spjwebster

2 months agodiscuss

My eldest is currently taking her GCSEs, and for the English Literature exam this week she had to write an essay on A Christmas Carol. Whilst helping her, I couldn't help but realise that the overarching messages around the importance of social responsibility are becoming increasingly relevant again.

spjwebster

2 years agodiscuss

Yours is definitely the spud gun I remember, and I suspect that's true for most folks of a particular age from the UK: a small die cast red gun and a monster potato to feed it ammunition.

If we're talking home made back garden arsenal, the go-to for my generation was the peg gun: https://www.instructables.com/A-Great-Peg-Gun/, which is, in retrospect, absolutely irresponsibly lethal with the right tension elastic bands.

spjwebster

3 years agodiscuss

A well-known UK startup, renting an old building just outside of London, is (or was, as of a few years ago) paying square footage cost for an entire floor that doesn't exist. The previous occupants - a government department - had the floor removed to make for higher, grander internal ceiling heights.

spjwebster

3 years agodiscuss

I wonder how many niches still use slide rules today. I'm currently training for my private pilot license, and many of the calculations for flight planning are still done using what is essentially a circular slide rule [1]. Having grown up in an entirely digital era it took me a good long while to get used to it, but there's a level of elegance baked into this multi-purpose device that it's hard not to like it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_computer

spjwebster

4 years agodiscuss

Makes me smile too. Around 2008 while I was at Yahoo! I built a standalone library called Dhaka (literally stuck a pin in a map and used the place name as the project name) that did almost exactly this. It was used on a few of the EU sites but I left before I got chance to open source it. The problem I was trying to solve was eliminating a bunch of duplicate JavaScript that was essentially sending/fetching data to/from a remote source and inserting/replacing it into the current page.

spjwebster

4 years agodiscuss

Having written a bunch of books on Flash and PHP back in the early 2000s, my experience is very much aligned with this.

For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after the first book did well I got a pretty decent advance for the subsequent books. They all sold enough to pay back that advance and so I got quarterly royalties on top too, but given the amount of toil it required - and quick turnaround times with new Flash releases, meaning many late nights - I would have been better compensated doing pretty much anything else.

That said, money isn't the only, or even necessarily the most important or fulfilling, reward on offer. I got the writing gig because I was spending a lot of my free time on various Flash-related forums answering questions and helping people with their projects. I did that for the sheer joy of helping others along in their learning journey, and saw writing books as a massive extension of that.

It very much mirrors my experience of the public school system in the UK: teachers are chronically overworked and underpaid, but do it anyway because it's something of a calling. In fact, that probably applies to a bunch of other public sector roles too, not least the NHS primary care roles.

spjwebster

4 years agodiscuss

At the risk of being ridiculed, when I was a lad growing up in the UK I saw something that I later learned might be described as ball lightning.

It was late winter in the South West with overcast skies and melting snow on the ground, and looking out of the window of my bedroom across the street and into the opposite neighbour's front garden - which had been dug over to prepare the ground for vegetable planting in the spring - I saw a sphere of pinkish glowing light falling slowly to the ground. At first I thought it was a balloon, but looking at it more intently it seemed perfectly spherical and as it got close to the ground it hovered there for a good 5 or so seconds, illuminating the ground below. Then it completely vanished without a sound - no bang, no fire, just... gone. I ran out of the house and over to the neighbour's garden to see if I could find any remnants of whatever it was but there was nothing to be found except for what I noted at the time was a weird sharp smell and a small dish-shaped depression in the rough ground below where it vanished.

I obviously can't say for sure that it was ball lightning, and I hadn't heard anything about such phenomena at that point so didn't describe it as such at the time, but every now and again when the topic comes up I can't help but see similarities between what I've seen and some of the reports. At the very least, it's a good excuse to retell this bizarre story from my childhood.

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