I just spent the last few minutes standing in the back garden, waiting for the International Space Station to pass overhead. After a week of clear blue skies, tonight we have blanket cloud cover – of course we have – because the universe likes to take a giant shit on us from as great a height as possible if it gets the chance.
Oh well. The space station will be back in 90 minutes – and so will the cloud.
I remember the year I bought my telescope – I paid for half, and my parents paid for half as a Christmas present. I think we had blanket cloud cover until mid March that year.
In other news, our younger children are having a running argument about internet access. Our broadband router allows you to put curfews on specific devices – which we have taken advantage of. If Miss 14 is telling the truth, she has just boasted to her sister that she still has WiFi – ten minutes after it should have cut out. She really should have kept her mouth shut – because now (of course) I'm going to investigate.
Everything the children do or do not has become a battle recently. Miss 15 asked for an extra hour of WiFi now school has broken up for the summer holidays – she asked in the same pathetic voice usually reserved for pretending to be sick on school days. Why do kids do that? Do they really think their parents are THAT stupid ?
While clearing the kitchen after dinner – up to my elbows in washing up, and with the dishwasher hanging open, Miss 18 wandered in and tried to dump the glass she had just used into the dishwasher – on top of the clean things that I hadn't put away yet. The fact that I even questioned what she was doing caused her to slam the glass down, march to her bedroom, and slam the door. I haven't seen her since. That was two hours ago.
Apparently my brother-in-law is visiting tomorrow with a chainsaw type thing to help chop a huge chunk of the tree down that hangs over the back of our house. Therefore I'll have to get the grass cut before that happens – because we'll have nowhere to put the wood, so it will sit in the garden for the next thousand years with the grass growing around it until an archaeological dig finds it and wonders if it was some sort of ceremonial burial mound.
Anyway. I'm hot, I'm tired, and I have a huge pile of unread books that still tower over the bedside table. I'm going to go try and read one of them (and probably wake up in the morning with a creased book stuck to my face).
After drinking several beers last night and announcing a half hearted withdrawal from the internet at large, I've decided today that I might have been a little bit rash. Don't get me wrong – I still believe a lot of what I wrote was true – especially the rant about consumers being lazy, and the algorithmic timeline being their own fault.
So. I've been thinking. Not something I do much of, it has to be said, given my track record of doing things because I can, rather than because I should.
I'm not moving the blog. For now.
Let's get things clear though – I hate that the various blogging platforms have become walled gardens, I really don't like the Wordpress Gutenberg post editor, and... and... I could go on – about lots of things. I'm stopping now because nobody wants to read a long and rambling rant about blogging.
I was touched by a comment I received yesterday – that likened my blogging journey to Forrest Gump running across America – that if I do stop, I will quietly announce to those following me “I think I'll go home now”.
So yes. I'm sitting on my hands. I'm not shutting the blog down, and I'm not stopping writing this drivel. Thank you for following me along this idiotic journey – I really do appreciate that you could have been reading much more interesting posts about dating disasters, fan-fiction, life struggles, and so on – but instead you read this. If you made it this far, you kind of rule.
I just re-wired MailChimp to point at jonbeckett.com instead of jonbeckett.blog. Something a friend wrote in an email to me recently resonated – that all of the big platforms – Wordpress, Tumblr, and so on – really are walled gardens. She had noticed how the circle of readers forms on each platform, and eventually stops growing.
I'm not sure if it's because people have become lazy and accept the feed of content a given platform presents to them – which of course comes from the same platform.
Anyway – getting back to MailChimp – I'm guessing a few people will get this post as an email, and wonder what the hell is going on. “Is he really thinking of walking away from everything AGAIN?” – possibly.
I can't help wondering if blogging as we have known it is dead. When we all started out in the early 2000s, there were no platforms. The earliest version of Blogger was much like Jekyll and Hugo – a script that helped generate a site. Wordpress was a script to run a site – not a platform. Hell – I wrote one of the earliest popular blog solutions – and open sourced it – because everybody was open sourcing everything. I still remember the day I started getting emails from corporates, and discovered Novell had packaged my blog script with their servers without telling me.
