You Don't Live Like I Do

Ball Games

2026-05-27T22:22:04Z

I had a nice time this evening going to the park with cosmolinguist and P. We got ice creams and tossed a rugby ball around, and hung out with P's partner J and a friend they were there skating with. I'm still not great at either throwing or catching a rugby ball, but probably better than I was 35 years ago when I last played rugby. We didn't get there until 8pm, so it was starting to cool down after another sweltering day, and it was great to just hang out, mess around and chat nonsense.

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Conversational White-Water Rafting

2026-05-17T23:37:01Z

The last Bank Holiday Monday was fun. cosmolinguist's Canadian friend Bill was in the UK, and we haven't seen him for over a decade. Incompatibilities with Bill's idiosyncratic approach to communication technologies meant that I had to be the go-between and secretary, and for a while we weren't sure whether he had received any messages from us. But he got back to us on Monday morning and we made plans, meeting him in the city centre at lunchtime.

I did my tour guide bit, showing him the still-bescaffolded Town Hall, Lincoln Square, the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. Apparently he'd been to the latter before, but didn't know it was one of the first places in Manchester to have air filters installed during the Industrial Revolution, to stop soot and sulphur in the air from contaminating the library books. We doubled back along Peter Street and the former Free Trade Hall, and ended up at Society, down by the Bridgewater Hall, where Bill and I enjoyed pizza and E had veggie quesadillas. After that we took in the lovely tiled Peveril of the Peak, the punky former-toilet Temple of Convenience where we chatted international politics with a lefty Polish bartender, and headed up to the Village to the Molly House.

Talking to Bill is a bit like white water rafting - he says what's on his mind at any given time, and he's massively knowledgeable and fearsomely intelligent, so the conversation flows fast from topic to topic and really all you can do is cling on for dear life and hope to occasionally nudge things.

It was great fun. So much so that we managed to do it again the following Friday - this time we hit the Northern Quarter, starting in Bar Fringe talking about creativity and art. Later in Terrace we got talking to some students who bummed cigarettes off Bill, which ended up in some bizarrely deep and meaningful conversations. Eventually E and I staggered off for the last train and Bill walked with us, then went to check out the Piccadilly Tap.

He'll be back next year. I'm looking forward to it already.

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First Time Back

2026-05-16T10:37:22Z

First time back at trans gym weight class since my hernia surgery two months ago. It was a quiet class, which means I got a lot of attention from the trainer, but they were happy that I knew what I was doing and didn't push myself. I mostly went bar weight for lifts, and when a snatch-and-jerk exercise made my tummy grumble I just stopped doing it and rested.

Also it was really nice to catch up with people, have some silly natters to the young people about cosmolinguist's and my opinions about Olivia Rodrigo, and do my best to support them through some of the tough times they're going through both at the gym and outside.

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Busy Weekend

2026-04-27T23:14:19Z

Last weekend was rather busy. After work on Friday, me and cosmolinguist cycled to Station South for a pint. It's the first time I've been on a bike since my hernia operation six weeks ago, but it didn't seem to cause any problems. Of course, I took it gently. And it was lovely to sit outside in the sun and drink and chat.

On Saturday morning, we met up with some Internet friends to walk around Sale Water Park with some doggos. It was nice being sociable, and the slow sniffy labrador meant we didn't go very fast. We chatted to a lot of people, and ended up having a nice pub lunch, again sat outdoors in the shade. We headed home briefly, to recharge my phone (and myself), before heading into the city centre for a friend's birthday, drinking in the sunshine at North Beer. It was fun to meet some new people, and have some good conversations about Manchester's history, culture and attitude. We ended up in the beer garden at The Salisbury, my old haunt from the 90s which is now much closer to its old rock pub self than its weird mid-noughties wine bar incarnation, but it was too noisy and smoke-filled so me and E headed home after a token pint of Old Perculier.

On Sunday, we went to visit Bud Garden Centre for their birthday party! We pottered round and looked at plants, but this was the point where my abdomen had had enough and started twingeing, so I went to sit in the car while E and V did the shopping, and took part in the raffle and other fun things. When we got home I had a nap, and in the evening we watched an MR James livecast.

