write.as/jonbeckett

While cycling to work this morning I was almost hit by a car. I was busy cycling along, minding my own business, and about to pass a junction. A car approaching me on the opposite side of the road decided that his need to turn into the junction was far more important than my continued existence, so started out by driving across the road directly at me – causing me to skid to a halt – before turning violently into the side-road on the wrong side of the road. The best bit? As he did so, he made a hand signal to me that I'm not entirely sure about – showing me the back of his hand, and pointing his fingers in the direction he was going. He stared at me as he swept past my front wheel.

Where do these people come from? How have they managed to survive as long as they have? Is it any wonder that I ride so incredibly defensively with people like that on the road? After it happened, it struck me that I really should put the camera back on my helmet, and start recording. Of course it's not every day that some ass-hat tries to kill me, but it feels like it sometimes.

It's not just other motorists either – pedestrians are an absolute menace in the center of town – mostly because they cross side-roads while glued to their damn mobile phones. If you're approaching a side road, signalling to turn on a bicycle, you can usually guess that people are not going to check back over their shoulder before stepping into the road. The really madenning ones are the parents with push-chairs, who push the child into the road before checking for oncoming traffic. How? Why?

I didn't mean for this post to become a rant about everybody and everything. It just sort of happened.

In other news, I just watched the US beat England in the World Cup. Fair play – they were the better team. There was one moment that kind of ruined it for me though – when Millie Bright fouled one of the US players late in the game, several of the US players ran towards the referee, gesticulating for the referee to show her a yellow card. As far as I have seen, it's the first time in the entire tournament that anybody has done that – and it's kind of disheartening. The women's game is SO much better than the mens because that sort of thing DOESN'T happen. There is usually no play acting, no cheating, no simulation, no dissent – the players generally just get on with playing the game.

I didn't really watch the game very closely – I spent most of the time talking to friends, and tending a fire to make our friend's children toasted marshmallows. There were worries for a few minutes that the fire might set light to the trees above, but I was only burning kindling and it died down after a minute or two. I didn't eat any marshmallows myself – I don't actually like them very much.

Anyway. Time to head to bed I guess. Another day of software development to come. Another day trudging up an impossibly steep and long mental hill. I need a holiday.

While making a cup of coffee a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that I might write a quick blog post, and perhaps make it into bed by 10pm. While holding the kettle beneath the tap, watching the water gush, I glanced at my watch – 10:15pm. Where do the hours in the day go?

It struck me earlier that I haven't really stopped work at lunchtime for weeks. While head-down on software development work, an hour out seems like an hour wasted. I take packed lunch to work anyway, so invariably end up hunched over the keyboard, munching away, and frowning at whichever piece of code is misbehaving.

Productivity gurus would probably castigate me for not taking time out. I probably wouldn't hear them anyway – I'm pretty good at blocking out distractions when busy. My other half despairs of me – particularly as I can generally re-wind the last few words of a nearby conversation in my head and re-play them.

I've always been the same way. During my teens and twenty-something years – before family life forced me away from the computer in the evenings and at weekends – I would typically work late into the evening, or through the weekend, and then wonder why I was shaking – not having eaten for the previous 12 or 18 hours.

Given free time late in the evening when I might have read a book or watched a TV show, I typically sit alone in the junk room and jump down the Internet rabbit hole – reading blog posts, news stories, magazine articles, and a hundred other things. I sometimes seek out classic or cult movies, but invariably set out on voyages of discovery into the darker corners of the Internet.

It turns out the Internet has a lot of dark corners.

I just checked the temperature on my phone – it's 33 centigrade, at 10pm. Madness. I've been hiding out for most of the day on the shaded side of the house – but as evening has drawn on the house seems to have realised what I was doing, and thought “that's enough of that!”.

The town brewery is open this weekend for visitors – several of my co-workers went today, and invited me along with them. I chose to spend the day with the kids instead – partly because I like spending time with them, and partly because I didn't want to throw Sunday away with a hangover. Work has been so crazy recently that I really value the weekends. This morning I was up at 7, along with Miss 18. By 9am we had both showered, dressed, and walked into town grocery shopping together. That was before the sun turned itself up to 11. Apparently we're returning to town in the morning to buy fruit and vegetables from the new grocer in town.

