write.as/jonbeckett

It's just gone 10pm on Sunday evening. My bags are packed, and I'm ready to go once again. Tomorrow morning I will get up a little after 6am, and go through the usual routine ahead of a taxi arriving outside the house. I will make friendly conversation with the driver for an hour before arriving at Heathrow Airport on the outskirts of London. A couple of hours later I will depart the surly bonds of earth, eat a pre-packed sandwich handed to me by an invariably pretty girl with a Germanic name, and then land at Frankfurt airport early in the afternoon. An hour later I will depart the airport and hopefully board a train headed towards the city, before walking half a mile to the hotel – dragging my case behind me. I will arrive, pick up my room key, and unpack my case before walking to a nearby Japanese restaurant, sitting down, and ordering food without looking at the menu.

I've done this all before. Many times.

All I have left to do this evening is fill the Amazon Fire table with movies and TV shows to entertain me during the week of evenings ahead. Perhaps I'll have a shave too – one less thing to do in the morning – one less thing to worry about.

Expect a blog post from the departure terminal at Heathrow.

It's heading towards midnight, and I'm racing to post something to the blog before Friday becomes Saturday. Yes, this is a mania to make sure I have at least one post per day. And yes, I am mad. I have something like 14 minutes to get these words out onto the internet. 13 minutes now. I would have had half an hour, but the cats came running into the house a few minutes ago like their tails were on fire – causing me to drop everything, and give the younger one – Kaspar – a fuss.

It wouldn't surprise me to discover that Kaspar – although small, and relatively young – is actually some kind of crime lord in the local area already – some sort of Al Pacino character that rules through fear and intimidation. He doesn't even look cute most of the time – he stares at you with huge green eyes that could really imply anything. It really doesn't help his cause when he stands in the middle of the kitchen and lets out by far the most pathetic meow I've ever heard. His other end is far more impressive – he walked into Miss 18's bedroom earlier, let a silent fart go, and she had to leave the room. It was THAT bad.

8 minutes left.

I really don't have any huge or interesting stories to tell at the moment – work has been never-ending, and family life has been it's usual chaotic self. I'm looking forward to a slower weekend than usual – our youngest is at a sleepover both tonight and tomorrow night, our middle girl has a friend staying tonight, and I'm apparently taking our eldest out to Starbucks in the morning. Oh – and tomorrow night I've been roped into propping up the staff table at the infant school quiz night. Taking part in the quiz night is more about drinking wine than knowing anything – and that's something I know how to do – although I'm sadly out of practice.

I'm sure something entirely forgettable will occur to me before the weekend is out that must be shared with the internet. Until then, you'll most likely find me nerding out with the old Apple Mac, or nursing a post-quiz hangover.

3 minutes left to post this. There. I did it.

Do you ever have days when you sit down to empty your head into the keyboard, and you just sit staring at the monitor ? I'm having one of those days – and it explains why this post is called 'Thursday', because that's all I can think about to share with you. It's Thursday.

Of course quite a lot DID happen, but I can't share any of that because of all sorts of arcane rules I have made for myself about never mentioning work. It's not that I can't mention work – just that it doesn't make for the most riveting subject in the world ever. It's ironic really – I build the corporate systems that office workers hate using – and if I do my job well enough, nobody realises I did anything. Of course if anything ever goes wrong, or doesn't work in the way somebody that matters imagined it should, I know about THAT pretty damn quickly.

I'll shut up about that now.

(Twenty minutes pass)

It's really no surprise that my blog posts appear so disjointed. Most of them are either written in minutes, or returned to over the course of three or four hours – a few minutes at a time. While writing this I've cleared the kitchen, put washing in the machine, folded laundry that was in the machine, cleared washing up again, made a coffee, attempted to have a chat with Miss 18, and now find myself back in here writing while my other half fetches Miss 13 from an after-school club (her second tonight). This is normal, if you were wondering.

They will be back in a few minutes, and we'll be dishing up dinner – which reminds me – I should go set the table. The cooker alarm is due to go off soon too.

