Month: April 2025

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There’s a strange sense of joy and accomplishment that comes after mowing the lawns and thus filling the garden bin.

Knowing that you’ve cleaned the garden somewhat.

And knowing that you’re getting your money’s worth from the garden bin subscription.

Nothing worse than seeing that collection truck go past for another week and having nothing to meet them at the bottom of the drive with. Another few quid wasted (pro-rata).

But not this time. This time I’ll have an almost full bin and I won’t lie — feels pretty good.

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Black Mirror: Common People

Dark as fuck. And so brilliantly doing a send-up of the modern “subscription culture”.

Both leads were great.

This is the second thing I’ve seen Chris Dowd act in after The I.T. Crowd. So it was a complete departure for me.

And he is incredible in it.

Similarly with Rashida I’ve only seen her in The Office and Parks and Recreation.

She too was great.

They missed a trick in one scene though.

When they thought that his wife’s implant was malfunctioning and they headed to the Rivermind building. They didn’t have Chris Dowd ask “Have you tried turning it off and on again”.

This is the first time in recent memory I’ve needed to watch something light-hearted after seeing an episode of something.

A bleak, subscription-based nightmare.

And I loved it.

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Hospitals and Supermarkets

What do hospitals and supermarkets have in common?

Go on – take a moment to think about it.

Got it?

No? Well, I’ll tell you.

Both are places where absolute fucking plebs congregate right outside the front doors, smoking.

Smoking is an individual choice, regardless of how completely dumb it is, but Christ if I don’t wish they would bugger off 100 metres away.

And the complete hypocrisy of a hospital placing one of their smoking areas directly outside their cancer wards. *smh*

Walking through a cloud of nicotine fog is not something I want to be doing.

Go away smokers.

Go away.

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The Last of Us series 2 episode 1

On the whole it was great to see the series back.

I’ve played through part 2, the game on which this series is based, five or six times through. So seeing certain scenes happen in this episode that were towards the end of the game was very strange for me.

But I get it from a storytelling perspective. Games are just completely different beasts to TV shows. Certain reveals and motivations need to be shown earlier.

Dina and Ellie at the Jackson New Years Dance

I just have to mention though. The Jackson dance scene was just incredible. I’m not 100% sure, but it seemed to be a shot for shot remake of the same scene from the game. And it hit just as well.

In fact, dare I say it hit slightly harder — mainly due to Joel seeming to have slightly more of a temper against Seth.

The shots, the dialogue, the chemistry between Dina and Ellie, and the music just fell right into place here.

Beautiful.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

My prediction is that the series will end at the closing of the third day at the pinnacle theatre. It just seems like the most logical place for me for it to cliffhanger.

But who knows what changes they will make.

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What the hell was I thinking

“What the hell was I thinking?”; “Huh?”; “Who’s the fucking idiot who did this?.. oh. It was me…”.

Three questions every developer / coder / programmer / whatever-er asks themselves from time to time.

And I am definitely no different.

I built an initial version of a web-based tool for work some time ago. I built it with some speed to get it done as quickly as possible. But I should have taken longer and focused in more on the ongoing code quality.

I wrote tests from the get-go, but I let it slip a little when I would dip back into the project for little updates and tweaks across the last twelve months.

The other day I ran a static analysis tool over the project for the first time.

Christ on a bike.

So for the past day or so I’ve been battling hard to climb up the 9 rung ladder to the highly sought after status of level 9 all green. (Larastan/phpstan this is).

I’m currently on level 7 with about 15 errors to fix.

I have found that from implementing the fixes — many of which have been type hinting and generics-related — I am understanding the code — and the underlying framework Laravel — much better.

I’ve even found a very odd design decision in Laravel. The `auth()->id()` method can return either of the following:

  • int

  • string

  • null

Why not just “int” and “null”?

Anyway.

It’s been fun and I’m looking forward to fighting through level 8 before defeating the final boss — level 9 All Green. 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

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What to write about

I’m having a great time keeping up to date with the blogging journey of a friend of mine.

And I mean keeping up — he must post at least three times a day.

And I have found it inspiring.

I used to write often back when I’d commute to work. But weirdly since working remotely I have written less. I suppose it’s not surprising — at home I have many things to pre-occupy myself.

But I want to start posting more often. Maybe not three times a day, but much more often than i do.

I do tend to post my daily Wordle plays, but I’m not counting those.

Who knows how this will go. Or even if it will go.

Let us see.

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Trying to move my wordpress site over to using the composer-driven “bedrock” structure of wordpress.

It’ll be a new server running docker, but will hopefully make it easier to make changes and deploy those changes to my site.

We shall see.