wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

In what you might describe as an enormous re-invention of my blogging existence, I have moved the entire archive (including all manner of mangled text from the distant past) into the shiny new blog, and wired up Zapier to automagically cross-post elsewhere for me. All hail the makers of the interwebs for allowing pollution of cyberspace with my written idiocy in such quantity. It took a fair amount of somewhat inventive scripting in Python to assemble the past posts into a somewhat organised collection, but I got there in the end. I can't imagine anybody would want to read it all, but that's not really the point.

I can't help rembering the advice given during NaNoWriMo – it's all about the quantity – not the quality.

Anyway.

It's Sunday, and it's a bank holiday weekend. I spent the entire morning messing around with the flight simulator, and recording YouTube videos of idiotic escapades five thousand feet above London in a questionable jet aircraft – rabbiting on about radio navigation techniques. There's a simple reason why – my YouTube channel has been “monetised”, and this has turned into a lucrative rabbit hole from which to dig “extra money”. My other half laughs at the amount of hours required to make anything like a profit, but I keep impressing upon her that if I spend the next thousand years at it, I might be able to afford several packets of cookies.

I've just realised it's getting pretty damn cold in here. I should really go find something warm to wear. Perhaps if I type fast enough, the friction from my fingers will warm the entire room up.

Ah. A coffee. A coffee will warm me up. Why didn't I think of that before?

Something rather interesting happened last night. Something I want to write about so I might reminisce in the future about “the day Elon Musk bought Twitter”.

I’m not quite sure why it happened, but a lot of people left Twitter last night – or rather, they cleared their exit route. I’m not entirely sure why so many people are so polarised by Elon Musk, but their apparently imminent exodus seems to have brought the potential future of the social internet into focus.

For many, the fediverse arrived last night. Of course it was already here, but it took a billionaire re-factoring the internet landscape to wake a lot of people up.

Somebody asked me yesterday what the “Federated Internet” means – wondering if it meant some kind of federal control. No. Not at all. Quite the opposite in fact.

If you look up “federation” in the dictionary, it describes a whole being made up of many parts (think countries in the world). Each part operates autonomously, and can communicate freely with the others. You might think of the world wide web as a federation – each website is autonomous, but connects to the wider world by agreeing on common communication protocols. Email works the same way.

Several years ago open source developers started looking at the tent-pole social internet platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and wondered if they might improve upon them. Given that the direction of an internet where intentionally incompatible social platforms can be steered by commercial decisions, the idea of a federated social internet gained traction.

Mastodon is one of the first federated social internet platforms to gain attention – a twitter-like collective of independent yet connected communities – run by the people, for the people, with no central ownership or control.

It’s perhaps wrong to talk about Mastodon as a thing. It’s not the thing – as the famous saying goes – “it’s the thing that takes us to the thing” – to the communities – to the people.

This video explains it far better than I can:

https://youtu.be/IPSbNdBmWKE

I’ll stop lecturing now.

After tinkering with Mastodon for the last several years, I registered with one of the servers last night, and began reading, following, and watching a platform that had been a quiet backwater of the internet explode into life.

It’s been fun. It continues to be fun. The marketers haven’t arrived yet. A new social network has been born, and is filled with wide eyed people stepping through Joe MacMillan’s Holland Tunnel, taking in the city for the first time.

https://youtu.be/mi_fKu9WTAE

I went running this morning before work. Finally getting off my backside and doing something about my general level of health and fitness. Over the next couple of months I want to both get fit, and lose some weight.

It’s not rocket science. All I need to do is some sort of fitness on a regular basis, and stop eating snacks between meals.

The run went better than expected – although I have to say I much preferred running during lockdown. Every footpath and road was teaming with people, cars, and whatever else. Of course I still firmly believe that I’m unwittingly starring in my own TV show, and that the majority of those I cross paths with are actors – scheduled to get in my way.

I wonder if there’s an official name for thinking you’re in a TV show? Trumanshowphobia, or something?

While writing this, I’m watching the clock tick it’s way through lunchtime. Six more minutes until the work day resumes.

Just enough time to make a coffee.

Did you know that if you install the “Dark Reader” extension into your web browser, you can write in “Dark Mode” in the Wordpress editor? Well you do now.

Technically it's already Sunday morning, but I'm still up – bathed in the light of an old angle-poise lamp in the junk room. There is no music playing. There is no sound of teenagers crashing around the house somewhere else. There is just the sound of my fingers on the keyboard.

I cut the grass today. While it might sound like a remarkably mundane thing to announce – hardly noteworthy in the grand scheme of things – it was at least something. I achieved something.

