Having a play with embedded tweets. In fact, I’m going to embed this one at https://www.eutony.net/. How recursive is that?
James Handley
eutony
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19th February 2025 - "Stripper"
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Having a play with embedded tweets. In fact, I’m going to embed this one at https://www.eutony.net/. How recursive is that?James Handley
eutony
Forgive the pretentious title – it is intended to be ironic, but I’m not sure it comes across.
This week saw my 37th birthday, and as I trotted out the old phrase one year older and wiser
, I actually stopped and thought about it. Sure, I’m one year older, but am I any wiser?
Wisdom is a very slippery fish to catch. The more you think you have of it, the less you probably do. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it’s an attribute that can only be conferred, not assumed. On the other hand, decisions and opinions can be examined in retrospect, and this perhaps provides a rough indication?
But I digress. As a proxy for an increase in wisdom, I decided to reflect on what I’ve learnt. Or perhaps more accurately on something that has struck me in a more than superficial way.
The two items I have chosen are both “soundbites” which have resonated with me. In both cases they are quotes from a blog (although not the same one).
Keep the room clean where you are, and in God’s time, the door to the next room will open.
(Things I have learned, by John Piper)
This quote really struck me, because of my personal profile. I am very much an initiator – I love starting new things, taking on new challenges, attacking new problems. The downside is that I get bored quite quickly, and want to move on to the next thing. I find it easy to lose interest in the ‘room’ I am in – allow dust and cobwebs to settle in the corners, leave stuff all over the floor. I know there’s a new exciting room next door, so I stop looking after this one as well as I could. God, I believe, is teaching me patience – to take pride in the room I’m in, and get it absolutely as clean as I can. To expose all the dark corners, have it open for inspection at any time with no fear of a moudly sandwich being found under the sofa.
Keep feeling stupid
(Thoughts on Developer Longevity, by Davy Brion)
While this piece is particularly about software developers, I believe it applies across life. His paragraph clarifies the sentiment. I hope he’ll forgive me quoting him verbatim:
Once you think you know it all, you’re pretty much done and are only harming yourself, your customers and the poor people who have the misfortune to work with you. Instead, keep reading blogs and books by people who are smarter than you, who are talking about things you don’t understand. When you’re reading their material and their code, you’ll probably feel stupid. Which is great because those are the times when you are most open to learning new things. Keep reading until you get it, and then, start experimenting with what you’ve just learned. Keep doing this over and over again. In short: Keep feeling stupid, it’s the only way to keep learning.
If you generalise the business and computing specific stuff, isn’t that great? Nobody likes feeling stupid, but it’s actually doing things you can’t do, or don’t find easy that provide the best learning.
As it’s now March, and my birthday approaches, I thought I’d take stock of where I am on my 2011 targets. This is my 8th ‘blog entry in 8 weeks, so I’m actually on track on that one. No climbing yet (although I’m thinking it’s going to happen soon).
Growing Leaders is going really well so far. Had two sessions (“Leadership Matters” and “Establishing Identity”), and the feedback I’ve had has so far been very positive. Best part is how the people on the course are being challenged by the material. It feels like we’ve almost settled down into the rhythm of the course now, and we’re starting to do some serious stuff.
Managed one cinema trip (“Tangled 3D”, with 2 seven year old boys!!). I think I had imagined films for me rather than kids, but I’ll take what I can get. Tangled was very good actually – hugely enjoyed it. I cried a bit near the end, when all the lanterns are floating up in the air, but I suspect the cause was actually over-tiredness and having a baby in hopsital. It really is a very emotional experience having a young child. He’s fine now, by the way!
We’ll skip over the weight part, as I haven’t dared weigh myself. I have been less then exemplerary in the snack department, and still using caffeine and calories as a substitute for sleep, and that combined with no climbing has not done my waist any favours.
Photos are looking more promising. The two top candidates at the moment are the Harrogate Advertiser (which periodically prints readers’ pictures), and Gardener’s World magazine (which prints them every month). The Advertiser was asking for Spring flower pictures this week, but I haven’t had time (or daylight) to do anything about it. The crocuses on the Stray are lovely.
