I'm back home, back in Scotland, after a touch over a week in the Netherlands. It's been a great week. Much like on the flight out, from the aircraft, I managed to get a view of a part of the UK I like. This time it was Whitby.
While likely not immediately obvious, it is there. It was a lot more obvious with the naked eye. Zooming in a bit...
The track confirms that we were in a good position for such a view:
While I didn't grab a photo (I wasn't in a window seat this time so it wasn't so easy to keep track of where we were), I also managed to see Scarborough -- a place where I spent many summer holidays as a child in the 1970s.
Sadly I did miss a view of Newcastle, as when we got close to there, we took a left-hand turn and all I could see out of our windows was sky.
I love flying, even though I rarely do so -- I'm not one for travel. But when I get the chance to fly I find it hard to not just sit there, staring out of the window, marvelling at the view.
Today I got the chance to get a pretty good view of the area close to where I used to live when I first started this blog (and also where I lived when I maintained the blog that came before).
The route I flew actually covered a couple of places from my past life, going fairly close to York (where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life), then carrying on down into Lincolnshire (where I used to live before moving to Scotland).
Much of the route was over broken cloud that made it tricky to really see obvious landmarks, although around Lincolnshire (without knowing I was over it at the time) I did see some shapes in the landscape that looked familiar. Then, after a small turn, and after a wee while, the cloud cleared and suddenly it was very obvious where I was. I had this excellent view of the Wash.
I know this sort of thing is conventional, everyday, and boring for many folk. Me: nope, not a chance. That I can have this sort of view is still a wonder to me.
Despite the fact that I am not, in any way, superstitious, I kind of have this rule: don't make definitive statements about the absolute happening of an event until it happens; it kind of feels like you're tempting the universe to prank you. I don't always follow it, I know it's kind of silly, but it's there and hard to shake. It's normal. It's human.
Sometimes it happens that it looks like I should stick to that rule.
Eleven days back I wrote about how I was aiming to return to streaming thanks to the fact that I'd once again be the proud owner of a full fibre connection. The thing that, in part, prompted me to write about that was the fact that I'd had an email, that morning, from Openreach, to let me know they'd done some work and that fibre was now available at my property.
The email proudly stated:
Hello Dave,
Congratulations, you can now get Full Fibre on the Openreach network at [my home address].
With Full Fibre broadband, you can choose your package based on the download speeds you'll need from 40 Mbps to 1.6 Gbps. Need some help choosing? Then read our blog before ordering to find out what's a good download speed.
We also have the UK's biggest choice of broadband providers, so you can find a package and price to suit you.
After a button that linked to a site for finding a provider, it went on to say:
After you've placed your order with the provider of your choice, we'll arrange a day and time with you for one of our engineers to connect Full Fibre to your property if it isn't there already.
They may need to drill a small hole in your wall, or they may be able to use the same access point as your current line. Either way, they'll take care of everything and leave you with a broadband that's ready to deal with anything the future brings. You can find out more about what's involved in our handy Full Fibre installation video.
I found this whole email mildly amusing because it was obvious that the work they'd done, that made this possible, will have been the result of the call I made to EE back in March to order fibre in the first place, when it became apparent I was finally able to request it.
So, yeah, when Openreach -- the people who do the cables and stuff -- email you to let you know they've as good as hooked your place up, you know it's a safe bet.
Today was the day. This morning, between 08:00 and 13:00, was the window I'd been given for one of their engineers to turn up and do the hole drilling and the box screwing and all the stuff and then this evening I'd be in a position where, once again, I could download the whole Internet and stream utter nonsense in the highest quality (both creating and consuming). I was looking forward to this.
Everyone in the house was.
The time window started, and kept going, and kept going, and eventually it was 13:00 and nobody had turned up and my house had no extra wires or holes and I was on the phone to EE to ask WHERE IS THE GLASS INTERNET PIPE?!?
Long story short: it wasn't turning up. At all. It appears, at some point in the recent past, Openreach simply cancelled the order and nobody thought to tell me. Openreach (the people who sent me the email 11 days ago) didn't think to tell me. That's the same Openreach who sent me the SMS on the 7th of this month to give me the date of the work; apparently they could not send me an SMS to let me know they'd decided against this.