My standard metric for a good weekend is "does last week feel like a long time ago", and with all these things it definitely does! I'm glad that I could do the exercise I did, and that I rested as soon as my tummy started hurting so it didn't get any worse. And it was great to get so much sunshine.

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Solar Feelings

2026-04-15T23:53:29Z

I'm in the process of sorting out solar panels and domestic battery for my house. This is a very popular thing in the UK currently due to Trump fucking around in Iran, which means that gas, petrol and other prices have skyrocketed.

The logistics are reasonably simple - I've approached three major providers (Wickes, EDF Energy, Octopus Energy) for quotes, plus a local installer who hasn't gotten back to me. I have quotes ranging between £8-12k, all for slightly different setups, with different capacities and brands of panel / inverter / battery (I'm obviously not touching Tesla). I need to figure out what I want and put the order in. I also have two other local installers I've been recommended, who I may approach for further quotes.

There have been rumours about the Government issuing interest-free loans for this work, which would be lovely, but if it's going to go ahead it won't be until after the local elections in a month due to purdah. And the install will require a G99 certificate, which can take up to 3 months to be issued due to the sudden high demand which isn't going to slow down. Between those, we'll miss a lot of the summer, so I'm tempted to just go ahead. And I'm immensely fortunate that between the household, we can afford that.

( Feelings, whining from a position of privilege )

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Eid

2026-03-20T17:11:44Z

We live on a street where about a quarter of the houses have Muslim families. This morning I watched our neighbours opposite, who moved in fairly recently and we don't know well, pose for photos outside their house all dressed up in smart clothes. Later on our next door neighbour, who we know well enough to have sent an Eid card, was outside with his toddler and wife, chatting with another neighbour, who is white and not religious AFAIK.

The weather is nice enough that I had the windows open - not enough to overhear any conversations but enough to know that there is chatter and happiness around me. It's nice.

ETA: Our next door neighbour just brought round some food and and a really cute little teapot for us!

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The Friday Five: Dreamwidth / LiveJournal

2026-03-19T22:24:00Z

The Friday Five for 20 March 2026

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?

In 2000, a lot of the UK Goth scene ended up on LiveJournal. I tried my hand at blogging by hand-writing HTML on a shell account on a nerd friend's Solaris box in the States, but quickly realised that the comments and community were an important part. Partly I moved so I could post sickeningly cute comments on my then-gf's LJ. That... didn't end well. But I started my LJ in 2001.

I was a fairly late mover to Dreamwidth after LiveJournal started its long slide downwards; I didn't hit the migrate button until 2017, and I didn't delete my LJ account until 2018 when a then-coworker linked to it on work IRC. There were a lot of very cringe public entries from decades before I didn't particularly want to be associated with.

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?

Other than thefridayfive, not many! DW never seemed to get the right critical mass for communities. I welcome suggestions!

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?

See above!

4. How did you pick your user name?

About the time I needed an LJ username, I was listening to a lot of The Velvet Underground, and the line "Different colours, made of tears" from Venus In Furs was stuck in my head. Unfortunately, that was one character too long for LJ usernames, so I had to elide a vowel. I'd never heard of the TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" before.

5. If you could change your user name, would you?

I don't think so. I have many usernames in many places, but I like this one here!

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I Ate'nt Dead

2026-03-08T23:59:58Z

Today has been a bit of a weird day. Me and cosmolinguist got up at 6am, were out of the house for 6:45am and at the hospital by 7am. The Elective Surgery Unit wasn't "properly" open, so we got let into the reception area and just wandered around until we found some people who told us where to go sit down. By 8am I was on the ward, I'd been briefed on what was happening, and E knew when to come back and collect me. He went and caught the bus home and had a nap, having done the most important job of getting me to the hospital on time. I was visited by the anaesthetist and the surgeon, both of whom were confident in the procedure.

The apprehension of mortality which had ruined my Friday Yoga had pretty much dissolved by this point and I was determined to just get through it. I was second in the queue of six patients, so I got changed straight away into incredibly snug paper pants, and two surgical gowns - one worn with the flap at the back like usual, and a second opening at the front like a dressing gown over the top to protect my modesty as I walked to the operating theatre, literally at the end of the ward. With 6 patients in a ward designed for 24, CO2 levels were low so I didn't have to mask. I dozed for about an hour and a half, using my rucksack and hoodie as a makeshift pillow. By this point, around 9:30am, I was feeling OK, just exhausted. I think I was too tired to be worried.