I gave Miss 18 an idea this morning that I've been thinking about for a few days. She didn't go to university – after a couple of years at college, she left education to start a full time job and rapidly discovered that her circle of friends had disappeared. I thought I might help her – and other young people in the area – to do something about it. With a bit of arm-twisting from me, she has created a Facebook group, advertising itself to 18 to 25 year olds in the local area that find themselves in a similar situation – where they can hopefully reach out to each other to meet up for coffee, movies, and so on. I think a fair amount of further arm-twisting might be needed to encourage them to get over themselves, but so far so good – there seemed to be a steady trickle of interest.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be for young people to form friendships these days. Everybody seems to hide behind their phones, and dating has been reduced to a random swipe-left crap-shoot based on a heavily filtered set of photos – and if a hook-up doesn't work out, it appears people have become mostly disposable – there are plenty more swipes in the sea. In a way it's been comforting to read that the latest generation are rejecting social media – but if that means hiding behind self destructing messages in Snapchat and Instagram stories, I can't help feeling like that's a step backwards. If you leave no trail, nobody can discover you.

The World Wide Web was invented to help connect people to information. We now have vast cities of people online, gathering on popular platforms to interact with each other – only they are not interacting – they are standing on soap boxes, shouting in to echo-chambers that leave no trace. It's all very strange.

Anyway. It's getting late. I'm going to go check in with Miss 18 to see how the group is going, do some arm twisting, and then turn in for the night. Fingers crossed.

I'm sitting in the dark of the junk room – sometimes humorously referred to as the “study” – with some quiet music playing, all the screens nearby switched off, and a full screen text editor called “WriteMonkey” on the laptop – to prevent me from becoming distracted by anything and everything. I am my own worst enemy. I completely understand why George R R Martin writes in a DOS word processor on a computer that only has Wordstar installed on it.

I wrote 50,000 words in November last year in 13 days. I used an 18 year old iMac with an old copy of Scrivener installed on it. The old iMac really isn't much good at anything else. The funny thing? I wrote a good proportion of the words during lunchtimes at work in a web based text editor called “Writer”, invented by a company called “Big Huge Labs”.

One day I'll have a go at writing something of substance – I just find this head-emptying journalling thing easy. I don't really have to plan, think, or make much sense – I just empty my head into the keyboard.

I didn't set out to write about writing again. I'll stop.

It's the end of the week!

I just watched the USA women's football team beat France. I would love to have been a fly-on-the-wall in the Whitehouse, especially after the second goal. I've never seen a grown man as obviously intimidated as Donald Trump is by Megan Rapinoe.

My eldest daughter asked earlier what we might be doing this weekend. After working full time for a few months, she's starting to realise that weekends are not to be wasted. I suggested going to London to see the Manga exhibition at the British Museum, but it's a private exhibition and therefore costs money. Once you add in the cost of getting to London and back it becomes an expensive day out. We already have tickets to return to “Hyper Japan” in July. Perhaps I'll talk her into a trip to the book shop in town.

(note to self – I do NOT need to buy any more books – the “to read” pile next to the bed is becoming dangerously unstable – if it fell over, it could kill somebody)

I spent an hour earlier watching the Robert Lazar documentary on Netflix. When I was younger I read all manner of conspiracy theory books, and in the early days of the internet scoured usenet for information on UFOs, secret bases, and secret histories. Of course as you get older you become more cynical – less willing to accept any new information without validation and verification. Bob Lazar always kind of flew in the face of that though.

If you've never heard the story before, Robert Lazar is the reason you know the name “Area 51”. He blew the whistle on the existence of the base in 1989, and the supposed reverse-engineering of alien spacecraft there. Nobody ever really got to the bottom of what motivated him to go public, and very few believed any of his claims anyway. Plausible denial won out, and the world forgot about him.