(Two hours pass)

And here I am again. It's now nearly 10pm, and I'm finally getting the chance to spend a few minutes writing this. Dinner somehow turned into a trivia card quiz game that was on the bookshelf next to the table – then the children wanted to play Trivial Pursuit (god knows why, because their general knowledge is hilariously bad – even with the family version). The game dragged on and on as everybody got more and more bored. In-between the games we had a break to clear the dishes away, clean the kitchen again, and do whatever else everybody else did while I was doing that. I won the game of Trivial Pursuit by the way – we eventually threw everybody in the middle and took turns in a sudden death round to finish the game.

Roll on tomorrow. At least it's Friday tomorrow, right ?

Oh – and guess who's headed back to Germany on Monday morning.

I've put my mad professor coat on this lunchtime, and set an experiment up. After leaving Tumblr a couple of months ago, swearing I would not return, I have inevitably returned. There is a reason though. Honest. This isn't just me messing around. Ok, maybe it is, but I'll explain anyway.

Over lunch I setup a Tumblr account, and then wrote some Python script to back-populate it with the last few months worth of blog posts from my archive. Eventually I will back-populate the whole lot, but Tumblr has a daily posting limit – it may take some time.

Anyway!

I want to find out if a journal style diary will still pick up organic traffic at Tumblr – to see if people discover it, follow it, and like the posts without me marketing it. It's going to be interesting (for a given value of interesting).

Of course I'll carry on writing here – I'm not about to MOVE the blog. It's just an experiment (he says to himself, and then sits on his hands to prevent himself from tinkering any further).

Being out here, posting to a blog that isn't in the middle of 'platform' has been interesting over the last few weeks – it's very quickly shown me who are really interested in reading, rather than only being interested in attracting me towards their blog. And on that note, I suppose I really should head off to Feedly, and start reading some of the growing mountain of posts I have not read yet. If you see a comment from me, now you know why.

I left the house a few minutes later than normal this morning, and left a note on my work calendar – 'haircut'. After the second attempt at cycling into town wearing full waterproofs to defend against the steadily dispiriting rain, I got some cash from the hole in the wall in the high street, and walked across to the barbers.

The first attempt to leave the house had been aborted twenty yards into the journey when I thought 'something doesn't feel right'. I had no crash helmet on. I then spent several minutes looking around the house for it, before realising it was right in the middle of the kitchen in plain view – I must have walked past it five or six times, growing more annoyed, and more perplexed as I did so.

In the warm and dry barber shop, a slim, pretty lady wandered in my direction with a smile, and gestured towards a waiting chair in front of a mirror.

'What can we do for you today?'

'Oh – a zero maintenance Dad haircut please – clippered around the sides and the back, and short and scruffy on top'

'How short do you want the clippers? Do you know the number?'

'Two please.'

She smiled, and started removing huge clumps of hair from the back of my head with the clippers.

The next fifteen minutes were filled with non-stop conversation about my work, her work, always being busy, never having enough time to do anything, always worrying about the next thing, and also worrying about what we might have forgotten to do.

While listening to her stories, it struck me that I was the only person talking to their hairdresser – everybody else was sitting in silence. Eventually two of the staff joined in with our conversation. When I was young I would never have dreamed of striking up conversation with a hairdresser – especially if they were attractive. I'm not sure if you grow more confident as you get older, or you just realise that people are people – or maybe you just don't care as much. I wonder if appearing confident is actually more about not caring what others think?

Rather serendipitously, when the time came to pay the conversation about clinging to life by our fingernails provided a perfect example. The cash I had just got from the hole in the wall was nowhere to be seen. I can only imagine that while standing in the rain outside the barbers – juggling my bike, work backpack, wallet, keys, bike-lock and phone, the money had somehow fallen from my pocket.

Guess who then found himself apologising, and running across the street in the rain to get more money from the hole in the wall? Yeah. Me. Thankfully it wasn't a lot of money, but I was still gutted.

I jumped down a rabbit hole of my own making today. Before describing the rabbit hole expedition however, it's probably worth filling in some back story.