I had to sit around outside the theatre for a bit, and get fitted with a cannula by an anaesthetist who was rather brusque. Fortunately such things bother me less than others, and he might have been kinder if I'd made more of a fuss beforehand. The nurse weighed me and said I don't look as heavy as I am, and I bit my tongue rather than go on a rant about the BMI bullshit which has denied me this surgery for years. I got asked what I did so I started talking about apprenticeships and how they're useful for people for whom academic paths don't work out - and how many people with dyslexia or other support needs we find once they've been pushed out of traditional schools, because testing for functional skills is mandatory in an apprenticeship. Turns out I'm still pretty passionate about that, even though it's far removed from what my job actually entails.

I went into the theatre, got settled on the table, started breathing in gas while they injected the general anaesthetic... and woke up in recovery, at about 11:30. ( Vague medical details below )

One of the ward nurses brought me tea and toast which was gratefully received and scoffed. I dozed for a bit, but the guy in the bed next to me, who'd had his inguinal hernia surgery (a complication from a hip replacement) before me, was waiting for his wife and bored and chatty. So I talked with him quite a lot, he's in his late 70s / early 80s, retired from doing computer stuff back in the 1970s. We talked about the changing face of technology over the decades, such as how a modern $1 embedded system can emulate an original Mac Classic. He had military tech experience so I talked about some of my programming jobs in the 90s on classified projects, and also about ISO26262 and MISRA, both standards in functional safety which came about from real-world errors such as the fighter plane which flips upside down if it crosses the equator on autopilot. We talked about dogs and horses (he keeps some where he lives in Altrincham). Lovely conversation but utterly knackering when I was a couple of hours behind him on the recovery from anaesthetic.

Just after his wife arrived to collect him, E arrived to collect me. He helped me get changed out of my tiny paper pants and gown, into the clothes I'd arrived in. By that time I'd had my last set of obs and the water had worked its way through my system so I had a successful wee. So the nurse brought over discharge paperwork, went through some of the details with me: no shower or bath today, no baths for a couple of weeks, no driving for at least 48 hours and until I can safely do an emergency stop without pain; no lifting more than 5-8kg for 4-6 weeks. Then we headed out and grabbed a taxi, getting home around 3:30pm, about 9 hours out of the house.

I've spent the afternoon chilling out on the sofa, drinking 2 litres of apple squash and just starting to feel rehydrated. I was too tired to play games or watch much of anything, until I had a little nap while E was out walking the neighbour's dog. E let me sit at his end of the sofa so I could stretch my legs out, and V lent me their weighted capybara plushy which was comforting. This evening we watched Team GB vs USA in the World Baseball Classic, which was an interesting game for the first 4 innings until the Americans woke up and walked all over the Brits. I'm still feeling tired and woozy - clearly too tired to write a concise DW entry, so well done if you've persevered this far. I'm glad the surgery is over; I hope the recovery is mild because I've got a lot of work to get done by the end of next week! I'm not looking forward to going weeks without any gym though...

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Gyms, Garden Centre and Hospital

2026-03-07T23:06:16Z

( Talk of health and exercise, mention of death )

This afternoon, me, E & V went to the garden centre in Cheadle for lunch and shopping. I'm not great at gardening and I made a few suggestions which turned out to be unhelpful, which was a bit of a downer. Still, I found a nice white clematis to climb up the plastic skeleton in the garden, and ham, egg and chips for lunch helped perk me up a bit. We ended up getting a buttload of plants to populate the garden - a mixture of flowers, herbs and ferns. And V & E swung by B&M on the way home to get some dirt and decorations to go with it, while I waited in the car.

After getting home, me and E took Teddy for a nice long walk, then I ordered fancy burgers for dinner - if I'm going nil-by-mouth I might as well have a big meal beforehand. Now it's time to pack, and get ready for a very early start - I'm due in hospital at 7:15am!

