All posts by Lloyd Davis

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day – Coding

I pulled the coding card again today and carried on working on automating my general knowledge management workflow, basically how I take notes, organise ideas about things that I’ve read or written in the past and turn them into something new.

Today this involved fiddling again with Drafts to do something that’s basically a mail merge, taking some structured data and inserting it into text. This used to be word-processing bread and butter, but I don’t do it at scale in the same way. It’s also about re-using stuff that I’ve already written without digging into documents. The philosophy of Drafts (or the bit that appeals to me) is that you write stuff without knowing what it’s going to be and then when you do know, it will probably be more than one thing and so you can send it to different places. If you have several blogs and you want to post roughly the same thing to each of them, then you compose in Drafts and then just press a button to publish to each blog.

Talking of having several blogs, I was also pointed at sheet-posting (yes the pun is intended) which takes a set of Google Sheets and turns them into a blog. It’s ridiculous and distracting, but I did learn a bit about CSS and also about Google Fonts, which for some reason have passed me by. Here’s my effort.

It’s late and I shouldn’t really be writing, and it shows.

I also had a trip to Central London today. It’s still weird. I took this picture by County Hall, of Westminster Bridge which at 5pm on a Tuesday would normally be heaving with road traffic, office workers and tourists, but today was empty.

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Walking to Victoria Station from Westminster Abbey later on, it felt like it should be more like 11pm than 8pm. Even on the station most of the food and coffee outlets were already closed or closing. And there just aren’t as many people there. I encountered a woman who was lost over the road from the station, looking for the Coach Station (a common issue in that part of SW1) and I walked her round to Buckingham Palace Road and pointed her in the right direction. She was going to get a coach to Bristol I said I hoped she got there before midnight. She said “There are just so many people here.” And I’d just been thinking exactly the opposite.

On my way home, I realised that I’d just been to my third church service in as many days. I don’t know what that means, if anything.

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day – Various

First thing is that 13th September is my blogiversary. It’s now seventeen years since I bit the bullet and committed to keeping a weblog at https://perfectpath.co.uk and not deleting it. The main things I thought about this today were how much stuff there is in here and how I’ve never quite achieved the goal I had at the start of using it as a learning tool, it’s been great for recording and capturing and supporting that first burst of creativity but I’ve not managed the double loop stuff. Not on the blog material itself. This is probably a lie and if I went digging I’d find the evidence – the most obvious kind of thing is to see how my thinking does develop over a number of posts, just through the writing down of ideas and arguments and rambling nonsense.

I made some progress today on automating the workflow – especially making a pipe between Drafts and logseq – I’m bored with thinking about it and why it’s important – it’s not that important, but it’s neat.

I was at work this morning and most of the time was at a funeral. It’s an occupational hazard of working with older people that you see more death than the average person. I think so anyway, it sounds right, but then I think of all the people I’ve worked with who died, who were (almost by definition) below retirement age and there’s something about the structure of this sentence that makes it sound like they died because they worked with me. Which they didn’t. I am not a psychopath. Psychopaths don’t keep a blog for seventeen years.

No matter, a Requiem Mass on Monday morning is a sobering thing, whoever you are. None of the silly things floating through my head over the weekend were important compared to the visceral grief of a woman who’s lost her husband and partner in joy and laughter, even in the face of a strong faith in the resurrection. And we got to sing Psalm 23 to Crimond, which is one of my favourite things to do at any time. I’ve always loved belting it out regardless of whatever reedy wheezing and croaking of those around me. I miss Roy, who I met through his attendance at our dementia-friendly café and singing group. He had a great smile and a twinkle in his eye. He was always smartly dressed and loved his bow ties. And despite not being able to remember much about what he’d done earlier in the morning, he loved talking about his working life as a chauffeur for the top brass at British Aerospace. I already missed his face for a while because of COVID when Julia told me that she was having a bed put up in the living room to look after him and that he wouldn’t have long. I last saw them both just after Christmas – there wasn’t any point in them getting excited about restrictions being lifted particularly, they knew that they didn’t have too much longer together.

