the corner office

It is indeed very British for people to vote in favour of calling a new research vessel Boaty McBoatface.

It is equally British for the whole damned country to then go around congratulating itself for being so British as to vote in favour of calling a new research vessel Boaty McBoatface.

And no less equally British for somebody very senior, and very sane, to eventually say "there is no bloody way we're calling a £200m new research vessel Boaty McBoatface".

And then they'll settle for the RRS David Attenborough, or call it the Victoria, or the Elizabeth, or the Catherine, or the Charlotte, and the whole episode of delightful Britishness will end with a slightly-wistful-but-with-upbeat-ending BBC News insert reflecting on what might have been. Maybe next time.

Winter would not be complete without snow, and my blog would not be complete without mention of it.

We saw our first bit of snow last night. First sleet, then snow, and this morning a dusting remained. There was enough for the kids to all be outside making snowmen.

By the afternoon, the snow was gone. Winter, thus far, has been disappointing.

We're already more than a week into the new year. Is it too late for the obligatory Happy New Year post? ... a bit like that thing when you go back to work in January and for the first day or two everyone's saying Happy New Year to everyone, and then after a day or few, you speak to someone you've not yet spoken to since the previous year, and you're not quite sure whether everyone's moved on from the festive well-wishing, but maybe not, and thus whether not saying Happy New Year will come across is a bit unfriendly, or conversely if you do, whether it'll come across as a little contrived.

But I will review 2015 very briefly: child-rearing, which included sleep deprivation, but joy, some tribulations, and then very unexpected help. Also, a new job, in an unexpected direction, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. And cycling again (just in the nick of time to claim that for 2015), and did a lot of walking around London, and taking pictures, and generally had a relatively laid-back, low-stress year, tootling along through life.

Now for 2016. Happy New Year. I have no resolutions (he says, lying as usual). Onward.

It's been nearly 4 years since The Great Bike Crash of 2012. It's not that I was too scared to ride again, or anything like that, and more just that I'm damned lazy and it was all too much faff.

But even my proscrastination has its limits. I'm still not sure what overcame me (stepping on the scales one morning, perhaps), but I found myself fixing the punctures, then lugging the bike into London on an early train, dropping it off at a bike shop near work, getting it serviced and having the broken front fork replaced, and then locking it up in the bike cage at work. Ready for the Next Step.

That was last week. This week, the Next Step. I took my cycling gear into work with me this morning, and tonight I cycled home. So now I am back in the saddle.

It wasn't too bad. Bromley Hill is still a seriously unpleasant f***er to climb, but that's OK, I managed it, and it'll get easier. And the plus side is that having gotten going in advance of Christmas, (and taking advantage of our half-arsed winter thus far), I can just haughtily sniff away any patronising "oh, a new year's resolution" looks come January.

The problem with having your own blog software is that you have to look after it. The software running my blog was something I wrote nearly a decade ago, and it's been many a year since I've done anything resembling web development. For the most part, it hasn't been much of a hassle, but the occasional hosted server upgrade was a real schlep, and a few too many spammers were getting through the old blog's comment defenses.

So I needed to do some work, and I decided it was time for a long-intended rewrite and simplification. The old app is gone, and in its place an app which builds up a static set of pages locally. More boring details will crop up on my tech blog.

Apart from cleaning things up a bit (like the archives), it should mostly look and work the same. One thing which I haven't rolled out yet is the reworked comments system. For now, the blog doesn't support comments - it'll come soon enough.

We all die with regrets. We go through life saying 'ooh I wish I'd done X' or 'ooh I wish I'd gotten Y'. And so it was with me after seeing a glass kettle at a friend's house. 'Ooh I'd really like a glass kettle', I'd say (frequently), and for ages it was a life's regret in the making. But then our existing kettle died, and I decided it was time to take the plunge, and we got a glass kettle, and we've never looked back.

We've had it for a while now, but tonight I was looking at it and reminded again about how great it is and how much improved my life is because of it. With a glass kettle, boiling water becomes a whole new experience. You see all the physics happening right there in front of you. The water bubbling and going crazy and if you're really living the dream like we are, you've got a kettle with a neon light so that not only do you have the bubbles, but you have physics and bubbles, sci-fi style.

Seriously. If you don't have a glass kettle you don't know what you're missing. You should be going to bed every night hoping or praying that your existing kettle packs up, so that you have an excuse to get a glass one. The fact that you have to descale it every three days to stop it from looking like crap is a small price to pay - it's that awesome.

1. In Rotherhithe:

See those symbols on his shirt? They all come from Hindu mythology, ... except they've been all ... messed up. By white people.

2. Near the Law Courts:

You need to be very careful what you say around journalists. Especially that one.

For posterity. When I was in school, a friend of mine had a fantasy poster - well, he had a good few - but one in particular which I really liked, and for many, many years, I've wondered whether I'd ever find or see the poster again.

Tonight, because I didn't really feel like doing anything more productive, I went hunting, and persisted a little longer than I have in the past, and found it. It's People of the Pines, by Rodney Matthews. (And the original painting is for sale on ebay for about 77 grand, assuming it's not a con).

The odd thing is ... parts of it I remember vividly, other parts of the image I'd forgotten, but they came right back to me, but overall, the picture has left me slightly underwhelmed. It doesn't tell the story I remembered. Would I have been better off had it just remained a happy memory?

Two exchanges with the eldest.

Me: "What're we reading tonight? Captain Underpants for the 11 millonth time?"

Eldest: "Noo" (Dismissively) "... it's only about the tenth time."

And for some reason (best not disclosed):

"Dad, sometimes you can be extremely annoying."

Headline from the Guardian. Rich man dressed like a tramp, tennis rackets and a tragic end. What a world we live in. Just go read it.