- This week Lachie has taken the kids away for the easter hols. Iāve gotten a lot of fun stuff done. Knitting, book binding, planting seeds, making kombucha. But my sleep has been wrecked. Work stress (fully to do with me having been there for 4 months, and not because it is actually all that stressful)) combined with not having the usual family around me ruined several nights of sleep for me and I was feeling very frayed by the end of Friday.
- Alice Bartlett has been the victim of a fraud. Not me, one of my namefellows.
- Is fellow gender neutral? It feelās a little masc to me.
- Hey, by the way, I now work in a place where everybody wasnāt brutally humiliated for saying āguysā on slack in 2016. In 2016 I worked somewhere where one of the teams decided the collective noun for themselves should be penguins. And they were very serious about it!
- Back to the fraud. On Easter Monday I woke to six emails from a jewellery website in the US thanking me for my order and reminding me that āEverything is free, just pay for shippingā. I didnāt make an order but there are a handful of Alice Bartletts who think they have my email address. The jewellery, I will say, was pretty hideous. Interesting I thought, I wonder how that works then. So I went and had a look at the website. Sure enough. Everything is free. And look - itās because this sweet little old lady is closing her business!
- I guess the scam is that the items never arrive so youāve paid for the shipping only? Or is it that the items do arrive but they are worth so much less than the shipping that there is still a profit? Iāve seen these posts before (usually about some old grampa selling his hand made knife business, because this is what the algo thinks I am interested in, and itās not wrong!). But because Iāve never fallen for said scam, I have no idea what happens when you do.
- On Tuesday I got a āyour items have shipped!ā email where the sender is in China.
- Checking on Saturday, the items have made it to Virginia (where Alice Bartlett prime lives).
- I will keep you posted.
- Last week I installed a physical tracker to help the engineering team see and celebrate the progress they were making migrating their applications from the Data Centres into Google Cloud Platform. The tracker is a 2m piece of transparent bendy pipe and 48 brightly coloured ping pong balls. When you migrate your application, you get to write the app name on the ping-pong ball and put it in the tube. When the tube is full, thatās all of the applications migrated. I also made some stickers that say things like āI was very brave for my Cloud Migrationā.
- I was a bit nervous about this foray into silly business because Iām so bloody new and I do think itās important to pair this kind of frivolity with a deep level of competence or else people think youāre simply a sort of facile clowning idiot. Have I managed to earn the trust of the team that alongside pastel ping-pong balls and hand painted clouds, I also am a credible and reliable person? Probably not in all quarters. But Iām working on the cloud migrationās timeline, not my own, so at 8am on Tuesday I took my glue gun and a bunch of zip ties into the office and got to work.
- People love putting balls in tubes - thatās just simple human psychology.
- āWhy didnāt we have this for the first wave of the cloud migration? :((((ā - Because I didnāt work here when you started that my dude.
- On Thursday I had a beer in the Cittie of Yorke with Alex. How amazing is it, honestly, to be able to move through jobs and retain friends who you can work with again and again. Alex and I met when we were the only two CompSci students at the University of York using Twitter back in 2007. Then we worked together at GDS, and then the FT, and I seriously hope we will manage to orchestrate further opportunities to be colleagues in the future.
- [Misadventure into book binding] I didnāt explain how I had made my first trial book for 2018-2019 weaknotes but it worked as follows:
- Create a print stylesheet that lies the pages out like itās a book - display:none the sidebars and whatever.
- Go through every week of that first year (manually - lol) and āp each page to a PDF.
- Use some PDF software to collate those pages into a single PDF
- Send it to Doczoo to print
- [Misadventure into book binding] When that book showed up, it was fine. Exactly as advertised. But I felt like the text was a bit small, and it didnāt have page numbers, and iād left some horizontal lines in under the titles, but when two titles were next to each other on opposite pages, it showed that they were not perfectly aligned which wouldnāt have been noticeable had they not been there. I had also not expanded the hyperlinks which I thought might be useful at some point in the future to know what the link was actually pointing at, should you want to painstakingly type it in only to probably find the site has been taken offline.
- [Misadventure into book binding] When the printed weaknotes arrived I quickly and roughly threw all of that into a book cover that I made following this instructables article. But the (perfect bound) binding method made the book hard to open and keep open, and I was worried I was going to break it, or deform it in such a way that it would not close again properly. The solution to this appears to be to sew the pages into folios and then bind those. IE the classic and proper way to bind a book.
- [Misadventure into book binding] So now I have
- Adjusted my CSS to address all of the issues with the first version
- Gotten Claude to write me a script that builds 1 single HTML page per year of my weaknotes, including the year note at the end
- āpād 6 (instead of 382) pages of blog posts
- Used this extremely handy book lay out library https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/ to arrange all of those pages into a PDF that I can then print and arrange into folios and then sew together myself.
- Sent the first of these to the printer to check that I actually can book bind them (they arrived back, it was fine), I decided I needed bigger margins.
- Fixed the margins and sent everything to the printers for the final time. Because I am binding these myself the printing cost for everything is Ā£23.28
- Anyway - enough about book binding. On friday evening after a long day of creating shareholder value, I sat down [to watch a video about book binding] and I realised that I couldnāt see properly through both eyes but it seemed to be on my right more than my left. āCool! I thought, an aura, Iām having a migraineā. Iāve had one of these before, when I was working at GDS, so 15 years ago, It was a lot more alarming then because I didnāt know what was happening. Last time I barfed in the GDS loos and went home, but the headache I was expecting never came. This time, again, aura but no headache. I went to bed very early, and woke up the next day feeling weird and brain foggy. For example I walked to the shop and paid with the wrong card and then on the way back I misjudged the speed of a van coming towards me as I was crossing. It was fine of course (iām not typing this from hospital) but just likeā¦ somethingās going on up here.