We were at a family BBQ on Easter Monday and as the week has gone on more of the family have become ill.
Ellie didn't finish her breakfast this morning and after she barely touched her lunch, the school called us to come and get her.
I've experienced waves of feeling rough throughout the day, with a headache and achy muscles to boot. I will now starve myself until I know with 100% certainty that I'm hungry and the worst of the bug is over with.
Readjusting back to work life today after a week off for Ellie's half term. Time off is always nice but the bad habits always creep in when you remove the structure of school and work during the week.
My worst habit during time off is going to bed much later than normal. I still get up around the same time each morning, so I feel more and more tired the longer that I let it go on.
Anyway, the time off was enjoyable. We went swimming, played crazy golf, visited the Winchester Science Centre and its awesome planetarium, had BBQs and spent time with family over the Easter weekend.
There is so much chocolate to eat and I'd rather we didn't have it in the house at all because it is derailing my summer body goals.
Popped in to Tesco on my way home from work to get a few bits.
A tinny-sounding 'Gotta Get Thru This', the 2001 Garage anthem by Daniel Bedingfield, was playing through the shop speakers. "Tune!", I thought to myself as I walked past the carrots and potatoes, chucking a bag of organic spinach into my basket.
It wasn't until I was back in the car that it dawned on me: the music playing in Tesco now includes songs from my own childhood. No doubt picked to make shoppers feel nostalgic and happy.
Did it make me feel more nostalgic? Yes, but that's not the point. I'm now one of the old guys in Tesco and I don't like it.
Recently, I discovered that our porch light had been wired in to our upstairs lighting circuit, instead of the downstairs circuit that it should be part of.
There's no need to ask me how I find that out. You can probably guess.
One of the most frustrating parts of being a homeowner is discovering that the previous owners cut corners or didn't take the same level of pride in their work as you do. "Out of sight, out of mind", is good enough for them.
Anyway, one of the best mindsets you can adopt is that whoever did the job before you did it badly. Kill the power at the fuse box first and always test wiring with a voltage detector before you touch anything!
While browsing my Spotify home page, I noticed some audiobook suggestions that are labelled "Included in Premium". Normally, I listen to music when I work, but I thought it worth giving these a try - I'm already paying for them, after all. Whether I can concentrate on work while listening to a story remains to be seen. Hopefully, I won't constantly have to skip back to re-listen to missed sections.
At the start of February, I purchased a walking pad so that I could get some steps in whilst working at my standing desk.
The WalkingPad Z1 has been such a good purchase, I'm really happy with it and I will write a more detailed post about it soon. However, step count aside, I've noticed an additional benefit that I've not seen mentioned before: focus.
My ability to focus and crack on with a work task has surprised me. It's like part of my mind is occupied with walking and that makes it easier to concentrate.
I know that music, or certain genres of music, such as those with a consistent beat or rhythm can help some people with concentration. Walking, like running, is rhythmic, so this makes sense.
I'll have to do some digging and see if there have been any studies into this.
It's been a frustrating couple of weeks trying to get my PC to be more stable when playing games.
Helldivers 2 continues to be hugely frustrating. One day you can play for hours without any problems and the next day it'll crash back to Windows within 30 seconds of starting a mission.
I'm not alone, either. This is a problem that huge numbers of PC players are experiencing, as a search for 'PC crash' on the Helldivers subreddit highlights.
I've also had issues with No Man's Sky and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, although recent Nvidia driver updates seem to have ironed those out.
At least I'm learning lots about PC optimisation in the process. I think I'll look to buy a larger SSD soon because I can't currently fit my most played games on the SSD Windows is installed on because there's not enough space!
Last week, I had a bit of a mental week, working on the latest update page for No Man's Sky. These pages are always a ton of work, but I enjoy doing them.
Afterwards, the Hello Games team mentioned me on their LinkedIn post, which was really nice. It still feels surreal to be involved in a game that I've enjoyed playing—and still do—so much.
A couple of years ago, I added 'notes' to the site. This was essentially what the microblog is now: short updates without headings organised in a feed.
I've decided that I want to post more on this site and the microblog is a friction-free way to do that. But, as the microblog would contain a lot of noise that wasn't work related, I was keen to separate it from my design and dev posts.