Camping – not gonna happen for at least a couple of months.
Cooking. I did bombay potatoes tonight with our curry, but I’ve cooked those before, so it doesn’t count. Souffle still very much on the agenda.
As previously mentioned, one of my targets for 2011 is to cook something I’ve never cooked before. Actually the scope of this challenge is growing a little as I’ve come across a few dishes I like the look of.
I fairly quickly settled on a pud. I love cooking and eating puds (cakes, buns, etc), and find them far more satisfying then mains. My first thought was a crème brûlée, from scratch. This is not least because it’s my other half’s fave pud, but also because one of the restaurants in town do a funky crème brûlée dish that involves lots of little ones with interesting flavours, like a raspberry one, a mint one, and even a thyme one, which I fancy trying myself.
However a bit more flicking through Leiths Cookery Bible
Soufflé is one of these dishes that’s meant to be very hard and very impressive – which is exactly the sort of challenge I’m looking for. That’s not to say that crème brûlée won’t feature at some point in the year, mind you – but soufflé is the one. Chocolate soufflé to be exact. I will let you know how I get on.
On the subject of cooking, I really do like Prue Leith’s book. It’s a little bit “first principles” at times – for example the recipe for lasagne starts with making the pasta. But I find her instructions very clear, and I very seldom have disasters with her dishes. That said, I use Delia for my annual Christmas Cake, and get annoyed every year that the recipe starts like this (my emphasis, and not verbatim):
Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 1.
An 8 in cake tin, greased and lined.
The night before you make the cake…
What is the point of putting the pre-heating instructions and tin preparation instructions before the stuff you have to 24 hours in advance?!?!?!
Contrast with Prue’s crème brûlée
Crème brûlée
Crème brûlée is best started a day in advance.
When I was younger, I always wanted to be a radio presenter. I used to rock out to “Radio James” in my bedroom. I had 2 turntables (which I wired up for remote start), mic, mixing desk, and some jingles recorded off Capital Radio. Actually I probably shouldn’t admit to recording jingles off the air… I think I’ll risk it this once.
For one reason or another, I essentially gave up radio and the media when I graduated – I decided to go out and get a real job instead. After all, why would I want to spend all day entertaining people and listening to great music when I could be sitting at a desk staring at a screen… Anyway, I digress.
So assuming I had pursued my dream, the one thing I didn’t ever settle on was a radio name. On IC radio I was “Jaymz Pace”. The “Jaymz” actually came from my season with PGL – we all had our names on our T-shirts, and everyone found crazy and alternative spellings (like “K8 the trekker”). Hey – it was cool at the time (or, at least, we all thought it was). By the time I did student radio the “Jaymz” was largely ironic, as I recognised its naffness. “Pace” just came out of thin air, as something that sounded good with “James”. I even had a “Jaymz Pace” phonecard, in the days when these things still existed.
But what’s wrong with “James Handley” though? I don’t know – it just doesn’t fly somehow. When I think of the Capital Radio DJs of the era, they nearly all had snappy names – “Pat Sharp”, “Mick Brown”, “Neil Fox”. I don’t believe any of these are their real names. There were some less snappy ones “David Jensen”, “Paul McKenna”, “Richard Allison.”
It’s a similar story for singers, actors, and to some extent authors. Very few (I believe) operate under their real names. Is everyone with a public face essentially unhappy with their own name? I’m aware that Equity has rules about this, but I think it does deeper…
It may have its roots in call-signs, from ham radio days. And of course the advent of networked computing rapidly brought screen names, and avatars. My online presence is principally “eutony” (eutony.net, eutony on Twitter and photobox). Not entirely by design, but it grew out when I decided to purchase a domain so I wouldn’t have to keep changing e-mail address. I probably would choose something different next time, but it’s too hassley to change now.
Humourously enough, I actually now know someone called James Pace. And no, he doesn’t work in radio.