Here's the thing though – thirty years later, Lazar has started to tell his story – and in the intervening years the details he described in 1989 – things he couldn't possibly have made-up – have been proven accurate. Gravity has been observed to be a wave. The existence of the S4 facility at Papoose Lake has been admitted, the viability of the substance on the periodic table known as “Element 115” as a fuel source has been confirmed. Even the hand scanners used for entry into the high security facilities (that people laughed about) have been proven to exist. One thing after another, for years.

I wonder if there are any other examples in history of whistleblowers being discredited for decades before being proven correct?

I think perhaps the most intriguing part of the story (to me) is that at least one of the craft Lazar described being reverse engineered at S4 was recovered from an archeological dig – it had been here for a very, very long time.

While walking across the green outside our house this evening – en route to the corner shop to buy drinks and snacks to get us through England playing in the World Cup quarter final – I thought of something I had missed at work – a part of the development project I am working on. I can't remember what it was now – I know I thought of something, and thought to myself at the time “you need to remember this” – but of course it's gone – and I'm kind of furious with myself.

My brain is a mystery unto itself. Just as I finished writing the paragraph above, the thing I had told myself to remember re-appeared in my head. It's now written down in the bullet journal – something to look at in the morning.

Yes, I'm still using a bullet journal, despite multiple dalliances with productivity apps, websites, and whatever else. There's just something about writing things down that works for me. Earlier in the week I sat at my desk at work, and the managing director sat down next to me to talk something through – and commented on my using paper and a pen to work things out. He does the same – we wondered if it might be a generational thing.

On about work – we hired somebody new this week – a young lad that's been helping out with a data migration project. He was hired to complete a relentless task that a human could perform far better than a computer – fixing the crazily broken data from an old system while transferring it to a new one. While chatting with him one afternoon it dawned on me that he had the exact skill set that we've been unsuccessfully seeking in somebody for MONTHS – we have wasted SO much time doing interviews it's unreal. I opened a chat window with the HR manager and quietly tipped her off. Five days later he has been hired. I wonder if I'll get a finder's bonus?

There's something rather sobering about him not being born when I became a software developer.

As hinted at earlier, we were invited to a friend's house this evening to watch the World Cup again. I bought a bottle of wine, some cartons of juice, and snacks from the local shop along the way to their house. On the way back from the store we encountered a stag beetle on the footpath – there's a photo of it on Instagram if you're interested – I also reported it on a website that tracks endangered species. I had no idea they were endangered until my other half mentioned it earlier in the week. This beetle was really not too pleased with me taking photos of it – rearing up to show me it's impressive pincers, and turning around like an armored exo-skeleton from a science fiction movie.

Anyway. It's getting late. Somehow it's half-past eleven. Where on earth did the evening go ?

For as long as I can remember, I have been searching out free stock photos and adding them to the top of my blog posts.

I'm wondering about removing them.

Any thoughts ?

Postscript – it is done – the photos are gone...

There is a tub of chocolate ice cream waiting in the freezer for me. I bought it during a trip to the local store with our youngest daughter this evening. She appeared quietly in the junk room and quietly asked if I might accompany her. After asking why, she whispered somewhat conspiratorially that we were running out of a particular sanitary product that she needed. I quietly smiled, dropped everything, and pulled my shoes on.

On the way to the store I received a crash-course in female sanitary products. I love that our daughters have so few filters. Any game of “I spy” in our car devolves pretty spectacularly if anybody says “I spy with my little eye something beginning with B”. The immediate responses will invariably include “Bits?”, “Boobs?”, “Bums?”, and “Bogeys?”.

If anybody says “nipples” in the presence of our eldest daughter, she still dissolves into giggles. It's kind of her kryptonite.

Anyway. What best to do with a tub of ice cream? My plans probably involve a rubbish movie, and staying up really quite late.

I was thinking the other day about movies, and how the kids don't understand how signficant movies used to be. These days they turn on their phone, tablet, laptop, or whatever, and a world of movies fall out of the air in front of them. I'm old enough to remember BEFORE video recorders were common. There was a real sense of loss if you missed something when it was broadcast on television. There was no “catch-up”, “plus-one”, or “on demand”. You couldn't buy the box set. I wonder what my grandparents would have thought of streaming movies, radio shows, and podcasts? They all died before the internet really took off.