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Slow Day

2026-03-01T01:19:27Z

Today I missed going to the gym because I had a morning hospital appointment. Next Sunday, I'm having surgery on my umbilical hernia, so today I was having bloods taken, being swabbed for MRSA, and having a pre-operative interview to discuss the procedure. This has taken literal years since I was diagnosed with the hernia in 2022 and dismissed for being fat in 2023 so I'm happy it's finally going ahead.

Other than that we didn't have many plans for the day. I finished playing through Control again, in time for the sequel to come out soon. Then I went upstairs and spent a couple of hours blitzing ADHD paperwork. I got so caught up in this that I forgot to come down for dinner and was exhausted by the time I did. We tuned into a Nunkie MR James stream, but I promptly fell asleep!

After that I made myself a snack and watched this week's Starfleet Academy, which was lovely. It has made me simultaneously curious about and terrified of reading / seeing Our Town.

Also, I noticed that iPlayer has the Derek Jacobi teleplay of Breaking the Code, the biographical play about Alan Turing. It's a much better portrayal of Turing (at least according to the biographies I've read) than the terrible "The Imitation Game". Me and cosmolinguist saw it on stage last October, which was a competent enough production.

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Gorton and Denton By-Election

2026-02-21T20:47:13Z

For the last couple of weeks I've been telling every canvasser that's come to my door the same thing - that I'd like to vote Green, but I'm going to vote to keep Reform out, and that there wasn't any clear evidence of the best way to do that. Labour have been relying on an opinion poll of 150 people taken weeks ago before the close of nominations, which shows them in second place to Reform. The Greens have been relying on betting shop odds (very easy to manipulate) and internal polling (very unreliable). Both have been telling me that their "internal data" points to them being the best option.

Yesterday, a new poll from Omnisis was published. The sample size is still small (450) but much larger than we've seen before, and the polling was carried out after the candidates were finalised and after the campaign started. I am pleased to say that it puts Greens in front of Reform in the constituency, within margin of error. Labour are trailing Reform, also within margin of error, but the Green-Labour lead is outside that margin. It also says that the Green supporters are more likely to actually turn out and vote than Labour ones, which suggests that the Green lead will be bigger on Thursday than this poll suggests.

I can nitpick some things about the poll such as the sample size, but this is the best indicator I'm likely to get before going to the polls on Thursday. And I'm glad that I have some reasonably solid evidence that convinces my head that I can vote with my heart, rather than just looking for something that reinforces what I want to be true. I know from previous experience that the Labour vote in Gorton is soft as anything, and it's nice to have evidence that the Green squeeze is actually working.

There are some interesting nuggets in the data which show how people either don't understand questions or give nonsense answers, like the Labour supporter who would vote Reform if they "knew" this was a Labour-Reform battle. There are a small minority of both Green and Labour supporters who would vote Reform to stop the other from winning. The Reform vote is largely unsqueezable - even if they think Reform can't win, most supporters would either vote for them, or not vote at all, than vote for either Greens or Labour. More would break Green though, which suggests the "vote to get Kier Starmer out" message is working.

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Parting Company

2026-02-16T23:04:11Z

I've just applied to Companies House to have my Limited Company, of which I am sole director, struck off and dissolved. I founded it years ago as a potential holding organisation for providing IT services to political organisations. But it never really worked out like that - I spent many years providing those services such as mailing lists, chatrooms, wikis, CRM systems, but never got on the "approved suppliers" list. Then 2019 happened and... yeah, I stopped doing that. Part of people fucking me over in politics was making false allegations about me violating data protection laws, and that shit could have damaged my real job, so it was another reason to back away.

I'm feeling bittersweet about it all, but I still have my head held high. I did a better job than many of the people who actually got paid for doing this sort of thing. In retrospect I'm glad I never did manage to get anywhere with it; losing my social life and activism was bad enough, but at least I didn't lose my livelihood at the same time. Still, it's an interesting trouser-leg of time to contemplate.

I guess this is why I do things like read my employer's social impact reports. It's nice to know that the work I'm doing is helping other people make a difference in the world, even if it doesn't feel like I'm doing it myself.

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Vaguely Romantic

2026-02-16T00:26:32Z

It's been a busy weekend, full of chores and errands, but for a while on Saturday night I was spending time with all three of my partners, chatting and sharing food. It wasn't an intentional Valentine's Day thing, but it was sweet nonetheless. And it's always good to be reminded of what awesome people I share love with.