I’ve not made any New Year’s resolutions this year, as such – instead I’ve decided to make a set of targets I am going to (try to) meet in 2011. I’ve also decided to record them here, so in 11 months time I can measure against how I’ve done! These ‘targets’ are actually the minimum I hope to achieve.
So, in no particular order..
It’s not an entirely ambitious list. Climbing, and blogging are potentially challenging (I managed 12 climbs in 2010, and about 18 blog posts). My ideal is to climb once-a-week, but I’m given myself until the summer to get into this groove, mainly because of the littlest Handley. To be fair 11 of the climbs in 2010 were Feb-July, but in July I had an awkward fall which put me out of action for 6 weeks, and then a baby inconveniently came along.
I haven’t been 70kg in 11 years, but I did get down to 72kg in October (before I started using chocolate and caffeine as substitutes for sleep) – it’s subsequently started creeping back up. Actually the graph of my weight for 2002 – 2010 is quite interesting. Don’t often put pictures in my blog, but here goes:
What’s interesting to me is, apart from the outlier in 2004, I’ve been more or less constant around 80kg, until 2009, when it suddenly plummets. For a while I was half-worried I had some awful illness, but I think it’s just that late 2009 is when I started climbing again, and the energy expenditure combined with a bit of motivation to stop snacking tipped the balance. You really notice an extra 10kg when you’re hauling yourself up a wall!
So far I’ve managed 5 blogs in 2011 (including this one), which is well on track for 50 over the year.
One of my more serious ambitions in life is to write a book. Well, specifically to write a novel, as one could argue a thesis counts as a book (certainly 3 years and 150 pages gotta count for something!) They say that everyone has at least one novel in them, and I’d like to let mine out.
I obviously enjoy writing, ‘cos I keep a ‘blog (after a fashion). My mother-in-law very kindly gave my an Amazon voucher for Christmas – so I took the plunge and got myself a book on writing a book. Specifically How to Write Your First Novel (Creative Writing)
Enjoying it so far. I have a fairly good idea of what my story is going to be about already, so I skipped over the first two chapters, which are all about thinking up plots and characters.
Chapter 3 is all about “finding your voice”, and it’s got some great exercises in it, which amount to basically sitting down and writing for 5 minutes. It starts off as pure stream-of-conciousness writing, but moves on to mini stories or scenes written in a certain style. In that regard, it reminded me of “Who’s Line is it Anyway”, where you have to read the credits in the style of a Gangsta Rappa (or whatever).
So far I’ve written in the styles of a detective novel (that actually turned into a Sci-fi), a chick-lit, and a romance. I very much doubt that these fledgling efforts will ever see the light of day, but it was fun to do.
I sort of feel like I already have a voice, but it’s an interesting experiment to try out different styles. I can’t say I found any one harder than another, particularly – just different.
One thing I did observe is that I can visualise things in my head, but they don’t necessarily make it onto paper.
For instance, my detective scene takes place in a dark alley at night. It’s drizzling, and there is no natural light to speak off. The walls are concrete, with big wheelie bins and rubbish sacks piled against them. It’s just off a main street, with dim street lights, and some shop or other opposite, which is closed but has a neon sign blinking on and off. The alley is a dead-end, ending at a tall brick wall, that may or may not have a door in it. It’s smelly and sordid, and not the sort of place you would feel safe. The main street itself is in a bad part of town, and doesn’t have any significant traffic, although there are probably ladies touting for business on the corners.
That’s how it appeared in my head.
What I wrote down was:
The dark alley was intermittently lit by the flicker of a broken neon lamp, revealing 2 men – one crouching on the ground, examining something, the other standing up, looking around nervously.
Obviously with a 5 minute time limit you can’t go crazy with descriptive prose, and I believe that part of the writer’s art is to conjure an image in the readers’ eye without having to be explicit about everything. My alley is heavily inspired by Bladerunner and 1,001 American detective movies, so perhaps the brevity hooks into that – my concern (if you like) is that I can’t help but to visualise the scene I had in my mind when I wrote “the dark alley”, but I have not necessarily conveyed it.
