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01.23 – 01.29

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Work

I paired on some improvements to our frontend component library, Cardigan. It’s still not great, but it’s definitely better. Beyond that, I struggled to get into anything of substance. Mostly spent the time either putting out fires (that I probably started) or not really being able to concentrate. Possibly related, I’ll not be back at work until after paternity leave.

Life

Haaahaaa of course the person who’d accepted our offer on their flat decided to play us off against someone else and we got gazumped. I feel a mixture of disappointment and relief. Mostly relief. They really were exceptionally painful to deal with (bae bore the brunt of said dealings). At best hugely time wasting, but more often than not exhibiting the textbook hallmarks of a scammer. They had the audacity to ask us to let them know when we’d had our baby. Err no you can fuck right off mate. And don’t call us when it all falls through you unconscionable chump (at least bae got to write a couple of cathartic and exquisitely cutting messages making that point). On the plus side, it’s not every day that you get to use the word, ‘gazumped’. Silver linings.

Ate this and reckon we’ll be eating it a lot more. Hard recommend.

The boy has a horrific cough. We all got very little sleep.

TODO:

sell flat buy flat potty-train toddler have baby

This site

I sorted grouping posts by year (I started with a collection, but found a filter was more flexible when I wanted the same logic for tagged posts). Not sure what the benefit of having a collection would be. Perhaps it is purely a convenience? I’ve still got a lot to learn about Eleventy.

I though the site was starting to feel a bit horizontal line heavy as well, so I’ve got rid of most of them and tightened up the spacing on the post-list items. I’m still not sure about the one under the main nav – it feels a bit punchy. Getting rid of it felt a bit too stark (especially when content scrolls underneath it) and removing the white background from the nav feels a bit too brutalist (although I’ve not ruled that out altogether). And a lighter grey line feels line a bit of a cop out. Design is hard.

I was proud as punch when someone noticed the entirely pointless behind-the-scenes toggle and went on to write a kind post about it on Mastodon. Finally, the recognition I so richly deserve!

add checklist styles

And I added a colophon.

Listening

• ShopTalk Show with Ben Ubois of Feedbin – prompted me to prune and tag my feeds, as well as set up some judicious filters to ward off the temptation to read news about billionaire bellends destroying everything in their paths (something I’ve set up to relatively good effect on Mastodon as well)

Reading

• A Short, Totally Unofficial, History of Port Numbers – I’ve long been curious about this, but never quite curious enough to do anything about it
• Changing the bulb in a Meridian Lighting CIR100B ceiling light – gripping stuff
• Using AI to appease Jest – “If you’re on the fence about Copilot, I’d recommend it for the sole purpose of having someone else around who will throw spaghetti when you’re tired of throwing spaghetti at the wall”. I do a lot of spaghetti-throwing, so might reconsider paying up (or asking my employer to)

TIL

• Tap and hold the 123 key on the iOS keyboard, move to the character you want, then release — types the character and auto returns you to ABC
• There’s a new scrollend event in (Chrome and Firefox) town
• Outlines of people’s bodies can be read by wifi signals – a new way to be surveilled
• Farpotshket: a Yiddish word for ‘broken because someone tried to fix it’ – it me

Running

Hills on Tuesday felt ok-ish for the foot (as well as legs and lungs) at the time. And a truncated hill session on Thursday felt similar. Longest I’ve been for over a month today (Sunday) was mainly enjoyable. I think it will have been the last hurrah for a while. Hard to say if the foot has really improved any, but I’m boring myself dwelling on it at this point so I’ll try not to bother mentioning it in future.