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Losing Community?

2026-02-13T00:05:48Z

I haven't posted on Facebook for about a year, since they announced that they were no longer even pretending to moderate queerphobia. But I've checked in there about once a week to catch up on close friends, and it's been a useful source of events. Since they've now insisted that users pay or get even more stalked / used to feed the LLM / GenAI machine, I've decided to just download my data (including photos etc.) and delete my account. I'm aware that I'm cutting myself off from some people this way, but most of them I've got other ways to talk to - mostly via Signal or WhatsApp.

This is happening about the same time as Discord are announcing various changes. I'm already using a SOCKS proxy based in Germany to circumvent their age restriction requirements, but that may stop being effective soon, or they may again be feeding everything into the GenAI behemoth. There's a good chance I'm going to have to disengage with Discord in the next few weeks.

I'm worried that this is going to cut me off from some other communities. The Manchester-based Discord has been a bit dead since a big argument a few months ago caused a schism, and neither it nor its supposed replacement managed critical mass. So that's not much of a concern. And I quit the UTAW Discord when I resigned.

But the Doof uses Discord for its Thursday evening stream chat, and I'll really miss that. I've been suggesting to communities that they move to Zulip, who provide a free tier much like Discord, but which is also Free Software, self hostable, and supports migrating between installs. I even set one up for the Doof. But nobody's even interested in trying it out so far. Discord is also a place where some queer and Covid-cautious activism happens and I'll be sad to miss that too.

Still, concentrating on the positives, I have friends from real-life things like Queer Club and the gym, who I talk to over Signal or WhatsApp, and I've just prompted a meetup of local gym buds for brunch in a few weeks. I'm playing a D&D campaign with P and friends every couple of weeks. I chat with people on the Fediverse. Even if I do lose out on communities currently based on Discord, I'm not going to be totally cut off.

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2026-02-10T01:32:02Z

I have just finished re-watching the 1979 "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" series with Alec Guinness. Such a wonderful piece of television, so beautifully filmed and constructed around a brilliant story. The acting is so wonderfully subtle.

Next up, "Smiley's People" from 1982 - I've not seen that before, so it'll be a complete surprise.

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CareADHD Referral

2026-02-05T16:04:31Z

(backstory: I asked the GP about an ADHD diagnosis in Spring 2023, got given some forms to fill in, sat on them for about a year, filled them in in March 2024, returned them in April, got rejected by the Adult ADHD service for not talking about my childhood symptoms enough; got given a different survey to fill out, returned that in April 2025, got accepted by the Adult ADHD service in September 2025 and put on a 7+ year waiting list)

Last October, cosmolinguist looked into getting a private ADHD diagnosis and compiled some notes for me. In January I managed to force myself to look through them and do some other research. I asked my GP to refer me to CareADHD for an assessment under NHS Right to Choose. The assessment will cost me about £400, which is a lot cheaper than some of the other providers. About a week ago I heard back from the GP saying that they'd done that. I haven't yet heard from CareADHD and obviously now it's not my turn to do something I'm really impatient about it! But I'll give it a little while longer before getting in touch to establish a timeline - it'll probably be another couple of months before I get the diagnosis appointment.

I'm having a lot of feelings about this. I know that getting ADHD meds has been a literal life saver for friends, and I'm hoping it'll help me with my current situation, where lack of concentration is making me suck at my day job and many other things in life. I'm hoping it'll help complement the therapy work I'm doing, where we've been talking about emotional dysregulation and my anhedonia - if I can't enjoy things, I'm significantly less motivated to do them and seek shiny dopamine diversions.

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. This won't be a magic bullet that'll solve everything overnight. It might not even help much at all, or it might be a painstaking process of adjusting medications and dosages (and dealing with ongoing meds shortages in the UK, particularly post-Brexit). In the short term it may even make things worse. But the possibility of breaking the decades-long cycle of overcommitment and burnout is so tantalising...

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One of Those Guys

2026-02-05T15:40:24Z

Last night, after a very pleasurable theatre trip with cosmolinguist, I ended up messing around a bit with the smart plugs I bought ages ago.

