wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

After going into surgery to repair her broken leg on Monday morning, Miss 16 came home on Tuesday afternoon. For the next few days she has swapped bedrooms with her older sister – who's bedroom is downstairs. While she can in-theory walk on the repaired leg, doing so is as much a matter of confidence as pain management.

She's on the maximum dose of paracetamol and ibuprofen at the moment – taking them on a strict schedule throughout the day. As the days roll by we will be reducing them, then eradicating them entirely.

Most of yesterday was spent hobbling around the house on crutches – trying out strategies for doing things on her own. Simple tasks such as going to the toilet have become a logistical exercise that have informed clothing decisions in the interests of making life easy. Making a cup of tea is still out-of-reach due to the unexpected barrier of retrieving an opened milk bottle from the fridge and carrying it to the kitchen counter without spilling it (we have milk in glass bottles – we still live in the 1950s).

Yesterday evening, confounding all of us, she visited Rugby practice. Not to play obviously – just to show her face. I imagine there was a fair amount of attention seeking going on, but the reaction of the coaches and players was fantastic. Some of them couldn't believe what they were seeing having witnessed the injury on Sunday – only three days before.

In other news, I bit the bullet late yesterday and started out on a task that I've been meaning to do for several years but avoided due to the drudgery of it – resetting all of my online passwords. I now have no idea what any of the passwords are for any of the services I use. I do however know the master password – not written down anywhere – for a database in the cloud containing the passwords.

It took hours. You really don't appreciate how many accounts you accrue around the internet until you re-visit them all. I'm sure there are more – I used the browser as my guide. Most modern internet browsers can compare logons against hacked databases to tell you how many of your passwords are out there in the wild.

Anyway.

My coffee break is coming to an end. Time to post these words to the internet, and retreat back under my stone until tomorrow. In a strange sort of way the chaos unfolding at home this week has provided a wonderful break from all things related to the internet. A reminder that life exists away from the screen.

She was scheduled to come out of surgery early this evening. We took a chance and jumped in the car – making the hour-long trek to the hospital. After parking the car and finding our way to the ward we thought she might arrive at, my other half’s phone rang.

I watched from a few feet away – trying to read her facial expressions. Good news? Bad news? Good news. Definitely good news.

I had called the hospital late the night before, and spoke to the sister in charge of the ward (do they still have sisters?). I very quickly handed the phone over to my other half, who was prompting me with questions. Quite why I was involved was anybody’s guess. There’s something about mothers, daughters, and healthcare staff – a higher data transmission rate kicks in once the men are removed from the communication loop.

Anyway.

Miss 16 is out of the woods. Operation is complete. Her leg is now re-assembled, aided somewhat by the precursor of hardware that will one day be built by Cyberdyne Systems. Let’s hope she doesn’t start talking about finding John Connor any time soon.

A few minutes after arriving in the correct place in the hospital my other half went off in search of the ward while I settled in for potentially several hours in a reception area, adjacent to a cafe that had just shut. While updating family on the situation, the phone started ringing.

“Hello. She’s here. She’s ok. She’s asking if I’ll stay.”

A very short conversation ensued, subtitled “don’t mind how you get home”. Five minutes later I stood on the pavement outside the hospital, having clicked the “home” icon within the Uber app. Moments later (literally moments), a swish black car swept to a stop on the other side of the road. I cracked the door open and a smartly dressed driver told me my name.

Isn’t the internet amazing.

An hour later I was home, having spent the journey home making small talk with the driver, listening to England play football on the radio, and updating family on further developments. The elder daughters met me mid-stairs and absorbed the news. Rather than repeat myself endlessly I pressed a “call back” button on my phone, and handed the handset to Miss 21.

It’s been a long day. A long day of not knowing.

The not knowing has now turned towards knowing, and although the future is perhaps still a little uncertain, it’s at least looking like a happy future.

While sitting in the taxi on the way home I began working through “what we would have done if” in my head – even though the darkest timeline hadn’t happened. I caught myself doing it, and wondered if others do the same.

