OneAndOneIs2

Realistically, even people who say they have no routine have at least a skeleton of one. Even if it's just "work daytime, sleep nighttime" that's still a routine. That was pretty much what I had for a lot of years.

We wound up with a more rigid and all-encompassing type of routine mostly, I think, because of my semi-autistic and overly-spoiled cat. A shy, timid rescue kitten, we noticed fairly early on that she had some very fixed ideas about How Things Should Be. An example being the pecan nut the cats had adopted as their personal toy one winter. They batted it around the living room and chased it, clearly enjoying the unpredictability of its direction and the impossibility of actually catching it.

Until, that is, the day when we left the door open and the nut went spinning out of the room and into the hallway. Whereupon my cat miraculously gained the ability to pick the thing up and carry it back into the living room, spit it out, give the other cat a dirty "You have to play with it In Here!" look, and go back to her own business.

That was one example. There were many others. And she was far happier with our doings and comings & goings when they happened on some sort of predictable basis. If I went out unexpectedly, she'd cry (seriously) and if I didn't come back when she expected, she'd complain at me. And so on. Gradually, we drifted into a more and more fixed routine, joking about having to keep the cat happy all the while.

But having a clear routine actually worked really well for us, for all sorts of reasons. It's really useful to have that kind of framework in place. It means that if you want to make a change, you just work out how to fit it into the routine and then just.. do it. e.g. I never managed to make "going to the gym" stick in the past.. but when it was a scheduled part of the day, every day, I just got up and got on with it. It was part of the routine.

Even simple things like working out what to eat - too often I'd shrug and not care and end up having cereal, or ordering takeout. When there was a sensible set of "defaults" that became drastically less likely. It's far easier to stick to an eating plan than it is to keep planning on on the fly the whole time.

And then.. the baby arrived.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to babies and a clear daily routine, and one is "hahahahahahahaha forget it"

It's easy to see why. Babies, especially newborns, do *not* grok the concept of time. Their eating schedule is "When I'm hungry", their sleep schedule is "When I'm tired", etc. etc.

But despite the odds being stacked against us, we did our best with establishing and keeping to a routine. You *can* build flexibility into a routine, you just stick to a standard as best you can whilst working around the changeable parts. And it did work, eventually. Yes, the timings and events changed as sleep cycles and eating habits shifted. But that's fine - routines aren't an "establish once, keep forever" thing. Routine can change, the important thing is to have one.

And as time passed, and we got better at understanding baby and she got better at picking up cues and a sense of time, the routine once again firmed up and settled back into a consistent rhythm. And these days, it's so easy to follow the well-established routine that it gets rather boring sometimes. And it can chafe a bit: Why am I always doing this same thing at this same time, every damn day?

And then, for whatever reason, you go Off Routine. And you remember, yet again, EXACTLY why you're always doing the same things at the same time.

When you're faced with a baby screaming because she's too tired to eat and too hungry to sleep and you *know* there's nothing you can do to fix both problems at the same time.

When you just can't seem to line up "time for a meal" with "times that she's hungry" so she ignores food when she needs to eat and you just *know* she'll wake you at 2am because she's suddenly hungry again.

When you're piling up dirty dish upon dirty dish because the dishwasher is still full of clean stuff you didn't have time to unload and you can't leave her alone to do it now and the work is just piling up and getting in your way and it's a never-ending vicious cycle...

When you drag her off to the other side of the country for a week and she's in a strange place surrounded by strange things, but she's utterly unfazed because you managed to keep routine the same. But then you come home and don't take her for a walk before her nap because you had to go to the dentist that morning, and instead of drifting to sleep in minutes you have an hour-long battle to get her to finally go down.

You get the idea.

In a normal day, meals happen when she's hungry. She's put to bed when she's tired. She doesn't complain about being bored indoors because she knows she'll be going out soon. The chores that need to happen, happen. Everyone has time for showers and meals, there's always a clean bib/plate/bowl/muslin/change of clothes/etc.

It can be so easy to just follow the routine you almost forget it's there at all. And then you step off it, and realize once again: Here there be dragons.

Having a routine is great. You know where you should be, where other people should be, what you should all be doing, what you should be eating, what you need to buy next time you do the shops... it makes life so much simpler. You can, of course, go Off Routine if you feel the need or want - skip that routine meal and order a pizza, it's fine. But having that structure to give you a useful, sensible default can be unbelievable helpful.

