inlaws - a pale slim ghost

weeknotes 24: river goddess

2 days ago weeknotes beach cornwall paradise park eurorack music bbq work inlaws aws sick

i am Mildly Sick. headache, fatigue, aches, temperature. i keep thinking i'm fine then making the mistake of standing up. i have stuff i want to do. i'm running out of summer weekends.

a final few days in Cornwall, went to Portscatho to eat mackerel from the Hidden Hut and find out who is the best at beach (it's Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew). made a sandcastle with a tower and a moat. couldn't get the moat to hold water so i had a brief stint as a river goddess. love watching hydrology happen right in front of me. then the tide went out and my— uh i mean, the river's— water table got too low. got in the sea. sunburnt my legs under the water. 10/10 would beach again

then Paradise Park, a childhood staple for the inlaws. it's a little bird sanctuary in Hayle, great fun. saw a red panda get fed then sleepily climb forty feet up a tree. yes i know that's not a bird. ate a Philps pastie; went around the little train a couple of times; didn't get landed on by a sun conure during the free flying bird show, although the pram in front of me did. hornbills are straight up dinosaurs.

that evening a barbecue. Matt invited Choo. Choo brought her entire family. Molly caught wind of it and brought Olly, Martin and Akira. Akira brought Max. and so a low key outdoor family dinner turned into a Get Together. i had fun at least! Matt and Meli had fun once everyone left and we could chat around the table and watch the satellites fly past.

the drive back was surprisingly tame; no Adorable tantrums, did it in under six point five hours which is pretty good going with two stops. finally dinner with the father- and step-mother-in-law where i even said some words.

thursday, drove to Royal Albert to drop off the car then drove the DLR into the City for the office. back to work not with a bang but with a whimper. in hindsight maybe starting to come down with whatever it is i have now. a day full of provisioning AWS services which was in fact fun. ate a Shake Shack korean BBQ burger which tastes exactly like a Burger King bacon double.

been gradually working on getting the Good Sounds out of my big eurorack case. i picked up a Ziqal Dimension Mk3, a gorgeous little wavetable synth voice that does MIDI polyphony and sounds incredible.

like that adage about engineering teams being immutable (you can't add or remove team members, you can only create a new team with an additional or removed person), every time you get a new eurorack module you've got a whole new instrument. it's starting to feel like an instrument that makes the kind of music i want to make. i really really need to practice more.

sorry it's portrait i thought Youtube would recognise it as a Short and bestow it portrait video status oh well

weeknotes 19: floorp

a year ago floorp inlaws musical operation mincemeat origami ourple theatre weeknotes work

it is the season of ending and decay and i really do not want it to be.

i have switched from Firefox to Floorp.

this isn't a bit, that is the actual name of a real browser. it's a fork of Firefox. it has some nice customisation features built in like being able to move the tab bar around and being able to use userChrome.css like Firefox could before 68 (yeah you can do that with an about:config flag still but that's not the point). using the theme colour from the website in the toolbar like Safari does isn't even a Floorp feature, it's just straight up a Firefox addon.

none of this is the point: i just don't trust Mozilla any more, and i do not trust Google. it would be nice if we weren't putting all our collective energy into capitalism-eating-itself-plagiarism-surveillance-and-climate-change-hockey-stick-machines but oh well

my mother-in-law (who is very nice) visited this weekend. we went to the Tower of London, then saw Operation Mincemeat, the musical about Operation Mincemeat, that one time MI5 stole a corpse, dressed him up as a marine officer, and dropped him in the Mediterranean with a briefcase full of fake plans for the Spanish to responsibly return to the UK and definitely not show to the Abwehr.

genuinely one of the funniest and most moving plays i've ever seen. i cried a lot. the Fortune Theatre is not built for 6'1" girls. but they do have an order-drinks-online-and-deliver-them-to-your seat thing. 10/10 go see it

everybody has a different idea of what "the Origami project" is. or, everybody is using different words to say the same thing. or, everybody knows what everybody else wants "the Origami project" to be and is lying to me about it so they get what they want from it. or, all of the above. TK too spicy rewrite this para

Origami is the design system for the pink newspaper website. there's a new version of it coming any year now. i am to test its components and fix any technical issues with using them in the pink newspaper website. or, i am to come up with a proposal re: the pink newspaper website's old weird CSS that is consuming the design system for us to work on. or, i am to work with the design system team and the design team on the things they want to improve about the wholesale design of the pink newspaper website that may or may not be related to the new version of Origami.

god, i don't know. i think i'm doing all these things? for the time being at least, i'm lifting up logs and finding woodlice and then taking a flamethrower to the woodlice. most of my job for the last few years has paying down eight-year-old tech debt caused by a bunch of people coincidentally all with my deadname. again, not a bit; i'm talking about three people who are not me whose code i am very excited to be deleting.