Recent Posts

First paragraph: Troy

Troy. The most marvellous kingdom in all the world. The Jewel of the Aegean. Glittering Ilium, the city that rose and fell not once but twice. Gatekeeper of traffic in and out of the barbarous east. Kingdom of gold and horses. Fierce nurse of prophets, princes, heroes, warriors and poets. Under the protection of ARES, ARTERMIS, APOLLO and APHRODITE she stood for years as the paragon of all that can be achieved in the arts of war and peace, trade and treaty, love and art, statecraft, piety and civil harmony. When she fell, a hole opened in the human world that may neve be filled, save in memory. Poets must sing the story over and over again, passing it from generation to generation, lest in losing Troy we lost a part of ourselves.

— Troy by Stephen Fry

Can SAAS build a better vaccination system?

Deloitte's system to manage the management of vaccination has come under fire for being unusable and in some cases, even abandoned for paper-based solutions.
Clinic workers in Connecticut, Virginia, and other states say the system is notorious for randomly canceled appointments, unreliable registration, and problems that lock staff out of the dashboard they’re supposed to use to log records. The CDC acknowledges there are multiple flaws it’s working to fix, although it attributes some of the problems to user error.

— What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?
This isn't great for any system that is rolled out for the public to use. But the staggering thing for me is that they were awarded the contract on a no-bid basis as they were the only responsible source to build the system. Also, $44 million should get you a website that doesn't get trumped by a paper-based solution.

Imagine for a second if GitHub had the resources to build this, or even Basecamp or Shopify. Not only do they have the experience of websites that are heavily used every day by millions of users, but they also have the knowledge of building for the public. Their websites are used by millions of people every day, and they have to ensure that design changes need to be clear to the people using it.

Could these companies build a better vaccination system?

The open web we let slip through our fingers

With the internet shifting into huge companies' hands, we’re losing the fight against the open web. Heather Burns reminds us of those times and why it’s down to Generation X to fight for that free open internet once more.

Today’s young tech policy professionals are are, quite rightfully, responding to the only internet in the only world they have ever known. The awful one. The one where the internet was and is a handful of billion-pound companies. The one where the internet has only ever been petrol on a fire. The one where the internet has been essential infrastructure like water and heat, not a thing you had to request and master. The closed internet made for them. Not the open internet I got to make.

— Why Generation X will save the web

Need to see more tabs? Then maybe Vivaldi is the browser for you.

I've already taken Brave for a spin as a replacement browser for Firefox on a Windows laptop. I wasn't completely convinced that Brave was for me. I'm now curious to see Vivaldi can offer.

Tweetbot 6 is here

Tweetbot 6 is here with support for cards and polls, and a new subscription model of $0.99 per month or $5.99 per year. You don't need to take out the subscription model, but it does limit what you can do. 

The trade-off here is that you can take the subscription out for the app and get a chronological timeline with a few added features or use Twitter's own app, which brings with it its own benefits and drawbacks.

After spending more time than I care to admit on Twitter's own client, I've plumped for the annual subscription for Tweetbot 6. Over time I hope that we'll get to see more features added to Tweetbot. 

NFL Championship heartbreak once again for the Packers

Not the results I wanted last night in each of the Championship games.

Heartbreak for the Packers once again. Starting to wonder if there's ever been a better quarterback than Aaron Rodgers with only a single championship title. Anyway, last night's game seems to be a recurring theme with the Packers when it comes to the big game. It was definitely a game of two halves with the Buccaneers being on top in the first half and the Packers rallying in the second half. However, the Packers offence in the second half couldn't capitalise on those turnovers, and the Buccaneer defence was first class.

In the other game, the Chiefs came out on top over my AFC favourites, the Bills. The Bills have been great to watch this season, and the Allen & Diggs combo is one that I hope provides plenty of playoff opportunities for the Bills over the next few years.
I managed my first walk/run of the year this morning. I ended up splitting the two roughly 50/50. Not bad for a first attempt at running. I'm aiming to run the full distance by the end of February.
It’s Divisional weekend on the NFL. I’m predicting wins for the Packers, Bills, Browns and Saints, but I really just want the Packers to win it all!
Spent a couple of hours tonight swapping in a TailwindUI component into a Rails app of mine. I can see me swapping more of the TailwindUI components to replace my own over the next few weeks.

The humble checklist

Adam Keys reminds us of the effectiveness of the humble checklist.
Checklists are great because they are an easy way to get my brain thinking about the details. They force me to think about all the things that need to happen. They force me to think in time and sequence: this needs to happen before that and this other thing will take a while so that’s probably another checklist. Checklists force me to think about dependencies and who is going to do what part of a project. For example: Bob has access to all the welding tools, so he needs to do all the metalwork which means Alice and Chris are stuck with all the woodwork and painting.