Of course, it's not all on Openreach. It would also seem that EE knew, from their own system, that the order had been cancelled and they too had failed to email me, message me, call me, something, to let me know I'd be wasting my time clearing half my day to receive them and have the work take place.
So: pretty shitty service all round.
The main explanation I've been given is something to do with a "CBT"1, or something related. This means that it's just not possible to deliver fibre to my address. This is after:
I called to check in March
I was told in March it was possible
Openreach checked things out, said more work was needed, did the work
I literally saw them doing the work, with a trench and barriers and everything
I was emailed by Openreach after the work took place to say they'd done the work and I could have fibre
Even today, even right now, if I go on their site and put in my exact address:
Not "no". Not "eventually". Not "soon". Now. It says now.
At this point this is where I have to say, after making a bit of a mess of all of this, EE have done all they can to smooth things over (especially given there's sod all they can actually do about this). They've compensated me for the missed appointment (despite the fact it wasn't technically missed; it had been cancelled and nobody had let me know), left me to hang on to all the new equipment for if/when the fibre does turn up (meaning I'll have a backup router I guess), and have also compensated me for 3 months of my current copper-based broadband by way of an apology.
On top of that they didn't just brush me off with a "sorry, can't do anything about this", they went to bat for me during a 90 minute phone conversation, chasing up more detailed explanations of what the issue was with Openreach, as we talked. While I don't actually have a solution that is anything other than "you'll have to wait", at least now I have something of a better explanation as to what the actual problem is.
So where does this leave me? Here's what I do know:
The issue that stopped my installation is solvable and, in all likelihood, is the sort of thing that will be solved in the next few months (mention being made of a reasonable range of between a 2 to 6 month wait).
Almost every alternative provider I could go to would have the same issue, as they all work over the fibre that Openreach would install.
From what I can see no provider that isn't Openreach-connected is even the least bit interested in providing fibre.
Openreach have promised that the moment they have a solution to the technical problem that stops the installation, they will call me and arrange to kick things off again (or at least, I guess, let me know it's safe to place the order with EE again).
To be clear too: we're not talking about providing a service to a house in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere, not even a house in some out-of-the-way village. I live in a reasonably large town, far bigger than the village I lived in before where I did have full fibre.
All of which concludes with: I started today excited by the prospect of fast downloads, fast uploads, and returning to talking nonsense on YouTube while being terrible at playing games; I'm finishing the day with no clear path to having fibre, and a wait time that could extend well into the rest of this year, and perhaps even into next.
I hope it won't be that bad, but I am deflated and disappointed.
Also, on the very remote chance that either Sharon or Neil from EE ever stumble on this blog post: thank you for all the effort you went to to get actual answers for me. It's a shame that it needs to be said, but it is rare these days that you call a customer support line at a service or utility company and get people who are willing and able to work in a way that isn't just following a script.
Well, except for the bit right at the end... I'm fine Neil, I don't need to swap mobile provider. ;-)
I'm sat on the sofa, MacBook perched on my lap, going over some photos and generally feeling pretty tired in a really satisfying way.
We've just had a brief weekend run to one of my favourite places on the planet, back in the county I was born in: Whitby.
The plan for the weekend, as it always is when we do a run down there, was to head down, wander around town and do some vague tourist-type things in the afternoon/evening, wake up early in the morning, head to the east beach and go fossil hunting.
Neither of us are fossil-hunting experts, but it's something we like to try and do at least once a year. For me it's a bonus that it's in Whitby as that's a place I just never get bored of. Its connection with all things Gothic and photographic is a constant draw for me.
As for the hunt itself: we managed to find a good few fossils, some being easily uncovered on the beach, some being found as ready-to-pick-up fragments, and some deeply-embedded in nodules that we've brought home to extract at a later date.
Backpacks came off the beach heavier than they went on.