I scanned this photo of my grandma today. I’m sure she’s in her garden – a middle-aged 1950s housewife. It was taken by my dad on his twin-lens reflex. She couldn’t see without her glasses but she also refused to be photographed wearing them. She’s probably about ten years younger in this picture than I am now. Being in your mid-forties then was not as it is now, her life must have felt like it was nearly over. Her older sister had died a few years previously. Her youngest son was a teenager, her oldest had just come back from Oxford early. She didn’t like her husband very much. She didn’t know it, but in a few years time she’d have a bleed on her brain and almost die. She also didn’t know that she’d got another thirty-odd years to live and would see her first two great-grandchildren. Who knows what she was thinking here.

Olive Davis in her garden c1958-60

Time passes.

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day – Sunday Review

I overdid it this week. I found that adding in exercise, more water and better sleep this week worked well on my ADHD, but left me vulnerable to doing too much. It all needs to be balanced with rest outside of sleeping at night. Yes it’s all common sense. No I still am not able to do it consistently. Also Friday has become this really busy day where I do Tuttle and then Friday Lunch at church and try to catch up with everything I’ve missed in the afternoon without having a proper lunch break… again.

Using otter.ai while I’m walking to talk through what’s on my mind has been really useful. It’s like having the ability to write index cards while I walk along the road. And I’ve been using logseq more this week, it feels more hypertexty and wiki-like for some reason. It also creates Markdown files by default, which I like.

I spent some time today going through the 15 cards (some of them I haven’t done anything on yet at all!). Again, I used otter, but this time at my desk. And I pulled them out of the box randomly and said what I thought the most important project and product for each card should be. It’s an exercise I’ve been meaning to do for ages, but have found it hard to write. It’s hard to write spontaneous notes like that, especially if you try to type them. So it’s a rambling mess, but I’ve got some more structure now. Some of them are long-form, long-term projects, others are the sort of thing where I might choose to do something every day for thirty days, or even just try to incorporate them into my morning or daily practice – like making photos, for example, it’s just good for me daily to give myself even 15 minutes of focusing on the visual and what’s going on around me that might be photographed – no obvious project jumping out at me, except make more.

So here’s some beans for you.

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I’ve noticed frustration setting in this weekend. With lack of progress, with having to rest, with people having expectations of me (which I’ve totally encouraged) with the things that are just not being touched at all – basically just by not being able to do all the things, all the time.

I need to prepare better for the week and choose some things that really need to be done to get done. There are a couple of family and work things that really need sorting.

I made this, music, words

Share Something Every Day – Music/Performance

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I put today’s gig in the book late in November 2019. Just after a holiday in Iceland, my last flight and last trip out of the country. It came out of one of those random conversations on Twitter – someone said something like “do I know anyone who’s a busker?” to which friends of friends said “@lloyddavis” and we took it from there.

It was scheduled for 17 April 2020. And rescheduled on 24 March for 1 October 2020. If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

But today, having stuck a tickling stick up my nose and getting the all clear, masking up and braving the (delayed, natch) trains of the Southern Region, I toddled off to the coast to entertain the folk while they queued up to get into the Brighton Centre for the brightonseo conference.

I had a coffee afterwards with my old pal Al Robertson (who turned out to be a delegate at the conference) and then had a little walk around post-COVID Brighton, had a quick lunch and then toddled home again, tired, but happy.

A few things.

I had to take a lateral flow test and be able to show a negative result this morning in order to get a wrist band that let me into the building. I don’t mind doing this – especially since it turned out negative… – but it’s not a great thing to have to do at 10pm, let alone with the prospect hanging over you of it being positive and so not only losing the gig, but also having to isolate and worry about who I’ve been in contact with in the last few days. But also, it’s incredibly fake-able, if you really want to – you do a test at home, fill in a form to report the result and then get a text from the government saying yes, you’ve reported a negative result. So if you’re on a very low income and the opportunity to work comes up for the first time in 18 months and you haven’t ever had any symptoms but you get a positive test, the pressure must be huge to just go “nah, I’ll report it as negative, no-one will know.”