It’s now a little after midnight, and my other half is curled up in a chair alongside a hospital bed quite some distance from home while the rest of our family sleeps soundly here. I’ve just downed a glass of wine – mostly to take the edge off the day. I’m tempted to get on with work tomorrow, for no other reason than to distract myself from the “what ifs”.

We’re already wondering about recovery, and re-arranging a room or two. Maybe we should stop thinking for the moment and just be thankful for skill and dedication of the army of NHS paramedics, nurses, doctors, surgeons, and consultants that burst from stage left when we needed them most.

The last thirty-six hours have been something of a whirlwind. While playing rugby on Sunday afternoon my youngest daughter tripped, fell awkwardly, and broke her leg. The first we knew was that she was down in the middle of the pitch – then after a paramedic arrived that had been watching the game, we heard her voice – from 100 yards away. I've written before about knowing your own child's voice in a busy play-park, and you also know the difference between a play-acted cry, and the real thing. My other half dropped everything and ran.

I'll spare you the next few hours, which involved a lot of gas and air, syringe after syringe of morphine, and an ambulance. A helicopter was nearly involved. I went with her in the ambulance while my other half raced around London in our car to meet us. She beat the ambulance, much to the surprise of the crew. En-route, my daughter seemed most impressed that we had the sirens and lights on...

“Why do they have the sirens and lights on?”

“For you.”

She was pretty out of it on painkillers. Her memory of the accident was almost non-existent. Thankfully her memory of the sight of the injury had also gone. The crew let us know that might happen, given the medication they threw at her in order to get her on a stretcher. She was so brave. She nearly broke my fingers as they pulled her leg straight, but then I told her to do exactly that.

Several hours later we sat in a hospital north west of London – my other half at our daughter's bedside, and me in a waiting room on the other side of the hospital – surrounded by the typically entitled emergency room time wasters you might imagine. One girl demanded to see a specialist about her headache – “I could drop dead right here, and it will be your fault”... She walked away from the unimpressed receptionist, murmuring “c*nt” to anybody within earshot.

We were sent home at about 10pm. Given COVID restrictions, and another story about her being checked into an adult ward that I also won't expound on (they're moving her tonight), we left her to sleep off the elephant tranquilisers they had hit her with.

Today has been somewhat less stressful. After being allowed to visit mid-morning and chancing upon the consultant while waiting outside the ward door, my other half and eldest daughter were allowed in to see her, and perhaps most importantly to deliver a bag of essentials (she had arrived at hospital with nothing). Of course, the most important belonging for a teenage girl should have been obvious – her mobile phone.

We're home again now, playing the waiting game. Waiting for the call that she has arrived back in the ward after surgery on her leg. When the word comes my other half will race off to visit once again, and return late this evening. I'm staying behind to make dinner for the rest of the family, given that only one of us will be allowed to visit at a time.

I'll write more as we know more.

We went “out out” last night. We took part in a charity fund-raiser quiz in town – held by the local rotary club. If you're never heard of such a thing before, rotary clubs are run by local people who work together to solve community issues, provide aid, and promote goodwill. They also tend to be skewed heavily towards retired people – perhaps because they have time to devote to it.

Anyway.

We arrived at the venue ready to abide by the somewhat strict COVID guidelines in the invitation, only to discover that the hall was absolutely packed to the rafters with people who were pretty much ignoring any of the advice or guidelines. Oh well. We are fully vaccinated and did lateral flow tests before leaving the house – so we were not too worried. Seeing how many old people were crammed into the hall I began to wonder about their safety in each other's company though.

We won the quiz. By quite some distance. An embarrassing distance, if I'm honest – especially as we drank prosecco throughout.

One guy in his late 50s across the room was apparently furious at being beaten. He made a complete arse of himself as the quiz started by standing up and shouting at everybody to “SHUT UP!”. We struggled to contain ourselves. Our singing of “We are the Champions” at the end was mostly aimed at him.

After not going “out out” for the better part of two years, the effects of an entire bottle of prosecco each came back to haunt us this morning. I still got up, still had a shower, and still got talked into going into town with my youngest daughter – but I won't pretend I felt great. Distinctly second hand would be a bit more accurate. I think my body might be a bit annoyed with me.