We were pretty lucky with the weather for the trip. While we saw some heavy rain while walking around on Saturday evening (which was enjoyable anyway as the skies were pretty dramatic for it, and we got a pretty neat rainbow as the reward for the wee soaking), Sunday was cool but sunny all the time we were on the hunt. The tide was very much in our favour too (although we'd planned it that way, of course) with low tide being around noon.
We did manage to cut it fine getting back off the beach though. This is a thing you have to watch out for while on the hunt there. While we had plenty of sand/rock to be walking around on where we were hunting, by the time we headed back to the slipway back off the beach the tide was up enough that we had to hop over a crashing wave or two. That part of the beach can be misleading so it's something you do have to watch out for.
So, like I said: I'm happy-knackered on the sofa and satisfied after a fun weekend away. We keep promising ourselves that we will hunt other spots on the North Yorkshire coast, and probably even hunt other parts of the UK, but Whitby is an easy drive and a fun place to just hang out.
It's been a wee while since I wrote anything here (been about a month) so I thought I'd make mention of what's going on.
The main news is that I'm employed again!
Once the news about the Textual layoffs hit I, of course, started the job hunting process. This lasted for a wee while (and I have a couple of stories about that -- perhaps I'll write them up one day). I officially became "unemployed" on April the 1st (yeah, I know), and by the 23rd I had an offer for a new position, which I accepted.
As of the time of writing I've been in that position for a touch over 3 weeks and it's going really well. Right at this moment I'm doing zero Python work (that will change, I strongly suspect) and, actually, for the first time ever, I'm writing some TypeScript (it's tempting me to dive into that some more).
The team I'm working in are great and I'm also really impressed so far by the practices they have in place relating to getting stuff done. It's actually a refreshing change to work in a bigger organisation and actually find it not massively frustrating!
I'm also back to working from home full time. This isn't that big a deal for me as I spent around 22 years doing so up until 2018, and of course it isn't that big of a deal to many folk these days anyway thanks to the 2020- period. This prompted me to finally clear out the spare room (I've only been in here a touch under 5 years so of course there were a lot of "I'll sort those soon" boxes and stuff in there), buy a second desk, and make a work-coding area that is away from totally separate from my for-fun-coding area.
This has turned out to be a really good decision. I love my main hacking space in the living room, and have done a lot of work there, but that was always on the odd days here and there when I'd work at home. Now that working at home is a full-time role it felt important to make the distinction.
Weirdly though, all of this means that I'm spending less time working on personal stuff. When I was working at Textualize, most days, I'd be spending the best part of 3 hours in the day getting to and from the office. I thought that perhaps getting that time back would translate into having more time to tinker with my own stuff. Actually what I'm finding I'm doing is I'm spending the time on more general self-care and domestic things. This is a good thing.
Doubtless once things really settle down and I form my new routine I'll dive back into FOSS coding more again, and perhaps get back to streaming while I code.
Meanwhile though you can find me steaming many late evenings, mucking about on my PS5. Right at this moment I'm finally playing all the way through Just Cause 4 (a game I bought back in 2019 and never finished). In fact last night I finished the main story.
Expect a lot more PS5-based streaming nonsense over the next few months.
One other change I have made is to my VR video publishing schedule. For the longest time I had the time and was playing so much that I published a video every day. This wasn't a schedule I set myself, this was more a case of I was playing so much that to publish less frequently would mean there would be a huge backlog. These days I'm back to working 5 days a week (previously I was working 4 days) so I have to cram a little more into my weekends, and also I want to try and do other things during weekends too. So recently I changed to an every-other-day schedule.
And, really, that's about it. For now expect to see a bit less Python-based content on here, and also quite a bit less Textual-based stuff too. Currently my focus is elsewhere and it also seems that Textual is a bit of a moving target recently, throwing in some fun new bugs and breaking changes which are tricky to keep on top of. That said, you will still find me in the repo, lending a hand when I can, and of course in the Textual Discord too; just don't expect to see me quite so omnipresent there, especially during the work day.
While I have been on the receiving end of redundancy once before, that was after 21 years of service at a company that, while it was in part about software development, I would never have called it a "tech" company.