Lots more to do but happy to put this live tonight after about an hour of work.
A couple of times before Ellie was born, Susan and I would go down to Hythe Marina at midnight to see in the New Year. Looking across Southampton Water at the city skyline, you get to witness hundreds of firework shows all going off at the same time.
New Year's Eve celebrations don't really happen when you have young kids. But this year, now Ellie is six years old, we decided we would go and watch the fireworks again and she could experience it for the first time.
Ellie wasn't too happy about being woken up at 11:30pm to get in the car but by the time we got to the marina she was wide awake and excited to see the fireworks.
Happy New Year to you all. Here's to a great 2025!
Our shiny new diverter valve actuator motor arrived today and we have hot water again! It's only when you can't have a hot shower or run hot water to wash the dishes that you realise just how much we take it for granted.
Today, a rather important part of our boiler - the bit that controls whether heat is applied to the central heating system or to the taps - decided to die.
It died whilst set to heat the central heating, meaning that the house is lovely and warm but we have no hot water to wash with.
At least I now know what a diverter valve actuator motor is. Every cloud.
Used a curved monitor at the office today for the first time. Seems silly/obvious now that I've used one, but it didn't really occur to me that horizontal lines on the screen are slightly curved and I'm not sure I like it. Won't be rushing out to buy one anytime soon.
I find engineering videos like this fascinating. But it was the video thumbnail that piqued my interest because it just looks so wrong.
In the 1950’s Robert Thomas Jones, a brilliant NASA engineer, began developing a radical new wing arrangement called an oblique wing (also referred to as a skewed wing). The wing design was characterized by a wing that could pivot into a unique angled configuration in relation to the aircraft’s fuselage. The design offered several advantages over more conventional swept wings. An oblique wing’s ability to pivot into a straight wing made it ideal for low speed flight (improving efficiency and take-off/landing performance), but at transonic and supersonic speeds, the angled orientation minimized both wave and induced drag, leading to improved overall aerodynamic efficiency. With lower drag at higher speeds, oblique wing aircraft would require less thrust to maintain a given speed, resulting in reduced fuel consumption and operating costs. Compared to other variable geometry wings, oblique wings would also be lighter, less complex and have fewer drawbacks like a shifting center of lift.
A shoutout to the production quality of the Mustard YouTube videos, too. Well worth a subscribe.
I picked up a copy of Hob: The Definitive Edition after it went on sale in the Nintendo Switch eShop back in January. It had been sat on my wishlist for a few years, so it was good to finally get to play it.
Probably the most impressive thing about the game is the world itself. Trees, grass and lush vegetation on the surface, with machinery and cogs underground. That machinery springs to life when you solve puzzles or unlock the next area of the map, moving huge parts of the scenery in such a satisfying way.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. My only gripe was that the game did chug a bit during visually intensive moments, but that's more of a limitation of the Switch hardware than the game itself.
This week, I reached a new streak milestone on Duolingo: 100 days of Spanish! 🇪🇸
According to my Duolingo profile page, I started using the language learning app in 2017. However, my usage in those first few years can only be described as 'sporadic' at best.
In 2022, I've made more of an effort to make learning Spanish part of my daily routine and try to do at least one lesson a day (usually before I go to bed). Attempting to spend more time using Duolingo, I put the app icon front and centre on my phone's home screen. Whilst that has made a difference, I still struggle to avoid reflexively opening Instagram, TikTok or Twitter each time I unlock my phone.
Frustratingly, I let a 60-odd day streak slip away from me earlier in the year. But, knowing that I've spent at least 160 days learning Spanish this year is a big step toward becoming fluent (however far away that may be).
After 10 days off, which included a bank holiday for the Queen's funeral (that fortuitously extended my time off by another day), it's back to work for me.
Time off always seems to go by quickly, and, whilst this past week was no different, it did feel like a good break. Despite catching a slight cold, I feel rested and ready to go again.
One often overlooked benefit of using the `ch` unit to apply a max-width to type is regardless of the font-size, it can help you create predictable breaks, which is super useful for massive headings etc pic.twitter.com/dMT7SeW0YG
As a huge fan of the Chris Sawyer Transport Tycoon games, I added Sweet Transit to my Steam wishlist as soon as I watched the trailer. Coming sometime in 2022, this strategic city building game from Team17 is no doubt gonna be a massive time sink for me.