The spirit of discovery has gone. Everybody expects everything to be given to them on a plate – and that includes discovery of new or interesting content. We used to find that stuff by going out and LOOKING. It's our own fault that the algorithmic timeline has appeared.
I'm still interested in the email subscription thing. I have an account at Substack that I've played with for a while – I'm wondering about doing a mashup of sorts, and cross-posting between here, and substack.
It's interesting how quickly the tide seems to have turned against Medium. Back when they started, everybody loved that whey were doing. They played the age-old game of playing nicely with everybody else. Nicely enough that lots of peole migrated to their platform – and then of course they lifted the drawbridge. Just like Facebook and Twitter (who both allowed their APIs to discover users from each other in the early days).
Maybe it's time for me to shut up. It turns out a couple of glasses of wine, and a couple of glasses of beer unlock something in my head. I certainly become “chatty man”, but filled with chat about inconsequential rubbish.
It's heading towards 10pm, and you find me sitting in the dark of the study at home, trying to write this quickly before I melt. I bought some beer from the corner shop earlier – it's in the freezer right now – I have to remember to retrieve it before it turns to ice.
Although not hot compared to some parts of the world, 37 centigrade is pretty damn hot for the UK. Tomorrow it's supposed to climb to 39 for the greater part of the afternoon and evening. I'll still be as pale as a ghost – for the last several weeks the only sunlight I have seen has been in the morning, the late evening, and through the slits in the blinds at work. By the time I finally go on holiday in late August, everbody else will be walking around in their holiday clothes, tanned, toned, and relaxed – and I'll be my usual self – stressed, tired, pale, and wondering how everybody else does it.
Before anybody says anything, yes, I know I haven't posted anything for the last few days. I guess it had quite a lot to do with being hot, tired, stressed, and ever so slightly fed up with endless chores.
Anyway – enough complaining. Time to go fetch that beer.
There was a moment this afternoon, while our house was filled with fourteen year old girls, that I couldn't help smiling – even though they were thundering up and down the stairs like a herd of elephants, shouting conversations to each other, and had taken over the living room for the better part of the afternoon.
While most teenagers are written off as social media junkies that gaze into their phones for hours on end like soporific zombies, these were doing anything but. For an hour they played various versions of hide-and-seek throughout the house.
I wondered both if this is the summer we have in store (they all broke up from school on Friday), or if this was a one-off throwback to years gone by, before relationships, hair, and clothes dominate everything they do, say, and even think.
While making a coffee in the kitchen, I blocked my ears from a really very dreadful rendition of one of the songs from The Greatest Showman that was coming from the lounge. I screwed my face up as I looked through the doorway, and was met with cackles of laughter from the collection of girls strewn across the sofas and the floor.
We empty our heads into the keyboard, or share brief moments in photos and videos, and often come to know each other better than those that surround us in the real world.
And yet we surround ourselves with lines – with walls – with rules.
We see a photo of somebody feeling good about themselves, and wish we could tell them, but we keep quiet because we don't want them or anybody else to think we're hitting on them.
We read a story about somebody going through a difficult time and wish we could be there to help share their burden – but then we become overly cautious because we don't want them or anybody else to think we're exploiting them at a vulnerable moment.
Maybe we overthink everything. Maybe nobody is watching every move we make. But maybe everybody overthinks everything – and everybody IS watching – and maybe that thought explains why the internet seems like such a barren ghost-town at times.
We are all out here – we haven't gone away – we're just all watching our backs, rather than taking any chances. I think that's a shame.
Although I migrated all of my old writing into Write.As, I'm wondering if it was a wise thing to do. It's not really designed to support a curated archive of writing by a particular person. I do like the connection with mastodon though, and seem to be picking up followers rather randomly.
Perhaps part of my misgivings is because I'm a developer myself, and can see how I could spin up an instance of Ghost at Digital Ocean in minutes, rather than use a platform owned by anybody else. I've been here before.
After a pretty spectacular falling down episode last night, I agreed to meet our eldest daughter for lunch today – to provide her an escape from work for half an hour. We're not entirely sure why such an escape is needed, but when you're trying to put somebody that doesn't appear to be in pieces back together again, you're kind of willing to try anything – or at least I am.
