Categories
Life

Hiding Out

I’m hiding out in the lounge. My other half has taken over the junk room (where the big computer lives), and is trying to cut together a video for the infant school with each of the staff members singing and dancing along to a pre-agreed music track, along with their children.

She started learning how to use the video editing software half an hour ago. The kind of video editing software you might use to make a movie. It doesn’t help that everybody’s video has been uploaded to a shared drive in portrait, landscape, with borders, without borders… so yeah – she’s going to have to rotate each clip, scale each clip, cut each clip, and re-assemble the various clips – all while keeping it in time with a backing music track.

It’s going to take hours. Especially as she’s learning as she goes. The only piece of advice I gave before running from the room in fear of my life was to use a parallel video channel to edit clips, and drop them into the “real” timeline after they looked ok.

I might not know a lot, but I’ve learned enough through doing the podcast to know how not to mess up everything you’ve already done in a huge hurry. I’ve already warned my other half that after an hour doing this, she knows more about video editing than anybody we know, and will be roped into editing videos for everybody over the next however many years.

My late father in law taught me an invaluable life lesson – never, ever be good at anything that anybody else needs somebody to be good at. I laughed when he first told me, but over the years I’ve learned through bitter experience that he was absolutely right. If you have a sought after skill, keep a damn good lid on it.

I suppose some people can’t hide their skills really. Take Gordon Ramsay, for instance – I wonder if his neighbours ever call up, asking “I’ve bought some bacon but have no clue how to wrap it round the chicken – can you spare a few minutes?”.

In recent years, the only time I’ve broken cover was to help a friend with her website. The site was pretty badly borked, and the person that usually looks after it was at a loss too. Within an hour I had rescued it from the fire, hacked my way through the back end, re-set passwords throughout, run updates, and handed her the keys to her shiny new online house. Here’s the thing though – she didn’t take advantage.

I love people that don’t take advantage. Unfortunately they seem to be in the minority. Some people’s entire existence seems to centre around taking what they can from others – exploiting, and using. Their lack of tact, empathy, guilt, or shame always amazes me.

Anyway!

I’m having a wonderful time sitting here in the quiet – eating chocolate biscuits, drinking coffee (I already had two glasses of wine), and half watching ridiculous TV shows on Netflix. Joel McHale keeps trying to talk me into binge-watching his show, but I’ve already promised to watch the second part of Dracula with my daughter.

Categories
Life

Relentless

The rest of the household have gone to bed, and I find myself alone for a little while. Alone in the dark with my thoughts. A little while to untangle and unload.

The world has been somewhat relentless recently. I can’t think of a better or worse word. Better or worse. It’s a strange concept, but also fitting. It feels like we are all balancing precariously at the moment – between something, and something else. Of course without knowing what something and something else is, you start to doubt the continued effort.

It’s the old conversation about “keeping going”, isn’t it – resisting the temptation to fall- the temptation to allow yourself to fall.

I seem to be full of abstraction and reflection tonight – and not at all tired, which is surprising, given a day perched in front of a monitor, wrestling with imponderable complexity.

Sometimes the only way past is through – and sometimes the journey is slow – an inch forwards, a step back, another half a step forwards, and so on. There are phrases for that too – “small moves”, “little by little”…

We wrap our lives in so many phrases. I wonder if they are no more than protective blankets, woven from received wisdom.

Categories
Life

Absolute Avoidance

I’ve been sitting in front of the laptop for the majority of the day, with a text editor open – ready to receive the usual stream of idiotic thoughts that invariably pour from my brain. For one reason or another, I’ve written nothing. All day. Nothing at all.

I’ve put several loads of washing through the washing machine, hung clothes out to dry, sorted our youngest daughter’s computer out for her, re-booted the WiFi router, washed up the dishes – you name it, I’ve done it – everything except write a single damn word for the blog.

It’s not so much procrastination, as absolute avoidance – and I have no idea why.

In the past I have gone through barren spells – so I’m not panicking too much. By tomorrow I’ll no doubt have discovered the next great side-quest in this supposedly unplanned adventure. My daughters have even come around to the idea that I’m starring in my own Truman Show – whenever I approach a road to cross it on foot, cars will appear from nowhere, preventing me from crossing. We have begun referring to them as “non player characters”.