I've been writing on the old Apple Mac for the last several weeks – sitting in the corner of the study at an old desk, with an angle-poise lamp, and a whirring heap of plastic and glass that appeared on billboards above the freeway through California in the late 1990s. There's something delightfully eccentric, reactionary, and anachronistic about using the Mac. It weighs more than the desk it sits on. Across the room, a Raspberry Pi sits on an adjacent desk – it's more powerful than the Mac, and yet weighs less than a small bar of chocolate.

While writing all manner of forgettable words into the Mac, an elephant has been sitting in the middle of the junk room. An elephant wearing a hat with a padlock on it. About a year ago the SSL standard began to change on the internet – the mechanism through which online services prove their veracity. Overnight, the Mac could no longer communicate with any secure services on the internet that had upgraded. Over days and weeks the internet slowly went dark.

And then I had an idea.

Before I can get to the idea I need to explain something else too though (I'm not a very good story teller, am I). For years and years, I have written blog posts in a plain text format called 'Markdown', and then copied them into wherever I was publishing the blog. I have over four thousand text files, split into month and year folders – and saved in a 'Git' repository on the internet.

If you're a fellow blogger, but not a software developer, you're probably thinking 'what the hell is Git?'. Git is the system invented by Linus Torvalds – the original creator of Linux – to store programming source code. Think of it as a database for files, that keeps versions for you. It comes into it's own when working in teams – you can each have a copy of everything you have all written, and push and pull changes between each other. I use Git to store the text of my blog posts, and push them up to a freebie account on the internet as a nerdy sort of backup.

The thing about Git – and this was my lightbulb moment – is that it's decentralised. Say you have the backup of your writing on a Git server on the internet (mine is at GitLab – you've probably heard of GitHub) – if you want a copy of it on your computer, you can tell Git to clone your writing to your computer. When you finish writing, you can push the words you have written back to the internet.

And there's the problem I needed to solve – it's all locked down with the padlocks that no longer work on the Mac – so the Mac can't push any words I write back up to the internet. BUT THE RASPBERRY PI CAN.

Therefore – bear with me – I cloned the backup to the Raspberry Pi, and then from the Mac cloned the backup from the Raspberry Pi to the Mac. The Mac can get away with it, because it doesn't need SSL (the padlock) to communicate with the Raspberry Pi.

What does this all mean? It means I can write on the Mac, push the words to the Raspberry Pi, and then tell the Pi to push the words up to the internet for me. If an auditor was reading this, they would start nodding – because I've unwittingly done an on-site backup, as well as an off-site backup. What does that mean? It means if the internet connection dies we have a copy here – and if the copy here dies, we have a copy on the internet.

If you made it this far, well done :)

You're probably wondering what Git gives you that saving text files into a folder does not. Well... you don't actually SEE anything – it's just a folder full of your text files. You can ask Git questions about your files though – like 'how is this text different than it was when I saved it two weeks ago' – complete with a full breakdown of the words, sentences, and paragraphs that have moved, changed, been added, or removed.

If you were working on some sort of experimental piece of writing, you could tell git to 'branch' what you have saved – giving yourself the writing equivalent of a multi-verse – where you can suddenly work on several versions of the same file if you so wish, and then merge them back together in the future too.

It's all a bit mad, a bit abstract, but very useful too. I've often wondered how many writers use Git. I imagine I might be the only one – if you can class me as a 'writer'. I'm writing words – that makes me a writer, doesn't it ?

Rather than let another weekend slip through our fingers while consumed with endless rounds of tidying, washing, and whatever else, I dragged two of our children out of the house this morning for a walk to the local park. The park is perhaps a mile and a half from home, and stretches along the side of the River Thames as it sweeps past.

We took a bag full of leftover pieces of bread with us, and spent quite some time at the riverbank feeding the swans, ducks, geese, and gulls. While surrounded by the aerial and water-borne bombardment, numerous photographers emerged from the crowd – taking pictures of the mayhem. I stepped away from Miss 13 – chief thrower of bread – and snapped a few photos of my own.