10/10 would recommend. Even if you *haven't* got a baby or a ridiculous cat.

Like most social media platforms, Twitter's interface has followed the arc of "Start out good, then become increasingly crap as you focus more on money than happy end users"

We all deal with it in different ways. Work out where the setting is to turn it back to the old order, use an adblock, use a third-party client, etc. etc.

I used to just use an app on my tablet. But these days I'm mostly on a desktop and my tablet gets used for an hour or so in a day. And Twitter has an annoying habit of deprecating features needed for third-party apps to work - because if people aren't using their app or their web interface, then Twitter isn't getting so many useful (to Twitter) clicks. So I needed to find something different.

And the option I settled on, remarkable enough, was one offered by.. Twitter?

See, the thing is, Twitter does annoying things (like putting tweets in a weird order; and showing you other people's tweets to other people; and showing you tweets from people you don't follow but might want to; and...) because they care more about your ability to generate them money than they do about you liking their interface. Customer satisfaction rules don't apply, because you're not the customer - you're the product.

But Twitter also relies heavily on professional social media people being able to do useful stuff - and these people *are* customers, or at least revenue-generators, so their opinions *do* matter. So there's a Twitter interface for them that *doesn't* keep fucking around: It's a lean, mean, configurable way of accessing tweets for people who mean business when they log in.

It's called Tweetdeck. And it's how I access Twitter.

It's not perfect. It's not got all the features I'd like. But it lets me:

• View tweets from people I follow in chronological order (column one)
• View activity (tweets liked, people followed, etc. by people I follow) completely separately from actual tweets, instead of cluttering up my timeline (column two)
• View notifications (People who liked/retweeted my tweets etc.) without having to go to a separate page/click on a menu (column three)
• View my own twitter timeline - the stuff I've tweeted or retweeted - all on the same page (column four)

There's a bunch of other options, too - You can have columns for specific accounts; hashtags; trends; etc - but those are the columns I need for day-to-day tweeting. And because this is Twitter's own UI, it Just Works and is likely to do so for quite some time yet.

If you're sick of your twitter feed being more noise than signal and want a reliable way of dumping all the cruft that Twitter wants to force onto your screen, I recommend giving Tweetdeck a try.

Much as we love the house we currently live in, the hope is to move in the not-too-distant future to somewhere with rather more land & open space. Being able to grow stuff & keep animals is something we both want to do.

Until then, we just have to make do with thinking about it, and reading about it. Which was how I came across one (of many) random bits of information: Adding charcoal to soil enriches it permanently and substantially.

Such was the claim, at least. In support was logic about how it would improve drainage, improve nutrient retention, and various other things; a lot of people tesifying that it made a big difference for them; and also evidence in photos of soil samples from ancient civilizations such as the Mayans, with the soil visibly blacker than the surrounding forest soil, which was argued to be (a) due to the carbon content and (b) what enabled them to grow enough food in such poor soil.

It's an interesting topic, if you've any interest I'd definitely recommend reading around.

But unlike a lot of the things I come across, this one was actually testable now. So I figured I'd give it a try. Nothing too elaborate or time-consuming, just a quick & easy comparison.

So the side of our house is basically bare earth. Can't really call it "soil" it's mostly clay and builder's rubble from when they built the place. So I took my basic material from that. Divided it into four so I could test two factors: Addition of compost & addition of charcoal.

We have a compost bin, so I raided that. Charcoal was just taken from a bag of the stuff meant for BBQing, and smashed up small. Then I mixed it up so I had:

1. Unmodified earth
2. Earth with compost
3. Earth with charcoal
4. Earth with compots and charcoal

And then I just left them alone in the garden. Yes, I know, the sample size is small etc. but this wasn't destined for peer-review :P

This was towards the end of last year. I kinda forgot about it until the spring weather recently arrived and we started to go out into the garden again. But I came across the little collection of pots, and it was quite noticeable how different they were:

You can see hardly anything grew in the leftmost pot - that's unmodified. There's more in the second - that had compost mixed in. But the third and fourth are far and away the most successful. There's not a huge difference between them, but I think the compost did do a little - the plants on the rightmost, which got both, are a bit closer to escaping the confines of the pot.

