One of two things has happened: either I've sampled so much fine ice cream that McFlurrys (don't come at me with McFlurries; it is a proper noun) now taste and have the texture of warm garbage, or McFlurrys always tasted and had the texture of warm garbage. I guess those aren't mutually exclusive.

Still I think today marked the first day that an ice cream was so repulsive that I threw it in the bin. Never thought I'd see the day.

I'm on an organising kick right now. Today I organised our finances for the next few years because Tabitha's secondary school was stressing me out. Then I found a Johnny.Decimal tab I opened a couple of weeks go from an article on Jack Baty's site and have decided to implement something akin to this for my own use as I'm a bit fragmented right now. I'm not going to do Johnny.Decimal because it's too restrictive for my tangent-prone, words-first brain, but I am going to learn all about it to really squeeze the best of it out and decant that into my system. That is generally how I roll with most things.

Now can he focus on this long enough to complete it? I'll let you know tomorrow.

Websites that excessively internally link annoy me so much. Somehow I have managed to have two hobbies where news sites are guilty of this. Maybe it's all news sites, but gaming sites will talk and talk about a game's Steam page, but they will never link to it. It has to be an internal link to the game's tag page on their site, which also doesn't have a link to the Steam page. Same with music sites - links to their artist tag page, but never a link to Bandcamp, Spotify; nothing.

I come across this at work sometimes, where we have to do things to appease search engines at the cost of user experience and I will never not argue against it (even when I know I'm going to lose!). Your users don't care about your clicks or interactions or bounce rate. And if you really cared about those things, you'd make good content instead of tricking people into clicking around your site and farming false positives.

I hate making things that are not as good as they could be, just because Google Says. Google says to put glue on pizza, so maybe we shouldn't be following Google.

I'm not a life-long fan of formula one. When I was a kid, my dad said it was boring and so it was boring and we watched British Touring Cars and Saloon Cars instead.

A few years ago, a regrettably estranged friend (I know you're reading this; please reach out) pretty much forced me to try F1 again. I did so and got hooked immediately.

I'm not sure why it appeals to me so much. The first season I watched was plagued with porpoising and was essentially a race to solve that issue without compromising to a degree that tipped the scale too far the other way. Since then it's been a procession with Max Verstappen at the head. It's been a bit boring but I still love it?

Because it's 2024, I'm in an F1 dads WhatsApp group and we're going to Spa Francorchamps in July and I'm super excited for that. I've got an F1 calendar on my phone that tells me when and where we're racing this weekend (I watch free practice highlights but I watch qualifiers, sprints and races in full).

I've also been watching the heritage races on the Formula 1 YouTube channel. For each GP they've been showing extended highlights from a past race and I love them. The mid-2000s cars look like something you might design if you were seven years old, and they sound like an angry, eight-foot mosquito. In a lot of ways I look forward to these historic highlights as much as the race itself. My F1 dads are less enthusiastic; they likely watched these races at the time. I'm the interloper.

It reminds me of The Big Lebowski. I love that The Dude listens to old bowling matches on tape to relax. My F1 Sundays with the kid are the most relaxing time of my week and I can be found snoozing in front of the F1; not through boredom but relaxation (unless it's Monaco - then it's boredom).

And so I had the idea to find some older F1 on YouTube to rip the audio from and listen to whilst I sleep. A decent idea in theory but the 90s races are balanced towards commentary and I don't think I can sleep with the dulcet tones of Murray Walker in my ear. I need to find some racing without commentary. Is that a thing people are doing?

Since I can remember, we've used htpasswd authentication on sites in staging/pre-production to keep search engines and anyone else out. Mostly search engines. Too many ignore robots.txt to rely on that.

Since I can remember, I have struggled to effectively communicate that the htpasswd popup and any CMS login are separate. It's a dual-layer failing because people complain about not being able to log in, and I invariably assume that they're talking about the CMS, so we go looking in the wrong place and then someone will have a lightbulb moment; "do they mean the htpasswd popup?". And, of course, they do.

So, is this a familiar situation to you? Have you solved it? Care to share your solution because it's driving me crazy. There has to be a way to do this.

If you're reading this and you're one of my clients, I want to stress that this is not a complaint about you. I know it's a confusing thing and I wish there was a better way to either do it or communicate it and that's what I'm trying to achieve here. I've had problems in the past with clients thinking I'm subtweeting them (and they're only sometimes right) and taking offence and I don't want that happening here.

In the autumn, Tabitha will be assigned a musical instrument to learn. I'm going to need everyone who sees this to transmit cello-y thoughts please. At the very least I'll need not-brassy thoughts. I don't need trombones, trumpets, French horns. I might compromise on oboe or clarinet, but I won't be happy about it. And you'd better do it; if you don't I'll know.

I think I've lost my joy. I don't know when it happened but I haven't felt right for what feels like a long time. Almost nothing makes me happy in any lasting way, and everything seems futile or unappealing.

I've been chalking it up as a temporary thing but it's been going on for too long now so I'm going to find someone to talk to. I've been saying I wanted to for ages, and I tried to self-refer but I'm not vulnerable enough so I need to do it off my own back. I haven't really wanted to spend money recently as it's already been an expensive year and it's not getting cheaper, but buying video games and records to just put them on a shelf isn't working any more. Maybe it never was.