I’m really out of practice in the social niceties of going somewhere else. Partly because I wasn’t sure until 10 o’clock last night that I’d be going, but also because I just haven’t been anywhere on this basis (a little bit of work that might have been nicely rounded out by seeing some friends). In the olden days, I’d have been open about it on social media and messaged the people I know in Brighton (probably all of both the Sussexes) to see if we could say hello, but it just didn’t occur to me until this morning.

I’m also out of practice with being fully prepped for a public gig. I need to have a good sign and a range of ways for people to tip that don’t involve cash which people just aren’t carrying around any more. I need to have plenty of water and give a bit more thought to repertoire – I’ve got a standard busking set, but ordinarily I just, um, busk it – ie I don’t worry too much about repeating songs or starting in the wrong key, none of which is terrible, but it puts me off my stride, reduces my confidence and what people want to see is cheerful confidence. And I need to think a bit more about what to wear – today was the nightmare, British cold misty day after a few days of hot sunshine in September, the weather when I left home was different from the weather when I started playing which had brightened up a bit by the time I stopped playing.

But mainly – It’s bloody great to be out performing again. I just stood outside the main entrance to the Brighton Centre and played and sang and made people laugh and helped them feel a bit more OK about going out to something like this, perhaps for the first time in a few months. I really hope that this isn’t an awful super-spreader event that I should, with hindsight, have known not to support, but it felt good to be out being me in the world after so long. Oh and invoice!

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day

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Community

Today I learned that there are (at least) two model railway societies in Guildford. The one that most people seem to know about is the Guildford Model Engineering Society who have a base in Stoke Park. They have 3½, 5 and 7¼ inch gauge passenger railways and have open days throughout the year. I didn’t know this level of detail, but now, of course, I’m going to have to plan a trip. Anyway, I met someone today from the other group, the lesser-known Astolat Model Railway Circle. I understand there was a break between the groups about fifty-years ago based on whether to work on fixed layouts (GMES) or portable ones (AMRC). So now you know too (though I’m open to being put right on details by anyone who knows better).

We heard that the church garden got a Gold medal from Guildford In Bloom. Ian, who does the garden, is justifiably proud.

I also got a list of films that we might be able to show at our Film Club. It’s tricky because of the Netflix problem of (near) infinite choice but also because we don’t really know who’s going to be interested, so we’re just going to have to plump for one and see how it goes.

We did make some progress on Panto planning today too, although again it will be interesting to see how our plan fares in contact with the people hereabouts.

I spent a brain-numbing hour on reviewing the new website layout too. At least I now know the things I need to do next and it’s not a terribly long list.

Podcast/Writing

I’ve been experimenting today with talking to otter. Otter.ai that is, the transcription service. So when I’ve had a walk (to work and back and into town for something) I’ve chatted away to my phone, which is recording what I say, sending it to otter for transcription and then at the end of the day I’ve been able to download some long rambling monologues in text and audio form. That helps me identify the (potentially) interesting bits and now I can use them either as the basis of a written piece or perhaps dropped into a podcast. In any case, it’s a good exercise for me in opening my mouth, rather than just thinking things over and over – stuff moves in me when I’ve said it out loud and I just look like an average idiot talking on their phone, whereas when I was doing this sort of thing in 2005, people thought I was proper odd.

Oh and I’m making progress using logseq.com as a general note-taker and knowledge-organiser, getting my head around syncing between all my machines and thinking about tagging and workflow. Baby steps.

I have to have an early night though because I’ve got to be up for a gig first thing in the morning and I need to polish my ukulele!