So, as of today, I can finally say that the "tech layoffs" came for me and I'm one of 67% of employees being let go from a tech startup.
Achievement unlocked, I guess?
To be clear: I'm not annoyed about this, I'm not even shocked about this; I planned for this from the off and realised and recognised the gamble I was taking back in 2022.
I am disappointed about this. Not in a "I'm disappointed in you" kind of way, but disappointed for all involved and what it says about how FOSS projects are funded and maintained.
It's been an interesting journey, and it's been a privilege to do something I've been wanting to do since the 1990s, when I first read the GNU Manifesto and subsequently watched the free software and open source movements develop and grow: work on FOSS for a living. In doing this I've developed my thoughts about the feasibility of such an endeavour, I've refined how I feel about working in very small teams, I've learnt a lot of useful lessons I'm going to draw on in the future (keeping a journal of my experience has been a great move; I have a lot of notes and thoughts written down that I'll be reviewing and distilling for myself over the coming weeks).
So... what happens now? Well, of course, right now, I'm looking for a new position. If you're reading this and you are looking for someone who's kinda handy with Python and a bunch of other languages and who loves learning new stuff, or if you know someone who is looking for such a person, do drop me a line!
As for what happens with Textual, and my involvement with it...
Well, what happens with Textual is Will's call, of course. As for my involvement with it: I care about FOSS and I care about Textual; I also care about the folk who have been kind enough to use their time to explore it, test it, build with it, commit to it and make neat stuff with it. My intention, as long as free time allows, is to carry on being involved, both on GitHub and in the Discord server.
It's my sincere hope that, as a community of FOSS-friendly developers, we see Textual over the 1.0 line and beyond.
But all that starts next week. It's a bank holiday weekend and I think I might have deserved a run, a bit of mucking about in VR, a beer, and just a wee bit of down time.
This one has been brewing for a year, more or less. Now that I commute into and back from Edinburgh most days of the working week, I find myself walking past a couple of music shops. Seeing these reminds me of the days, back in my 20s, when I mucked around in a couple of bands and had fun making noises on a bass guitar. Since that time I've also owned a cheap six string electric, which is currently in storage (and has been since 2016) and an acoustic, which I have with me but I live in an apartment building and I'm not an arsehole so I never play it.
So, yeah, walking past those shops has made me want to muck about on a guitar again. I've never properly learnt the guitar, I've just managed to learn enough chords to make some noises I like for my own amusement, but even then I've not picked one up since around 2016 and what little I do know is very rusty.
Add to the above: earlier this year I was at a friend's and admiring her collection of bass and six string guitars and picked a couple up and realised I could not play anything. It had been too long, I'd lost most muscle memory and coordination, and what little knowledge I had.
So this made me want to fix this even more.
Given the apartment thing I decided on a plan: how about I get an eclectic, and then some sort of amplification that would always rely on headphones? Given such a setup I could knuckle down and try and learn properly.
So, this week, being on holiday, I told myself I'd pop into Edinburgh one day and have a look at my options; perhaps even come home with something. Yesterday was that day.
It didn't quite go to plan, but the outcome was that I ended up with something to play.
So, on getting into the shop, and explaining what I was after and why to the chap in there, I tried the usual Stratocaster and Telecaster thing. Both were fine (I think I liked the feel of the Telecaster more in my hand). I had one eye on a Les Paul too, but never tried that. What I did see though was this rather lovely black Höfner.
Now, of course, it's hollow body, so sort of has that acoustic thing going on. This isn't what I wanted for playing in an apartment. But I had to try it anyway. As soon as I started dabbling I was sold. The sound was enough that it would be easy to pick up and play without having to faff with amplification of any sort, on the other hand it was nowhere near as loud as my acoustic. I felt like it bridged the gap between easy to pick up, and versatile enough should I ever want to plug it into something.
And... let's be honest: it was black. Sooooo black. I like black.
Long story short... it had to come home with me!
As mentioned earlier: most of my guitar stuff is still in storage, from when I moved to Scotland, but I did find my old tin of plectrums and the tuner.