— The unreasonable effectiveness of checklists
I love a good checklist, especially when I'm going through a process that I'm not familiar with. You have the steps to go through, and if the checklist is well written, each step validates the previous step.  If something goes wrong, it has to be in the previous step or two.

The Couch Console

I'm not sure what to make of this Couch Console on Kickstarter.

I like having a reason to get up and get some nibbles or a drink, but this makes it much easier to sit and enjoy my movie, the American football, the golf or the lastest PlayStation game.

One thing I do know is that my boys would love one each!

HT to Tools & Toys for sharing this. 
Pulled the trigger on a license for Tailwind UI. I've already been using the free components, but weighing up the cost of the license for what you get back in terms of components is worth it in my book.

Looks like I’ve missed the release of Edition 2 of the bullet journal notebook. I hope they get more in soon. Almost at the end of my current notebook.

I’m always torn between how picturesque it is when it snows and when it will melt enough to get back on the golf course. I’ll enjoy this view for the moment though until it clears.

Ultimatum for WhatsApp users

Another classy move from the Facebook family.
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.

— WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app
I use WhatsApp for chatting with family and friends as well as a means of communicating with a few groups at the golf club. I haven't agreed to the terms yet (and I don't want to), but I suspect that I will need to before the 8th of February when the new privacy policy will kick in.

Facebook has really backed everyone into a corner with this one, but I suspect that amongst the millions of users, there won't be much of a revolt against this. There are other options to WhatsApp like Signal, but for most people, they just can't see beyond Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

Plans for the blog

With the basics of my blog now in place, I can focus on other parts of the blog that I would like to build.

I've been writing notes for an aggregator of sorts that would subscribe to content streams. These content streams can then be shown on my blog. RSS would be the initial type of stream that I would offer as these are open and simple to integrate into the blog. Other types of content streams may follow if I decided to incorporate them into my blog. This aggregator will then be displayed on its own page or on my blog's sidebar if I choose to put it there.

One of the great blogging platforms that I miss the most is Posterous. The idea of this blogging platform was simple yet highly effective. Instead of writing your posts in a password-protected section of your blog, you write your posts with email and mail them to your blog. Starting small by being able to email posts without titles would be a good start. Posts with titles and attachments would then follow.

Cross-posting to Twitter is definitely something that I want to include in the blog. It's more the shorter posts that I would post on Twitter, but not all of them. I think for this a simple checkbox would be sufficient.

Building my blog using Rails has been a great way of making something that I can experiment with more. It's also something that I can create at my own pace. The blog is still using the CDN version of TailwindCSS, WebPacker hasn't been set up, and no there aren't any tests.

This isn't a business system or a product, though, so I can afford to do these things in my own time. It just feels good to be writing code in Rails that I don't need to worry about too much and can do in my own time.

A word for 2021

Niklas Göke's word for 2021 is "matter". He'll use this word as his theme for the year to centre all his thoughts and actions. More of a guide for the year than a goal.
A theme is a baseline ideal, one that you use to guide your actions and decisions. It isn’t worried about tomorrow, nor does it care what happened yesterday. With a theme, all that matters is what you do today. It turns happiness into an attainable, daily standard that’s based on your behavior, not your accomplishments.

— How To Set a One-Word Theme for 2021
I've always liked the idea of themes, whether they be daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. I must admit though, I haven't done a yearly goal for a couple of years. I have definitely wandered off my intended path over the last couple of years.

I think I have a word in mind for this year, but I'll just keep it to myself if you don't mind.
If you like tracking what you read, you might want to consider The StoryGraph. After a few months of being in beta, they've finally launched—a good alternative to GoodReads.

Jen discovered another notebook retailer for me over the holidays, Notebook Therapy. I can definitely see me ordering from here in the near future. 

A new blog, of sorts

In the last few months, I've been fairly quiet on the blog front. Just like everything else that went wrong in 2020, I could blame it on the global pandemic, but that's not why I stopped blogging.

I started blogging on Micro.blog while it was in the Kickstarter phase. I liked the idea of not only having a new blogging platform, but one that focused back on RSS feeds. Now though, I feel like I have outgrown Micro.blog. It's has a nice collection of features and themes, but I'm looking for more from my blog. I want it to do more than just display posts and pages. I'd like it to handle long-form articles that fall outside of the chronological order of the blog, handle bookmarks, and track other places where I am active on the web.

To get started, I decided to start moving some content over from my Micro.blog so that it's now hosted here on my main domain. I've been putting everything together using my own blogging engine, which does just enough to display posts in chronological order, supports an RSS feed, and has an admin section to manage posts.

I've still got a lot to do in terms of development, but the main thing I'm taking from this is that I am working with Ruby on Rails again. It's been a long time since I worked with Rails in a full-time capacity, and I do miss it. Rolling my own blog engine gives me the chance to get myself familiar with Ruby on Rails and try out a few different ideas.