We won though. And that's what matters – or at least, it mattered for about a minute while we sang “we are the champions”. After the quiz we wandered how through the late night air and looked forward to meeting up over Christmas, and the New Year together.

The world is slowly returning to normal. I'm not sure my liver is quite ready for it yet though.

It's Friday. The end of another week. I'm sitting in the junk room in front of my work laptop, picking through source code of a recent project written by a co-worker in a language I have little experience of. In some ways it's easier to learn from existing code than a text-book or a tutorial video.

It's funny – although I don't know many real-world languages, I know countless computer languages, and feel perfectly at ease switching between them throughout the working day. Ask me to direct a taxi in France or Germany though, and I'll start stumbling over words.

I guess one of the traits that software development has left me with is a fascination in how language works – the underlying structures and rules – why words are combined in the way they are. While visiting Germany regularly over the last few years, I loved the mechanical nature of the language – where many longer words are created by combining smaller words.

While chatting over a coffee one day, an Austrian colleague said something I will never forget – “you English – you say things without saying them”. She was right – we do. She has since moved on to further adventures, and I kind of miss her approach to dealing with the world. Some saw it as blunt, or rude. I saw straightforward and transparent.

Anyway.

Time to make a coffee. It's always time to make a coffee.

In the early days of the pandemic the office owned by the company I work for was closed, and sold. Ever since I have spent my days sitting in the dark of the junk room at home in front of several computers – writing code, taking part in conference calls, and occasionally wandering into the kitchen to make coffee.

Every day has become much like every other day.

In the middle of the endless routine of getting up, having a wash, doing chores, working, doing more chores, helping with dinner, and wondering where the evening went, I somehow began to misplace old friends.

Friendship is a curious thing. I find it tremendously difficult to make new friends. The work involved in crossing the bridge from “acquaintance” to “friend” always seems like such hard work.

Sometimes you discover a kindred spirit half a world away, and marvel at the universe's twisted sense of humour. Why could they not even be on the same side of the ball of mud we all share as it hurtles through space? Perhaps there are unwritten rules woven into the frabric of things – among them that kindred spirits must never cross paths, lest they cancel each other out. It would explain a lot.

It's been five days since the last blog post. How does that even happen?

I'll tell you how it happens – you install a ridiculous video game where you pretend you're the captain of a star ship, and you jump from planetary system to planetary system buying and selling goods, taking on contracts from pretend people, going sight-seeing, and pretty much living the second life you will not live long enough to see happen.

You then discover an underground of software developers that have written all manner of integrations with the underlying mechanics of the game to open up it's beating heart – allowing you to essentially perform “insider trading” within the machinery of the pretend universe – buying and selling at huge profits. Before you know it, you've upgraded your white van to a container ship – hauling thousands of tons of contraband half-way across the galaxy while avoiding just the sort of villainy depicted in Star Wars.

The game is called “Elite Dangerous”.

So yes. That's why I've not written a blog post. That's also why I tend not to play “role playing” video games – because I know myself, and know what will cause my world to stop turning.

I've always stayed away from “World of Warcraft” for the same reason. I still smile when I recall my other half picking up the box for a game similar to World of Warcraft in a computer superstore many years ago (back when computer superstores still existed), and pointed out that it came with “free boots of infinite striding”.

Anyway.

It's lunchtime. Time to go make a sandwich, and NOT waste my lunchtime in the damn star ship, no matter how tempting it might be.

After several weeks experimenting with all manner of technologically sophisticated productivity solutions, I retreated back to a paper bullet journal tonight. There's just something about writing things down on paper that helps stick them in my head.

It's not like I write things down to plan far ahead either – I'm not that clever. I just write things down that I need to do, and mark them as done, so I know what I did on a given day when somebody asks (cough, when I need to fill my timesheet out, cough).

I guess the thing I've learned is not to use a bullet journal to record notes – which sounds utterly mad. Notes can go on the computer, and be made searchable. No – the bullet journal just has a list of bullets that get ticked off (or not) throughout the day.

My bullet journal is a mindfulness crutch. A sticking plaster for my occasionally terrible short term memory.

I wonder if my inability to hold onto things I read a few seconds ago is related to my inability to juggle? It makes no sense, because I can recall all sorts of things that I don't need to – old phone numbers, passwords, and all sorts of trivia.