Movies are becoming strangely disposable though. After getting home from the cinema at the weekend – watching the Godzilla movie – I had a look to see if any of the old Godzilla movies were available to download. If I had chosen to, I could have downloaded every monster movie ever made in the space of one night. On the way home from the cinema I assured my daughter that as impressive as the new Godzilla movie was, it wasn't quite as good as watching some Japanese guy in a huge rubber suit stomping on cardboard houses. To prove the point I downloaded the original “Gojira” movie from the 1950s – after watching a few minutes of it, she saw my point.

I really don't know why I do this to myself. I sat down in the junk room an HOUR ago, with all the intentions in the world of sitting down to write a blog post. I've left it now until twenty minutes to midnight, with the OCD part of my brain screaming “if you don't post this within the next twenty minutes (nineteen now, actually), you'll have missed another day on the damn blog”. I don't know why my brain does this to me – it's not like I HAVE to post every day.

I'm way behind with reading other people's posts too – although I don't feel so guilty about that because I know I will catch up when I get a chance. I'm resisting the temptation to have a rant about those out there that try really hard to attract readers to their own blogs, but never put any effort into reading or commenting on anybody elses. I'm not going to rant about that though, because I've done enough ranting just recently.

We lit the chiminea in the garden this evening, and toasted marshmallows. It's funny – I had only just lit the fire when the children appeared from the darkest corners of the house as-if by magic. We have had a bag of giant marshmallows in the cupboard for some time – and now everybody feels sick, and it's all their own fault. I don't even LIKE marshmallows – I just toast them for the kids. Being completely honest, I like sitting next to the fire outside because the smoke discourages flies from coming anywhere near.

Anyway.

I don't have a lot to report today. I'm still plugging away on the huge project for work. I suspect we may not meet the deadlines, but I'm trying not to stress out too much about that. Yet. It's out of my hands really.

Thirteen minutes left. It will take me a few minutes to find a suitable photo. I'm not sure if adding stock photos to blog posts actually helps that much – they have become so prevalent, everybody knows when they see them. I guess it's better than a page full of text on it's own though (but also makes me wonder – are people that superficial – that they won't even bother looking at a blog post without a picture on it? – the data seems to support that rather depressing theory).

I'm actually amazing myself here – at my ability to churn out utter tosh for fifteen minutes, and then post it without really caring if it's interesting or not. I promise to do better tomorrow, when the OCD won't be forcing me to write five hundred words before I turn into a pumpkin.

p.s. I've ditched Scrivener for blog posts. It was a bit mad, using the aircraft-carrier of the word processing world to write sticky notes about my life. I'm back to using text editors, and saving the words into a Git repository at github. Feel free to explore at https://github.com/jonbeckett/blog

p.p.s. an impressive stag beetle flew past while sitting outside with our eldest daughter – causing her to stop mid-conversation and make the most horrified sound I've ever heard her make. I don't think she's every seen the B-52 of the insect world in action.

We have one of my school books from infant school somewhere – a book where half of each page is given over to a drawing, and the other half is ruled with wide lines to allow for a story to accompany the drawing. The book in question has a label on the cover with “Weekend News” written in very tidy handwriting – obviously the teacher's – and is filled with mostly fantastical stories that either never happened, or are embellished somewhat enthusiastically. Sometimes the stories are accurate though – like the page devoted to a Godzilla movie.

When I was young it's fair to say that I was a monster-movie fanatic. Actually, it wasn't just monster movies – it was anything to do with dinosaurs, monsters, space-lizards – it really didn't matter too much. My Nan called me “Professor Stegosaurus”, and my Grandad wound me up expertly by mis-naming dinsaurs as humorously as possible. I seem to remember “Ippy-dippy-docus” being a particular favorite.