Maybe this all IS a simulation.

You know the old saying – about waiting for a bus, and then two come along at once? What if that’s because the world works the same way as Grand Theft Auto – and the vehicles on the road aren’t entirely random?

I’ll shut up now. You can stop gawping at the screen, slack jawed at my idiocy.

Categories
Life

Sunday Morning

After waking up a little after 8am this morning I was very busy daydreaming when my other half rolled over, woken by the cat asking for his breakfast, and murmured:

“Are you not going for a run this morning?”

I sighed. For some reason I woke up with little or no enthusiasm this morning. After wondering about maybe going running tomorrow instead, some unseen force scaped me out of bed, gathered together some shorts and a t-shirt, and delivered me to the bottom of the stairs.

Miss 15 leaned around the corner of the kitchen doorway, bowls of cat food in her hands.

“Shall we go for a run then?”

She shrugged – “I suppose?”

Five minutes later we found ourselves doing warm-up exercises in the warm morning sunshine outside the house, and then set-off through town. While running, it occurred to me that I don’t have to make conversation with my youngest daughter while running – she’s the polar opposite of her older sister. With Miss 19 I have to keep a continual stream of nonsensical conversation to take her mind off what she’s doing – with 15, I don’t have to do anything – just be there with her.

We ran eight sets of three minutes this morning. She sniffed throughout the entire run – I imagine hay-fever. The sun has caused everything green to burst into life over the past few weeks – suddenly the air is thick with pollen and insects, even in the morning.

After the run we took turns through the shower, and then made a late breakfast. She cooked pancakes, while I cooked bacon. Of course I say “she cooked pancakes” – it was more a case of she made the mixture, massacred the first pancake, and then I cooked the pancakes and the bacon.

It’s now almost lunchtime, and I’m not entirely sure what I might fill the afternoon with. It has already been suggested to me that I might spend some time with our eldest, but she just printed out a recipe to make sushi. Ah – so I’ll be cleaning up an unholy mess in the kitchen later then.

Coffee. That’s what I’ll do first.

Categories
Life

Familiar Faces

We setup a Zoom meeting with people living nearby in the neighbourhood this evening, wired up the laptop to the television in the lounge, and spent a couple of hours catching up with each other. It was nice to see familiar faces again.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have had far too much to drink, and am trying to figure out how I might go for a run in the morning.

Categories
Life

It’s about being there

I watched an old episode of “Halt and Catch Fire” this evening. If you’ve not seen it, the show ran for four seasons, and broadly told the story of the 1980s computer revolution, the birth of the internet, and latterly the world wide web. The story was told through the lives of a small group of people that cross through many of the defining moments of those decades – sometimes by luck, sometimes by foresight.

There is a monologue towards the end of the third season, where one of the characters is trying to describe not so much what the future might hold for the World Wide Web (which in the time-line of the show had just been invented by Tim Berners Lee), but that the Web wasn’t the important thing – and neither was the Browser – it was all about the means of getting to the place you’re going.

The internet, the web, and the browser were “the thing that gets us to the thing”. You might even argue that directories such as Yahoo, and latterly the search engines were a further extension of that – because we don’t set off in search of pictures or words – we set off in search of the subject of those pictures, and the author of those words.

When we access the internet, the thing we are trying to get to isn’t a distant computer, or a page of text, or a photograph. It is a person. Their thoughts, ideas, and opinions. It’s not about how we get there – it’s about being there.

Categories
Life

It’s Life Jim

It’s been a day. After pulling the design together for a future project this morning, I wandered into the garden to find my other half sitting in a camping chair outside, hiding from the children, who were arguing about chores.

The chore argument was entirely predictable. A reward system had been introduced – you know – like you might have for 7 year olds – except our younger kids are 15 and 16. I was quite impressed with how quickly Miss 16 figured out how to take advantage and try to cherry pick the chores she was willing to do (mostly driven by laziness).

Rather than work through lunch once again, I decided to spend an hour in the garden, and got most of the grass at the back of the house cut. It still looked like hell, but better than it was. I spent another half an hour out there after work – it almost doesn’t look like jungle now.