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day – Community

Friday Lunch With Friends

When I wrote my review of the week on Sunday, I forgot something that I’d meant to say.

I regularly forget that making Community is something that I probably work on every day. If I’m not actively doing it, I’m thinking about it. I’m writing about it or writing something that will help people connect with each other.

I have a part-time day job now. I’m Community Worker at a church just up the road from where I live. It’s lovely work and it can be challenging to do for someone who’s recent experience in community building has been mostly with people who want to be online and want to organise online – the congregation I work with are open-minded and enthusiastic about digital things but they just don’t have much experience and often default to the ways that they’ve always organised things. This isn’t always wrong but it can carry a bigger overhead, which might not be achievable or sustainable in a two-and-a-half-day week. There’s a big need to attract new volunteers and for me to delegate much more.

I managed to write a weeknote for the church website last Friday. That’s a discipline I’d like to maintain, even if it finds a different home.

I’ve rejigged my week to be Monday morning, Wednesday all day and Friday all day. That gives me days like today to do other things. Wednesday’s main thing is Sunflower Café, our dementia-friendly coffee morning and Fridays revolve around the community lunch. I’m hoping that doing that every Friday will serve as a focus for attracting those new volunteers and collaborators.

This week I’m also going to be working on making the website a bit more useful, how we bring back our dementia-friendly singing group and working up the idea of a community theatre group – aiming to do a panto at Christmas.

On Friday mornings I also have been running Tuttle (my long-running networking event for people who don’t like going to networking events) on Zoom since March last year. It’s been fun and we’ve settled to a regular core who enjoy seeing each other.

And I’m aware that blogging again regularly (in my personal capacity) is also helping to recreate and revitalise some connections that had faded away somewhat.

I made this, words

Share something every day – weekly review

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Today was my wedding anniversary – we walked over to Watt’s Gallery along the North Down’s Way and had lunch. I was glad to see my friend Debbie Davies’s artwork “Belonging” is still hanging in one of the oak trees outside. It looked great today against the blue of the sky and the green trees, summer came back from the dead today and it should be sticking around for a while.

So this was the week that I made a film, a podcast (even if I wouldn’t share it), chopped up some candles and learned a lot of programming.

There are two main improvements in this week’s review – one is to keep focusing on the sharing rather than on reporting the making. The making is going on, but it isn’t driven by the need to write about it.

The other is that I’m being a bit more systematic about my non-medication ADHD treatments. I’m keeping an eye on my daily practice of: meditation; exercise; diet and dietary supplements; art; reducing physical clutter; sleep, rest and other self-care activities. The last three days, for example I’ve started the morning with meditation and exercise before breakfast and made sure I got to bed at a reasonable time.

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day – Coding 002

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I went for a nice long walk this morning, about 5 miles, before breakfast. It was warmer than it has been lately but still cloudy. It’s supposed to get warmer this week.

It was a good space to think about things – especially my desire to make some very simple automation for my blogging. Everything is so complicated and dominated by the various silos. I really ache for the kind of #indieweb vision of a server, under my control, running software that I understand fully and which only does the things that I want it to do, so that it serves me, rather than me having to bend my style of writing and capturing into someone else’s way of thinking.

I walked for 45 minutes and then turned round (took a photo to remind me of how far I’d gone – above) and walked back, talking into my phone about the things that I’d been thinking about. It works so much better for me to record like that. I haven’t listened back to it. It’s likely to be atrocious quality, but it gives me the chance of getting something done before breakfast that I haven’t done for a while. I’ll see if I can get better at doing that – and better at grabbing bits of audio as I go, to avoid the gross feeling that comes when I think about making a podcast. In the meantime, I think I’ll feed it to otter.ai and see what kind of transcription it can make of it.

I spent the rest of the day reading up and making notes on node.js and how it works. Patiently just plodding through the Hello World examples and seeing where I could break them or find ways that they didn’t work as I expected so that I could see how they do work. Standard.

