Blogging

I work in IT and am vaguely technical. I use Linux and vaguely know how to program in C, Python, PL/SQL and install, configure and tune a variety of databases. However, apart from the odd gratuitous post detailing my Linux desktop setup, I generally don’t post technical content and never have done. I am slightly conflicted and feel guilty about this as I feel that I have learned so much from other people’s blog posts and, increasingly, videos that I should really try to reciprocate and offer something back to the community....

‘Nice weekend, Barry ?’ ‘Yeah, very busy though, Dave. Very busy’ ‘What did you get up to ?’ ‘Saturday morning, Sandra and me went down Tesco. Bloody great queue as normal. Full of idiots with nothing better to do. It was 25 minutes before we even got into the store’. ‘What did you go for ?’ ‘Nothing much. Just laughing at people asking staff for that fancy wholemeal, gluten-free flour when there’s bread on the shelves....

Saturday 2 May Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.

Friday 1 May Inspired by Luke’s post about his love of books, here’s the current collection of books on my bedroom dresser. I also like books but my reading is mainly limited to the time in bed before going to sleep. This is a rather atypical list as I normally read lightweight, disposable thrillers (Michael Connelly, Clare Mackintosh etc). Humble Pi - Matt Parker An interesting book about how maths causes glitches in real-life scenarios such as the wobbly Westminster bridge in London....

Thursday 30 April Please don’t think I have a lovely working environment where I work remotely and I have an immaculate, tidy, uncluttered desk with an immaculate, tidy, uncluttered desktop. I have several irritations that are all very minor (given the current climate) but are irritating nevertheless. Periodically, I am tempted to re-install Arch cleanly from scratch to see whether that would resolve some of these issues but that would take me a while (an Arch install is fairly straightforward but I do need to encrypt the disk) and this might potentially leave me back in exactly the same situation....

Wednesday 29 April I use a Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 desktop computer that runs Arch Linux for work. This PC is a few years old now and has i7-6700@3.40GHz CPU (4 cores) and 16GB of memory which is adequate for my purposes. I used to distro hop (Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Solus) quite regularly but haven’t done so for a while as Arch meets all my needs (rolling distribution) with almost modern, up-to-date versions of every software package I would ever need....

Tuesday 28 April Over the years, I have maintained a variety of blogs and migrated my content between most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Ghost, Joomla, Habari, Typepad, Tumblr, Posterous, Jekyll, Django, Octopress, Nikola, Hugo, Pelican). For this #100DaysToOffload exercise, I am using write.as. I currently have a neglected but perfectly functional blog which uses a static site generator (Hugo) and publishes the content on Amazon S3. However, it’s five months since I posted on that blog and I can guarantee that if I were to use that platform, the workflow would be:...

Monday 27 April I don’t normally write much about my job. I guess that’s because I am wary of revealing company confidential information but I work for Oracle Corporation and have done so since 2006. I am a Technical Consultant (‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’). I find ‘Dear Diary’ blog posts quite tedious but anyway, during these strange times, it’s something to write about. I have been a remote worker since I returned to work following a ‘minor health issue’ in 2011 so this remote working thing isn’t novel, strange, challenging or depressing for me....

Sunday 26 April Wife cut my hair. Probably not as good as the lady who visits us at home but my sideburns no longer resemble those of a 1970’s George Best. Fringe is sub-optimal but who cares. Not me. Another walk in Richmond Park. Entered at Kingston Gate, walked up to Isabella Plantation car park and back again. Don’t know how many steps or distance but it takes us about an hour....

Saturday 25 April Went for a walk in Richmond Park. Still swerving people, mainly on the roads approaching the park and at the entrance gates. Great to see families out on bikes, dog walkers, people jogging and folk enjoying the open spaces with no cars and no cyclists on the roads. Thankfully, didn’t see any cyclists flouting the massive ‘NO CYCLING’ signs on every gate as that was getting irritating and rather stressful....