When I was a kid, my dad knew this guy called Ronan O'Connor. His mother was an Austrian woman called Maria, and my dad used to work on their vehicles. They lived in a huge house with loads of land, right on a flood plain. When it flooded Ronan had a kayak he would take from his front door to his front gate so that he could do things like leaving his home.

Once I was a precocious ~ten-year-old; if you can believe that. I forget the exact content of this conversation, but one day Ronan was trying to tell me something. He had a left-hand-drive VW Scirocco, and he'd obviously seen a lot of the world. I distinctly remember being blasé and obstructive. I already knew what he was trying to tell me, and so the conversation ended before it began.

Later, I asked my dad what Ronan had been trying to tell me. He didn't know. I was so busy trying to impress Ronan that I'd missed out on something cool he could've taught me.

I learned three things that day:

1. Always keep your ears and mind open
2. Your parents don't know everything
3. Get your damn COVID vaccination. I don't care about your half-baked research. This isn't about you.

Real Life

When I was a kid, dairy grossed me out. Don't know why but I have a real problem with food texture so maybe there.

Anyway now I have two favourite butters and I don't remember the last time I wasn't eating cheese.

Pralines and Cream is the epitome of ice cream flavours. If I could only ever have one flavour of ice cream forever it'd be this. 10/10

Here's a hot tip for you, if you're making a TV show: if you need to fill some product placement obligations, you should contrive to shoot a scene in a supermarket. All the cool kids are doing it!

Literally every time one of our clients says "what's the ETA?" I have to almost physically force myself not to say "it's the estimated time of arrival". Because apparently I am still 7 years old, or Lloyd Bridges.

Got my first COVID vaccine today. Didn't really want the AstraZeneca, but was only offered the Pfizer so lucked out I guess. Or someone somewhere else is making my decisions for me.

The whole thing was super slick. So many staff, making sure everyone's funnelled through to the right place in the right order. Was in and out easily in under 25 minutes, and that includes a 15 minute post-needle wait.

I made a new friend, and he's a really good blogger. He writes about things I wish I could write about like music and movies, but for some reason I feel like this blog has to be about me and the things I make, and that writing about those things doesn't fit here somehow. I wish it did because when something like that grabs me I feel so compelled to share it, and I don't really have any meaningful way of doing that.

It's given me an idea that will result in one of the following:

1. A failed social network
2. A new blog post category here
3. This short post and nothing else

Not difficult to see the smart bet here.

Me: don't upload loads of images to your CMS

Also me: [uploads 750MB of images to a single entry]

I am absolutely sick of my devices thinking they're smarter than I am. Every morning I get on my bike to use Zwift, turn on my iPad (for TV) and phone (for Zwift) and my phone is like "he wants to listen to Zwift" and pulls my Airpods from my iPad. I then have to quit one of the apps to force it to either give up or request access to my headphones. It is absolutely infuriating.

And my phone has just done it with my cabled headphones. I plugged them in, and my phone decided (even though I don't think I've ever done this) that I wanted to output audio to my TV. Not the headphones that are physically plugged into the device. So I went to change that and my headphones disappeared as an option. They're physically plugged in! I had to re-plug them to get them to show up. So not only is wireless an unpredictable and unstable mess, but we're forgetting how to do cables now?!