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
This past month has been an absolute blur. Seriously, where has August gone? Part of me is glad that the weather has been pretty poor for this time of year, because I wouldn't have wanted to be that busy whilst also melting.
What's interesting is that today, the first day I've had in weeks without a deadline, has been a terrible one for productivity - It's like my brain never got out of bed this morning. "Diamonds are formed under pressure", as the saying goes. And now, without the pressure of a deadline my mind has completely switched off.
This is also my first post since 30th June, which is disappointing as prior to that I was on a bit of a roll, posting a couple of times each month. It'll be good to get back to writing about CSS again and finally (fingers crossed) start writing some longer articles about design.
The week is off to a miserable start with heavy rain. It's actually pretty chilly, too. But then shorts and tshirt is my go-to remote working attire of choice.
An Etch office poll to see if staff prefer to stack cups up or down on shelves provides incredibly divisive (I stack mine facing down).
England won last night (Tuesday) to finish top of Group D. They'll face the runner up of Group F, which'll be either France, Germany or Portugal. 😬
Lots of meetings today (Wednesday). Spent some time researching font rendering in browsers. I feel like there's more I can be doing in this area to make website text look better.
Got a client meeting coming up for some idea generation. Also took part in the weekly Etch Play live show on Twitch.
I've always been pretty bad at remembering to book time off, sometimes going months and months before taking a break. It's something that I've gotten worse at during the pandemic. In my mind, I reduce the importance of any time off by telling myself, "I can't go anywhere anyway!".
It's a weird way of thinking because time off during the pandemic has actually felt less stressful than during 'normal' times. You can't go anywhere or see anyone, so there's no expectation that you need to make the most of your break by doing something every single day.
Sounds like good downtime. Now, if I can just remember to spread the rest of my annual leave evenly throughout the rest of the year...
I've made a change to my Ghost theme: each post is now rendered in full on the index page, instead of displaying an excerpt.
Why do this? Well, I wanted my posts to be more like notes; quick thoughts and observations that come to me throughout the day. Most of these 'notes' will be just a hundred words or so. A longer excerpt, essentially.
I also prefer the visual variety of different length posts. Scrolling down the homepage is now more interesting because each post isn't restricted to a particular character count.
Should I want to write a lengthier post I simply tag it as an article. The loop in my Ghost theme will then display an excerpt for that post, rather than the entire post contents.
I'd been a long time admirer of Firefox and in particular, its Developer Tools. They're also a not-for-profit and you get a lot of additional privacy and cookie blocking out-of-the-box. A no-brainer, really.
Switching was easy, with a quick export of bookmarks from Chrome. I don't really use bookmarks anymore. At the very least I need to sort through them. Maybe.
Had one slight hiccup with Firefox whereby the 1Password plugin I was using stopped working. However, I eventually found a solution for it.
Yet here we are in week 23 of 2020 and I've posted just 6 times (and one of those was the 'Goals for 2020' post). Yikes.
This one is frustrating as it should be easy. One post a week is not a huge amount of work, especially when it can simply be just documenting something cool or interesting that I've seen or read about online.
I really want to get to the end of the year with at least 52 posts in 2020. Content volume has always been a sticking point on this site and from now on I would like 52 posts to be the minimum amount of new content posted per year.
Significantly improve JavaScript knowledge
The lack of any progress on this goal is probably the most disappointing of them all. Improving past a basic knowledge of JavaScript has always been something that I've wanted to achieve and it constantly gets put off.
I recently signed up to Dan Abramov's Just JavaScript for more daily snippets and have been enjoying the content so far.
I'll be making a conscious effort to make sure a considerable portion of my weekly posts are JavaScript related from now on.
Broaden front end skills
As this is an ongoing goal it's hard to quantify it. There won't ever be a point where I look back and say that I'm happy where I am - I can always learn more.
CSS continues to be a keen interest and I'm excited to see how my knowledge of CSS Grid (in particular) grows and what it enables me to do in the browser.