(Yes, the tin was once mine and was once full; the early 90s were a different time)
I even found one of my old stands, that I've had since around 1991! So now it's set up in my living room, next to the PCVR rig, ready to go at a moment's notice.
This is my plan now: each weekend I aim to put in at least an hour a day of practice, to try and get my fingers up to strength again, and to build up the muscle memory of where the strings are, to get the coordination between both hands, etc. I'm also going to be working through beginner's lessons from a tutor application. I'm going to treat this like I'm the complete novice I am and slowly work on improving.
There's no end goal; other than just get proficient enough that I can muck about on my own and be happy that I can play the sorts of things I want to be able to play.
Also, it's good to learn new stuff, especially new stuff that isn't just more coding.
Some time around late October or early November last year, around the time I started working at Textualize, I "discovered" Obsidian. While I didn't need another note-taking application (having gone through Evernote, trying to use Org, dabbling with a couple of other things and finally settling mainly on Apple Notes), I was quite taken by its style and ubiquity and the fact that it was, at heart, just a bunch of Markdown files.
So quite quickly I started using it; not to replace Apple Notes (which is still my general note-taking tool of choice), but to keep work notes and a daily coding journal, the latter coming in useful for the quick end-of-day meetings we normally have.
One of the things I was quite taken by was the graph. It was interesting and fun to see how each of my work days related to other work days, and what subjects kept getting pulled in, etc.
So come the start of this year I had an idea: what would it be like to keep a personal vault, but one where I track things I've done. Not a journal as such (I do keep one of those too, have done for many years now, but that's for other far more important reasons -- perhaps I'll write about that one day too), just a daily record of stuff I've achieved, stuff I've actually done, the routine things and the exceptional things?
What would that graph look like?
While it's not the end of this year yet, here's how that's shaping up:
Each of the yellow circles is a day, each of the blue ones is a tag of some sort. As you'd imagine, the size of the circles relates to how often that item is tagged. So I can see what proportion of my days so far this year have been tagged with being heavily involved with work:
Likewise, if I want to see how many days this year have involved a significant spot of gaming:
Ditto for days where I've done some coding on pet projects, or even some personal-time coding relating to work projects (it might be work, but it's also Free Software and I do like to support FOSS!)
I sort of have a curated set of tags I apply, but I've not made it a strict set; if some new situation crops up that calls for a new tag I'll use it. Mostly though I try and keep the tags pretty general so lots of days can relate to the same general subject.
Another thing I've done is tag each and every day with the day of the week, so while it's not really surprising to find that Sunday doesn't dominate over other days, I can see which days are Sundays and perhaps wander along the connections and see what I get up to:
I don't quite know what I hope to get out of this, I don't really know if there's anything useful to be had here at all, but it will be interesting to look back over it at the end of the year. It also means that I'll have a directory hierarchy full of Markdown files, all tagged and filled with information, which I'll be able to grep and slice and dice and count and perhaps pull into a database and cross-reference with stuff and things.
Or perhaps it's all just really me not having a good use for Obsidian but inventing one anyway. ;-)
I moved into my current place back in August 2019, bringing with me a fairly small desk. Originally, many years back, I'd had a pretty big office with lots of office space but, upon moving up to Scotland back in 2016, I needed to go with something a lot smaller.
Which was perfectly fine. Me and that desk wrote a lot of code. Me and that desk transitioned from one job to another, and then another. Me and that desk made it through the pandemic.
It's been a good desk.
But it was small. I'm in a place where I could spread out a fair bit again, but I also kept putting it off and putting it off.
Earlier this year I decided that it was high time I actually upgraded; I also promised the desk to someone else who I know will get a lot of good use out of it; so finally earlier this week I put in the order for something bigger and fancier.
Yesterday, with the help of a very good friend (thanks Mariëlle!), I got the desk built and roughly in place, and then today I've been putting the desktop back together and adding extra bits.
It's so nice to have more space to spread out, it's also nice to have a black desk again! (the last one was white because... reasons) But what's really exciting is that it transforms into a standing desk at the touch of a button.
