Posts

Posted Oct 23, 2023

It's been a busy few months here at Hodzilla Mansions. Busy, but in a good kind of way: work has been really highly enjoyable, we had some lovely holidays over the summer and some fun activities are in the diary for the coming months. So all good.

Posted Aug 7, 2023

You might recall my recent post about OnePlus's extremely poor recent update. Here's part two, and it isn't good news.

Posted Aug 6, 2023

It is a curious paradox that many of the most lovely places are also the least accessible. Norfolk is a beautiful county, for instance, and the lack of motorways there is in my view not a coincidence. As it turns out, the same can be said to some degree for Cornwall.

Posted Jul 30, 2023

If the last few days have proved anything, it is that it is very easy to miss the mark on intentions. I've been broadly working with three main goals, and I can see now that I'm spreading the net too wide: I need to start with one.

Posted Jul 26, 2023

A mad couple of weeks here, going from general business through to full-on illness. For two days I wasn't even able to keep my thirty-sit-up streak going, oh dear, poor me...

Posted Jul 13, 2023

I've mentioned in that past that I find noise-cancelling headphones pretty essential for work. For quite a few years I relied on a pair of Bose QuietComfort QC25 over-ear headones, which are definitely good. More recently, after some old in-ear Bluetooth headphones died of old age, I bought some new headphones, and these are the subject of this blog post.

Posted Jul 11, 2023

The title of this post should be taken more as a question than as a statement. It represents a dilemma whose horns I'm currently perched over. On the one hand, I deeply object to the way that big companies like Facebook and Google are hoovering up all our personal data in order to feed an advertising engine. I also deeply object to the way that these same companies actively seek to distract me with advertising. On the other hand, I need to get a marketing message for a local service in front of potentially interested people, and the same list of companies look like the most effective option.

Posted Jul 10, 2023

Did I mention I whacked my thumb the other week? What a nightmare!

Posted Jul 9, 2023

A short post today, after a very busy weekend. Here are the highlights.

Posted Jul 8, 2023

I remember a conversation I had many years ago with my brother, discussing jobs and places to live. He was of the opinion that it was best to live in a big city like London, as there are hundreds of different jobs and directions to choose from. My view was that having a massive range available is great, but I can only actually do one job, and that there are other factors that weigh more with me for choosing where to live. We don't all have the same objectives; and the same is true with social networks.

Posted Jul 7, 2023

Of my three affirmations I'm working on, it's clear that there's one that rules the others, which is the one about ... sleep. If I can get sleep right, the others tend to fall into place. Conversely, if sleep falls apart then the others are pretty well doomed too.

Posted Jul 6, 2023

Today I've been thinking about stability. I made a change to some software back in January, and last month a problem came up for users that can be traced back to my earlier alteration. Mistakes happen, but I am thinking about how to improve the odds of stability.

Posted Jul 5, 2023

A short post today, as today has rather run out of control, and now it is late.

Posted Jul 4, 2023

Today has been all over the place. Some definite pros, but quite a few cons too.

Posted Jul 3, 2023

With a busy timetable at work, I was concentrating at my desk when a notification popped up on my phone saying there was a system update available. It seemed like a good time to update it, as I wasn't using the device and it had plenty of charge, so I kicked it off. Big mistake!

Posted Jul 2, 2023

During the process of moving this blog across to its new home, I ended up reading through quite a few posts I wrote years and even decades ago. Reading themes in my life back then really brought home to me how incredibly difficult it is to achieve actual, genuine, lasting change.

Posted Jul 1, 2023

Well, that took a bit longer than I was expecting. But finally I've completed the first part of my website migration from Jekyll (the Ruby-based static site generator) to Eleventy (the JavaScript-based static site generator). The final piece was getting the initial build working on Netlify. It's late, but I've just got something going at last. Search isn't in place yet, but otherwise things are, at least, not noticeably worse than they were in Jekyll.

Posted May 28, 2023

We caught up with some friends this morning, ambling around the lovely Rickmansworth Aquadrome in the sun. There was also coffee. Later, we popped over to see my in-laws, and managed to catch up a bit on the family support line backlog.

Posted May 27, 2023

Today didn't get off to the best of starts. Due to a confusion with laundry, I discovered that my wallet and car keys were swooshing round the washing machine. Sorting this out delayed my trip to the gym, some present-buying and then our leaving to head into London for ... a restorative yoga session.

Posted May 26, 2023

Alertness levels today: |-------O--|

Posted May 25, 2023

It's going to take some time to get back into the headspace of writing daily, I can sense. This is mainly because my head is jumping around between different subjects, and needs a bit of reining in. In no particular order, here are some of the things in my head:

Posted May 24, 2023

Yesterday I performed the flute solo I've been working on these last few months, with my local orchestra the Misbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Posted Feb 15, 2023

I've been in York for the last few days, visiting my daughter at university. We decided to get the train up rather than driving this time, which has made the whole experience easier (I started writing this post on the train heading back down).

Posted Feb 11, 2023

For various unfortunate reasons, I ended up working quite late last night. The not-too-long version is that we had a Tesco food delivery booked for 10-11pm, and I was doing some work while waiting for the delivery. At around midnight I thought I should check what was going on, and then found an email from a few hours earlier saying they were very sorry but the delivery was cancelled. Grrr. At that point, the work was on a bit of a roll so I pushed on, in true no-sense-of-self-preservation style!

Posted Feb 9, 2023

The approach I've set up for this website has been working really very well indeed. Now obviously I'm a developer-type, slightly techy kind of person so I would say this. But, adding a new blog post as I'm doing now is pretty straightforward. I open a text editor, add some dull boilerplate at the top with titles etc, then just keep typing.

Posted Feb 7, 2023

The last couple of days have blasted by with lots going on. There's not much to report, although I did find this rather interesting article in the Guardian about some Empire-related history of the type I was mentioning the other day.

Posted Feb 4, 2023

Today is a story in two parts. It kicked off with some outdoor circuits followed by a quick gym stint to get some rowing in (1km in 3:55) and weighted heel drops for Achilles reasons.

Posted Feb 3, 2023

I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with aspects of the "British Empire".

Posted Feb 1, 2023

This has been a very busy week. Work has been really enjoyable; it's been around eight months since I started this job, and finally I'm starting to feel a bit like I'm "cooking on gas" a bit. Enough of the pieces of the puzzle are fitting together that I am able to make a bit more timely progress.

Posted Jan 31, 2023

Woo hoo, it's my last day of Janathon today. I did an hour of yoga this evening. Yesterday's blog post was out the window on the basis that I was working until cough AM and just couldn't face it. So you are all probably desperate to know what my activity was then - circuits and yoga, in a nutshell.