Anyway, the upshot of this mighty rambling is that I’m going to try to practice writing more. Specifically more blog posts. My regular reader will know I’ve dug out my old laptop, so I can indulge in the bloggers arts without hogging the computer (or being shut away in the study), so my hopes are high.
I’ve actually got another post brewing in my mind – about names, callsigns, and avatars – but I might not have time tonight. (The less prosaic task of writing “thank you” letters on behalf of my son unfortunately comes first).
I am fortunate enough to own a laptop. I inherited it from a friend many moons ago, who was more or less chucking it out. The screen is HUGE. The keyboard is full size. The battery life is 0 (have to run it off the mains), and the processor is a 600MHz 486 (!!!).
I must confess that it’s spent a large portion of my ownership of it sitting in it’s bag.
However, I’ve finally managed to find a wireless Access Point that works properly, and lets me WiFi from anywhere in the house, so I dug it out again. (That combined with the fact that my lady wife has started wanting to use the house computer in the evenings!) So I’m here in the kitchen typing away on the laptop.
It’s also my first excursion into Ubuntu-land (always been a Fedora man before this). I have to say Ubuntu is a nice distro. Pop the CD in, and it all “just works”. Even my ancient PCMCIA WiFi adapter with WPA is happily chatting to the AP.
So this may be the start of a bit more blogging. Or it may not. Either way I need to go and do the bottle thing for the baby, as I can hear squawks from on high!
I’m very excited, because we just started running the “Growing Leaders” course at Church. We were going to start it at the end of last year, but the arrival of a baby in the Handley household rather put those plans on ice! As it is, I feel on the back foot a bit..
The first session (on Saturday) was great. We spent the day in Ripon, thinking about what leadership is, what Christian leadership is, and about styles of leadership.
“Leadership” is one of the those words which carries a whole lot of baggage, and one of the big tasks I faced was convincing would-be attendees that it didn’t mean a man standing up at the front! It’s a great course, and my vision is for all of us to reach a new clarity over what our calling is. Ultimately, I’m hoping we end up saying “no” a whole lot more!!
Well, I’ve just realised I haven’t done my 2010 review.
At the start of the year I thought 2010 was going to be almost entirely boring – like 2009. Well, I was certainly wrong about that. Way over and above anything else, as I wrote it the wheels were in motion for the arrival of number 2 son (not that we knew that at the time). But we also went to 2 major birthday parties (a 70th and a 90th), and my sister-in-law got married. Throw a tenth wedding anniversary in the mix, and all in all you’ve got a pretty eventful year.
On the other hand, none of us have moved house, school, or jobs in 3 years now, which makes a happy change. In fact, depending on how you count it, I have been in my current job for the longest I have ever done any job (I worked for around 7 years for the University of Leeds, but that was technically doing 3 different jobs).
And somehow we now have a seven year old (when did that happen?), and a 3-month old baby.
I took up climbing again (although a nasty sprain followed by the arrival of a baby limited it to the first half of the year), and – astonishingly – dropped from 81kg to 72kg over the course of the year. I think the reality of hauling myself up a rockface carrying 10 more bags of sugar than I used to was the final spur to me taking a diet seriously. Climbing is akin to a spiritual exercise for me, but I’ll write about that another time. Anyway, a big nod to the Harrogate climbing centre.
2010 has been the year of Twitter for me. In 2009 I discovered it, and 2010 saw me throw myself into it, hook, line, and sinker. It has definitely replaced Facebook as my social media outlet of choice (but I still love FB photos, and FB remains the best way for me to keep tabs on folk). My pet project this year was writing a weatherbot, which taught me a lot about REST and OAUTH – and my ‘bot is far more popular then me!!!
Anyway, if you’ll forgive me a piece of shameless self-indulgence, I’m going to round off with some of my own favourite tweets from 2010:
improved matters. [6 Jan]
get on with it? [2 Feb]
the harness. [22 Feb]