Anyway.

I better drink the coffee I made a few minutes ago. It's going cold.

It's the morning after Halloween. In the UK Halloween remains very much an import from the USA – I remember it gaining traction when I was young in the early 1980s. It alway interests me to see my friends in the US embracing it far more than us – with many adults dressing up too. In the UK it tends to only be children of infant and junior school age that go door-to-door.

While our daughters have now grown out of dressing up, they were excited to answer the door during the evening – handing out sweets to the children. Our youngest had acquired a roll of Halloween stickers from somewhere, and awarded them to the younger children. Quite unexpectedly the stickers went down far more excitedly than the sweets. More than once we closed the door to excited small shouts of “MUM! I GOT A STICKER!!!”.

Today I'm back at work – or rather, back in the junk room, sitting in front of my work computer, waiting for the next conference call to start. The project I have been on for several months is starting to wind down for a while, and another will be taking it's place. It's odd – being inbetween things.

While writing this I'm downloading Zorin OS, and will spend lunchtime installing it on my old laptop – a huge shoutout goes to the community at Fosstodon for telling me about it. One of the problems of the (vast) Linux community is the number of projects going on all the time – there's no way any one person can stay on top of it all. It sometimes feels a bit like standing in the middle of a busy gathering, trying to listen to all the conversations in the room at the same time.

Eric Raymond was right when he titled his essay about the open source community “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” – the community really does feel like a busy, vibrant, dynamic gathering that's moving at pace in all directions at once – where no one voice is dictating, but the gathering somehow achieves a collective trajectory.

Maybe Darwin's observations have a lot to do with it too.

In other news, something remarkable happened at the weekend. A very long time ago I wrote a blog post about the presenters that used to appear on MTV Europe – and sheepishly admitted to liking one of them rather a lot. Which is fine. Until she finds your blog post, likes, it, and comments on it :)

It kind of secretly made my entire weekend. Still star struck after all these years.

I'm trying to think of something clever to write about federation or diversification. I'm not coming up with much. Perhaps if I take a look at a definition of fediverse it might help.

Wikipedia has the following to say:

The Fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.

You're probably wondering why I'm rambling on about fedivi (is that the collective noun?), and you'd be quite right to be wondering because I've not explained anything yet.

It all started late last night, when I stumbled back into the tentacles of the federated Mastodon universe. If you've not heard of it, Mastodon is an open, free social network that anybody can join. Rather than operate a monolithic service such as Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook, it's a federation of lots of servers – each serving a particular community of interests. Here's the trick – anybody on any server can follow anybody on any of the other servers.

It's a bit like saying “I hang out in the tech community, but I'm also interested in books, comics, music, and art – so I might follow people who are members of servers that revolve around those subjects”.

Anybody can start a server and connect it to the rest of the “fediverse”.

Anyway.

While falling straight down the Mastodon rabbit-hole, I started to learn about more federated services – among them a publishing service called “WriteFreely”, and a photo sharing service called “PixelFed”. Services with many independent servers around the world providing free alternatives to Tumblr, Wordpress, Substack, Instagram, Flickr, and wherever else – and none of them selling or using your data for any sort of commercial means.

I'm still learning, still reading, still tinkering, and still delving around to find out how it all works. I've begun pulling a few bits and pieces together, that can be found at the following locations:

• https://fosstodon.org/@jonbeckett
• https://wordsmith.social/jonbeckett
• https://pixelfed.social/jonbeckett

In other news, I've also been meddling with a publicly accessible method of publishing the various writing that had previously been behind the paywall at Medium. After a day of experimentation, desk thumping, and endless reading I managed to funnel all of previous writing into Github at the following URL:

• https://jonbeckett.github.io

It uses a free service provided by Github called Jekyll that turns markdown text files into a published website. All I have to do is upload articules as plain text to Github, and it re-builds the site for me. All clever stuff. If you're interested, Jekyll is actually a “Ruby on Rails” application in the background. You weren't interested. It's ok. I didn't think you would be.

My dinner will be ready in a bit. I'll return to “slice of life” stuff next time, honest.