I have actually been using these plugs somewhat. They're on the house WiFi and that lets me remote-control them through a browser and set timers for them. They also have a mechanical button if you want to interact with them in a more traditional manner - that's basically a hard requirement for any home automation stuff I do, after the time I visited a friend and had to poop in the darkness because the bathroom lights couldn't be switched on until he reinstalled a Raspberry Pi.

But having resurrected Home Assistant on my fileserver I figured it was time to actually get these things talking to each other. I still find HA overly complicated, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is between an "app" and an "integration". I hit a few dead ends following this guide but eventually got to the point where I could use the Home Assistant web UI to control the plugs rather than the built-in web UI.

That doesn't sound like much of an improvement but it's actually quite exciting, because now anything I can do with Home Assistant, I can do with the plugs. I installed up simple speech-to-text and text-to-speech integrations in HA, and now I can talk to the HA app on my phone, tell it to turn the plugs on or off, and it does so! And tells me it's done it in a northern voice called Alan!

It's another small step on the HA journey and I'm still not thinking about temperature monitoring around the house, but it gave me a nice little dopamine hit.

(by this time it was 2am and E prodded me to come to bed, so I excitedly demonstrated this to him and then went to sleep)

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OggCamp

2026-01-19T22:45:35Z

OggCamp is a long-standing Manchester-based geek "unconference". This basically means that you don't know who's going to talk about what until the start of the day, which is why I've never bothered going before. However, given my dead ends trying to get geek spaces to be serious about Covid safety at FOSDEM and EMF, I wondered if it would be worth a go trying to get OggCamp on board with basic ventilation. I have sent them the following email:

I'm interested in attending OggCamp and also volunteering to help. I'd like to help make OggCamp a safer place with the ongoing pandemic. Geeks are knowledge workers and the impact of Long Covid on memory and "brain fog" are truly horrifying.

I am pleased that the website mentions the pandemic at https://www.oggcamp.org/code-of-conduct/#health--safety but the advice there seems a little out of date - particularly around "rules and guidelines" which haven't been imposed since the UK government decided to "let it rip" through the population.

I'd like to volunteer to help with the listed Covid mitigations - handing out FFP2 masks and lateral flow tests. I'd also like to try and work with the venue in the run-up around the ventilation point. Ideally I'd like to see if Pendulum can achieve 5 or 6 "air changes per hour" (ACPH) in each room through their existing ventilation system, which is the standard recommended by WHO and CDC. If not, I'd like to look at air filtration mechanisms such as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes which could make up the difference. I'm happy to work with other volunteers on this, and to try and bring in other volunteers from organisations like Breathe Easy to help with this and other aspects of OggCamp.

Can I suggest that OggCamp considers offering refunds to people who can't attend due to Covid or other contagious illness? I expect most people wouldn't claim the refund, but it might make the difference to a contagious person staying home.

It might not get anywhere but it's worth continuing trying to chip away improving at pandemic safety in geek spaces. One victory would be a huge difference from the indifference or hostility I've encountered so far.

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Hello!

2026-01-15T12:03:55Z

I just gave my therapist a link to my Dreamwidth. Only the public entries, but we thought it'd be useful for her to see how I express myself in writing. Obviously I'm a bit nervous about this!

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De-Bris

2026-01-11T21:52:01Z

As per my previous post, the audit went OK and we re-scoped down to two days onsite. There may be a few followup questions on Monday but we're basically done with it. I managed to make it to the office for 8:45 ahead of a 9am start!

The main complication was Storm Goretti, which hit the West Midlands and South-West on Thursday and Friday. I walked back from the office in a torrential downpour after work on Thursday, having been loaned a golf umbrella. The rain racing down the hilly streets and pavements soaked my feet, but it was still preferable to getting a taxi in the stationary central Bristol traffic.

I did think about trying to meet up with any of my Bristol friends but I was exhausted even after a shorter day at work, not least due to the early start. It was also distinctly not sitting outside weather. I crashed out for a couple of hours and decided to eat at the hotel rather than venture further afield. I did manage a brief mooch until my digestive system wanted to have a go at me for the disruption.