I remember one weekend (before the days of video cassette recorders), the movie “The Valley of Gwangi” was going to be on television. I would have been about 6 years old. It was a Saturday afternoon – I remember it vividly. Moments before the beginning of the movie, the BBC announcer apologised that the movie had been replaced at the last moment by something else. I cried all afternoon. In those days there was no “on demand”, and no recording – if you missed it, you missed it – that was that.

Anyway. Let's get back to the “Weekend News” book. There is a page in it devoted to a monster movie involving both Godzilla, Mecha-Godzilla, and another monster that could use it's tail like a fan to blow everything away (read: blow cardboard houses away). In three sentences, the page give a fairly accurate run-down of the entire plot of the movie, and the accompanying drawing is by far the most impressive of the whole book. If memory serves, I might have added an X-Wing fighter in the air-battle above Godzilla on the battlefield too.

Where am I going with this? Maybe I'm just letting you know how far back I go with Godzilla. So you can imagine how excited I was to take my 18 year old daughter out tonight to watch the latest Godzilla movie. I'm not going to write a capsule review of the movie – you can read those anywhere – and it was brilliant – but I am going to talk about going to the cinema.

Why do cinemas let people buy noisy food? Why do some people not realise how annoying they are? Why can some people not eat with their damn mouth shut? And why oh why in a cinema would you finish eating the incredibly noisy bag of whatever it was you munched through for the first hour of the damn film, then screw the bag up and throw it on the floor, before slurping on your drink seemingly as loudly as possible too ?

There was a point – about half an hour in – when I realised I was missing huge chunks of dialogue, because my ears had attuned to the crunching, munching, slurping, rustling, huffing, and puffing of what must have been an Olympic level eating competition going on a few rows back. I seriously thought about leaving the cinema and demanding a refund. Thankfully the movie got really loud not long after, and the eating competition seemingly ran out of food.

We were at another movie recently – Rocketman – and some single guy came into the cinema with both hands full with both bags of food, and trays of tacos. He ate for the ENTIRE movie. I thought he should perhaps have been awarded some kind of award for it – given that we could hear him eating from 30 feet away throughout.

Godzilla was great though. And the post-credits scene was great too. I'm guessing Tywin Lannister is going to grow a new King Gidora in a lab, and it's all going to go very, very wrong – so wrong that both Kong and Godzilla will need to team up to defeat it. That's just my guess. I suppose we'll have to wait four years to find out.

Reaching the end of the week feels like being tipped from a wheelbarrow into the weekend. It's been a tough one. Not emotionally or physically – just mentally. It's difficult to describe what software development is like if you've never been involved in it, and it's probably interminably boring to hear anybody try to explain it – so I won't. Let's just say I'm tired.

When I got home from work this evening I cleared the kitchen around my other half as she made dinner, threw some washing in the machine, and then headed out into the garden to cut the lawn. There was method to my idiocy – the more things I get done on a Friday night, the more the weekend becomes my own. Of course the world never quite works as we might like, but the hope is there. No doubt tomorrow will bring all manner of unexpected errands – Saturdays are particularly crafty like that.

So what else has been going on? It feels like I've become a bit detached from the blog just recently – too busy chasing my own tail to sit down and write much of consequence. Let's think...

One of my co-workers retired yesterday. We don't often see him in the office – he's usually out on the road. I've known him for the past eighteen years – since I started in 2001. It's odd to think that I've been working at the same place for so long. I still think back to my first “proper” job with perhaps more fondness than the current one – I was only there for five years, but have all sorts of wonderful memories – mostly of the characters I worked with – of nights out, and idiotic adventures.

It's my Mum's birthday today – she's 70 years old. We bought flowers via the internet and had them delivered, then after dinner this evening I called to wish her many happy returns. The phone handset took turns being handed around everybody to wish her well, and to share each other's news – we don't stay in touch as much as we perhaps should. In the summer we're heading down to the coast to visit for a week – if the weather is kind to us, a days of beach combing, coast walks, ice creams, and pub lunches.

Anyway. It's getting late. Time to go pour myself a glass of wine and perhaps read a book. Time to switch off.