Before arriving at the riverbank we had stopped at a cafe near the entrance to the park, and acquired hot drinks – two coffees and a hot chocolate. They took forever to make, and cost the price of a small house on the outskirts of London. Now I remember why I rarely buy coffee from town any more – the joke in the LEGO movie about the price of coffee wasn't without merit.

After running out of bread, we sat on a bench alongside the river for quite some time – watching families taking their dogs for walks along the river. I pointed out a passing black labrador as my favorite – his tail wagging like an aeroplane propeller, and his tongue dangling somewhat hilariously from his mouth. My eldest daughter fell in love with a bad tempered husky puppy that seemed intent on eating a gull (if only he could get near enough to one). My youngest gazed in awe at a Great Dane that lumbered past – closely followed by two sausage dogs that would have scarcely filled it's mouth.

While sitting on the bench watching the world go by, we all remarked that it should be a thing – this 'going for a walk on Sunday morning' lark. Of course most weekends find us trudging to football or rugby matches – but when we are not, the sunshine and fresh air seem like a fine tonic to offset the cares of the week ahead. It's worth mentioning that while writing this, Miss 15 is taking part in county rugby trials – if they go well, we may find ourselves losing even more weekends.

While writing this, a curious silence has fallen upon the house. This means either the washing machine has finished, or Alexa has run out of tunes on whatever play-list the children have chosen. I should probably investigate.

I've been playing with the old Apple Mac this morning – the one I used for NaNoWriMo last year – the one I told myself would provide a distraction free writing environment. Such a good idea – pretending to be George R R Martin running his copy of Wordstar on an old PC – right until I discovered a website called 'Macintosh Garden' full of abandonware. The Mac now has AppleWorks, iWork, Filemaker, Stuffit, WriteRoom, and a host of other long-forgotten applications installed on it (all applications I used to own, I might add). A bit later on today a very, very old version of Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc) will appear on it. You might wonder why I'm bothering. I'm asking myself the same question. I'll go with 'curiosity', 'reminiscing', and 'tinkering'.

I remember spending the better part of a couple of years using Adobe Illustrator to draw building cross-sections for marketing materials where I used to work. Although my main job revolved around systems administration, and development of the database the staff used to run the business, in-between I got called on to produce product technical sheets and so on (it was a manufacturing company). I also remember spending countless hours messing around with FileMaker – the business ended up using Microsoft Access, but it was a close run thing.

It's funny – looking back – at how differently computers were used before the internet came along. These days the computer sitting on our desk is just a conduit to the internet – the thing that gets us to the thing – whereas years ago, the computer WAS the thing. I guess that description doesn't really work either, because the internet is just another huge collection of computers, all working together. Maybe that's the point though – maybe 'the thing' we have always been trying to get to doesn't exist – it's really about the transformation and communication of information. Oh I'll shut up already – this is turning into a computer science lecture with a side of philosophy.

After dire predictions about an apocalypse the likes of which the country had not seen for some time, the much talked about and endlessly forecast snow finally arrived last night. An entire inch of it. Given the news headlines you might wonder if White Walkers had descended on the country. Apologies if you have not read or watched Game of Thrones – just think about an army of the un-dead emerging from the snow – not that we have much snow for them to walk from. Maybe they would be localised? That doesn't really make for a good apocalyptic story, does it – regional marches of the un-dead.

The alarm clock went off at 6am this morning. For a few moments I wondered what on earth was going on, but then remembered my other half works in an infant school – she's 'the lady on the front desk'. Calls were made, council websites were updated, and local radio stations were informed – no school today.

After jumping into the shower – coincidentally the warmest room in the entire house – I got dressed, and dug the work laptop from my backpack – clearing the desk in the junk room to make way for another day fighting the good fight with the leviathan I have been working on for the last year. Concentrating on any work at all has been made more difficult by a house full of children that seem to think the only volume available to them is 'shout as loud as possible'. As far as they are concerned 'snow day' means 'go shopping for chocolate', and then 'play monopoly on the bedroom floor'. I keep hearing shouted accusations of cheating, and all manner of really quite nasty threats.

