have a rather special guest on the podcast this week.\n\nShe is one of the luminaries that helped forge the idea of posting an online diary or journal into the collective consciousness. If you were reading and writing blog posts in the mid 2000s, back when blogging started to become more mainstream, you might have followed any of a number of online journals – among them Dooce, written by Heather Armstrong, Belle du Jour, written by Brooke Magnanti, or Petite Angaise, written by a british girl living in Paris called Catherine Sanderson.\n\nOf course back then we didn't know the author's names – shielded in wonderful anonymity, we knew only the name of their blogs.\n\nI still can't quite believe I'm writing this.\n\nThis week I had the opportunity to talk to Catherine Sanderson – to recount the story of how \u0022Petite Anglaise\u0022 came to be, what happens when a blog becomes famous, how you go about turning a blog into a book, and why we know Catherine's name.\n\nClick the link below to listen to the episode:\n\n* #16 – Catherine Sanderson – Petite Anglaise\n\nEnjoy!\n\np.s. although Catherine no longer publishes Petite Anglaise, you can still read the archived entries at petiteanglaise.com. The blog tells quite a story.”} We have a rather special guest on the podcast this week.

She is one of the luminaries that helped forge the idea of posting an online diary or journal into the collective consciousness. If you were reading and writing blog posts in the mid 2000s, back when blogging started to become more mainstream, you might have followed any of a number of online journals – among them Dooce, written by Heather Armstrong, Belle du Jour, written by Brooke Magnanti, or Petite Angaise, written by a british girl living in Paris called Catherine Sanderson.

Of course back then we didn't know the author's names – shielded in wonderful anonymity, we knew only the name of their blogs.

I still can't quite believe I'm writing this.

This week I had the opportunity to talk to Catherine Sanderson – to recount the story of how “Petite Anglaise” came to be, what happens when a blog becomes famous, how you go about turning a blog into a book, and why we know Catherine's name.

Click the link below to listen to the episode:

• #16 – Catherine Sanderson – Petite Anglaise Enjoy!

p.s. although Catherine no longer publishes Petite Anglaise, you can still read the archived entries at petiteanglaise.com. The blog tells quite a story.

/wp:jetpack/markdown

I slid out of bed early this morning, pulled on some old shorts and running shoes, and looked in on the children. There had been plans at dinner last night for myself, and all three of my daughters to run together – with promises of cooked breakfasts on our return from my other half by way of a bribe. None of it happened.

I walked out into the cold morning air, and wondered if the aches and pains in my legs from the first run (the first in months) might be shaken off during the first few minutes. I guess it shows how poor my fitness has become that DOMs has affected me so badly this time – usually I cycle to work every day – 6 miles or so of pretty strenuous leg workout.

The route I took around town was almost entirely deserted. I will admit to grinning as I turned a corner and saw a couple walking down the middle of the road, all over each other. I wondered if they had met up during their walk – a liaison of sorts. I don't think they even registered my presence as I ran past – such was their infatuation with each other.

After running for perhaps half an hour, I let myself back into the house, and discovered everybody except Miss 19 still fast asleep. While waiting for bacon to cook I looked in on her, and discovered her buried in a book about HTML, tinkering with the website she has been building.

'I figured something new out!'

I grinned, looked at her source code, and nodded my approval.

An hour or so later, the rest of the household began to appear from their hiding places, and somebody asked if I could help them print a form out. Why do paper forms still exist? Why? Quite apart from requiring a printer to print the damn form, and then some form of scanner or camera to record the filled form and then a computer to send it back – it's madness. The thing that really drove me insane? The person that invented the form sent out the Microsoft Word document file containing the form – so I could (for example) insert a sentence here and there, and make it available to others... When will people learn?

We won't talk about it taking an hour to get our printer to work. Bloody thing. I did a bit of reading on the internet, and it turns out that connecting printers to home computers is STILL a nightmare for everybody everwhere. There really is no standard printing protocol – every printer in the known universe talks a different language to every other printer. You might think somebody would have tried to sort that out by now, but no. Hopefully the need to print things will eventually go away entirely – I'm not banking on it though.

Time for a cup of tea, something terrible to eat, and some rubbish television.

In mid January this year I started recording a podcast – a podcast talking to bloggers around the internet about their blogs. This morning I started to take the lid off the podcast, and include a bit more about it in the blog.

What does this mean? It means that in-among the posts about running out of breakfast cereals, filling the washing machine, and not reading the awaiting mountain of books behind me, I'll be posting about the podcast episodes as they are released. There are sixteen of them so far. Apparently if a podcast makes it past ten episodes, it's doing better than 90% of podcasts out there. Go me! I'm not sure if making it past ten episodes means it's sails are set for a great and wonderful future, or if I just haven't got the hint yet about it's lack of popularity.

(insert Gollum leaning into the shot, and whispering 'Nobody listens to it!')

For those that had no clue, here's a list of the episodes so far, along with the countries each guest hails from:

wp:list * Jonathan Beckett – Testing 123, England * Laura Beckett – Tumblr, Wordpress, Snapchat and More, England * Amy Lyon Smith – Bedlam and Daisies, USA * Steve McCune – stevemccune.com, Panama * Ian Hope – Half Time Pie, England * Brooke Cutler – The Little Blog of Everything, Australia * Laura and Jonathan – Movies, Books, TV, and Video Games, England * Tinika Wells – NeekNacks, South Africa * Jon Jacob – Thoroughly Good, England * Jade – Jessica June, USA * Natalie – Coffee with Calypso, USA * Kristin – Dialogue in my Head, USA * Lauren – Back in Stilettos Again, USA * Katy – katyland.co.uk, Wales * Stacey – The Sharess, USA * Jonathan Beckett – A Retrospective, England /wp:list As I publish each episode going forwards, I will post about it to the blog – so don't be surprised to see two posts from me on a given Friday (or over the weekend if life lands on me like a proverbial grand-piano).

Finally, if you've not been on the podcast yet, what are you waiting for ? Give me a shout, and we can arrange something. Please don't be nervous or scared – I'm in charge of that. No, honestly – it's just a relaxed chat over a cup of tea – and I edit afterwards to remove any falling down moments where you exclaim 'Oh this is going to be shit!, I sound like a moron!'. I've gotten quite good at editing.

wp:jetpack/markdown {“source”:“This week on the podcast I look back at how the podcast is going so far – the challenges, the trials, the successes, and of course the amazing guests that have told us their blogging stories so far. I also take some time to report on \u0022life in lockdown\u0022.\n\np.s. check out the isolation haircut my daughters inflicted me with :)\n\nClick the link below to listen to the episode:\n\n* #15 – Jonathan Beckett – A Retrospective\n”} This week on the podcast I look back at how the podcast is going so far – the challenges, the trials, the successes, and of course the amazing guests that have told us their blogging stories so far. I also take some time to report on “life in lockdown”.

p.s. check out the isolation haircut my daughters inflicted me with :)

Click the link below to listen to the episode:

• #15 – Jonathan Beckett – A Retrospective /wp:jetpack/markdown