I've been trying it in the standing configuration today and, while I doubt I could do a whole day of coding with it like that, I'm already really liking it as a way of breaking up the time at the keyboard. On the days I work from home, or the days of my own where I get sucked into a personal project, I can absolutely see me swapping between the two states.
All that's left now is to get used to it. The screens are ever so slightly further away, the height is ever so slightly different (although I can adjust it, of course, but what I've done is adjust the sitting position to a nicer one and that's going to take some getting used to), my iPad and Stream Deck are in just a slightly different location, etc, etc... So I'm sure there'll be a few days of sitting here and making small tweaks to the spot where things live.
Before I know it I'll be used to it. It'll be "my spot".
Just over five years ago I got a message from my then employer to say I was going to be made redundant after 21 years working for them. After the 3 month notice period the final day came. Meanwhile, I found something new that looked terrifying but interesting. In the end it was less terrifying and way more interesting than I imagined it would be. It was fun too.
But... (there's always a but isn't there?)
In the four and change years I've been there the company got bought out, and then the result of that got bought up. As I've mentioned before I'm generally not a "big company" kind of person; in all my years I've found that I'm happier working in a smaller place. After a couple of buyouts my employer had gone from being 10s of people in size to 100s of people in size (and technically 10s of 1,000s of people in size depending on how you look at it).
This change in ownership and size meant the culture became... well, let's just say not as friendly as you tend to enjoy when it's a smaller group of folk. On top of that I was starting to notice that my efforts were making less of an impact as things got bigger, and I started to feel like my contributions weren't really relevant any more. There were some problematic things happening too: undermining of efforts, removal of responsibilities without consultation or communication, that sort of thing. Plus worse. There's little point in going into the detail, but it's fair to say that work wasn't as fun as it used to be.
That felt like a good time to start to look around. If work makes you feel unhappy and you can look around... look around.
Thing is, I wasn't sure what to look for. I was in the comfortable position of, unlike last time, not needing to find something, so I could take my time at least. Over the course of the last year I've spoken to many different companies and organisations, some big (yes, I know, I said I don't like big places -- sometimes what's on offer deserves a fair hearing), some small, but none of them quite said "this feels like me". In some cases the whole thing didn't have the right vibe, in others the industry either didn't interest me, or felt uncomfortable given my personal values. In one particular case a place looked interesting until I checked the CTO's socials and OMG NO NO NO AVOID AVOID (that was a fun one).
Then I saw Will McGugan saying he was hiring to expand Textualize. This caught my interest right away for two reasons.
I can't remember how long I've been following Will on Twitter; I likely stumbled on him as I got back into Python in 2018 and I also remember noting that he was a Python hacker just up the road from me. We'd vaguely chatted on Twitter, briefly, in that "Twitter acquaintance" way we all often do (I remember one brief exchange about fungus on The Meadows). A small company run by someone I was acquainted with seemed like a safe bet.
The second reason was Textual itself. I'd been watching Will develop it, in open, with great interest. I had (and still have) a plan to write a brand new CHUI-based (okay fine TUI-based as the kids like to say these days!) Norton Guide reader1, all in Python, and Textual looked like the perfect framework to do the UI in. The chance to be involved with it sounded awesome.
Now, I said two reasons, but there's also a third I guess: Will's pitch for applying to Textualize felt so damn accessible! I'm on the older end of the age range of this industry; for much of my working life as a developer I've worked in isolation from other developers; while I first touched Python in the 90s, I've only been using it in anger since 2018 and still feel like I've got a lot to learn. Despite all these things, and more, saying "aye Dave this is beyond you" I felt comfortable dropping Will a line.
Which resulted in a chat.
Which resulted in some code tinkering and chatting.
Which resulted in...
Something new.
So, yeah, as of 2022-10-10 I'm on yet another new adventure. Time for me to really work on my Python coding as I work with Will and the rest of the team as part of Textualize.
Or, as I put it on Twitter a few days ago: "I'm going to be a Python impostor syndrome speedrunner".