I've switched the old Apple Mac on in the corner of the junk room, in the forlorn hope that it might generate a kilowatt of heating energy while streaming internet radio, and showing a screen saver. I don't think it's working.

I don't really remember 'snow days' when I was young – but that may be because most children lived within walking distance of the schools – and by walking distance, I mean a couple of miles. I'm always amazed while cycling to work at how few children walk to school – and how many more cars appear (no doubt ferrying their precious children to school) if it rains. Do children dissolve if they get wet these days? Actually, I do remember a few snow days – back in the early 1980s, when the UK was clobbered pretty damn hard. The primary school I attended had huge cast-iron radiators lining many of the classrooms – they hurt like hell if you caught your knees on them. While the radiators would probably operate quite happily for several thousand years, if exposed to the cold they promptly turned their contents to ice, and burst – flooding classrooms and corridors very efficiently indeed.

Anyway. I think it's time to make a cup of tea. Almost the weekend.

My body clock performed the curious feat of waking me up two minutes before the alarm on my mobile phone this morning. I'm not sure how it does it, but my body seems to keep better time than the atomic clock at Greenwich. The radio alarm clock kicked in a few minutes later, and filled the bedroom with music. This is another curious thing – music means we have missed the news headlines – and seeing as the clock is supposed to keep itself in time via a radio signal, I'm not sure if our clock is wrong, or the local radio station is wrong.

Weather reports have been predicting lots and lots of minus numbers for days – and their predictions started to unfold overnight. Of course the heating boiler in our house decided that the first really cold night of the year would be a good night to trip out and stop working – the house was frigid this morning. The first clue is usually a lack of hot water – which I discovered while standing in the shower. At least the cold water woke me up.

After racing to make breakfasts and packed lunches, feed the cats and the fish, unlock the cat flap, and put the kettle on, the rest of the household slowly arrived downstairs – walking from room to room drinking tea, eating anything available, pulling clothes on, and brushing hair at the same time as one another. When the children were young the house ran on rails on a morning – it had to run on rails – now the first hour of the day is little more than vaguely organised chaos.

One by one the younger children, and my better half left the house – leaving me alone with Alexa filling the kitchen with the local radio station, and the cats stepping outside the cat-flap before retreating back into the house. It appears minus-whatever is far too cold for them too. By the time I left for work, wrapped in several layers, the cats were perched in windows at each end of the house, watching the world go by.

While it didn't rain last night, the cold brought a fair amount of mayhem to the local roads, and served as a reminder just how selfish, thoughtless, and ignorant so many people are – and how many snowflake children there are out there. The amount of traffic on the minor roads was at least triple usual levels – no doubt filled with children being ferried to school because – shock, horror – exposing them to the cold might CAUSE THEM TO GET COLD. Have people never heard of coats, scaves, gloves, and hats? These are the same people that take their precious children skiing, and plaster Facebook with their exploits.

While standing in the middle of the road for quite some time on a particularly slow stretch, cars behind me started beeping their horns. Just how stupid are people? What did they think beeping their horns would achieve? Nobody in front of them could go anywhere, and nobody behind them either. Idiots.

Once away from town, and into quiet tree lined lanes, the struggle continued – this time navigating the hoardes of trophy mums out walking or running in their label-victim sports clothing – so consumed with their own conversation that they didn't hear me coming, and didn't hear me ask them to let me past for the first three times I tried to get their attention. I thought I might be stuck behind the second group for some time – I followed them for a quarter of a mile last week – oblivious to my presence. This morning I snuck past at a point where the road widened, and they nearly jumped out of their skin as I drew level – suddenly looking behind them, reminded that an entire world might exist outside of their bubble. I smiled.

So. Here I am. Back in the office, and slowly warming up. I think a trip to the kitchen to make a hot drink may be in my immediate future, before opening the code editor, and diving into a world of programming for the next several hours. Wish me luck.