Tomorrow will be spent on the touchline of rugby pitches for the last time this season – or at least until the summer touch-rugby tournament starts.

On Monday I will find myself back in this seat, sitting in front of this same computer, pretending to know what I'm doing once more, and talking a good game in conference calls.

It's easy to sound like you know what you're doing. I meet people that talk a good game all the time. It's more difficult to pull those same people's projects out of the fire and drag them over the finish line. I know – I've done it.

Anyway.

Time to sleep.

How is it Thursday already? What happened to the first half of the week? Why do I have a headache? Is three cups of coffee before 11am a good idea? Is the coffee the reason for the headache?

So many questions.

The household has fallen remarkably quiet this morning – leaving me at my desk in the junk room to get on with work. The rest of the household except my eldest daughter have gone to a theme park for the day. A belated birthday present for our youngest daughter.

After a week filled with the “conversations” of teenage girls rattling around the house, the silence is almost deafening.

Silence. That means the washing machine has finished.

In other news, I appear to have made a new friend this morning. This is as rare as rocking horse shit. There I was, minding my own business, when a random message appeared from somebody I crossed paths with on the internet some time ago.

It's tempting – when somebody new comes along – to “unload like Chunk” on them (you have to see Goonies to get that, sorry). I remember years ago I made the mistake of asking a friend of a friend “so what do you do then?”, and was treated to a good chunk of her biography over the next half an hour. Don't get me wrong – it was interesting – but... a bit much maybe?

So yes. I'm sitting on my hands today, resisting the urge to get through the whole “get to know you” thing as fast as possible.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just send people we meet a link to an about page, and say “this will save you half an hour”.

I wonder if the domain halfanhoursaved.com is available?

I returned to work today. Or rather I cleared the chores, had a shower, helped our youngest with feeding animals at a neighbours house, and then sat at the same desk I've been sitting at for the last week – just with a different computer in front of me.

The routine of work was a pleasant change after the last week rattling around the house finding things to do.

My other half return to the school office (it's still the school holidays – there was paperwork to do). When she returned home she was shattered. It's going to take time for her to fully recover from COVID.

After finishing work this evening I walked into town to get groceries, then returned, cooked, and washed up. Later this evening I took part in a damn fool escapade on the internet with some of my Dad's friends – or rather, I tried to.

At the moment if I go anywhere near anybody else with a computer, they start asking me why their computer does this, or why their computer does that. The answer is invariably “because you did something to it, that caused it to do that” – but by the time that conclusion is arrived at, I've pretty much thrown away the reason I was there in the first place.

It's frustrating, and makes me want to either climb in a hole, or always claim ignorance when anything to do with technology comes up in conversation.

It must be a similar experience for plumbers and electricians. “Oh, can you have a look at my radiator?”, or “can you look at this light switch?”

Anyway.

It's already late, and I'm about to go get a decent night's sleep in my bed – rather than the sofa. If I get sick over the next few days I'm not going to be happy.

The final day of my staycation started at 7am when I heard Miss 17 leave the house to go feed a neighbours cats (they are on holiday). She returned ten minutes later after not being able to get in the front door – so guess who extracted himself from his sleeping bag (yes, I'm still on the sofa while my other half self-isolates) and accompanied her back to the house is question.

At least it's sunny outside.

There's an old saying – “a change is as good as a break” – that's been the story of my week. Rather than working each day I've been washing clothes, cooking, grocery shopping, washing up, tidying up, and so on. Granted, I do most of those things anyway, but it kept me busy at least.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to cook today. Perhaps a curry? At least curry is relatively straightforward. I'll wander into town in a bit and get some quorn or something. My other half is vegetarian, and two of the kids are coeliac – so it's easier to make one thing that everybody can eat, rather than a collection of different meals.

(a couple of hours pass)

I bought quorn pieces, and a ready-made curry sauce. Lazy, I know. We already have courgettes, onions, and peppers in the fridge, so I'll bulk out a vegetable curry with that later. At least I don't need to think about what to cook now.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go jump down the deepest internet rabbit hole I can find – because that's how we're supposed to spend our last day “off work”, isn't it ?

I'm deliberately staying away from the television and social networks today – the insufferable hoard of “He is risen!” folks are busy preaching to the converted. I'm not going to get into the history of the pagan fertility celebrations that have existed in Europe for millennia, and the positioning of religious festivals to disrupt existing gatherings. People tend to cherry pick concordant versions of history and accept as alternate fact anyway.

I'm just glad we have an excuse to eat some chocolate.

It's tempting to sink into a Mr Robot monologue rant about the commercialisation of everything, but I'm resisting the temptation today. This may have something to do with already eating a small packet of chocolate frogs while drinking the first coffee of the day.

