It’s been a little while since I wrote about some stuff. Let’s do that!
The Year of Order
Unlike last year’s yearly theme, I haven’t kept ongoing updates on how The Year of Order has been going.
For the most part, it’s been decent! I, at least, certainly feel a bit more on top of things and organised than I was previously.
I had expected this year to involve a lot more digital productivity findings (such as trying new email clients, new calendar clients, new to-do list apps, and so on), but that hasn’t turned out to be the case.
Instead, I’ve spent more time reconfiguring my physical space—particularly in the kitchen—to find a place for everything and keep everything in its place. It’s not always easy, the flat being as small as it is, but it’s something.
Digitally, the main focus has instead been in two areas: making sure everything is written down, and reducing distractions.
The first has ended up simply being a to-do list that I keep in GitHub Projects. Why GitHub Projects, you might ask? Because it’s right there in front of me almost every day, a lot of my to-do items are related to coding projects, and I don’t need an app to do anything with it.
The best todo list is the one you actually look at, after all.
For other tasks, I was recently gifted Due by Kai. Due is different for having the ability to ‘nag’ me—it drops a fresh notification to my phone and watch every five minutes until I mark the task as being done or go through the effort of manually postponing it for longer. It’s neat.
That sounds like it would be counter to reducing distraction, but as I only keep important and time-sensitive reminders in Due, it works alright.
Elsewhere, I’ve just been cutting back on what I allow notifications for and making greater use of the Apple ecosystem’s focus modes. I’ve been half tempted to upgrade my iPhone just for the Apple Intelligence-based Reduce Interruptions mode and notification summary features, both of which I’ve found quite handy in beta testing. That expense might have to wait for a bit, though.
Gender transition
I’ve been keeping gender matters fairly quiet for the most part—the last mention of it was in the 2023 year in review, when I was close to the front of the waiting list—but things have happened!
Back in February I had my initial intake appointment. Since July, I’ve been regularly making my way to Exeter to attend the psychotherapy sessions that are a mandatory part of the NHS gender clinic experience.
The last of those sessions was last week. My previous, privately acquired diagnosis of gender incongruence has been concurred with and there’s an agreement-in-principle that I should be prescribed gender-affirming treatment via the NHS.
The results of the initial blood tests may yet throw a spanner into those works, but the outlook at the moment is much more positive than I would’ve expected this time last year.
Work stuff
Work has been going well. Earlier in the month we held our fourth overall, second in-person, Design System Day conference in Liverpool.
It might sound weird to compare, but my pedigree in running brony and furry meets has given me a bit of a taste for helping with these kinds of scheduled in-person events. I honestly find running around and trying to preempt issues or solve developing problems the best part of things like this.
Despite being in neighbouring Manchester for much of my youth, I’ve only been over to Liverpool a couple of times in my life. It turns out that Liverpool is actually a pretty nice city.
Mid-year peer reviews happened recently and provided the usual heady mix of head-bloating praise and useful feedback.
This past six months, I’ve been trying to do a lot more ‘extra-curricular’ activities that’re outside of the job description, such as publicly publishing GOV.UK browser stats each month and contributing to community projects like the WCAG Primer —which, in my mind, succeeds my own attempts to rewrite WCAG criteria for a non-technical audience.
These things come out of my usual work hours, so I am effective paid for doing them. No frets about being exploited there.
The main takeaway for improvement I’ve gotten is that I’m bad at explaining my process, which is fair. My process when it comes to web development is chaotic, a real ‘throwing stuff and seeing what sticks’ approach, which usually isn’t conducive to succinct description.
At least, that’s what I think. It could also just be the case that I’ve been doing this for so long, that I can do so many things on autopilot by now, that I don’t recognise the processes I’ve developed.
As such, I’ve been trying to get a mentorship scheme organised so that I, in the role of teacher, have little choice but to explain the hows and the whys.
I’m not sure how well that’s going to go, to be honest, but the whole point is to try and improve both my ability to communicate and my mentee’s ability to develop webs. So long as we both end up better than we started, that’ll be a win.
Bumblings around London
Last weekend, I popped over to the Formula 1 Exhibition in London, followed quickly by a couple of shows at the London Podcast Festival.
The exhibition was interesting enough. I’m a relatively new follower of Formula 1, so a lot of the historical stuff was more just a curiosity than anything meaningful to me, but it was nice to see familiar things up close for the first time. You can spend a good couple of hours in there just looking at stuff, it’s a pretty sizeable collection.
It was an early start and I was so incredibly knackered by the time the podcasts came around, but they were still good fun. First up was The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast—the number one podcast for those involved, or just interested, in the production of beef animals and dairy herds (in actuality, a surreal comedy show loosely based around being about cattle farming).
The actual episode is already live, if you’re interested in listening, though the host himself noted that this episode is very much the deep end of in-jokes and references.
Afterwards was The Greatest Generation, comedically reviewing the seminal Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Survivors”.
This was only their second ever show in Europe. I’d also attended the first one at the 2023 London Podcast Festival. Unlike the first time, this time I was prepared for the makeshift meet-n-greet afterwards. We had a nice chat. They’re great guys.
Travel home was a total mess. Typical Paddington–Reading line stuff.
This day, rather unintentionally, ended up being a whole social event. Thanks to Calvin, Owen, Caylee, Sophie, and Alice for all hanging out at various points throughout the day. We also ended up spending a bit of time suffering at Paddington with someone named Rosie. Wild.
I’m going to London again next weekend for some quality time with Kai. Might hit up the Science Museum.
Random life stuff
After probably far too long in development, the (still rather basic) website I built for the BristolFurs has gone live. Woop woop.
This website also got a little bit of a makeover, with new artwork from Tuxedo Dragon everywhere! I’ve been updating the links page aggressively too, in response to a lot of friends and acquaintances setting up personal sites in response to the closure of Cohost and ongoing enshittification of Twitter.
I bought a new fridge–freezer. It ended up being slightly too tall for the kitchen door and we had to remove bit of ceiling to get it in, it was a whole thing. Still, it’s a very good fridge–freezer.
I have gotten horribly addicted to playing Factorio. Like, 150 to 200 hours of gameplay a month addicted. I’ve not played anything but Factorio for weeks addicted. Factorio is fun.
Okay bye!