This particular goal will also be vastly improved if I can nail down the previous goal of becoming more competent with JavaScript. This is definitely a priority.
Continue to grow as a designer
Recently, my work has had more of a front end focus. I haven't had to design much from scratch. But, design is so much more than that and there has still been plenty of opportunity to improve my UX knowledge and help clients understand the reasoning behind certain design decisions.
As with broadening my skills, this is a goal that won't ever be finished. But it's always worth reflecting on how far you have come and challenging yourself to keep improving.
Conclusion
Quite a bit has changed since the start of the year. I feel like a six month review is probably not frequent enough to keep tabs on my progress, as things can easily fall by the wayside if not regularly checked.
Quarterly reviews would be better but probably still isn't enough. So, I'm going to start doing monthly reviews. This will give me a chance to review the work I've done and the things I've posted, whilst they're still fresh in my mind.
Back to work today with a nice little two day week to help get back in the swing of things. As nice as it is to have time off, it's good to get some routine back - at least so I know what day of the week it is!
2019 seems like such a blur to me; I loved every second of my first full year as a Dad but from a work point of view, I know I could have done more. That's not to say that I didn't improve or learn anything - because I did. Ultimately, it comes down to being better at documenting the journey and in turn, that makes it infinitely easier to look back and say, "Wow, look at all the things I did!".
With that in mind, I spent time over the Christmas break working on a few website theme changes, improving the list of posts on the homepage and introducing a new 'Today I Learned' (TIL) tag. It's this new category that will be getting a lot of use in 2020.
So, what do I want to achieve this year?
Post at least once a week
Most of the time this one should be easy. I read plenty of front end and design articles every week, so I'll be documenting the best ones in the new TIL category. But by setting the bar at a minimum of one per week, I know I'll end up with at least 52 new posts this year - which is more posts than I've ever had on this site!
Significantly improve JavaScript knowledge
One of the best decisions I made last year was subscribing to Go Make Things - a developer tips newsletter run by Chris Ferdinandi.
Chris sends a short email each weekday with code snippets, tools, techniques, and interesting stuff from around the web. This daily exposure to bitesize chunks of JavaScript with well thought out explanations have been a great learning resource for me.
Throughout the year I also completed a few JavaScript courses and I want to do more of the same in 2020.
Continue to grow as a designer
Honestly, I feel like the design work I did in 2019 was my best yet. I know that's partly because at Etch I'm surrounded by a group of talented designers producing really great work, whom I can ask questions and share ideas with.
Working alongside people who are good at what they do challenges you to up your own game. I still have so much to learn about design but I'm confident that this year can be another best yet.
Broaden front end skills
I've already mentioned JavaScript, but this goal is more about making sure I'm improving across everything that I'm involved with. There's so much great stuff on the way for CSS and I know there's always more that we can do to ensure our work is as accessible as possible.
Be less reliant on Chrome
For a while now I've been wanting to make Firefox my primary browser. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Not only does it have great set of dev tools (if you've worked with CSS Grid then you'll know what I mean) but Mozilla, the corporation behind Firefox, are a not-for-profit. They value privacy, security, open-source, gender equality in tech and much more.
So there you have it, a few but very achievable goals for 2020. If you've got your own goals and resolutions, good luck and stick with them.
Someone take my site away from me. Give it the home it truly deserves, with an owner who can love it and spend time with it.
That's not to say I don't love this website. I spent a good deal of time tarting it up and making it look nice, it's just spending time with it that I struggle with.
It doesn't help that I run another website: Go Marching In. That site gets all of my attention on a weekly basis because it is viewed by a far greater number of people. Plus it helps when there are games every week as there is always something that needs writing (venting) about.
I plucked up the courage to look at my Google Analytics for this site and even though I expected the stats to be pretty shit I was surprised to see 123 sessions in the past 30 days. That's higher than I thought it would be, but then I saw the 98% bounce rate and an average time spent on the site of 1 second.
There's my answer then: they're all fucking bots!
Just one human visit would be better than 123 bots skewing my stats.
Which makes my first website task of 2015 (second if you count writing this post) to find a way to filter out the bots from my analytics and if possible, stop them from even reaching my site in the first place.
I'll report my findings and then I'll have already done two things to my site this year...
