Matthew Lang

Struggling to do the usual reading and writing that I use to do on a daily basis. I finished Andy Weir’s Artmeis last night. It took me a month to read it. Who takes a month to read a relatively light book?

Yes to the bigger picture and more to say yes to by Nicholas Bate.

I wish we had tools like this medieval city generator when I was growing up. It would have been a great accompaniment to Dungeons & Dragons.

A horrible round of golf today. Started poor, a run of good holes and then another horrible hole at the turn. Need to do better next time.

Fastmail’s aliases are a great way of protecting your main email address.

I had to contact a website to remove a business incorrectly listed under my home address.

The site was riddled with ads so I used an alias to protect my email address.

McIlroy says Tiger could play for ten more years.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think Tiger’s Masters win has worn off yet. It was a long time coming, but I would hate to see Tiger stop with his win at Augusta.

Great night for a hit.

Just finished seeing Avengers End Game. An amazing conclusion to this part of the MCU. Fans will not be disappointed!

It’s taken me such a long time to find my way back to what I was doing yesterday.

Some things are easier to find your way back to, but other things can take longer. I usually find that the bigger the task I was doing, the longer it takes to get back on track. It can get frustrating, especially when you’re making steady progress with something.

I’m starting to wonder though if by focusing on smaller tasks as well as keeping a log for the day, that I can begin to reduce the time it takes me to get back on track again.

It looks like the people of Scotland could be on their way for another vote on independence.

I’m not that particularly enthused about the idea. We just had an independence vote, and we’re still trying to get Brexit done and dusted. Now because of Brexit, we could be voting on independence again. To say I have politics fatigue is an understatement.

I’m starting to wonder if we’ll ever see politicians returning to the everyday matter of running the country instead of this seemingly never-ending cycle of big game politics.

Change the game up with NB’s power rules.

However, if you haven’t yet made plans and wish to take a stand, there is one activity that you can do alone at home that will help you and the planet. It ensures that ever-so-briefly you are not contributing to climate change, and are doing what you can to save endangered species. Don’t drive or fly. Don’t buy anything. Do no laundry. Turn off the lights. Avoid going online. Depending on where on Earth you are, shut down the air-conditioning or heaters (unless you’ve got solar panels!).

— The best thing you can do on Earth Day is sit perfectly still

I appreciate that doing nothing can help climate change, but I’m reading this article on the day of Earth Day and if sharing it means I can get a few more people to increase their time offline, then it’s worth that little burst of me being online today.

Ubisoft are making Assassin’s Creed Unity free to download on PC and donating money to the restoration project for Notre-Dame. I never thought I would see gaming and culture cross-over like this.

Good advice from NB that can apply to more than just business.

Start the plan to make 6 months from now so much easier.

— Brilliant at the Basics of Business 100: 88

Great day down at Troon today with Jennifer and the boys.

Spent most of the day walking along the beach searching for shells for Drew’s school project. The water was nice and cool for a refreshing dip at the end of the walk as well.

I don’t really follow the football in the UK, but it surpises me how often managers are held accountable for a team’s performance. I get that as a manager they are responsible for the team as a collection, but is there no argument against the team itself as well as the manager?

McLeish was under pressure from day one and didn’t have the capacity to deal with it. It was painful to watch at times. It’s now over, but the old problems remain at Hampden. It’s not just about who the next manager should be, it’s about who can be trusted to appoint that new manager.

— Scotland: Alex McLeish exits after poor start to Euro 2020 qualifying

22 years without a major tournament appearance. With a record like this, I’d say it’s less about who can be trusted and more about who would want such a position.

Last night I shipped the ability to search your bookmarks in Markcase. With over 1800 bookmarks in my collection, finding anything was beginning to get a bit frustrating.

The search query will match any term in a bookmark’s title, description or URL and will only search through your own bookmarks.

I want to be able to search over URLs as well, but the results for your search may yield more results than you would like depending on the term. URLs can be quite lengthy and therefore can be included in the search results when you might not expect them to be there. For now, I am going to leave searching over URLs in. I haven’t used it enough to see whether it will be useful in the long term or not.

The next step is the importing and exporting of bookmarks. I’ve put this off long enough, but it’s the next best feature to implement to entice a few more subscribers to the service.

Once importing and exporting is in place, then it’s on to billing. I’ve always said that Markcase will be a paid service, but for just now I’m happy to let people use it for free. I’m hoping to have billing in place by the summer which will then let me focus on performance and usability improvements for a few months.

Last night I shipped a little search improvement to Markcase and tonight a change to another Rails app.

Feels good to be working with Rails, even if it is for a couple of side-projects.

A study commissioned by Microsoft found that since the year 2000 – or about when the mobile revolution began – the average human attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds, which places us just below a goldfish, which tends to stay focused for an entire 9 seconds at a time.

— Slack Is Not Where ‘Deep Work’ Happens

Wow. In almost 20 years we’ve become less focused than a goldfish.

I get ticked off by Slack as a platform, but not for what it is, but how it’s used. Instead of restricting channels to specific actions or topics, Slack allows any channel to be openly used and abused without user’s even knowing that they are distracting others. Why have one firehose channel when you can have ten?

I do miss the days of freelancing where I could get in a few hours of deep work in the morning and then catch up with clients and meetings in the afternoon.

My own Commonplace book has been neglected of late. Time to change that.

I would love to see Woods win at Augusta today. It’s taken a while but he’s finally back to winning form. As a fellow Brit, I would also like Poulter to win as well. He’s a Ryder Cup legend but he’s due a major win.

Throw Schauffele into the mix as well as I drew him out the hat for the pro shop raffle and I have a dilemna for the final day of the masters.

Whoever wins though, it’s going to be a great day for watching the golf.

Another concerned netizen on the rise of Chromium-based browsers.

This wasn’t intentional, it just kind of happened.

With a week off work, I’ve been doing other things rather than sitting in front of a screen. The boys and I have been enjoying a few days of golf. Drew has been going to a golf camp for the younger kids in the morning, and Ethan and I have been hitting the course this week. By the time afternoon rolls around, me and Drew are happy to leave Ethan at the club and head home for an afternoon of chilling.

The results have been a quieter than usual blog. It’s not been a bad thing though, because yet again I’ve been toying with the value of my blog and whether it’s worth continuing with. It seems that every few months I question this and inevitably continue posting. This time the decision is still the same. I’m sticking with the blog.

Regular posting should resume shortly.

Light nights are finally here at the golf club.

Maybe it’s the books that I buy, but I don’t see many books with illustrations in them. In books the illustration is a visual indication of where the story is but in the case of older books, I would say the illustration is much more of a labour of love.

These illustrations for “The Tempest” by Arthur Rackham are a great example of this.

I only know of Arthur Rackham as it was his illustrations that were included in my edition of “A Christmas Carol”. There is something about his illustrations that set them apart from other illustrated books.

I would love to see more illustrated books in stores.