So it's certainly something I'll be wanting to investigate further in future. Charcoal is hardly expensive and if you can get this kind of difference with it then it seems well worth doing.

So if any of my readers are into gardening or other growing-related pastimes, hopefully this is something you'll find interesting too :)

I hated commuting to London. It meant hours spent on rush-hour trains that were always standing room only for at least part of the journey.

On the plus side, I almost always got a seat - living so damn far from the city meant the train was empty when i got on it in the morning, and I mostly managed to be one of the first on the train home in the evening.

Still, hours stuck on a train. Not fun. But it had one bonus: I finally got to make a significant dent in my reading list. I learned (at least basic) Haskell, Scheme, and Lisp. I worked out what a monad is. And a metaobject protocol. And so on.

It was with no regret at all that I stopped spending a chunk of my income on the privilege of sitting on a small chair in a crowded box, and became a telecommuter. But I did, and do, miss the amount of time I had where there was nothing to do but read. It got even harder to find the time when the baby arrived. I think there might be a link!

For a while I just gave up on reading, which sucked a bit. But then I started to feel the need to get at least some learning done - I had a course on AWS I wanted to do, some books I really wanted to read, etc.

Looking at a list of videos that will take twenty hours to watch, or a book with a thousand pages, it's really easy to get so discouraged at the impossibility of finding the time that you just give up before you start. "It took me a month to find the time to move a box into the attic, how can I watch 20 hours of videos??"

And the secret is: By doing it slowly.

The modern world is so busy telling us about how we can do stuff faster, more efficiently, etc. that you can sometimes lose sight of the fact that you don't *have* to get instant results. If you have 20 hours of videos to watch, you don't have to be able to watch them all in a day. Or a week. Or even a month. Slow progress is better than no progress.

The course in question is broken down into over 100 videos. Most of them are only 10-20 minutes long. Finding 20 minutes is a lot easier than finding hours. So my goal is merely to watch one video a day. Yes, it's slow going. Yes, it'll take me months. But so what? In six months time, I can either look back and think "I wish I'd found time to watch those videos" or "I'm glad I watched all those videos, even if it did take months of 'one a day' to do it."

The time will pass anyway. May as well make use of it.

So I watch a video a day. I read at least one page of my book every day. Sometimes I watch several videos, or read many pages. But even if I only manage one, it's still progress. There is an end goal that I'm getting closer to. (At least for this book - the actual list of books I want to read? Grows faster than I'll ever be able to keep up with. Ho-hum.)

If there's something you want to do but can't spend much time on, don't let that put you off - figure out what time you *can* reliably spend on it, and then spend at least that much, consistently.

Even if you make progress so slowly it's hard to believe you're even moving, you're still going infinitely faster than you would if you weren't moving at all.

Well, it's been.. a while! But I started to get the urge to write stuff again, so.. let's see if I can remember how to work this thing!

A quick update on where life has taken me over the last few years:

Workwise, I migrated from a frontend developer into DevOps. Getting away from the neverending Javascript frameworks might have been a part of the motivation for this :) These days I mostly work with things like Puppet & Chef, Terraform, and AWS. I did dabble with GCP for a bit but I wasn't impressed by it. The same goes for containers - I definitely can see their use, but I still don't see them as something I want to run production on for the most part. If VMs are too heavy for your taste, serverless seems a far better approach than containers to me. YMMV.

Personally, I got married in 2016 - an event that we took very seriously indeed

I definitely recommend this as music to walk down the aisle to, by the way:

Last year a baby arrived!

And my goodness, isn't she a bundle of energy... we had some hard times in the first few months, but eventually we worked out that she's allergic to proteins found in cow milk and soya - apparently a relatively common problem for babies - and once those were excluded everything got a lot better. She's a happy little soul & growing like a weed these days.

I still technically work in London, but it's a remote role - I've spent one day in the office so far, and most of my co-workers are in other countries. So I get to spend a lot of time at home, which is really nice.

Rehab from the injuries of 2011 continues, mostly a lot of stretching and strengthening work in the gym. I can do a whole seven pull-ups in a set these days!

That's the over-view, you're now all caught up on the big stuff. And hopefully I'll start writing all the posts that have been annoying me by being stuck in my head recently. I kinda miss writing.

We'll see how it goes!