August 6, 2023 – Hello Curns

Weeknotes #28: virtual queuing

Week commencing Monday, 31 July 2023

New for ’23: Mandrill Mayhem at Chessington World of Adventures

Quantified Self

This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 6/7 and Move 7/7. (95%, best for a while). Morning walks: 0/2 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/3. Total steps: 85,826

Life

In a work virtual conference, we were asked to write our names as many times as possible with our non-dominant hand. Harder than expected but it was legible (I managed two in the given time). It was something to do with embracing challenges and changes: ‘Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first’.
On the train to work on Tuesday, a loud Property Manager on the phone discussing that three portfolios were unmanageable and why, when talking about staffing levels, did his boss keep forgetting about Lauren? And I wanted to know the rest of the story.
Family arrived on Wednesday. All the arrangements worked, including the inflatable bed. Although I wish I had realised that if you don’t use the adapter on the pump then it fits much better. There were little people in the house.
Chessington World of Adventures opens at 10am and we were ready for Mandrill Mayhem at 10:30am. It uses a virtual queuing system which worked well. Worth doing. Vampire does not operate such a system and I wonder why we stood for 90 minutes (still a fun ride). Zufari seemed a shorter ride then last time. Gruffalo is fun with a 7 year old.
News spread amongst future colleagues and my phone buzzed while hurtling around the tree tops from people who were only getting the news this week.
Technically, AC was 7 on Friday. Vauxhall City Farm was a nice treat. I fed lambs from my hand to prove it wasn’t scary. Not sure what she made of the Imperial War Museum but her brother enjoyed it.
The Speedboat Bar’s food is spicy for kids. OC stuck to his guns and ate all the Minced Beef with Holy Basil in spite of the heat.
PY and I saw the Brokeback Mountain play. Impressive performances in an equally impressive new theatre. I’d forgotten how sad the story was. We didn’t have the heart to tell the fans at the stage door that one of the stars was having a chat in the theatre bar. The younger ones saw Matilda the musical. It comes with a 7-year old seal of approval.
Saturday we looked after kids so parents could party. Learnt interesting things on the Horrible History boat – nicely done – but learnt a foot splinter can’t be cured by Uncles. Discovered that trying to direct people back to Raynes Park using the night tube is harder than expected.
Sunday, much more to see at Kew than I remember. The need to buy a hat because of the sun was unexpected. The Hive is fascinating. The Palm House is hot. I still like the bamboo gardens.
Related, Kew Village Market is on the first Sunday of the month. It all looks delicious.
Introduced everyone to Raynes Park kebabs. Consensus is that the chilli sauce is hotter than other places people have tried. Tip: get it in a tub on the side.

Media

To calm the spirits after Saturday night’s splinter, PY and I were introduced to Miss Trunchbull and Matilda via Netflix. It was sufficiently distracting to soothe although it did not remove the pain. It’s quite dark in places, isn’t it?

BEWA: Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken.

Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken. It’s impossible to come up with a new acronym for anything anymore. BEWA, for instance. It’s been used. At least twice. It’s the British Equestrian Writers Association and the Business Educators of Western Australia Inc. It is also a Singaporean fashion brand and a village in Jamtara district of Jharkhand state, India. And I just wanted to start a meme. Not that I really have the ability to do that, but, you know, it was an idea.

I hear you cry, “A meme? Are you sure?” And you would be right but indulge me for a moment.

I just paid the hosting fee for curnow.org to the folks at Dreamhost again. I host my own site on some rented server space there. It’s been with them since 2002, and I can’t remember the company that did it before, but I don’t think they are around anymore. The idea was simple: own my own space so I am not at the whim of a dot-com business that might not be there tomorrow (this was 2002 and Web 1.0’s bubble had well and truly gone bang). I think I was inspired by Phil Gyford’s website and the idea of collecting all my own web content in one place.

I once wrote that the reason for building a site like this was because, “The ideals of a less censored form of communication, open and available to all, appeals to some deep belief I have in the basics of human community”.¹ Of course those are the wild ramblings of an Web 1.0 idealist and you only need looks at the comments on any newspaper website to see how utterly nonsensical I was being.

But, having paid for another year, I began to think about why I cough up this money, given I don’t really write a great deal here when I could host a simple site for free in many places. Go and check out the beautifully simple curns.me for something along the lines of my original plans for this site.

Then, on Monday, somebody asked me about Google search and websites. I know very little about this. So I did a bit of research and looked at the search terms that got people to curnow.org. So, hello all you Ashley Paske fans (for the kids, he was Matt Robinson in Neighbours sometime in the last century). There’s a reference to him here, and it seems to drive people to look. And the picture isn’t there anymore, so I will have to look at that and fix it one day.

So much for the more worthy stuff I wrote about personalised radio and why we should all stop thinking that news is something that can be easily defined.

All this led me to think that I ought to try and add some new ramblings here just to justify the payment and get people here for some other reason. Which led to my big idea – BEWA: Blog Every Wednesday in August. Catchy, don’t you think? And so I will try. Don’t hold your breath.

Footnotes

¹ Originally written in a post entitled ‘Reasons‘, July 2000

Doesn’t Time Fly?

Silent for a while.

I posted 35-or-so entries in May and have been going downhill since. It’s been an interesting couple of months, and there are some things that I should have written about. This upcoming weekend I’ll be doing a lot of work in the garden (I might start with some before-and-after pictures), so who knows if I will have time to write.

Failing to write here is only one of the things I have not done in the past few weeks. Failing to watch any Big Brother 2004 was the other – although I am not so upset by that. Tonight, however, Nadia won, and I will be waiting to see if a TV career beckons.

Finally, a sobering thought: do we still think of today as Hiroshima Day?

To Some People Enola Gay is Just a Pop Song

Did you know that today is Hiroshima Day? It seems to have missed me. I think this is something we should all be thinking about at this time.

While we appear to be on the verge of more war in the world, the good folks at today’s Daypop news point us toThe Guardian:

Today is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of a bomb so powerful that it would come to threaten the existence of the human race. Only two such devices have ever been used, but now, a decade after the end of the cold war, the world faces new dangers of nuclear attack – from India, Pakistan, Iraq, al-Qaida, and even the US. Launching a special investigation into nuclear weapons, Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission to Japan, tells Studs Terkel why he has no regrets – and why he wouldn’t hesitate to use it again
[Guardian]

Did you know that today isHiroshima Day? It seems to have missed me. I think this is something we should all be thinking about right now.

Day: 6 August 2023