That gave me a bit more confidence reading some other people’s code on GitHub and I realised that I have looked at similar things before, just given up when my brain started hurting and run away screaming. Much better these days. I got a couple of examples running on my Mac here and then spun up a cloud server to prove to myself that it really would work over the net 🙂

Still very early days and baby steps, but I’m much more confident that I can make something work. And that I can strip away pointless stuff in other people’s software to just provide the functions I want – really old school, but also using the computers to do the hard work that they’re suited to and not being dominated by some silo providers business model.

Nothing to show yet, but a good progress day.

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day – Craft 002

Back to the candles

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I went for a run this morning, because I was reminded, by a slight deterioration in my mental health, that I need to do physical and manual work as much as thinking and making digital artefacts.

So I just gave myself to whittling down some of these candles, chipping a bit here and a bit there, not making anything special, just playing with a knife and something to cut with it. A simple process repeated over and over as I did when I was a child.

I remember one time my parents brought home a big box of old candles that they’d been given by the pub landlord where they’d been for a drink. I mean I guess he was throwing them out and they’d said, wait, no we’ll take them home. My sister and I had hours of fun melting them, remelting them, chopping them up, burning each other with hot wax, pouring hot wax into water to make bizarre shapes.

So I’ve been revisiting that a bit and I’ll probably do some more.

This also marks a shift in these blog posts to “Share Something” rather than “Make Something” since I got a bit obsessed with only making things that I could then share, in a day and a little *sharing* of process and progress and playfulness is really what this is about.

I made this, words

Make Something Every Day – Coding 001

04102008325

Today, I was more gentle with myself. I pulled “coding”. Now I definitely don’t have any coding projects all set up and ready to go. But I am interested in how to automate my workflow for blogging on Hive. The process for wordpress is straightforward and handled by lots of different clients. I currently post straight to a draft post on my wordpress.com having given draftsapp my credentials a long time ago. I’d like to be able to compose in one place and then click one button to send it to wordpress and another to send it to hive. I don’t want to be copying and pasting or doing something so automatic that it reduces my flexibility.

So today, I’ve poked around in the developers documentation for Hive. That makes it sound very efficient. Of course what I’ve actually done is googled stuff and then decided I needed to set up my own testnet and then realised I didn’t and wondered what I did need to install and then started going through the examples on the development portal and realised I’d forgotten how node.js works exactly and you know, it dawned on me that I’d started in the middle with the bit about posting rather than starting at the beginning and working my way through methodically, so no wonder…! Once I did that, I found the example for Hivesigner and by that time, either because this did what I wanted, or just because I’d looked at so much that wasn’t and so was getting my javascript-reading-eyes back, I understood mostly how it works and felt able to have a go.

Anyway, long story short, because yesterday what I really learned was that I don’t have to present something here for approval or be thinking of the audience at all, I’m writing for myself… long story short, I posted a little test post on the tuttleclub blog which I haven’t really used since I used it as an experiment in setting up a second account.

Notes on yesterday…

It wasn’t really a fail, because I did make something. I think I need to spend some time, not only reviewing what I’ve done, but also planning what I might do next. I’ve got lots of ideas in my head, but if I’m going to continue with this approach, they really need to be committed somewhere so that I can pick them up when I need them. So that I’d have something to start with yesterday morning (or today for that matter) without having to think almost from first principles.

In the case of podcasting, what’s notable is that I don’t have lots of audio clips stashed away, in the way that I have bits of writing, film or photography all ready to pick apart and put back together in a new form. Or if I do have a stash, it feels old and stale and a lot of work to breathe new life into it. I also feel like I’ve done the mumbling, bumbling improvised ramble character to death. It was so 2005 for me and, man, that was sixteen years ago – a different world and definitely a different me. And I’m not really interested in two-hander interviews either. There’s a new form of podcast out there that will excite me but I don’t quite know what it is yet. And making it will take more than a day’s sprint.