We finished early on Friday as well, and my boss and I shared a taxi to Bristol Temple Meads. All the direct services to Manchester were cancelled (as were many others across the country) but I managed to get home via changes in Birmingham and Stafford. I got a seat on each leg of the journey, and at least the stops meant I got brief breaks from masking. The one disruption that significantly impacted me was a vehicle driving into a bridge in Levenshulme, which stopped all trains between Stockport and Manchester Piccadilly - so I jumped out at Stockport and got a taxi home from there. I was very glad to be home, and earlier than planned!

We've so far had one problem identified by the audit - we should have done a risk assessment on our Bristol office, because laptops are stored there overnight. I'd been told that it was only used for meeting space and nothing was stored there, so it's a fair cop. I'll get that sorted tomorrow.

I'm feeling pretty good about the audit - our ISMS is lacking in a lot of ways, not least some overdue document reviews, and I'm glad we didn't get wrapped over the knuckles about that. My boss is happy with me, which is always nice.

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Brizzle

2026-01-08T00:32:30Z

I'm in Bristol for work for a couple of days. The work is annoying - it's a poorly-scoped ISO27001 audit, pencilled in for five days but I reckon we can do it in two, so I'm hoping I don't have to go back next week.

I spent the train down being That Wanker with my laptop out, updating another couple of documents ahead of the audit. Turns out with no Internet or other distractions I can actually get a few hours of useful work done... I cut about half of our Disaster Recovery Plan out, reducing verbiage to make it more streamlined and effective.

I was clever enough to get an earlier train into Manchester for my connection; the train I was recommended only gave me ten minutes to change at Piccadilly, and ended up running at least 7 minutes late. I managed to end up with a table seat, which was nice, but several hours wearing a mask is always going to suck. The CO2 meter was giving levels up to 2000ppm, so it was definitely worth doing (for reference: 400ppm is "fresh air"; 800ppm is where the CO2 helps the virus to breed. I try to stay under 800ppm without a mask).

Got into Temple Meads, bought a milkshake for a homeless guy, and hopped in a black cab to my hotel. It's a Premier Inn, rather perfunctory, but it'll do the job. I had dinner and went for a walk, which reminded me how hilly Bristol is!

I also enjoyed hearing some proper Bristol accents, and had to stop myself mimicking them. I'm close enough to where I grew up that my accent's veering to the rural anyway!

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The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks

2026-01-07T00:44:44Z

I just got back from The Moonwalkers. I didn't know quite what to expect but had a great time. "The Lightbox" is a large dark space which allows a film to be projected onto all 4 walls and the floor. The film was about 45 minutes long, narrated by Tom Hanks.

Factually, I didn't learn that much from it, but again that wasn't the point. It was nice that every Apollo mission that reached the moon was mentioned. Usually people concentrate on 11 (the first landing), 13 (which didn't make it) and maybe 17 (the last one). But this film showed that every mission advanced our knowledge and understanding of the moon with experiments and new equipment, including the Lunar Roving Vehicle used by 15-17 which extended the range at which astronauts could operate away from the lander. cosmolinguist told me afterwards that the Sea of Tranquility was picked for 11 because it was the most boring place they could find to land, and even that was strewn with boulders which Armstrong had to avoid while landing manually.

The sensory experience was interesting - the images were bigger than IMAX but not too bright, and the pitch black of the room meant there was good contrast between the inky black of space and the grey lunar regolith. Annoyingly, where we were sat (in the "reserved seats" for disabled people), we had a projector shining straight into our eyes, and also had to crane our necks to see some of the video on the wall alongside us. We were among the last to enter and didn't get a lot of time to orient ourselves and find seats; the large bank of seating in one corner was a clue to the "correct" place to sit but it was full by the time we got there, largely of wet coats. Still, that was a minor inconvenience. The sound levels were enough to be impressive but not overwhelming. I didn't notice them doing anything particularly clever with the "surround sound" but again maybe we were sat in the wrong place for that.

The overall impression was one of spectacle. The obvious sensory overload was projecting onto four walls (and the floor!) at once. Everywhere you looked there was something to see, usually in the form of collage. Kennedy's speech at Rice University, for example, is shown on the "main" wall while the sides show various footage of the crowd watching the speech. Experiments on the moon are shown through footage, while all the experimental apparatus for each Apollo mission is displayed on the sides. One of the great shots in the film is Armstrong taking the first step on the Moon, shown as a collage of the recorded TV broadcasts from around the world, with captions in different languages stating that the viewers were watching footage direct from the Moon. Obviously you can't take it all in at once, and that's kind of the point - this is a big overwhelming thing.