There is only one problem with visiting my daughter at lunchtime – a mini version of a Tour de France mountain stage to reach her. I cycle to work – the office is next to the river in the bottom of a beautiful country estate. Also, my bicycle is somewhat simplistic – it has no gears – meaning that I have no gears to change down through when faced with hills. In true murphy's law fashion, my daughter works just outside of town – a mile of steep climb winding through the estate. Add driving rain and wind today, and you're starting to get some sort of mental picture.
The first few hundred yards weren't too bad – my legs vaguely remembered the days when I used to go out training on a bike, and put some considerable power down. Unfortunately after half a mile of continual climb, lactic acid, and lack of talent kicked in – reducing me to a pathetic crawl.
I made it though.
After continuing on for half a mile, I spotted my daughter standing near a bus shelter – her hood up, hiding under a tree from the really quite ridiculous rain.
When we arranged meeting up, I had thought we might sit in the sunshine and enjoy a picnic together. Reality reduced us to standing under a copse of trees, eating wraps from the supermarket while squinting up at the bows above – wondering where best to stand – not that it would have made much difference to me by that stage.
Sitting and writing this nearly twelve hours later, I'm wondering if my legs have forgiven me yet. The thought has occurred to me that if this becomes a regular thing, I might actually become fit again – or fitter than I am at the moment at least. Years ago I used to make time to run two or three times a week – mostly because it was free. Maybe I should try and get back to that – you know, along with reading books, watching movies, writing, and all the other things I keep promising to make time for.
I'm beginning to wonder when life will give me a break. While projects at work loom over me like an avalanche waiting to happen, the parenting adventure threatens to tunnel underneath me, and cause the ground I'm standing on to fall in at any moment.
I wonder how some people do it – how they manage to live such seemingly “together” lives. Life seems to be an endless struggle for us – often so busy holding each other up that we lose sight of ourselves – sometimes for months at a time.
While wandering through the office at work this afternoon, I started wondering what the point of everything is. We strive to learn, to experience, to collect, to connect, and to curate things our entire lives – and then suddenly we are gone. What purpose does all that effort really serve?
And no, I'm not turning into a nihilist. I'm just wondering out-loud.
Many people seem to be driven in some way – by all sorts of things. Money, fame, friendship, knowledge – most people seem to have something – but then some people don't seem to have much of anything. Maybe they're just good at keeping quiet about whatever their thing is.
Some people never seem to have enough of whatever they seek, and others seem content with what they have. How does that work? What causes some people to stop, and others to continue on? Is it so wrong to just drift along and find out what happens next?
I've returned photos to the Wordpress incarnation of my blog. If nothing else, they brighten it up a bit. Publishing purely textual posts becomes awfully repetitive after a while. I'm hoping that I might use the photos as an inspiration of sorts – on the days when I don't think I have much to contribute, I'll look at the front page of the various stock photo sites and see what comes to mind. It's probably no better than daubing my face with facepaint and throwing pieces of bone on the ground, but it's better than nothing.
I often think of things to write about while I'm out and about – and of course never have a notebook in my pocket to write them down. By the time I return to a computer, the thought has either completely gone, or diluted so much that the incredibly important rambling opinion piece I might have written is reduced to a footnote on the end of yet another post about blogging.
And yes, I know I've told myself not to write about writing. It's kind of recursive, isn't it. Writing about writing. And now I'm writing about writing about writing. I could point out that the last sentence was writing about writing about writing about writing, but it all gets a bit silly. Welcome to the mind of a software developer.
On about software development, I heard an awful joke the other day. I'll preface it by saying that I'm going to explain it, which will kill the joke even if you get it.
“A man went to the grocery store on his way home from work. While there, his other half called, and said 'While you are there, can you get some bananas?'. He never returned home”.
Did you get it? I'll explain. It's all about the word “while”. The condition on a while loop in programming specifies the exit condition. After getting the bananas, the man is still in the shop, so he gets some more bananas, then he gets some more, and so on.