It was nice to have Alicia back this week. The combination of rising temperatures and adjusting to a new family routine meant we had our fair share of grumpy evenings at home. I think the short tempers and exhaustion were fairly evenly distributed across the family. The hot nights saw people sleeping all over the house in search of cooler temperatures or a breeze.
I made some progress on a new iteration and structure to my blog. I want to keep using Hugo but my current layout isn’t working for me in a couple of key areas; photography and taxonomy. One of my most popular posts is the guide on creating a photography gallery with Hugo created back in 2023. In the three years since I set this up, I’ve developed a feel for what works and what doesn’t. The biggest challenge is that photos that appear in blogposts don’t appear in the gallery. They have to be added separately. This means duplicate images and duplicate Markdown files for each photo. The approach I’m working on publishes one canonical photo and references that elsewhere as needed. This has the side effect of allowing me to create galleries of images, something I can’t do in my current layout. I’ll write more about this nearer the release but this week saw me make real progress.
Oscar is starting to ask about computer games. The console of choice amongst his friends is the Nintendo Switch. I remember what it was like, making excuses to end up at the home of any friend who had a computer capable of playing games. So I asked him if he was interested in having one (there are a couple of long-haul flights coming up). He isn’t. We talked about the fun of playing with friends or being able to compare notes on games, share experiences. But nope, the Switch isn’t for him. Why? Flight Simulator! Train Sim World! He could spend hours watching people play these simulation games. Realism matters. For now we’ve settled on Flight Pilot on the phone. One of his friends has been playing and they talk about it a lot.
At work I’ve been battling the controls put in place to protect large enterprises from bad actors. We all know the controls; the ’trusted’ intermediate certificate, the broken encryption, the executable not on the allow list, the VPNs, the scans, the virtual workstations, the endless authentication redirects, the proxies, and the blocked domains. Each one of these is there for a reason. Together they add up to a hostile work environment. Thankfully this isn’t my daily work environment. A brief piece of work that I’m doing, or trying to do, reminded me of what things used to be like. I wrote some code, in an old (approved) version of a language. Ironically the goal was to speed up patching. But the code never ran. Not on the approved list.
We wrapped up the week with the LSO Family Concert at the Barbican Centre. A theme for this concert was Music at the Movies. Workshops were as engaging as ever. We got to try and compose and play music to a silent film. We learned about how click track is used to keep orchestras in time across multiple takes. We tried guessing the ending to a film based on the music that was played, without the visuals. And we got to hear the London Symphony Orchestra perform well known music from the movies. I wrote more about an earlier performance here. The concerts are an absolute delight and I’d highly recommend them to anyone in London with kids. They sell out months in advance.
Plus Minus Next
- ➕ Loved sitting outside the Black Lion by the river on Thursday evening. Alcohol free beer means the morning after was just as delightful.
- ➕ The boys are loving Oscar’s drum kit, me included.
- ➖ I’ve struggled to know how to help the boys cope with fears that, to me, seem irrational; in this case, insects.
- ➖ The heat has been unbearable. Like many families we’ve been talking about air-conditioning.
- → It’s time to start planning for EMF Camp if you are going, let me know
Week in Pictures
Long Grass - much of the grass has been left uncut. The boys have been having fun using these ears of wall barley as darts.
Shade - the long hot days made any shaded area a place of sanctuary
reflection - we’ve had the shutters closed most days this week, feels odd to sit in the dark
stickers - pink, purple and Hello Kitty
deserted - midday sun too hot for anyone to be out
Scientist at Work - we stood for an hour to watch this scientist perform experiments at the local Polish community fair. Close up, engaging, complete with flames, liquid nitrogen being thrown in the air, and the occasional explosion
Barbican Centre - we came in to town for the LSO Family Concert