We finally let Miss 15 join Tiktok this evening. She has been asking for months, and most of her friends have it. I’m just hoping we have done the right thing. I guess it’s time to start having some trust in her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her quite so happy.

I’m running again in the morning, and then helping my youngest daughter call a journalist and ask about her work as part of a school project. I imagine she will talk on one phone, and I’ll record it on another – so she can go back through it afterwards.

This evening I may fall back into the clutches of “No Mans Sky”. It’s a ridiculously addictive video game where you get dumped on a distant planet, and have to MacGuyver your way off it, and then set out across the universe.

Or maybe I should go read a book, or watch a movie. Actually, something rubbish to eat, something nice to drink, and a terrible movie sounds quite persuasive.

This has been a very random post, hasn’t it.

p.s. I might have re-acquired the jonbeckett.blog domain name this evening, and attached it to the WordPress account. Does this mean I’m eventually headed back to WordPress? Perhaps. Very slowly though.

Categories
Life

Switching Off

After sliding out of bed at perhaps 7:30 this morning and fishing some running shorts from the long neglected “fitness” drawer, I knocked on various daughter’s bedroom doors, and asked if they might be running with me. Minutes later only Miss 15 made an appearance.

We ran more or less the same route we had at the weekend – the same intervals – the same rests. After perhaps half an hour we arrived back at home, stretched, and then took turns through the shower. I had just enough time to get changed, clear the kitchen, and make a coffee before work beckoned.

I don’t know why I’m such a stickler for “turning up on time” at work – even while working from home. I watched the clock while making the coffee, and fetching the work laptop – worrying that I wouldn’t be sat down and logged in on the stroke of 9am. Nobody would have seen me. Nobody would have noticed.

The day flew by – filled with meetings, online conversations with co-workers, and the design of a potentially huge future solution. Before I knew it, I had worked straight through lunch, and the end of the day was approaching.

For dinner we had baked potatoes with salad. I love simple, nutritious food. I know professional chefs often talk about ingredients rather than processes, but I think simple, tasty food wins out over fussy, complicated food every time.

This evening I’m trying to switch off for a couple of hours. I need it. A meteor shower is supposed to happen a little later – the Lyrids? – I’ll wrap up warm and sit outside with a cup of hot chocolate. Then perhaps a book before bed.

Categories
Life

Crossing the Streams

I suppose the first few months of this year will go down as something on an experiment in my blogging history. I started the year off by walking away from WordPress, and setting up a self-hosted blog in splendid isolation. I had become fed up with the temptation to “play the game” – to seek the attention of others. I installed Ghost on a virtual machine in the cloud, and switched comments off entirely for a month or so. My castle, my words, and my rules.

Long time readers at WordPress emailed me when I left – expressing more than a little exhasperation, and wearily predicting my return in the not too distant future.

Here we are – in the not too distant future – and I sort of have returned, and I sort of haven’t. It turned out running my own island required effort on my part – looking after webserver updates, SSL certificates, and so on. I ended up moving my writing to GitHub – leveraging their ability to turn a source code repository into a website for free. If you’re looking at jonbeckett.com, you’re looking at the result of that effort.

After happily posting to jonbeckett.com for a while, the corona virus lockdown happened, and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. This thumb-twiddling-time resulted in the realisation that I missed the online community perhaps more than I liked to admit.

Early in April, I returned to Tumblr and WordPress, and then after reminscing with old friends on the podcast, LiveJournal too. I back-populated them with all the posts since the beginning of the year, and figured that if I wasn’t happy in any one place, I might as well try to be at all of them.

I’m still not sure if it was the right thing to do. It often feels like I don’t really fit in anywhere – that I’m a strange sort of rolling stone that passes through from time to time – causing familiar faces to look up, and ask “Isn’t that the guy that used to write that blog ?”.

There is a temptation to give in – to return to WordPress, and board up the constellation of cross-posted satellite blogs. You might liken it to returning to the city (especially as WordPress now runs perhaps a third of the web, if commonly touted statistics are to be believed). Perhaps metropolis is a better word.

On my little blogging island, my voice is the only voice. I can sit on my pretend hill and write messages to myself all day long – thoughts, ideas, dreams, adventures. In a metropolis, my voice will be but one of millions – lost in the cacophony. Is it better to be on the outside, looking in, or on the inside, looking out?