Anyway.

I'm hoping for a relatively quiet day today – after busting my ass in the garden yesterday, getting all the clothes washed, clearing the washing up, and going grocery shopping again this morning.

My other half is making noises about sneaking out to sit in the garden. She's been in isolation for a week upstairs, and is still testing positive for COVID. The government guidelines recommend isolating for five days after the initial positive test – which seems to be more about retaining a functioning economy than stopping the spread of the virus. If she stops isolating and we all catch it, I won't be happy.

On a lighter note, I'm actually enjoying writing again. I'm not sure why. While recent posts have been somewhat acerbic in nature, it can only be a matter of time until a little humor creeps in.

While walking into town to get groceries earlier I passed through a small piazza bordered by boutique cafes. Sitting around one of the tables in the sunshine were a group of smartly dressed seventy-somethings. “People who lunch”, or however they are typically described. They were not talking to each other – they were all coughing, repeatedly. There was a certain morbid humor in it – watching them lean in to shout conversation at each other, coughing in each other's faces.

It struck me that they might have been doing Darwin's work for him.

I'm waiting for the new lawnmower to arrive, so I can begin to de-jumanjify the back garden. That's a real word, right? It is now.

Let's hope the lawnmower is straightforward to assemble. I've come to the conclusion that most Amazon reviews are written by utter morons that couldn't assemble themselves if Tony Stark called. And yes, I bought a lawnmower from Amazon.

I'm listening to my now somewhat famous playlist on Spotify – the one assembled with the help of an old friend – the playlist that accompanied throughout the years travelling back and forth from Germany.

This might sounds ridiculous, but it often doesn't occur to me to put any music on – I invariably sit in silence while at the computer. And yet I love music – or rather, music of a certain era. I'm full of contradictions.

Heart are currently playing “Alone”. Although I knew their music, I only really discovered them in recent years. I chanced upon their cover of “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” at a live concert twenty years ago on YouTube, and fell in love.

Somebody I shared my playlist with this morning commented that they tend to judge people by the music they like. I'm not sure if I do that – I tend to see the best in people – or rather, I filter that which I take notice of.

Anyway.

My coffee cup is empty. And we're almost out of milk. What's the betting the lawnmower arrives while I'm at the shop ? Because that's the way the universe is hard-wired, isn't it – if it can possibly pull the rug from beneath my feet in any way, shape or form, it will do so with glee.

And no, I didn't watch “Glee”.

Do I get a badge that says “honorary member of the old fart club”, or something? I went shopping at lunchtime on the internet, and ordered a new lawnmower. If I had not done so, the garden would have been used to film the next sequel in the Jumanji franchise.

Of course I couldn't just buy a lawnmower. I had to buy an extension cable too (we have had petrol mowers for years, but I really can't be arsed with spending three times more for something three times more unreliable). I don't really care if an electric lawnmower will last a third of the time either – I'll buy three of them, and it will work out at the same cost.

The whole debacle reminds me of printers and ink. I don't know if it's still the case, but you used to be able to buy inkjet printers with ink cartridges in them for less than the cost of a set of new ink cartridges. My other half would never let me throw the printer away each time it ran out of ink – so we ended up re-filling it repeatedly.

It's the same argument as the person that can afford expensive boots – that cost twice as much, but last for 10 years – versus the person that can only justify cheaper boots – that cost half as much, but only last 2 years. People without much money end up spending more than those with money – and it drives me nuts.

Anyway.

See! This is what happens. You get older, and you write a blog post complaining about lawnmowers, or inkjet printers, or whatever else.

What happened to enthusing about television shows, or music? While we're talking about that, what happened to watching or listening to pretty much anything any more? We are subscribed to Prime, Netflix, and Britbox at home – I don't watch any of it. The kids do. My other half does. I noodle around on the internet, and listen to a free Spotify subscription. I'm pretty sure my brain has constructed it's own ad blocking technology – I couldn't tell you what adverts play between tracks on Spotify.

I'm sitting here in silence writing this, if you are interested. Just the sound of my fingers tapping away at the keys. I'm the only person still “up” at 10pm. My sleeping bag is waiting for me in the lounge (if you haven't been reading, my other half has COVID and is isolating in the bedroom).

I wonder what music I might listen to tonight while trying to get comfortable in the sleeping bag? I have an old playlist on Spotify that's been something of a “go to” for the last several years. I built it with a friend, and filled it full of ear-worms of the 1970s and 80s.

Listening to those tunes now remind me of evenings walking the streets in Frankfurt – where I worked on-and-off for a couple of years. I would wander the streets on my own, messaging back and forth music suggestions, and listen my way around the city.

It's a good memory.