This is entirely fitting. The Apollo missions were a huge spectacle, and still represent one of the pinnacles of mankind's engineering capabilities. And the narrative recognises this - Hanks talks about how he watched the Apollo missions to the moon as a kid, and couldn't understand why some of his family got bored after a few hours. It features on-mission recordings from the Apollo astronauts, and interviews the astronauts from the upcoming Artemis mission which will see humans reach lunar orbit again this year, for the first time since 1972. During some of amazing wide shots, and soaring music, I felt tears in my eyes. It was a joy to experience.

For 45 minutes I forgot about the world's problems and revisited one of our greatest achievements. Totally worth it.

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Double Lockout

2026-01-06T02:29:50Z

Recently I was playing around with the boot systems on my two main computers - laptop and desktop - to enable Secure Boot. This is a quite old tech by now, and helps protect against "evil maid" attacks where somebody has temporary access to your hardware and uses it to install some kind of persistent backdoor. I don't think this is a huge threat to me in real life but it's fairly standard behaviour now so I figured I'd familiarise myself with it.

In the process I managed to get myself locked out of both. This was mildly concerning, because usually I'd use one system to help me repair the other. Fortunately I managed to "repair" the desktop by simply disabling Secure Boot.

The laptop was a bit more complicated. ( Nerdy details )

For all that parts of this experience were frustrating, and the stakes were moderately high since going without my laptop would be a huge pain, I quite enjoyed this little pair of experiments. I learned new things, refreshed my memory of a few others, and found a weak spot in my nerding abilities. A larger, and more importantly faster, USB stick will be replacing its venerable predecessor on my keyring - and I'll keep the old one around for smaller file transfers too, so I don't have to keep reformatting.

Next steps are to figure out why Secure Boot doesn't work on the desktop, and to try and replace Grub with systemd-bootd on the laptop. But that can wait for a while before I'm in another geeky mood...

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Merryneum Stasis

2026-01-01T20:33:29Z

Urgh, the lack of routine in the Merryneum is knackering my sleep patterns. I didn't get out of bed until nearly 4pm today. I woke up at 10am with my alarm, then fell asleep until my 11:30am Pokemon Sleep alarm, then I stayed up for a bit but dozed off again. Then I got caught up doing Squaredle. I meant to do a couple of hours of day job work today to get ahead of next week's audit but I didn't get round to it.

At least I have the New Year Doof TV show this evening. It's nice to catch up with the Doof regulars and watch lots of cool and silly videos.

Will try again tomorrow...

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There Is No Power In A Union

2025-12-31T14:05:05Z

About 9 months ago I joined UTAW, the tech worker's union (technically a branch of the CWU rather than a union in its own right). Recently I left it.

I joined because I was hoping to find a group of like-minded people in the tech industry, to take action on AI/LLM technology, and on the pandemic and Return To Office mandates. I didn't see anything like that on UTAW's website but I was told it'd be like "pushing at an open door". So I signed up, and joined the official Discord.

( Details )

Rather than pushing at an open door, I felt like I was in a maze full of open doors, leading nowhere but twisty circles. Nobody ever told me I couldn't do anything, but nobody explained what I could do instead. it was opaque to those not in the inner circle or not familiar with trade unions. I briefly considered standing for election as comms officer to try and fix some of these problems but I felt the union as a whole was institutionally hostile to improving, and my minimal level of engagement was already sucking a lot of my energy.

Resigning was also a farce; the CWU website wouldn't let me log in or reset a password using the email address via which they sent me communications. So I just cancelled the Direct Debit for my membership payment, and they were right on top of that - a few days later I got a letter confirming my membership had been cancelled.

I do think it'd be good to have some kind of organisation working in the interests of the tech sector and tech workers. But UTAW isn't it - it's something co-opting tech workers to serving the interests of the trade union movement. At least I only wasted a relatively small amount of time and money finding this out.

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