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Learning English as an adult and the spelling is the part that still defeats me. Through, though, thought, tough, thorough. Knight with a silent k and a gh doing nothing. Colonel pronounced with an r that is not there.…
Forty people started a trial. Two converted. The other thirty eight simply stopped, mostly in the first few days. I know nothing about them. No feedback, no complaints, no support tickets. They arrived, poked around,…
Launching in three weeks. The default seems to be a launch discount, often fifty percent, sometimes a lifetime deal. I can see the argument: it creates urgency, it rewards early people, it gets the first customers who…
I am reasonably good at fixing things once they break and completely useless at the small maintenance that stops them breaking. What I would like is the short list the jobs that take a few minutes, that almost nobody…
First electric car, a driveway, and a socket in the garage. Quotes for a wall charger are a meaningful amount of money and the car came with a lead that plugs into an ordinary socket. Everybody I ask says get the proper…
Small board running a couple of always on services. Roughly every four months the card corrupts and I reflash it, restore my config and carry on. I have tried a better brand of card, which did not obviously help. It…
A deck built up over two years. A handful of cards come round constantly and I get them wrong nearly every time. I recognise them, I sigh, I fail them, and they come back in a day. The software flags some of them, which…
A source system started populating a status field with a new value we had never seen. Our transformation has a case statement that maps known values and defaults everything else to one bucket. So nothing failed. No job…
Two days flat in a guesthouse in a place where I spoke none of the language and had no idea what to do. It resolved on its own and I was lucky. What bothered me afterwards was how unprepared I was for something entirely…
I own a thin summer pair with mesh on the back, a leather pair with a wrist strap, and something waterproof that I bought in a hurry. I wear whichever suits the weather and I could not tell you what any of them would do…
Two years of study, comfortable with podcasts on familiar subjects, and I bought a normal paperback in the language because that felt like the natural next thing. Page four took forty minutes and I looked up about…
Three weeks, everything booked flights, all accommodation, two trains, and a couple of things I had to reserve. It felt responsible while I was doing it. Now I am reading about people who book the first few nights and…
An upstream API started returning errors. My worker retried, as designed. Within a few minutes the queue had thousands of jobs all retrying, the upstream got substantially more traffic than normal, and what had been a…
Started something alongside a full time job with a plan of two evenings and a Saturday morning. That was the deal I made with myself and with my partner. In practice it is in my head constantly. I check messages at…
Two hundred articles built up over four years. Almost none of them link to any of the others. Each one was written, published and left alone. I keep reading that internal linking matters and I cannot tell whether that…
I have been recording everything faithfully. The problem is what I am recording it into. I started with sensible categories and now have about ninety, because every time something did not fit I made a new one. There is…
One night. Forty young plants, beans, courgettes, a tray of lettuce planted out in the evening after weeks of raising them. In the morning there were eleven, and most of those were chewed. I have since read about beer…
Four day trip, weather came in on the second afternoon. Wind picked up, cloud dropped, and the forecast on my phone changed from unsettled to something worse. I stood there for twenty minutes genuinely unable to decide.…
A serverless API with about a dozen routes. One of them generates PDFs, one talks to a payment provider, one does image work. The rest are ordinary database reads. Every request pays for all of it at startup, because…
A form that updates a record. The action runs, the database is updated, no errors anywhere. The page still shows the previous value. Navigating away and back shows the old value too. A hard refresh shows the new one. I…
About a year of rings and a pull up bar. Pull ups, dips and push variations have all progressed clearly. Legs have not, and I think it is because I do not know what to do. Squats and lunges I can do for very high reps…
Switched mostly to audiobooks about a year ago because of a long commute. My count has roughly doubled. Two things bother me. First, I retain noticeably less I can tell you a book was good and struggle to say what was…
A monthly export I read with a short script. Most months it works. This month it fails partway through with an error about a byte that cannot be decoded in position something. I opened the file in a spreadsheet and it…
I do a setup service for clients that takes me a few days and produces a genuinely good result, because I make dozens of judgement calls along the way based on what I see in their data. I am building the software…
Simmered a tomato sauce in a well used cast iron skillet for about forty minutes. It tasted fine. The pan looks fine. Every source I can find says never cook acidic food in cast iron, and every one of them says it as…